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Speaker 2: That's f I R S T L I T E
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 1: I got two things of major interest, well three things
Speaker 1: if you count Phil. Phil printed off the script of Christmas.
Speaker 1: What do they call that?
Speaker 3: A Christmas Carol?
Speaker 1: Christmas? Carrol printed the script off. He's been highlighting his lines.
Speaker 1: Who are you? Who are you playing? Cratch It?
Speaker 3: Cratch It? Yeah, God, seems like you play Robert cratch It.
Speaker 3: He was only a matter of time.
Speaker 1: They didn't try to get you for Scrooge.
Speaker 3: Uh, surprisingly not No, I think maybe a few more years,
Speaker 3: wait till I get in the forties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a joke. I don't think he'd be
Speaker 1: a Scrooge. Yeah, you know what I could picture you being?
Speaker 3: Know what's that?
Speaker 1: You know what he might be good at? You know
Speaker 1: the guy that like the that he's he's like the
Speaker 1: nephew and he's trying to get him. He's trying to
Speaker 1: get Scrooge fired up about Christmas, but then like Scrooge
Speaker 1: catches him, goofing on him.
Speaker 3: M They they tried to get me to play Fred
Speaker 3: two years ago.
Speaker 2: You know your first name Basis.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: You wanted you wanted more of a role.
Speaker 3: No, I was. I was doing a different place.
Speaker 2: So it's just ya out there. God, just what is uh?
Speaker 1: What is want to crash its big lines?
Speaker 3: Oh, he doesn't have a lot of big lines. He's
Speaker 3: he's just kind of like the anchor for like, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of the moral moral anchor. Yeah, that's the word. Good.
Speaker 1: Phil won't be able to do that.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Probably the worst part about your what you got coming up?
Speaker 1: If I had to say.
Speaker 3: Here, I'm just I I would just like to say
Speaker 3: I love how involved and interested you are in this
Speaker 3: whole process.
Speaker 1: Oh, because I will be there my wife like without
Speaker 1: even knowing you're in it. My wife will be like
Speaker 1: alerting the family soon about what day this is happening,
Speaker 1: but what like we will be there.
Speaker 2: So I want to make sure when I get.
Speaker 1: There, I know what's going on sure, so I can
Speaker 1: whisper and be like, well, actually Phil doesn't even like
Speaker 1: this part, or this guy kind of bugs Phil, you know,
Speaker 1: like he Phil wasn't very happy with this actor.
Speaker 3: I'll spill all the details.
Speaker 2: Along the way.
Speaker 1: But what might be challenging to you is because you
Speaker 1: have your own kids.
Speaker 3: I do, one of them's in the play with me, Steve. Oh,
Speaker 3: he's playing my son. No, he's he's the middle child.
Speaker 3: He's he's there's there's a there's an older daughter of
Speaker 3: Cratchet's a middle boy, and then tiny Tim m he's
Speaker 3: playing the middle boy.
Speaker 1: What I was gonna say it could be a problem
Speaker 1: for you is because you got to deal with your
Speaker 1: own kids all the time. You might not want to
Speaker 1: go down there and need to deal with this whatever
Speaker 1: kid it is playing Tiny Tim. You might be like,
Speaker 1: so sort of consumed with your own kids and what
Speaker 1: they got going on. Then all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: got to get sort of like intimately familiar with this
Speaker 1: other kid while trying to take care of your kids.
Speaker 3: Well, that's that's kind of crash. Its big scene is
Speaker 3: that he's got he's got to kind of break down
Speaker 3: over the death of Tiny Tim in one of the scenes.
Speaker 3: That's the Oh I forgot that.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's a good thing that your kids
Speaker 2: aren't cast as tiny tim because they're too healthy, they're
Speaker 2: too robust, strapping young men.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, my little boy. You know how Matthew's on
Speaker 1: crutches for six months?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, were you making a bunch of tiny Tim?
Speaker 1: Well, he's he's a very agreeable young man, very agreeable.
Speaker 1: So well while he was on and crouches, that was
Speaker 1: his nickname because he he's so agreeable. Yeah, just a
Speaker 1: cheery little fellah.
Speaker 2: Not you know, he's not disgruntled. Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well keeps posted. Will Maybe maybe, Randall, maybe you
Speaker 1: and your wife would like to go with us.
Speaker 2: I'd love to. I don't go to the theater enough.
Speaker 1: You don't take in much theater. Well, I take in
Speaker 1: one play.
Speaker 2: I went to Christmas Carrol, I went to film shows.
Speaker 2: I went to Phil's last production and it was lovely
Speaker 2: and I was I was seated right behind JK. Simmons,
Speaker 2: famous Montana JK. Simmons, and he loved it.
Speaker 1: He did.
Speaker 2: Every time Phil made a joke. I looked at JK.
Speaker 2: Simmons and he.
Speaker 1: Was just a you know what, I don't think. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not knocking on film. I don't think that that
Speaker 1: was I don't think it was genuine. No, I think
Speaker 1: that he knew. He's like a big famous theater guy,
Speaker 1: and he's in theater, and so he's got to act
Speaker 1: like he's into it.
Speaker 3: I think he just might be part of it.
Speaker 2: But I think he's so into it that, you know,
Speaker 2: any good theater he gets, it's just like a shot
Speaker 2: of life into his blood, you know.
Speaker 1: So like little date night, Well, it's gonna be kind
Speaker 1: of like a weird date night for you because it'll
Speaker 1: be me like me and my wife and you and
Speaker 1: your wife.
Speaker 2: That'll feel normal. But then they'll be my children. That
Speaker 2: sounds like a normal outing for us. Yeah, because often
Speaker 2: we don't bring children to anything. Yeah, because it wouldn't
Speaker 2: work for us.
Speaker 1: Like she's gonna make them go, Yeah they won't, you know, sure, sure,
Speaker 1: don't don't fill them. They're not gonna.
Speaker 3: I was eleven year old once as well.
Speaker 1: It's like I'm not gonna want to, but they'll be
Speaker 1: down there.
Speaker 2: I mean I've been I've been workshopping with Phil's as
Speaker 2: to how we can graft sort of the structure of
Speaker 2: a Christmas Carol onto the live tour.
Speaker 3: I think it's brilliant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can have ghosts of hunting season, past, hunting season, present,
Speaker 2: hunting season future.
Speaker 3: Well you can appear this is gonna air random and
Speaker 3: that this doesn't happen, there's going to be some disappointed
Speaker 3: fans in the audience.
Speaker 2: So, well, whatever we come up with will have to
Speaker 2: be equally good or better. I don't I don't imagine.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is a great idea. I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: say that. But whatever whatever replaces it or supplants it
Speaker 2: will be better.
Speaker 1: So Clay's planning on having Brent Reeves Fry Bluegills on
Speaker 1: stage every night.
Speaker 2: I know I like that, but.
Speaker 1: And I like it too. But you either got to
Speaker 1: decide you're gonna bring it up with the venue and
Speaker 1: then they're gonna have like the They're gonna have like
Speaker 1: the fire department down there, and.
Speaker 3: They're gonna say, our very expensive and thick curtains are
Speaker 3: gonna smell like fish for the next three months.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or you don't bring it up and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Uh, you know what's gonna tickle Phil's fancy he's gonna
Speaker 1: get gell us.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to do a thing, Phil, and we're already
Speaker 1: setting this into motion. I'm gonna do a thing where
Speaker 1: it's called Interviews with a black.
Speaker 3: Bear and who's the black bear?
Speaker 2: I haven't cast it yet.
Speaker 3: Is there gonna be a whole time gonna be called backs,
Speaker 3: do some scene tests?
Speaker 1: Because if I could interview any animal in the world,
Speaker 1: I would interview a black bear about like what he's
Speaker 1: up to, what he was thinking? You're like, like when
Speaker 1: you ate the gear oil, like what you know? Like
Speaker 1: like I could see the first sip, right, You're like,
Speaker 1: I can see why you might take a sip, but
Speaker 1: then but you kept eating.
Speaker 2: It is the twentieth trash can curiosity? Or is it
Speaker 2: just you can't break the habit? You know?
Speaker 3: You throw out black bears as an example, Steve. But
Speaker 3: I think if this, you know, takes off, I think
Speaker 3: going through a bunch of different animals would be very
Speaker 3: It would be a funny series. Interview with a turkey,
Speaker 3: interview with a with a dove.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like if you interviewed a black bear. If you
Speaker 1: could interview like a black beard that finds like Clay
Speaker 1: Newcome's bait barrel. Yeah, okay, and then he slowly put
Speaker 1: like it'd be like, okay, well, dude, when you first
Speaker 1: found the bait barrel, didn't you think it was a
Speaker 1: little like a little suspicious. Yeah, all of a sudden
Speaker 1: and he's like, here's a bear.
Speaker 2: He's like, you know, things hadn't really been going well
Speaker 2: for me lately, and I thought maybe my luck had
Speaker 2: finally changed.
Speaker 1: And like yeah, and you knows, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's like a platform up in a tree like by
Speaker 1: like does this stuff you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, register or like a black bear that finds his
Speaker 2: way into a convenience store and he's caught on the
Speaker 2: close circuit television.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, did you know.
Speaker 2: You were at risk?
Speaker 3: So is this is this a bear that is is
Speaker 3: post mortem? Like like it's a no, no no.
Speaker 1: That's why I like it's going to be a bear
Speaker 1: to his like his buddy gets their Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna like bring a bear back from the dead.
Speaker 2: You could do you could do a repetitive series and
Speaker 2: anytime a black bear is in the news, you just
Speaker 2: have the God I can't catch a break. Honestly, my
Speaker 2: fan only so embarrassed.
Speaker 1: Here here's the everything that will How did I What
Speaker 1: did I say? There's three things of interest? It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I just got off the phone. I'm trying to Here's
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do. You guys ever preview radio live segments.
Speaker 1: We hold we hold this up. Phil said you can
Speaker 1: hold this somewhere. So I want to preview. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to get an interview with a guy I don't even
Speaker 1: want to say who. I just spoke to a wildlife
Speaker 1: enforcement agent. I don't want to spoil anything. I got
Speaker 1: to fill out like a form. I got to fill
Speaker 1: out a thing to try to get him permission to
Speaker 1: speak to us. He's got to take it to the suits.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to blow it. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: got I just did ire my pre interview. Hold that up?
Speaker 1: Real nice. What Randall's holding is a wild mink pelt.
Speaker 1: Did you know?
Speaker 2: How's that feel? It's like a shiny Should I bring it?
Speaker 1: Did you know? Did you know that if you if
Speaker 1: you go in and buy fake eyelashes, there is a chance.
Speaker 1: I don't want to put statistics on it, but there
Speaker 1: is a very I'm not saying a probability, but a
Speaker 1: light like a good chance that when you buy fake eyelashes.
Speaker 1: It is mink, not advertised as but it is actually mink.
Speaker 1: And when you put that up and look at it, yeah,
Speaker 1: my god, does that look like a nice eyelash. I
Speaker 1: don't like that. Look just a big fake eyelash. Look. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not my style. But you know it's popular.
Speaker 2: Yep, we'll probably fake I feel like it. I feel
Speaker 2: like it came into popularity.
Speaker 1: I feel like but it already went.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's way popular, like in twenty years. If you're
Speaker 1: dressing up for Halloween and you're dressing up as a
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five person for Halloween, you're gonna glue on
Speaker 1: big fake eyelash, sure, and people will be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I remember that.
Speaker 2: But yeah, uh, mink are just striking.
Speaker 1: And I was wondering is that like enough to drive
Speaker 1: up the mink market. But then, man, think about how
Speaker 1: many eyelashes are hide in that thing right there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's nothing but it. You could do the whole town.
Speaker 1: You could give every woman in town new eyelashes with
Speaker 1: this mink.
Speaker 2: We should try to make We should take a sliver,
Speaker 2: like a dental flos sized sliver off the side of
Speaker 2: that and try to make a set of uh, fake
Speaker 2: eyelashes for someone.
Speaker 1: In what they do when they're testing. I don't want
Speaker 1: to blow the interview. I wanted to give this last
Speaker 1: little tidbit away against my better judgment. When they're testing
Speaker 1: a shipment, guess guess what the test is that I
Speaker 1: already tell you what the test did, and I like it.
Speaker 1: Take a cigarette lighter.
Speaker 2: Smell like hair.
Speaker 1: If it smells like burnt hair, it'll either smell like
Speaker 1: burning petroleum based or it'll be like, oh, that's burnt hair.
Speaker 1: That is a mink greake eyelashes made from a mink.
Speaker 2: And what I won't be.
Speaker 1: Able to tell you even when we do the interview,
Speaker 1: I won't be able to tell you the country of origin.
Speaker 2: It's not known.
Speaker 1: We're not knowing if these mink are American cop mink
Speaker 1: or European wild mink. Third thing of interest, can you
Speaker 1: put the photo film?
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: This is a tremendous interest. You got your thing handy,
Speaker 1: I do. Randall and I just did a probably one
Speaker 1: of the best, probably our best piece of video work
Speaker 1: ever in terms of what I think is interesting. Phil
Speaker 1: has a picture held up of me and Randall here
Speaker 1: holding two it's the big hunks of fat that come
Speaker 1: off the back of a buffalo. It's called the depoey,
Speaker 1: the depouey French. If you imagine like picture that you
Speaker 1: pull the hide off a deer, because more people have
Speaker 1: done that than pulled the hide off a buffalo. Hat
Speaker 1: off deer, and he's got like the big caps of
Speaker 1: fat on a real healthy deer, the big caps of
Speaker 1: fat that lay over the backstrap. But these are in
Speaker 1: this picture we're holding up. These are like giant slabs
Speaker 1: of fat removed from over the backstrap and hump of
Speaker 1: a buffalo.
Speaker 2: And working on.
Speaker 1: The latest installation of meat Eater's American history, The Hide Hunters,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three, we ran across
Speaker 1: this passage which doctor Randall's share with you.
Speaker 2: Another important article of food, the equal of which is
Speaker 2: not to be had except from the buffalo, is dupoyer
Speaker 2: or depeuwey depewy. It is a fat substance that lies
Speaker 2: along the backbone next to the hide, running from the
Speaker 2: shoulder blade to the last rib, and is about as
Speaker 2: thick as one's hand or finger. It is from seven
Speaker 2: to eleven inches broad, tapering to a feather edge on
Speaker 2: the lower side. It will weigh from five to eleven
Speaker 2: pounds according to the size and condition of the animal.
Speaker 2: This substance has taken off and dipped in hot grease
Speaker 2: for half a minute, then is hung up inside of
Speaker 2: a lodge to dry and smoke for twelve hours. It
Speaker 2: will keep indefinitely and is used as a substitute for bread,
Speaker 2: but is superior to any bread that was ever made.
Speaker 1: Yes, we made it. We made a whole video about
Speaker 1: making it. We followed those instructions.
Speaker 2: Why do people say to the tea, I don't know.
Speaker 1: We followed them to the great question. You want to
Speaker 1: know why the whole nine yards? You know what that means? No,
Speaker 1: it's like the in a peeth? Is it was that?
Speaker 1: What was that like spitfire P thirty eight airplane in
Speaker 1: World War Two?
Speaker 2: Uh? Is it a P thirty eight? A P thirty
Speaker 2: eight is a thunderbolt? I believe.
Speaker 1: Oh, well, you know the Nate Mason, Yeah, big army guy.
Speaker 3: Hm.
Speaker 1: He was telling me that that that belt, that machine belt,
Speaker 1: the animal belt twenty.
Speaker 2: Seven feet long.
Speaker 1: So to give him the whole nine yards is to
Speaker 1: give him twenty seven feet am or out of that aircraft, gotcha. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know why people follow stuff to the tea.
Speaker 1: We filed it to the t and I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: tell you what happened, you know how I tease the
Speaker 1: mak thing with I'm not telling the secrets. I'm not
Speaker 1: telling the secrets of what happened with our depui. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this project is sitting with Seth Morris right now, who's
Speaker 1: editing it.
Speaker 2: I had a crisis of confidence in my answer the
Speaker 2: p third eight is the lightning, Just correcting myself.
Speaker 1: So going back there, and I did fact check Nate
Speaker 1: Mason on that he takes a lot of pride and
Speaker 1: being able to offer up little things like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now that I feel like I have heard that somewhere.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of pride in that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: If he waves you down, you know, on the staircase
Speaker 1: or something, it's going to be to tell you like
Speaker 1: a little tidbit, or to correct you.
Speaker 2: About something you got wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh, here's an interesting one. Now we're gonna get We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk a whole bunch more about Buffalo because we're
Speaker 1: talking about the hide Hunter era.
Speaker 3: Really quick, just before you get into this and can
Speaker 3: completely derail you. David says that there's no consensus about
Speaker 3: where to a tea comes from, but the best accepted
Speaker 3: candidate candidate, is that it's a shortened version of to
Speaker 3: a tittle. The word tittle refers to those tiny little
Speaker 3: editions you have to make when writing letters like a
Speaker 3: like dotting an I or a JA or crossing a T.
Speaker 1: Hmmmm, that's not like something Bob Crash did say.
Speaker 2: To the tidy tim But sir, it's Christmas. Is that
Speaker 2: a Bob Cratchit line?
Speaker 3: Yes, it is, Actually he does. He tries, He tries
Speaker 3: to leave right at the stroke of five or six,
Speaker 3: and Screwge gives gives him a dirty look and he says,
Speaker 3: but sir, it's Christmas.
Speaker 1: Oh God bless it's the biggest goose.
Speaker 2: In all of London.
Speaker 1: Here's a really good one that a guy is sent in.
Speaker 1: We have done one of these in a while. First
Speaker 1: of this guy starts off by saying he's rarely heard
Speaker 1: our team prep pet that points to me passed up
Speaker 1: an opportunity to discover argue about semantics. So check this out.
Speaker 1: This this cannot stand. This guy recently moved to South Carolina,
Speaker 1: gets to study in the state hunting rags just to
Speaker 1: get a grip on what's going on, okay, and he
Speaker 1: notices within South Carolina's hunting rags that they have an
Speaker 1: explicitly stated still hunt season, still hunt season. Now, ask
Speaker 1: any American boy what still hunting is and what are
Speaker 1: they going to tell you?
Speaker 2: Creeping quietly through the woods yep, slowly, slowly, slowly, shaving
Speaker 2: a deer before it sees you.
Speaker 1: Take a couple of steps, yep, stop and listen. Take
Speaker 1: a couple steps, stop and listen. Still hunting. So he's like,
Speaker 1: why would they have a season where you can only
Speaker 1: still hunt? So he calls Fish and Game to say,
Speaker 1: what's up with how you can? Like?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 1: Why? Why are you saying like you can only hunt
Speaker 1: this method? You mean you can't you can't stand hunt
Speaker 1: during the still hunt season, to which they say, no,
Speaker 1: you dummy. Still hunting is hunting without a dog. It
Speaker 1: is the no dog season.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Who in the world?
Speaker 2: I would have just called it quiet?
Speaker 1: I call it no dog time?
Speaker 2: Right, a good song?
Speaker 1: I call it no dog Time?
Speaker 2: Like is it a sandy song or is it like
Speaker 2: an upbeat pop song?
Speaker 1: No, it's like a country party song. Parties it's any
Speaker 1: parties song. Yeah, that's a great one. That's a great one.
Speaker 1: I have never but it might be the like, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you would like, I'd be curious. I
Speaker 1: don't beat a dog on it because I'd be curious.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 3: Oh there I was with already halfway through the lyrics.
Speaker 2: Okay, here, man, I didn get into this.
Speaker 1: Now I get into this. I was with dan and
Speaker 1: read Isbel okay from God's Country podcast, and we're eating this.
Speaker 1: We're in this restaurant and they got like a paddlefish eggs,
Speaker 1: paddlefish caviar and I'm eating mine and I get a
Speaker 1: little bit of that caviar on my upper lip, like
Speaker 1: and it's like Marilyn Monroe's birthmark. Dan Isbel goes, Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 1: But then there was like I everyone at the table
Speaker 1: detected a pause before he like did like a gotcha yeah.
Speaker 1: And the debate was did he know or did it
Speaker 1: only occur that he was going off the birthmark? And
Speaker 1: said Marylyn because MARYL. Monroe has.
Speaker 2: Did he know.
Speaker 1: Before the delivery? The row connection. So we wanted to
Speaker 1: get the security camera footage from within the restaurant to
Speaker 1: see if like when the twinkle in his I felt
Speaker 1: the twinkle was like delayed, like he goes like marily
Speaker 1: Monroe and then and then does a hah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: But he's like, no, I knew all along. That's why
Speaker 1: I said it.
Speaker 3: I don't buy it.
Speaker 2: I don't buy it for no one bought it. No.
Speaker 1: I was like, there was like you said it, and
Speaker 1: then there was like a beat and then it.
Speaker 2: Hit Yeah, I'm I'm dubious.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm still impressed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great. Why was that talking about her dogs?
Speaker 1: Dogs?
Speaker 2: You don't mean to dog on the Why about I
Speaker 2: got talking about the row? Well the way he did
Speaker 2: one of those, he said, well I just did one.
Speaker 2: He said, I don't mean a dog. That what it was.
Speaker 1: That's what it was. So Marylyman, Now, I would be
Speaker 1: curious if you went to dog hunting states. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, I honestly don't know the answer that this
Speaker 1: people can write in like if I went to a
Speaker 1: dog hunting state, So I go to Arkansas, right South Carolina,
Speaker 1: there are many left, which I've makes me a little
Speaker 1: bit sad. Uh And I said, hey, I'm gonna still
Speaker 1: hunt like or well they people said that, how'd you
Speaker 1: get that buck? And I said, oh, I was like,
Speaker 1: stile still hunting. Would they be like, huh, he was
Speaker 1: hunting without dogs?
Speaker 2: Or would they be like he was actually still hunting?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, if it's a universal convention in states that
Speaker 2: have dog hunting, that's still hunting. Is hunting without dogs?
Speaker 1: Or do even dog guys look at the rags and
Speaker 1: they're like.
Speaker 2: What Yeah, they could have pretty much picked any other
Speaker 2: descriptor there and it would have caused less confusion.
Speaker 1: Here's another quick one. This is good think him in
Speaker 1: an obscure question, Steve may be uniquely equipped to answer.
Speaker 1: And I gotta tell you right off the bat, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna let you down home, buddy. But it's good. There's
Speaker 1: a phenomenal book that I recommend anyone out there called
Speaker 1: Shadows on the Koyukuk. It's about the It's about a
Speaker 1: Koya Khan. So the Koya Khan people.
Speaker 2: Are are like a like a tribe.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't beat that, but like a tribe of Native Alaskans,
Speaker 1: and they and and these Native Alaskans, the Koyu Khan
Speaker 1: people are centered around the Koyukuk River which flows into
Speaker 1: the Yukon River. Sydney Huntington is a is a koya
Speaker 1: Kan man and Shadows on the Koyakok is like his
Speaker 1: story of growing up on the river. It's it's a
Speaker 1: phenomenal book. In the book, there's this passage and I
Speaker 1: I am very the person that wrote in your you're right,
Speaker 1: I'm very familiar with the passage. And in this passage
Speaker 1: she says, basically in Shadows on the Koyakuk, a big
Speaker 1: part of the book is that this boy and his
Speaker 1: siblings like their their mom dies and they just they're
Speaker 1: just like left out in this cabin. It's a true story.
Speaker 1: That's a big part of his life stories is trying
Speaker 1: to like keep his little siblings alive without parental help.
Speaker 1: And he says, supper that night was rice and fish
Speaker 1: we had caught the day before. He saw about the
Speaker 1: night his mom died. Supper that night was rice and
Speaker 1: fish we had caught the day before. Whitefish have a hard,
Speaker 1: gristly part in their gut that looks af it as
Speaker 1: if it has tentacles all over it, which is a
Speaker 1: favorite delicacy of Koya Khan Indians. Mom fried and ate
Speaker 1: this part. He says that whitefish got killed my mother.
Speaker 1: Mom called us into the cabin and told us she
Speaker 1: wasn't feeling well. Go upstairs and go to bed, she said.
Speaker 1: We found our mother lying at the bottom of the stairs,
Speaker 1: half out the door, as she had been when we
Speaker 1: had gone to bed. Her eyes were closed, most of
Speaker 1: her tongue protruded from her mouth, and it was bitten
Speaker 1: almost in two. The author this is the guy that
Speaker 1: wrote the letter in matt continuing. The author doesn't elaborate
Speaker 1: any further on how the hard gristly part in the
Speaker 1: Whitefish's got killed his mother. Google searches have failed to
Speaker 1: shed any light on the mechanism of death. He's wondered,
Speaker 1: you got any thoughts about that. I don't think. I
Speaker 1: wasn't there, but I remember reading it. I don't think
Speaker 1: that that's what his mom died from when she bit
Speaker 1: her tongue. Wouldn't it be that she had a seizure,
Speaker 1: possibly bitter tongue in half?
Speaker 2: Yeah, although you don't know what triggered that. No, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 1: I felt it was coincidence.
Speaker 2: I did my own five minutes of googling, and I
Speaker 2: found the part of the stomach that looks like that,
Speaker 2: and I a lot of fish have it, and I
Speaker 2: found uh, I actually found a cookbook of of like
Speaker 2: traditional Tommy min, does it take you to do all this? Oh?
Speaker 2: Five to ten?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 2: Not lying pretty good with computers?
Speaker 1: Five it just double Do you know what's that film?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: I thought you were started to call them out and jump.
Speaker 2: I thought you were so impressed by the depth of
Speaker 2: my research that I thought five seem unrealistic. I really
Speaker 2: don't know how much time I spent on this. It
Speaker 2: was in the hazy, it was in like the first
Speaker 2: cup of coffee stages my morning on.
Speaker 1: It without without bragging.
Speaker 2: I actually found it without bragging. For sure, sure there
Speaker 2: exists available online to any Internet researcher a book of
Speaker 2: traditional coya con recipes. When there's pages and pages about
Speaker 2: how to prep whitefish, and there's been a couple of
Speaker 2: hours going through that. Yeah, I scanned through it. Uh
Speaker 2: I scanned through it poorly, because I'm not bragging. I
Speaker 2: scanned through.
Speaker 3: I scan through it haphazardly and ply meg yourself now,
Speaker 3: But I.
Speaker 2: Was unable to find anything. Surely a more a talented
Speaker 2: researcher could have found the answer but I was unable.
Speaker 1: But you found the recipe I did, Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: found no reason. You found no reason like that they hate.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, what's that what's that fish liver
Speaker 1: that is toxic?
Speaker 2: You found no thing?
Speaker 1: Like, hey, be careful.
Speaker 2: No, I couldn't find anything like that, but that I
Speaker 2: couldn't have found anything anyway, just because of how bad
Speaker 2: I am and that stuff.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't really say it doesn't mean yeah, no, I.
Speaker 2: Think someone else should probably back me up.
Speaker 3: Ye, I don't even know why we're trusting a single
Speaker 3: thing you said.
Speaker 2: I missed it on the first time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I always read that and like, again, I can't
Speaker 1: recommend that book enough.
Speaker 2: You could have read that book a long time ago.
Speaker 1: I read that and wondered about that. I just feel
Speaker 1: like it's like I hate, I would never want to
Speaker 1: argue with the brother, but I think something else happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's just like it's hard to make a one
Speaker 2: to one connection there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, think about when you get real sick from eating,
Speaker 1: like your mind will kind of find culprits. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I remember one time I got super sick
Speaker 1: in Mexico, like like deathly ill, and I couldn't eat
Speaker 1: avocados forever. But I had a ham in avocado. We
Speaker 1: bought like some some room temp air dried ham and
Speaker 1: avocado and bread. I got deathly ill. It wasn't an avocado.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, but a.
Speaker 1: Week later I could have had a big old ham sandwich,
Speaker 1: but avocado. I couldn't go near an avocado for two years.
Speaker 1: So I feel like stuff stands out in your mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh sure.
Speaker 1: And you're looking at this crazy octopus tentacle when you're
Speaker 1: a kid. Yeah, you're looking at that, and you're like,
Speaker 1: good Lord, and then like you know, haven't for bid
Speaker 1: like your mad dies the next day, like it's gotta
Speaker 1: be that stoch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she says she wasn't feeling well. It probably could
Speaker 2: have not mattered what she had for dinner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So we're gonna talk about we're gonna
Speaker 1: dig in and explain a We're gonna dig in and
Speaker 1: explain a really fascinating period of American history. And Randall
Speaker 1: and I have done he's in the past. Uh, we
Speaker 1: did one on Daniel Boone and The Long Hunters. We
Speaker 1: did one of these episodes on Daniel Boone The Long Hunters.
Speaker 1: We did one of these episodes on the Mountain Men,
Speaker 1: so Jim Bridger, John Colter and the Mountain Men, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna do one right now on sort of the
Speaker 1: era that the era, the Backwoodsman era that came after
Speaker 1: the really big hit that came after the mountain Man era,
Speaker 1: which was the hide Hunters. So to start, Ranald's gonna
Speaker 1: lay out a little bit about like he's gonna why
Speaker 1: are we talking about those three things? Like why are
Speaker 1: we bucketing those three things? What makes them similar, what
Speaker 1: makes them distinct?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So these are the first three installments of this
Speaker 2: Meat Eaters American History series, and what we've focused on
Speaker 2: in that series are these eras of sort of frontier
Speaker 2: market hunting where large groups of individuals are going out well,
Speaker 2: I should say relatively large groups of individuals are seeking
Speaker 2: sort of a new life by harvesting wildlife resources for profit.
Speaker 2: And that's a phenomenon you see repeated over and over
Speaker 2: again in American history and often aligns with sort of
Speaker 2: bigger shifts in the larger national story, like the Mountain
Speaker 2: Man aligns with the Louisiana Purchase and the opening up
Speaker 2: of the Rocky Mountain West. The long Hunter era, which
Speaker 2: is in the late seventeen sixties early seventeen seventies. That
Speaker 2: aligns with this window of opportunity between the French and
Speaker 2: Indian War and the American Revolution broadly speaking. But in
Speaker 2: each of these instances, there's there are these individuals that
Speaker 2: go out into what is then land largely unknown to
Speaker 2: them and occupied by Native people, and they're harvesting wildlife
Speaker 2: resources on the scale that's sort of unimaginable to us today,
Speaker 2: and in doing so, they also leave behind some of
Speaker 2: our most told and retold stories of wilderness living and
Speaker 2: outdoor adventure that have sort of, you know, been passed
Speaker 2: down to us as as like the origin story of
Speaker 2: like American hunters and anglers, right, But in this series,
Speaker 2: we're asking what were they doing really, like, what were
Speaker 2: they after? How are they acquiring it, who were they
Speaker 2: selling it to, what was it being used for? And
Speaker 2: what are the various like larger contextual factors that shaped
Speaker 2: how they lived the lives the way they did so.
Speaker 2: Like I said, the first one was the long Hunters,
Speaker 2: and Daniel Boone is the most well known of those.
Speaker 2: These are guys largely coming out of western North Carolina,
Speaker 2: western Virginia, and they're going across the Appalachian Mountains to
Speaker 2: shoot white tailed deer for their skin, which is used
Speaker 2: in leather goods primarily manufactured in Britain breeches, but all
Speaker 2: sorts of other and breeches are like knee length pants,
Speaker 2: like the goofy things you see on paintings of old
Speaker 2: guys with big white wigs. Yeah, yeah, when you see it.
Speaker 1: If you see like an old guy or like or
Speaker 1: Napoleon or someone, he's got like some white pants, some tidy,
Speaker 1: some type in white pants.
Speaker 2: Buttons on the front might be buckskins, like a little
Speaker 2: button fly flap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be American buckskin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so yeah, these are essentially poor farmers living
Speaker 2: on the frontier, and it's an economy where they don't
Speaker 2: have ready access for cash but one thing, and their
Speaker 2: farms don't produce enough of a surplus to really sell
Speaker 2: on a market. But the one good that they can
Speaker 2: take to market and sell to buy the things that
Speaker 2: they need to buy is white tailed deer skin. So
Speaker 2: after the French and Indian War, when it's a little
Speaker 2: bit safer to go across the Appalachian Mountains, they start
Speaker 2: going over to Kentucky, Tennessee. Basically the Ohio River Valley
Speaker 2: in the Cumberland River Valley and shoot deer by the
Speaker 2: hundreds and thousands and pack them by mule train across
Speaker 2: the mountains. And they stay out there for months, sometimes
Speaker 2: a year longer. And that's how they get the name
Speaker 2: long hunters long ass hunt. Long ass hunt refers to
Speaker 2: the duration of their trips. And these are sort of
Speaker 2: smaller groups. Oftentimes it's like family members, neighbors, and they
Speaker 2: organize their expeditions along these lines of kinship and sort
Speaker 2: of clan, you know. And and it's it's a really
Speaker 2: interesting sort of fleeting moment because in seventeen seventy five
Speaker 2: the first permanent white settlement is established in Kentucky. And
Speaker 2: then also you have the beginnings of some of the
Speaker 2: frontier violence that ultimately bleeds into the Revolutionary War. So
Speaker 2: that's the long hunters. Yep.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a interesting thing that we compare through
Speaker 1: all these is these like what are the the groups,
Speaker 1: the group dynamics, And you you made a point with
Speaker 1: the long hunters. When you're reading about long hunter expeditions,
Speaker 1: it's tons of brother in laws, Yeah, tons of cousins, tons,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Brother's father in law's brother in law. This guy married
Speaker 2: this guy's sister.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and he's like sort of like these familial, very
Speaker 1: neighborly clan. Yeah, but it could be as many as
Speaker 1: forty people, and.
Speaker 2: They're And one of the big differences too, between the
Speaker 2: Long Hunters and some of the later volumes. The individuals
Speaker 2: we look at in the later volumes is they don't
Speaker 2: leave behind a lot of records. They're they're rural people,
Speaker 2: they're largely illiterate. Most of their stories that we have
Speaker 2: of them are recorded after the fact by interviews with
Speaker 2: their survivors or maybe interviews with them later in life,
Speaker 2: you know, like talking to an old man about what
Speaker 2: he did in his twenties. And so the source material
Speaker 2: for that, with the exception of Daniel Boone, is very
Speaker 2: very thin. So we had to do a lot more
Speaker 2: sort of piecing together and hypothesizing in that story than
Speaker 2: we did in some of these other ones.
Speaker 1: Yep, okay, recap mountain men. Like when you hear the
Speaker 1: word mountain men, it's an abused term, it is it
Speaker 1: means like, yeah, it's not like an old her that
Speaker 1: lives up in the mountains, and there's like when you
Speaker 1: see mountain men from a historical standpoint, it's something very specific.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So as we use the term in most I
Speaker 2: guess people who are in this field use the term,
Speaker 2: it's referring to Rocky mountain beaver trappers who went west
Speaker 2: after the return of Lewis and Clark. So it's eighteen
Speaker 2: oh six, it really is sort of becomes a big
Speaker 2: thing in the late eighteen twenties, mid eighteen twenties, late
Speaker 2: eighteen twenties when they developed the rendezvous system, which is
Speaker 2: a way of supplying these trappers and also getting their
Speaker 2: furs to market. But they're they're out there in the
Speaker 2: Rockies sort of nomadically traveling from watershed to watershed in
Speaker 2: organized groups, trapping beaver, which is being used to produce wolfeldt.
Speaker 2: So really they're not after the skin. They're after the hare,
Speaker 2: which is and the hair not attached to the skin,
Speaker 2: which is sort of a an interesting twist when you
Speaker 2: think about like the fur trade in general, it's like
Speaker 2: you're making mink eyelashes, like mink eyelashes exactly. I was
Speaker 2: curious when we were talking about that if they're keeping
Speaker 2: if they're just gluing them in place.
Speaker 1: On some they're just plucking them.
Speaker 2: There's no way they're putting Let I think be cool
Speaker 2: if you have you.
Speaker 1: Had the letter on there, you have all the yeah,
Speaker 1: but the underfur.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh you know what we fail to mention? What's that?
Speaker 1: Met Eater's American History, The Hide Hunters. So volume three, yes,
Speaker 1: is out now.
Speaker 2: Out now out October fourteenth. This is being released October thirteenth.
Speaker 2: So unless you're the type of person that listens to
Speaker 2: it the day it drops as you listen to it,
Speaker 2: it's out now.
Speaker 1: So met Eater's American History The Hide Hunters, which we're
Speaker 1: giving you a we're giving you a crash course in
Speaker 1: the subject right now. We're giving you a free crash
Speaker 1: course in the subject right now for an hour, little tease,
Speaker 1: but then the actual thing is how many hours? Seven Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you're getting a little you're getting a little little
Speaker 1: tittle later right now. But then the big helping, the
Speaker 1: big Christmas Goose with all the trimmings, with all the
Speaker 1: trimming is out now seven hours anywhere you get.
Speaker 2: Your audio books, where you get your audiobooks. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: Mountain Men is is a story that I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people might be familiar with just when they
Speaker 2: think of a frontiersman trapper. But one of the interesting
Speaker 2: differences between mountain men and long hunters is that, uh,
Speaker 2: these expeditions because they're going across the continent and there's
Speaker 2: a ton of logistics involved, they're they're actually organized by corporations,
Speaker 2: and they have a lot of capital, and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of sort of behind the scenes jockeying for control
Speaker 2: of different corporations and so and so sells their interest whatever.
Speaker 2: But out of that you get the fact that these
Speaker 2: these trappers, a lot of them just see an ad
Speaker 2: in a newspaper. It's like, do you want to go
Speaker 2: west and trap beaver for two years? Three years? And
Speaker 2: sign on?
Speaker 1: And so like.
Speaker 2: While Daniel Boone and some of these long hunters were
Speaker 2: going and hunting with their family and their neighbors, guys
Speaker 2: like Jim Bridger were sort of you know, he's he's
Speaker 2: eighteen years old, and he's doesn't have a lot of
Speaker 2: he's sort of rootless. His parents are dead, and he
Speaker 2: sees an ad in the newspaper and shows up at
Speaker 2: an office in Saint Louis and.
Speaker 1: Signs, yes, signs an employment agreement. Yeah, that's the funniest
Speaker 1: thing you think about. When you think about these guys,
Speaker 1: like the mountain men that are out there living off
Speaker 1: the land for multiple years with very little resupply. Most
Speaker 1: of those guys start out it's like it's a job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it has a pay scale and you commit,
Speaker 2: it's financial security, like there's.
Speaker 1: Not like an HR office. But I mean it's like
Speaker 1: a job though, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and like the I mean, it's it's interesting
Speaker 2: because whenever you read a story about like the Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountain Fur Company, they always mentioned this one really famous
Speaker 2: at advertisement where they're seeking one hundred enterprising young men
Speaker 2: to go up the Missouri and so yeah, although it
Speaker 2: seems like this really distant, sort of ancient world, they're
Speaker 2: finding job ads in the newspaper and following up on
Speaker 2: them to become a trapper. And then that story dies
Speaker 2: out really with the virtual extirpation of beaver from the Rockies,
Speaker 2: and at the same time there's a collapse in the
Speaker 2: beaver felt market. There's a bunch of different reasons for that,
Speaker 2: but the silk top hat becomes the preferred fashion and
Speaker 2: essentially the beaver trade sort of vanishes, and in the
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty eight eighteen thirty nine, when these guys are
Speaker 2: coming together for rendezvous to sell their furs, they sort
Speaker 2: of see the writing on the wall. And then eighteen
Speaker 2: forty is the last official rendezvous where which is like
Speaker 2: the big commercial exchange that sort of keeps this whole
Speaker 2: world turning.
Speaker 1: When when Randall's talking about for hats, like, if you
Speaker 1: imagine honest Abe Lincoln, so honest Ave Lincoln is running
Speaker 1: around in that hat eighteen sixty, if he was running
Speaker 1: around in that hat in eighteen thirty, his would have
Speaker 1: been wool felt, beaver wolf felt. But I believe honest
Speaker 1: Abe was wearing was by Civil War, was wearing a
Speaker 1: silk hat. I think it was a silk hat, same cut,
Speaker 1: like those crazy looking hats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you keep like a house cat up inside there,
Speaker 2: but it seems like a very inefficient. Oh just an
Speaker 2: insane when you're wearing a backpack and it catches on
Speaker 2: everything over your head and you just go, oh shit,
Speaker 2: I'm wearing my backpack.
Speaker 1: Noyea.
Speaker 2: You know, I would imagine that a guy with the
Speaker 2: top hat would have a similar issue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a guy trying to wear a cowboy
Speaker 1: hat on an airplane.
Speaker 2: Especially a tall guy like a Blincoln, you know, better
Speaker 2: have high door door openings.
Speaker 1: Where are we at? Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which moves us into the hide Hunter era. Okay, here's
Speaker 1: one of the funny things about working on these series
Speaker 1: of all these these American commercial hunter market hunter periods.
Speaker 1: For the first couple of volumes we did the Long Hunters,
Speaker 1: the Mountain Men. You have all these American heroes, these
Speaker 1: mythologized characters. And what's interesting about these American heroes, these
Speaker 1: mythologized characters is there's more awareness. There's more awareness about
Speaker 1: the individuals and the lives they lived. Then there is
Speaker 1: awareness about what they actually were doing for a living,
Speaker 1: meaning people know the name Daniel Boone. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: you went out and just took it, just pulled random
Speaker 1: adult Americans off the street and said, have you ever
Speaker 1: heard of Daniel Boone? You're gonna get a nod. Yes,
Speaker 1: what was up with him? Some kind of hunter or
Speaker 1: some kind of frontiersman?
Speaker 2: What I lived in the woods?
Speaker 1: Yeah, But if I said, can you explain me what
Speaker 1: he did for a living, You're gonna have a very
Speaker 1: low success rate on getting a good answer. So people
Speaker 1: know the name, they know these pioneers, this pioneering figure,
Speaker 1: but they're not clear on what he was doing. He's
Speaker 1: known for people have an understanding that he was a
Speaker 1: sort of explorer settler, which he was, but not necessarily
Speaker 1: intentionally being like he wasn't like like, he wasn't a promoter.
Speaker 1: He is very tightly affiliated with people know him as
Speaker 1: a Kentucky figure. He left Kentucky, died elsewhere, right, there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of awareness of what he was. Same
Speaker 1: with if I went to you and said Davy Crockett,
Speaker 1: people are gonna be like, yes, familiar with the name
Speaker 1: Davy Crockett, And I said, can you explain to me
Speaker 1: some of the things Davy Crockett did for a living,
Speaker 1: and they probably wouldn't have a very good sense. The
Speaker 1: Mountain Man era, people know Jim Bridger explorer or whatever.
Speaker 1: But if I said, but why was he exploring? They
Speaker 1: might not know that his sole focus over much of
Speaker 1: his professional career, his sole focus was like trying to
Speaker 1: locate populations of beavers in order to trap them. But
Speaker 1: they stand as these American icons are American heroes. Now
Speaker 1: that we're moving into the hide hunter era, and when
Speaker 1: we say the hide Hunters we're talking about is buffalo hunters,
Speaker 1: but there's a long history of being buffalo hunters. When
Speaker 1: we talk about the hide hunters, we're talking about a
Speaker 1: very specific type of buffalo hunters. We're talking about a
Speaker 1: type of buffalo hunter who was hunting buffalo in order
Speaker 1: to get the skins which were just sold as dried
Speaker 1: what they call flint hides, not tanned. They were collecting skins,
Speaker 1: pegging them out to dry and selling them, and these
Speaker 1: were skins that were being tanned into leather products in
Speaker 1: the East. That is what we call a hide hunter
Speaker 1: is someone who's using like a systematic system of slaughter
Speaker 1: of buffalo in order to sell hides in a specific
Speaker 1: period of time. One of the things that struck me
Speaker 1: the most we started on this highe hunter period is
Speaker 1: that here you're now entering into a type of a
Speaker 1: type of frontiersman, a type of market hunter from an
Speaker 1: era that produced zero heroes. Rhymes.
Speaker 3: Well, if I left the s off, it would have
Speaker 3: put it in the dog song.
Speaker 1: There's no heroes, like, there's no mythologized figure. And you
Speaker 1: can ask you why are there no famous heroic hide hunters?
Speaker 1: And I think that there's probably one main reason why
Speaker 1: while the long hunters like Boone extra pated deer from
Speaker 1: certain areas or greatly reduced deer herds wiped out elk herds,
Speaker 1: wiped out buffalo, they're not known as the guys that
Speaker 1: did that. That crime hasn't been pegged on them. The
Speaker 1: mountain men Jim Bridger, they extra pated beavers across a
Speaker 1: bunch of their range. They wiped out regional populations of beavers,
Speaker 1: but the crime hasn't been pinned on them.
Speaker 2: And a lot of people probably don't even know there
Speaker 2: was a crime. Yep.
Speaker 1: They probably don't know that those things happen. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: when you get into the buffalo hide hunters who as
Speaker 1: will explain the years who from the end of the
Speaker 1: Civil War to about eighteen eighty three, they virtually eliminate
Speaker 1: They kill about fifteen million buffalo. They kill them until
Speaker 1: there's less than one thousand left in the United States.
Speaker 1: It is very well understood that they committed the crime and.
Speaker 2: Were still living with that consequence. That consequence today, Like
Speaker 2: even though they didn't wipe out the buffo, biologically speaking,
Speaker 2: the buffalo never recovered from that episode as a wild animal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The way the best way I've heard that that
Speaker 1: distinction explained as I remember years ago someone explaining that
Speaker 1: they weren't driven to genetic extinction, but they were driven
Speaker 1: to ecological extinction, meaning they cease to be they cease
Speaker 1: to have an ecological artage landscape. Yeah, and we understand
Speaker 1: that these Buffalo Hunters did that, and it's and that
Speaker 1: crime has been pinned on them. And when you watch
Speaker 1: a documentary that deals with this era, they're usually just
Speaker 1: treated as villains. They're the villains. Everyone agrees that they're
Speaker 1: the villains. We don't have buffalo Hunter heroes. We don't
Speaker 1: make Buffalo Hunter movies. There aren't movies where the buffalo
Speaker 1: Hunter winds up being heroic and saving everybody, right, And
Speaker 1: Jeremiah Johnson, he doesn't run into and get saved by
Speaker 1: a buffalo Hunter because they're villains. Yeah, he gets saved
Speaker 1: by an old mountain man because they're heroes.
Speaker 2: They and the other thing too that we get into
Speaker 2: this in the audiobook is that there's a shift in
Speaker 2: consciousness that occurs during their lifetime where all of a
Speaker 2: sudden you see the rise of the modern conservation movement,
Speaker 2: the founding of the Boone and Crocket Club, the curtailment
Speaker 2: of market hunting by the federal government. And this all
Speaker 2: happens during their lifetimes sort of almost as soon as
Speaker 2: the smoke is cleared from their shooting, all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: market hunting is a very bad thing in sort of
Speaker 2: the cultural and political American consciousness, and so they sort
Speaker 2: of live in this weird space where the world that
Speaker 2: they did these acts in and killed all these buffalo
Speaker 2: was not the world that they lived in twenty years later.
Speaker 1: Randall that we're gonna touch on this today. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna touch out now. I think we're gonna touch on
Speaker 1: this today. Yeah, here's the thing about to keep in
Speaker 1: mind about this hide hunter thing. And we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about why the years. Well, you don't talk about le's
Speaker 1: let's do why the years now, because I want to
Speaker 1: talk about the way in which this era, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: way in which this era turns into the modern era.
Speaker 2: Hm.
Speaker 1: You know, we'll get into this more, but we make
Speaker 1: the point in there that these some of these buffalo
Speaker 1: hide hunters lived to see the publication of San County Almanac, right,
Speaker 1: They live to see the presidency of an individual Theodore Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: who was like an adversary of the market hunters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of them eliminated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they were like living a period of sort
Speaker 1: of watching their peers, watching their contemporaries come to condemn them,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean you were making that point, but
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I just think that it's important to
Speaker 1: realize that like there was no there was almost like
Speaker 1: no period when they were celebrated. A lot of them
Speaker 1: got bitter about this, and we tell that story in
Speaker 1: the book. A lot of them get to be old
Speaker 1: men and they're bitter. Yeah, they're bitter about how they've
Speaker 1: been disparaged in their own lifetimes for what they did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in some ways, I mean, there are other
Speaker 2: parallels I could I could draw, but they're in there
Speaker 2: later in life, once they're no longer living in this
Speaker 2: world where the hide hunt was a good thing, or
Speaker 2: or you know, even a new like once it became
Speaker 2: a hot button topic and the buffalo wiped out and
Speaker 2: conservations on the rise, they often would look back and
Speaker 2: explain what they were doing in a different way. They
Speaker 2: tried to They tried to reimagine what drove them to
Speaker 2: do what they did in order to align themselves with
Speaker 2: things that were still okay at that time, and so
Speaker 2: a lot of them said, well, we did it to
Speaker 2: tame the frontier, we did it to conquer Native people.
Speaker 2: We did it to sort of, you know, break break
Speaker 2: Indian resistance and open up the West for settlement. But
Speaker 2: what's fascinating is when you go back and you read
Speaker 2: the accounts that were written at the time, as opposed
Speaker 2: to like what they wrote down in nineteen hundred or
Speaker 2: nineteen ten. They always say, I was young, I needed money.
Speaker 2: It was free for the taking. All you needed was
Speaker 2: a rifle. You go out there and you get as
Speaker 2: many as you can, make a lot of money. And
Speaker 2: there's none of these guys at the time or sort
Speaker 2: of thing are explaining their actions in a way that's
Speaker 2: like part of a broader national story of quote unquote progress.
Speaker 2: But as old men, oh yeah, living now, living in
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, or even just back in
Speaker 2: like during the Roosevelt presidency, they're saying, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 2: we were part of we were part of the American story.
Speaker 2: We weren't bad guys. The whole money thing was just
Speaker 2: decide issue. What we were really trying to do is
Speaker 2: open up the West. For white settlement.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they get terribly sentimental too. This isn't this isn't
Speaker 1: a direct quote, but it would be that you'll get
Speaker 1: this kind of sentiment from them as old men. Like
Speaker 1: when I look and see children coming out of Sunday School, Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the Texas Panhandle, running into the arms of their
Speaker 1: waiting mothers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, by god, I.
Speaker 1: Did the right thing.
Speaker 2: And one of the interesting things about these sort of
Speaker 2: after the fact explanations for their actions, especially as it
Speaker 2: comes to like the consequences for Native people, Like they
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen hundreds, they said, well, this was
Speaker 2: a good and necessary thing. We did it so that
Speaker 2: we could we could defeat the tribes of the Planes.
Speaker 2: At the time, they did that because they thought it
Speaker 2: was something worth celebrating. They said what they did in
Speaker 2: that way, they explained their actions because in a way
Speaker 2: that would be celebrated. But then decades later, once people
Speaker 2: started thinking differently about what happened to the tribes of
Speaker 2: the Planes, they latched on to those explanations because it
Speaker 2: made the guys seem even worse, made the heigh hunters
Speaker 2: seem even more villainous, and so like you almost have
Speaker 2: to go back to what they were saying while they
Speaker 2: did it, rather than what they were saying long after
Speaker 2: the fact, once their actions had sort of taken a
Speaker 2: big shift in sort of the public opinion.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We well, I'm gonna say it now. I keep
Speaker 1: trying to be like really disciplined about what we bring
Speaker 1: up when. But there's a hide hunter who kills over
Speaker 1: ten thousand the buffalo okay, who who lives through the
Speaker 1: Korean War. Yeah, he lives to see we mentioned he
Speaker 1: lives to see like Playboy magazine being published.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he lived to be one hundred and four years old.
Speaker 1: Lives to see here's a guy that's on the Texas
Speaker 1: Plains fighting comanches, shooting buffalo for a living, and he
Speaker 1: lives to like read Playboy magazine, see the introduction of
Speaker 1: the corvette.
Speaker 2: The first Burger king opened before he died, and the
Speaker 2: first nuclear submarine launched before he died. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But he you know, he.
Speaker 2: Listened to the president on the radio. Uh he he uh,
Speaker 2: he drove cars, you know, like there's stories about these
Speaker 2: buffalo hunters. The wife of one buffalo hunter later in
Speaker 2: life said, you know, I hadn't been back to Dodge
Speaker 2: City since the Buffalo Hunt and the interviewers like, well,
Speaker 2: why did you go to Dodge City? Why did you
Speaker 2: go back? And she goes, oh, there is a motorcycle race.
Speaker 2: We're going to watch a motorcycle race.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the extreme like that.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 1: That's then we spent a lot of time on it
Speaker 1: is just how abrupt at the end of this era,
Speaker 1: how like abrupt the country changed out of it. And
Speaker 1: a thing we bring up as well, we keep talking
Speaker 1: about these the certain these certain hide hunters who lived
Speaker 1: through the buffalo slaughter and became they kind of stayed that,
Speaker 1: they kind of wanted to continue to defend themselves. And
Speaker 1: we talked about that there's no hide hunter heroes. Now
Speaker 1: that's not entirely accurate, because there's a lot of mythologized
Speaker 1: Western figures who became mythologized later for their exploits as gunfighters, lawmen, gamblers,
Speaker 1: but who you wouldn't realize cut their teeth as hide hunters.
Speaker 2: Uh Wider.
Speaker 1: There's like historians a little bit questioned like how into
Speaker 1: hide hunting wider was he? He was hide hunter adjacent,
Speaker 1: maybe did some high hunting, Wider did some high hunting.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you who absolutely was a highe hunter Pat Garrett,
Speaker 1: the man who killed Billy the Kid.
Speaker 2: We recently had Brian Burrows, Brian Yeah, Brian Burrows on,
Speaker 2: No Burrow Burrow singing of William Burrows. I know that's
Speaker 2: what That's what screwed me. I always do that.
Speaker 1: We recently had the writer Brian Burrow on and his
Speaker 1: very excellent book The Gunfighters, and in The Gunfighters he
Speaker 1: tells the story of the night Billy the Kid died
Speaker 1: in New Mexico, and he talks about that the last
Speaker 1: person Billy the Kid addressed he said ken as to
Speaker 1: a man named John Poe, and then was shortly thereafter
Speaker 1: shot and killed. Will set it again, said the same thing,
Speaker 1: goes into a bedroom, He passes a guy outside and
Speaker 1: says keen as, who is that? Goes into a bedroom,
Speaker 1: says it again to someone in the room, not knowing
Speaker 1: who he's looking at, and that guy kills him dead.
Speaker 1: Those two guys were buffalo hide hunters, but no one
Speaker 1: knows John Poe and Pat Garrett as buffalo heide.
Speaker 2: Hunters their former buffalo hide hunters at the time.
Speaker 1: Bat Masterson gunfighter becomes a sportswriter buffalo hunter. So it's
Speaker 1: not fair to say that the Buffalo Hunters didn't produce heroes,
Speaker 1: but they didn't produce heroes from that.
Speaker 2: They shed that, They shed that identity and became new people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Some became like dudes that were presidents of banks.
Speaker 2: A lot of them got killed in bars and card games.
Speaker 1: Yeah, many, like many divide, died violently. And that's another
Speaker 1: thing about like the legacy of the hide Hunters is
Speaker 1: you'll find people say, oh, the hide Hunters were nothing
Speaker 1: but horse stephens, scoundrels. Yeah. And the other historians, including
Speaker 1: Elliott West, who we had on the podcast years ago,
Speaker 1: Elliott West has this passage like, oh, they became candy
Speaker 1: salesmen and high school principles. Yeah, and you're like, both
Speaker 1: those things are true. They were some horse stealing scoundrels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some became candy salesman, like they became all things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Elliott Elliott West in that passage he makes
Speaker 2: a point that like the hide hunters stepped out of
Speaker 2: normal life to become hide hunters. You know, they were
Speaker 2: like farmers, they were guys that worked on the railroad,
Speaker 2: they were they have these they weren't born to be
Speaker 2: right and like boone was born to be right, and
Speaker 2: there was there was an opportunity, and they stepped into
Speaker 2: that world and they they did what they did, and
Speaker 2: then that world vanished along with the buffalo, and they
Speaker 2: moved on to the next thing.
Speaker 1: Uh, it's more appropriate to say this is a segue.
Speaker 1: It's more appropriate to say that these Buffalo hide hunters,
Speaker 1: who we no one understand and have condemned for exterminating
Speaker 1: the American buffalo. Yes, they stepped out of normal life.
Speaker 1: But it's more it's it's better to say, yeah, they
Speaker 1: stepped out of the American Civil War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's something that I it's something that you
Speaker 2: hear about this era. Like a lot of these Buffalo
Speaker 2: Hunters were formal former Civil War soldiers or somehow affected.
Speaker 2: Their lives were affected by the Civil War. But you
Speaker 2: really don't have a full appreciation for it until you
Speaker 2: start reading their individual stories, by the dozens, and it's
Speaker 2: just it's overwhelming. Frank Mayor, the guy who lived to
Speaker 2: see Burger King and Playboy magazine. He was a thirteen
Speaker 2: year old drummer boy.
Speaker 1: Wonder if you ever read Playboy while eating Burger King.
Speaker 1: I think he's in a corvette.
Speaker 2: At one hundred and four. He I hope he was
Speaker 2: doing all that stuff. It's doubtful though, is that. Baby.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take my corvette down, pick up the April issue,
Speaker 1: get a burger, get a.
Speaker 3: Whopper, just for the articles, of course. Yeah, yeah, well
Speaker 3: that was.
Speaker 2: Back when when you really could read some good stuff
Speaker 2: in there, you know, to be a country. So he Yeah.
Speaker 2: Frank Mayor, the guy who lived to be one hundred
Speaker 2: and four, he was a thirteen year old drummer boy,
Speaker 2: serving they think, in his father's artillery unit at the
Speaker 2: Battle of Gettysburg. If you can imagine what he witnessed
Speaker 2: during that period of time as a thirteen year old, like,
Speaker 2: it's hard to imagine him going on to just live
Speaker 2: a quiet life somewhere right. And he even makes the
Speaker 2: point in his memoir that after the Civil War there
Speaker 2: were a ton of men who didn't know what was next,
Speaker 2: but they knew they knew they had to move on, right,
Speaker 2: and so they were sort of lost. They were looking
Speaker 2: for purpose. A lot of them like they'd lost family members,
Speaker 2: They might have lost fathers. John Cook. I don't know
Speaker 2: if we mentioned Cook yet.
Speaker 1: No, we haven't mentioned Cook yet, but a very like
Speaker 1: Cook also comes out of one of the most ugly
Speaker 1: violent aspects of the Civil War, which and we explained
Speaker 1: it a little bit, which is not widely known about.
Speaker 2: What was going on in that period. But yeah, so
Speaker 2: he's he's his family moves out to Missouri, and so
Speaker 2: they get all wrapped up in the guerrilla fighting that's
Speaker 2: going on on the Kansas Missouri border. And his brother
Speaker 2: is shot twenty seven times. His brother was serving he.
Speaker 1: Shot pieces, yeah, like a revenge attack.
Speaker 2: And his brother is serving in a Union military unit.
Speaker 2: And some Confederates earlier that day had killed some Union
Speaker 2: soldiers and put on their uniforms, and so they marched
Speaker 2: right up to Cook's brother and he got shot twenty
Speaker 2: seven times. And the commanding officer of that unit gave
Speaker 2: John Cook his brother's hat that's just soaked in blood
Speaker 2: and full of holes, and says, you know, this is
Speaker 2: what we have left your brother, Bring it to your mom.
Speaker 2: And so even though Cook himself was like again a youngster,
Speaker 2: you know, he didn't like bear the brunt of the fighting,
Speaker 2: like the Civil War profoundly brought an end to his
Speaker 2: like childhood innocence. And then there's guys that served as
Speaker 2: prisoners of war and guys that there's one hide hunter
Speaker 2: who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. And there's a
Speaker 2: you know, we have stories of like a guy who
Speaker 2: is a Confederate soldier who is he was at a
Speaker 2: fort that was went under siege and like two thirds
Speaker 2: of the guys in there with them had died by
Speaker 2: the time they surrendered, so you can imagine.
Speaker 1: And then he that's the guy he gets taken up
Speaker 1: to a military prison in the North at the end
Speaker 1: of the war, walks home to North Carolina, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then heads out. That's important thing to bring up is
Speaker 1: Confederate like not just Union, but Union and Confederate soldiers
Speaker 1: in the years immediately after the war, within a decade
Speaker 1: after the war are coming together in hunting outfits in Texas.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And and you also there's a couple of
Speaker 2: interesting stories of brothers, the Clarkson brothers, the l of
Speaker 2: the three. He served in the war, and then afterwards
Speaker 2: they said he grew his hair out long, and he
Speaker 2: went out west and started trapping wolves. And then once
Speaker 2: the buffalo hunt got underway, he wrote to his other
Speaker 2: brothers and said, come on out, you got it. And
Speaker 2: these guys killed I believe twenty thousand Buffalo during their
Speaker 2: career as Buffalo hunters. And there's another guy. He writes
Speaker 2: to his brother, and that guy comes out and he
Speaker 2: brings a rifle and a canteen and a compass, and
Speaker 2: they're all his Union issued like army army gears. So
Speaker 2: we begin this story in eighteen sixty five because the
Speaker 2: connection to the end of the Civil War is sort
Speaker 2: of inarguable, but the hunt itself really doesn't get underway
Speaker 2: until later, until six years later. Essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a little device we use in these American
Speaker 1: history pieces where we like to bracket. We like to
Speaker 1: bracket like the years that we're talking about, which is no,
Speaker 1: it's true. Yeah, But what we also do is we
Speaker 1: also hint at we.
Speaker 2: Bracket it.
Speaker 1: Okay. So with the Long Hunters, we say in the
Speaker 1: title met Eater's American History, the Long Hunters seventeen sixty
Speaker 1: three to seventeen seventy five. Seventeen sixty three being the
Speaker 1: end of the French and Indian War or the Seven
Speaker 1: Years War, so you get a period of relative peace
Speaker 1: on the frontier which allows guys to somewhat more safely
Speaker 1: go into the colonial frontier to hunt. Seventeen seventy five,
Speaker 1: of course, is the year before the American Revolution, which
Speaker 1: brings in this very bloodied period on the American frontier
Speaker 1: when it becomes really hard to hunt. But then, of
Speaker 1: course we explain a lot about like what happens before
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty three, yeah, and in a little bit about
Speaker 1: what happens after seventeen seventy five, But the era is
Speaker 1: that with the Mountain Men eighteen oh six, so that's
Speaker 1: the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition. However, we
Speaker 1: explain a little bit about the Louisiana purchase, which is
Speaker 1: before that, but the action is like the return of
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark and the reports of great quantities of
Speaker 1: beavers in the American West with the collapse of the
Speaker 1: market in eighteen forty. The hide Hunter story, we're saying
Speaker 1: sixty five, And as we explain, it's because you can't
Speaker 1: understand the hide Hunters without understanding the Civil War from
Speaker 1: a standpoint of firearms, from a standpoint of railroads, yeah,
Speaker 1: from a little bit of politics, okay, and from the
Speaker 1: standpoint of creating a generation of displaced young men. But
Speaker 1: the shooting doesn't start till about seven years later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the shooting really starts in eighteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: And on the railroad. On the railroad, note, like the
Speaker 2: trans Continental railroads are authorized during the Civil War, and
Speaker 2: that's tied to politics and questions about you know, like
Speaker 2: keeping California in the Union. And also the northern elected
Speaker 2: officials don't no longer have to concede things to the South,
Speaker 2: so it's really a Northern project. So they authorize the
Speaker 2: trans Continental railroads. They really don't get construction. They don't
Speaker 2: make a lot of progress and construction untill after the war.
Speaker 2: But the railroads are important for two reasons. One, the
Speaker 2: sheer logistics of moving all these buffalo skins off the
Speaker 2: planes is unimaginable without the railroads in the quantities that
Speaker 2: they're moving them. Two, a lot of these Civil War
Speaker 2: veterans got they sort of cut their teeth as buffalo
Speaker 2: hunters shooting meat to feed railroad workers, and so they
Speaker 2: were already making this transition into market hunters before the
Speaker 2: hide hunt as meat hunters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd like to explain one example that just because
Speaker 1: it's a name people are gonna be familiar with. If
Speaker 1: you're sitting there now listening to this, if one buffalo hunter. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying a hide hunter. A buffalo hunter you
Speaker 1: probably know is Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill Cody never
Speaker 1: participated in the hide hunt. Buffalo. Bill Cody shot four
Speaker 1: thousand buffalo as a meat hunter for the railroad, but
Speaker 1: then got off on other ventures, got into the show,
Speaker 1: got into show business and some high profile guiding. He
Speaker 1: never made the transition, but other guys like that, like picture,
Speaker 1: you got a guy like a guy like Bill Cody, Buffalo.
Speaker 1: Bill Cody kills four thousand for the meat. This guy
Speaker 1: has perfected the has perfected the skill. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: had these dudes when the hide market takes off, and
Speaker 1: we explain in great detail why the hyde market exploded.
Speaker 1: When the hide market takes off, you got guys that
Speaker 1: are rare and to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they don't need to figure out how to
Speaker 2: kill buffalo. Yeah, they've had their sort of professional apprenticeship
Speaker 2: as meat hunters and they're selling meat. Not only two
Speaker 2: railroad camps. Like you think about all the laborers needed
Speaker 2: for these infrastructure projects. Like there's companies that get a
Speaker 2: contract from the railroad to board and house all of
Speaker 2: the workers, and then those companies are going out and
Speaker 2: hiring a guy like Bill Cody to kill buffalo and
Speaker 2: it's like eight to day or something like that. They're
Speaker 2: also getting contracts to supply meat to forts, like there's
Speaker 2: military forts being established across the west to guard the
Speaker 2: railroad and also to wage war on the tribes. And
Speaker 2: so there's civilians who are going out and hunting buffalo
Speaker 2: to feed the soldiers. And then they're also engaging in
Speaker 2: a more limited scale selling meat to butchers or meat
Speaker 2: stores in the east, restaurants, hotels, whatever. It's sort of
Speaker 2: a curiosity. But all these there's very much like an
Speaker 2: intact robust trade in buffalo products before the hide hunt
Speaker 2: gets rolling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like if you imagine all of a sudden, squirrel
Speaker 1: brains are worth ten thousand dollars of brain, who's best
Speaker 1: suited to capitalize on that.
Speaker 2: Explodes that market Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy.
Speaker 1: So people later one hundred years later saying, do you
Speaker 1: know that Kevin Murphy used to just hunt squirrels, like
Speaker 1: for the meat. People don't realize this, and yeah, everybody
Speaker 1: knows him as the squirrel brain hunter.
Speaker 2: It's so funny because they like the Clarkson's the who
Speaker 2: I mentioned earlier the three. A lot of them will
Speaker 2: come out west not really knowing what they're doing, and
Speaker 2: then they get a job cutting wood to supply firewood
Speaker 2: to a military base, or cutting wood to supply firewood
Speaker 2: to a railroad camp, and then they realize another one
Speaker 2: of the guys cutting wood has sort of a side
Speaker 2: gig shooting buffalo, and then they realize, oh, I could
Speaker 2: do that. And then they realize if I got a
Speaker 2: wagon of my own to haul this meet, I could
Speaker 2: just kill buffalo all the time. And so there's like
Speaker 2: a series of years leading up to the hide hunt
Speaker 2: where there's sort of this professional class developing, and there's
Speaker 2: still like a huge rush of outsiders once the hide
Speaker 2: hunt gets out our way, but like there's very much
Speaker 2: like a well developed expertise around killing buffalo, like especially
Speaker 2: in Kansas where it gets rippen.
Speaker 1: We should touch real quick on this idea that we
Speaker 1: talk about with the long hunters, that oftentimes a long
Speaker 1: hunting expedition would be people related, strong familial connection coming
Speaker 1: out of a specific settlement, oftentimes like in the Yadkin
Speaker 1: Valley of North Carolina, but coming out of these small
Speaker 1: agrarian settlements loosely connected individuals and they become like a
Speaker 1: like a they launch a long hunting expedition. It could
Speaker 1: be forty guys, it could be five guys.
Speaker 2: The mountain men.
Speaker 1: You have this thing with Uh, it's just all these
Speaker 1: many uprooted, displaced young men sort of randomly thrown together.
Speaker 1: It's not a family enterprise. With the hide hunters. You
Speaker 1: do get a little bit back into a there is
Speaker 1: some family stuff. Yeah, but we bring up this term.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a beautiful term and I'm surprised I
Speaker 1: had never heard it before. It's so great. We get
Speaker 1: into this thing called siphon. I don't the way you
Speaker 1: picked the Randall introduced this word to me. Siphon migration
Speaker 1: m H where a person will a person will move
Speaker 1: out west, start doing well in the Buffalo high trade.
Speaker 1: And then and then heunctions as a sort of siphon
Speaker 1: and starts pulling people out with them.
Speaker 2: Come on out, you guys gotta get in on this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So like cousins, brothers, whatever, get on the train
Speaker 1: or ride and they're coming out of Ohio, Illinois, Virginia,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, and they're being drawn out by someone
Speaker 1: in their social network, someone in their family. They're being
Speaker 1: drawn out to get in on the bonanza. You also
Speaker 1: have these organizations that they've called an outfit, who are
Speaker 1: coming together, oftentimes like under specific job titles. It's a
Speaker 1: hierarchical structure. The mountain men would work for these giant
Speaker 1: by the time would have been like corporations. They had financiers.
Speaker 1: They're like VC backed corporations hired the mountain men. There's
Speaker 1: no corporate structure with the hide hunters. It's like whoever
Speaker 1: has the money to buy the equipment is the top
Speaker 1: of the hierarchy, and they'll be that. Usually that guy
Speaker 1: is the shooter, but then he has like specific roles
Speaker 1: with specific for specific skill sets. You have a shooter,
Speaker 1: you have a skinner, maybe you have two skinners, you
Speaker 1: have a camp cook, and these are like assigned roles
Speaker 1: and you can you can climb through the hierarchy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's like it's like a it's a job description,
Speaker 1: it's a skill, and you can go apply that skill.
Speaker 1: I could be I'm gonna go cook for Randall's outfit.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get sick of that, and the next year
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go and sign a similar deal and get
Speaker 1: a job cooking for Fhill's outfit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's the I'm forgetting the name of the historian,
Speaker 2: but he talks about this idea of crew culture where
Speaker 2: you develop, like an industry develops, this sort of well
Speaker 2: recognized a blueprint for how a crew works and if
Speaker 2: you if you make it through a season with one crew,
Speaker 2: you can pretty seamlessly hop onto the other crew. And
Speaker 2: you think about this as like guys in relative dangerous professions.
Speaker 2: You know, if you think about like logging, like wildfire
Speaker 2: crews or commercial fishermen, it's often people sort of in
Speaker 2: dangerous jobs. There's high turnover and there's like some hazing
Speaker 2: involved and once you but once you know the lingo,
Speaker 2: and once you have your own sort of set of tools,
Speaker 2: like you can you can bounce around and so so
Speaker 2: these buffalo hunting outfits are really small scale outfits, maybe
Speaker 2: four or five guys, some you know, twelve fifteen. I
Speaker 2: think they're in rare instances. There's some crews of twenty,
Speaker 2: but they all have very well defined jobs and there's
Speaker 2: a well defined sort of order of operations in terms
Speaker 2: of how you kill the buffalo, how you skin them,
Speaker 2: how you process them, and everybody's doing it. The same.
Speaker 2: And what's sort of just circle back one bit when
Speaker 2: you're talking about all the money in the in the
Speaker 2: fur business being tied up in like the corporations that
Speaker 2: are hiring the trappers, the big money in the buffalo
Speaker 2: hunt story is with these companies that are sort of
Speaker 2: in the import export business. They're they're trafficking in furs
Speaker 2: and leather and other goods, but they're just sort of
Speaker 2: they're in Kansas City, sort of these big hubs on
Speaker 2: the eastern side of the planes, and they are moving
Speaker 2: these skins by the thousands to tanneries in the east.
Speaker 2: They're sort of brokers like middlemen, and they actually are
Speaker 2: sending flyers out onto the planes explaining to guys how
Speaker 2: to skin, how to how to care for your skins,
Speaker 2: how to like like what the process is, what they want.
Speaker 2: And then essentially all you need is a wagon which
Speaker 2: is still a big investment in a rifle, and you
Speaker 2: go out and kill all the buffalo you can. And
Speaker 2: then a fur buyer or a hide buyer i should say,
Speaker 2: moves either. Either you go to town and sell your
Speaker 2: hides to them of the town and they're sort of
Speaker 2: a field agent for one of these big brokers, or
Speaker 2: they are even traveling around in the field to different
Speaker 2: camps and hauling the hauling the hides away, buying them
Speaker 2: directly in camps. So the hunters themselves and their crews
Speaker 2: or of these autonomous units on the periphery, and then
Speaker 2: there's there's a real hierarchical network of buyers that sort
Speaker 2: of vacuum and funnel all this stuff up to places
Speaker 2: like Kansas City.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: We were when we worked on this, we were struggling
Speaker 1: to be like, how do you describe the chaos of
Speaker 1: the Civil War, to understand how it's spinning people out,
Speaker 1: Like people know how horrible it is. So in world
Speaker 1: in World War Two, we lost about two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand Americans. In Vietnam we lost fifty seven thousand Americans.
Speaker 1: And the Civil War we lost this is combatants, and.
Speaker 2: When our population was considerably lower.
Speaker 1: Yeah, between the two armies comprised of you know, of Americans,
Speaker 1: seven hundred thousand dead combatants. In many communities, you took
Speaker 1: away an entire In many communities, you the war carried
Speaker 1: away entire generations of men. You in communities, you went
Speaker 1: and you you eliminated people, say seventeen to twenty eight
Speaker 1: or so. I mean you like you had it be
Speaker 1: where that town lost that bracket of individuals that that
Speaker 1: war killed off eight percent of the white men aged
Speaker 1: between thirteen and forty three. Remember said we lost fifty
Speaker 1: seven thousand and US soldiers in Vietnam, fifty thousand, fifty
Speaker 1: thousand civilians died in the Civil War. Sixty thousand people
Speaker 1: lost arms and legs in the Civil War. So by
Speaker 1: beginning this story in the Civil War, it's like you
Speaker 1: have literally destroyed huge swaths of the country and people
Speaker 1: needed something to go do. And the reason I bring
Speaker 1: this up and that kind of the reason we focus
Speaker 1: on this, Well, the main reason we focus on this
Speaker 1: is because it's like it's the truth and it's how
Speaker 1: things happened. But a big part of the a big
Speaker 1: impetus in like explaining the situation is I feel that
Speaker 1: coming and saying all the hide hunters were these sadistic
Speaker 1: people hell bent on destroying American wildlife, It's not accurate.
Speaker 1: I think that some of them, not think some of
Speaker 1: them were aware of the destruction they were doing. Some
Speaker 1: of them in the moment articulated an acute awareness of
Speaker 1: the destruction they were doing. But there's more to the
Speaker 1: story than just to be that these were like sadistic
Speaker 1: money grubbing executioners of wildlife, Like these were often people
Speaker 1: that had like not just like little opportunity, no opportunity.
Speaker 1: And though we weren't using this term at the time,
Speaker 1: about trauma, being shell shocked whatever, people coming out of
Speaker 1: horrific circumstances with absolutely no promise of employment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think two like a lot of them
Speaker 2: were refugees. Like when we think about the Great Depression
Speaker 2: and we think about like the you know, the grapes
Speaker 2: of wrath, like people heading out looking for work, like
Speaker 2: hitting the road looking for work, Like that's the situation
Speaker 2: on the ground in eighteen sixty five, and there's something
Speaker 2: like two hundred thousand people in the South lost their homes.
Speaker 2: So they are you know, not only maybe their farms
Speaker 2: had been burned, like their crops had been burned, like
Speaker 2: they're they're unmoored from what their lives had been like
Speaker 2: prior to this. And like we mentioned, you know, there's
Speaker 2: a there's a clear opportunity in the Buffalo market. And
Speaker 2: then the other the other side of that is like
Speaker 2: the eighteen seventies were a time of serious economic upheaval,
Speaker 2: and there's all sorts of financial panics and businesses failing,
Speaker 2: people getting laid off, unemployed, and so you find these
Speaker 2: in these accounts, like somebody's explaining why they became a
Speaker 2: buffalo hunter, and they're like, well, the ground oppers eight
Speaker 2: my crops, and I had to feed my family, so
Speaker 2: so I became a buffalo hunter. There's another story that
Speaker 2: a bunch of butchers from Saint Louis had shown up
Speaker 2: on the planes looking to cut buffalo because they'd all
Speaker 2: lost their jobs in a financial crisis. Right, and so like,
Speaker 2: even after the Civil War, the country's on very rocky
Speaker 2: footing and and it's very it's overwhelmingly clear from the
Speaker 2: stories that these people left behind that there's there's obviously
Speaker 2: some like hunger for adventure in frontier life and all that,
Speaker 2: but it's so overwhelmingly clear that these are people who
Speaker 2: are desperate.
Speaker 1: Another thing that's kicking out people onto the frontier is
Speaker 1: the progress of the railroads. Viewed in hindsight, the progress
Speaker 1: of the railroads was was was stunningly fast, but at
Speaker 1: times there'd be pauses. The Northern Pacific Railroad paused in Bismarck,
Speaker 1: North Dakota like just shut down. So you'd bring out
Speaker 1: all these workers and create this job opportunity and now
Speaker 1: and then money would dry up. Things that happened, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden it just like but we're done, yep.
Speaker 1: And so here you have people on the frontier who
Speaker 1: just had the rug.
Speaker 2: Pulled out and they can't get a bus ticket home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so that you'd like you were sort of
Speaker 1: like dumping people, like displacing dumped people out on the
Speaker 1: planes on the American frontier. And a lot of these guys,
Speaker 1: if you look at how they creep into it, like
Speaker 1: Randall said, I mean, they're doing like pretty lowly work
Speaker 1: like cutting firewood and then trying to haul firewood and
Speaker 1: sell it to a military fort. No one's getting rich
Speaker 1: cutting firewood, but that is putting them in position to
Speaker 1: be queued up to participate in the hide hunt.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One story that is probably worth mentioning is there's
Speaker 2: a guy named Elijah Cox who's actually a freed slave
Speaker 2: and he he served in the Buffalo Soldiers, the cavalry
Speaker 2: all black cavalry unit, and he gets discharged and he's
Speaker 2: he's discharged in Texas's I believe he's born in Michigan.
Speaker 2: So he gets discharged in Texas at some point fighting
Speaker 2: the apaches, and he doesn't have anything else to do,
Speaker 2: so he becomes a cook for a buffalo hunting outfit,
Speaker 2: and then after a couple of seasons of serving as
Speaker 2: a cook, he becomes a skinner. And and after a
Speaker 2: couple of seasons of serving as a skinner, one of
Speaker 2: the hunters in the outfit like breaks his leg or something,
Speaker 2: and so Elijah Cox gets to be a shooter. And
Speaker 2: so it's one of these sort of strange stories of
Speaker 2: like he spent he spent many years involved in the trade,
Speaker 2: worked his way up. Had know. It was not a
Speaker 2: plan that he had, right, It's just circumstances where he
Speaker 2: found himself. And and ultimately I think he killed some
Speaker 2: seven hundred.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had an AskMen of how many got And
Speaker 1: I think that when he when he got cut loose
Speaker 1: from the military, if I remember right, and it's in
Speaker 1: we explained it in here, I think he got cut
Speaker 1: loose from the military from an injury.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was he was like medically discharged. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so here he is he's just on the frontier, yeah,
Speaker 2: with no network, like like nothing to fall back on.
Speaker 1: Later when he was asked about it. You know, we're
Speaker 1: talking about earlier, we were talking about the way people
Speaker 1: justify it and the way they kind of like maybe
Speaker 1: misremember their motivations. Later, when he was asked about it,
Speaker 1: his reply was basically like, oh, I know, as I
Speaker 1: had plenty to eat and I always had money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And that was during the that was So
Speaker 2: what's interesting about that is like during the Great Depression,
Speaker 2: you know, there's all these oral history projects, and so
Speaker 2: he was interviewed at the tail end of the Great Depression.
Speaker 2: He's still alive and he's lived through the Great Depression,
Speaker 2: and he's thinking about the Buffalo days and he's like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's.
Speaker 3: Pretty pretty good, a lot of meat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I what I said earlier contradat he was
Speaker 2: he was born to escaped slaves, So he was born
Speaker 2: in Michigan. His parents were both escape escaped slaves from
Speaker 2: the South.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Buffalo soldiers play into this story a little bit,
Speaker 1: and we get into much greater detail in the project.
Speaker 1: But the the that term, you hear that term often,
Speaker 1: like even the what's his name Bob? The Bob Marley reference.
Speaker 2: I believe it was the.
Speaker 1: Commanche or Apache, I'm not I can't remember who likened
Speaker 1: the hair. They likened the hair of these black American
Speaker 1: cavalry members. They likened the hair to.
Speaker 2: The wool of a buffalo, so they would say they
Speaker 2: were a Buffalo soldier. Man. It became like a proud
Speaker 2: identity for a lot of these guys after the Civil War,
Speaker 2: Like they're they're out west, they're serving in the army
Speaker 2: and and yeah, it's like a really fascinating Eventually they
Speaker 2: come up to Yellowstone, they're in Montana.
Speaker 1: And they and they're having mix ups like they they're
Speaker 1: oftentimes during this little period that have them done. In Texas,
Speaker 1: Buffalo hide hunters are joining groups of Buffalo soldiers fighting
Speaker 1: against Comanche. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the situation that maybe we should get into this
Speaker 2: like the phases of the hunt, Yeah, the three phases,
Speaker 2: because it starts in Kansas really along the tracks of
Speaker 2: of the railroads, the Topeka, Santa Fe in particular, Dodge
Speaker 2: City is like a big hub. And then the slaughter
Speaker 2: sort of goes on until there aren't any buffalo in
Speaker 2: Kansas anymore, and they the high hunters push into Texas,
Speaker 2: and Texas it becomes a much like at first they're
Speaker 2: so far away from any hub of settlement that they're
Speaker 2: still hauling the hauling the hides back up to Dodge City,
Speaker 2: but they're bumping into comanches and and there's a real
Speaker 2: recognition on the part of the comanches and other their
Speaker 2: their allies that the high hunters are killing off their
Speaker 2: economic lifeblood. And so it becomes sort of a very bloody,
Speaker 2: uh theater for the for the hide hunt, where high
Speaker 2: hunters sometimes are serving as sort of like proxy fighters
Speaker 2: for the US Army, and the army is serving as
Speaker 2: sort of proxy fighters for the buffalo hunters. And then
Speaker 2: at some point they kill all the buffalo in Texas
Speaker 2: and they roll up to Montana, and then Montana it's
Speaker 2: it's sort of a mop up job, and and in
Speaker 2: a couple of years the herds of the northern plains
Speaker 2: are basically blinked out.
Speaker 1: That that's a It's an interesting point about the Indigenous
Speaker 1: Americans that when we get into the deer skin trade,
Speaker 1: like in our long Hunter piece we focus on we
Speaker 1: focus really heavily on these Euro American, these white long hunters,
Speaker 1: but that the deer skin trade was really built by
Speaker 1: Native hunters before these guys like Boone and people started
Speaker 1: going into that area. There had been long a colonial
Speaker 1: trade in deer skins, and in the early days of
Speaker 1: that trade, those deer skins are being harvested by Native
Speaker 1: Americans and bought in and exported with the beaver skin trade.
Speaker 1: There were some tribes wanted nothing to do with the
Speaker 1: beaver skin trade. Other tribes jumped in pretty heavily, like
Speaker 1: the Flatheads were famous for having engaged in the beaver
Speaker 1: skin tribe trade. The Blackfeet. Some historians like to point
Speaker 1: out how the Blackfeet sat it out, but there's other
Speaker 1: accounts of the Blackfeet engaging pretty heavily and trading to
Speaker 1: the north. But they did it. The mountain men would
Speaker 1: often overwinter with tribes. A lot of mountain men were
Speaker 1: very tightly as so, like jim Bridge was very tightly
Speaker 1: associated with the Shoshone. Right, So there's this big Native
Speaker 1: American element of people in the trade, of people traveling
Speaker 1: with the practitioners. You get into the hide hunters and
Speaker 1: you don't find like.
Speaker 2: There's no cultural exchange, there's no sort of shared interests,
Speaker 2: there's no allies.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: As we get into it, we had a whole chapter.
Speaker 1: It kind of sets up this thing there was we're
Speaker 1: talking about when we talk about hide hunters. There was
Speaker 1: a thing called what we call the robe hunt or
Speaker 1: the robe trade. There was a commercial Native American trade,
Speaker 1: which was small scale and very artisan, for tanned buffalo
Speaker 1: robes that were used as an as an insulation. Like
Speaker 1: if you were on a way. You could be in
Speaker 1: Boston riding in a wagon on a cold day and
Speaker 1: you have a lap blanket that is a winter killed
Speaker 1: buffalo from the northern Plains. You could be in the
Speaker 1: military and be issued a sleeping bag on a polar
Speaker 1: expedition that could be a winter killed Indian tanned buffalo
Speaker 1: robe from the northern plans. So Indians would shoot buffalo
Speaker 1: at the right time of year and the right location,
Speaker 1: the women would tan it into a finished good, and
Speaker 1: that finished good was sold.
Speaker 2: But that was small and there's bottlenecks on there's natural
Speaker 2: constraints on the scale of that trade because of the
Speaker 2: seasonality and especially because of that labor part. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: a woman could tan ten a year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a woman in addition to serving her family, preparing
Speaker 1: hides to clothe their family, working on hides to make
Speaker 1: a tent, she might be able to put out ten robes,
Speaker 1: yeah a year.
Speaker 2: A hide hunter.
Speaker 1: That's just hunting for skin, not tanned goods, but just
Speaker 1: hunting selling skin. A hide hunter, they would get into
Speaker 1: long periods where they are killing thirty and forty a day.
Speaker 1: There is examples of killing way more than that. We
Speaker 1: get into some of these extraordinary kills, but routinely, in
Speaker 1: good conditions, they're waking up every day and killing thirty
Speaker 1: to forty and a woman, a woman in a Native
Speaker 1: American family on the Great Plans, might be able to
Speaker 1: produce ten robes and annually.
Speaker 2: And like we said, the hide hunters are only drying
Speaker 2: the skins out and then they're being tanned on an
Speaker 2: industrial scale. In the East, there's sort of a bottomless
Speaker 2: appetite for buffalo skins, and there's really a bottomless appetite
Speaker 2: for leather at this time because the leather making industry,
Speaker 2: the tanning industry, has grown and consolidated and mechanized and
Speaker 2: made all these improvements and sort of process to the
Speaker 2: point that like it's basically like a big gaping maw,
Speaker 2: and as many hides as you can shovel into it,
Speaker 2: it can handle it, and it can find markets for them.
Speaker 2: So the tanning industry is just absorbing this on a
Speaker 2: scale that like native communities could not have during the
Speaker 2: robe trade era.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're being tanned where you have a native woman
Speaker 1: tanning a buffalo hide with hand tools on the ground,
Speaker 1: using a buffalo's brain, okay, or a concoction of liver
Speaker 1: and brain to soften it when the hide hunters get going.
Speaker 1: Their skins are being tanned in railroad fed tanneries in
Speaker 1: buildings that are three hundred yards long by companies that
Speaker 1: own There's one company we talk about that owns twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand acres of timberland in Pennsylvania because they want
Speaker 1: tamarack and hemlock. They owned twenty five thousand acres of
Speaker 1: timberland to produce bark to make tannic acid.
Speaker 2: And this is a place like if you've heard the
Speaker 2: term of company town, where the company owns the store,
Speaker 2: the company owns the houses. You go there, you work
Speaker 2: for the factory, you go live in a house owned
Speaker 2: by the factory, and you buy your groceries from the factory.
Speaker 2: Like this is a company town in rural Pennsylvania that
Speaker 2: has nine story buildings where they're drying buffalo hides and
Speaker 2: they're tanning them these huge vats. They have rows of
Speaker 2: hundreds of vats, and yeah, like it's almost it's sort
Speaker 2: of startling when you see photos and these tanneries continue
Speaker 2: to operate even after the buffalo It was like when
Speaker 2: the buffalo hide trade was going on, they switched over
Speaker 2: to tanning, a majority of their business was buffalo skins,
Speaker 2: and then afterwards they simply switched back over to cattle skins.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really one of the more fascinating points,
Speaker 1: like a discovery that I hadn't working on this. Oftentimes,
Speaker 1: when we go into these projects, like we're going to
Speaker 1: it with some level of pre awareness about the details,
Speaker 1: and we'll be able to like random and I can
Speaker 1: sit and we can kind of map out based on
Speaker 1: what we already know.
Speaker 2: We can kind of map out.
Speaker 1: How the story plays out, and we might come up
Speaker 1: with like we need to find out this or we
Speaker 1: need to learn why this is the way it is.
Speaker 1: But we come in with like some level of familiarity
Speaker 1: I and I kind of understand how I came to
Speaker 1: think this. Now I had thought from previous research and
Speaker 1: in fact, oh you know what I was gonna mention
Speaker 1: this story, like I wrote a book.
Speaker 2: I think it came out and so it was two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, I published a book, American
Speaker 1: Buffalo and Search of a Lost Icon. And it tells
Speaker 1: the story of the species from you know, the place,
Speaker 1: the scene. It tells the story of the species from
Speaker 1: the ice age up and into the future. It's this
Speaker 1: whole overview of the animal. There's a part of a
Speaker 1: chapter where I talk about the hide hunters. So have
Speaker 1: you ever seen like an exploded diagram where you're looking
Speaker 1: at like a piece of machinery, and then there's like
Speaker 1: a little arrow pointing to a part of the machinery,
Speaker 1: and on the next page is an exploded diagram of
Speaker 1: that little component. This is an exploded diagram of what
Speaker 1: is perhaps the most interesting part about that story, where
Speaker 1: this is taking that little that couple pages about the
Speaker 1: hide Hunters and American buffalo and blowing it out to
Speaker 1: something as long as the American buffalo. So there's if
Speaker 1: you've read that, and I know many of you have
Speaker 1: read that, there's like a little bits of overlapping stuff,
Speaker 1: But this is like a greatly this focus is on
Speaker 1: the most important stretch of a couple decades in that
Speaker 1: story and tells a very detailed accounting of something that
Speaker 1: I briefly gloss over in the book. But in that work,
Speaker 1: I had come to this thing, and you'll see it repeated,
Speaker 1: like I know where I got it, this idea that
Speaker 1: there was a invention, okay, or a revolutionary new process
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden made it so buffalo leather
Speaker 1: was like the greatest leather of all time. Okay. You'll
Speaker 1: see this, that they came up with news tanning methods
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, lordy, lordie, you could make
Speaker 1: this great elastic belting out of buffalo hide, and buffalo
Speaker 1: hide was this super special leather. And that's not entirely wrong,
Speaker 1: but it's not quite right.
Speaker 2: You'll see that in every single thing, almost every single
Speaker 2: thing you read on the subjects, even like people writing
Speaker 2: in the eighteen nineties like William Temple Hornaday, like they
Speaker 2: they're saying, there's this Eureka moment where all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: there's value in buffalo leather and it goes It's like
Speaker 2: a boom and a bust, and that's just sort of
Speaker 2: accepted as fact. And I'd never read an explanation of
Speaker 2: what that was, and I really wanted to find that
Speaker 2: for this project. And we talked about this a lot,
Speaker 2: like we got to find that, We got to have
Speaker 2: that in there. Our audience is interested in tanning and
Speaker 2: working with skins and all this stuff. Like if there's
Speaker 2: one thing we need to have, it's that, and it
Speaker 2: just it doesn't really exist.
Speaker 1: You know, what would be a maybe perhaps a better
Speaker 1: way of thinking about what actually happened. What's that wood
Speaker 1: that everybody uses under decking? Now, it's like that composite wood.
Speaker 1: It's like chipped up. It's like chipped up wood with
Speaker 1: with with resins and adhesives.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like the fake wood. Okay, never mind
Speaker 2: that particleboard. Plywood, Yeah, plywood, Sure, everybody knows plywood.
Speaker 1: All right. Let's say you got a mill and they
Speaker 1: produce plywood, and because of where they're at, what trees
Speaker 1: they have available, they're producing tons of plywood, let's say,
Speaker 1: with white pine, and they develop this strategy and they
Speaker 1: can use white pine and they're making this really nice
Speaker 1: plywood and they're selling plywood like hotcakes. And all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, someone says, hey, man, you know how we're
Speaker 1: paying five dollars per unit of wood on white pine?
Speaker 1: Do you know that we can get ponderosa pine for
Speaker 1: three bucks? And so they go to their engineers, Hey,
Speaker 1: what happens when you use Ponderosa pine? And the engineers go, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, it turns out if you if you add
Speaker 1: a little more resin, it's the same thing. Man, like
Speaker 1: plywood's plywood. We could definitely use that Ponderosa pine. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, if it's three bucks and not five bucks,
Speaker 1: we'll take as much of that Ponderosa pine as we
Speaker 1: can get our hands on. Yeah, And they keep making plywood,
Speaker 1: and people keep buying plywood, and a lot of these
Speaker 1: people that are buying it, they wouldn't know white pine
Speaker 1: from ponderosa pine if they saw it. It's the product
Speaker 1: they want, and they're buying it. And then sometime down
Speaker 1: the road some guy goes, ah, you know what, the
Speaker 1: ponderosa pine they cut it all down.
Speaker 2: It's gone back to white pie.
Speaker 1: I guess we'll let's just keep running that white pine.
Speaker 1: That's great, is goodball lasting?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean it was like that's a better way of
Speaker 1: thinking about leather consumption because they were being like asiatic
Speaker 1: water buffalo.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the paddle from South America. Sure, the United sure
Speaker 1: buffalo hides, why not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like there's another there's the United States is importing
Speaker 2: leather anywhere it can't, or hides from anywhere it can,
Speaker 2: like sourcing hides, and all of a sudden, with the
Speaker 2: railroads they can access. However, many million hides are just
Speaker 2: sort of walking around out there on the planes and
Speaker 2: it can be sucked into this this pre existing you
Speaker 2: know network. And there's some truth to the idea that
Speaker 2: there's technological advances, like they're the the industry as a
Speaker 2: whole is getting better and better at working with big,
Speaker 2: heavy hides. There's some there's there's some changes in method
Speaker 2: where they're they're using hot water, like they're they're lining
Speaker 2: them and then doing a hot water bath. And there's
Speaker 2: actually a guy who calls that the buffalo method. But
Speaker 2: it's not. It wasn't invented for buffalo. It's just sort
Speaker 2: of like a gradual improvement and processes over time that
Speaker 2: happened to align with their ability to ship buffalo hides
Speaker 2: by the hundreds and thousands every year.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The challenge is if anybody that's skinned it deer
Speaker 1: knows that the belly right the belly's real thin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the hides much thicker on either side of the backbone,
Speaker 1: you know, the inside of the legs is real thin,
Speaker 1: the hides real thick up on the neck. Whatever. The
Speaker 1: challenge is, how do you produce a uniform? How do
Speaker 1: you produce the biggest piece of uniform.
Speaker 2: Product you can?
Speaker 1: And so they're doing all this stuff like they're like
Speaker 1: they're they're like, imagine basically that you're sanding it down.
Speaker 2: And I think we just before that, I mean we're talking.
Speaker 2: I don't think we've mentioned yet belting.
Speaker 1: No, we have a tub of where all this like
Speaker 1: why yeah, yeah, the country had always used leather. The
Speaker 1: number one thing we want a leather for shoes. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: let shoes were leather, tack, horse equipment, harness equipment, all
Speaker 1: that stuff was made out of leather. But and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden they.
Speaker 2: Need belting, which is like if you picture if you
Speaker 2: picture a timing belt on your snow machine or whatever
Speaker 2: in your car, Like a belt is simply something that,
Speaker 2: at the most basic level, takes movement from one place
Speaker 2: and transfers that movement to something else. Right, So one
Speaker 2: thing spins, the belt spins through it and the other
Speaker 2: side spins that. Yeah, does that make sense? And so
Speaker 2: if you imagine like a very early factory, it's all
Speaker 2: it's all gears and cogs either made out of wood
Speaker 2: or metal, and you're taking power from a stream like
Speaker 2: a like a You've got a water wheel and a stream,
Speaker 2: and the wheel's turning and that's turning a big shaft
Speaker 2: that's turning a gear that's turning another shaft until it
Speaker 2: gets to wherever you're doing the work with that power,
Speaker 2: whether it's like a grinding mill or you know, you
Speaker 2: can power a saw with that. You could power any
Speaker 2: sorts of other like mechanical tools with that power. But
Speaker 2: it all has to be transmitted through One thing moves,
Speaker 2: another thing moves, and other thing moves another thing moves,
Speaker 2: because they can't just zap it down a wire like
Speaker 2: in the age of electricity. And so the leather belt
Speaker 2: replaces this older system of shafts and cogs and wheels
Speaker 2: and things like that. And it's revolutionary because you can
Speaker 2: spread power out across a factory floor in all types
Speaker 2: of different directions, and you can spread it out to
Speaker 2: different machines or whatever. And this is something that's invented
Speaker 2: in America the leather belt drive, and then it's sort
Speaker 2: of perfected during the Civil War as like there's this
Speaker 2: increase in wartime manufacturing, and so that coincides again with
Speaker 2: the railroads reach the planes. The buffalo can be shipped east.
Speaker 2: The tanning factories are ready to absorb the buffalo, and
Speaker 2: there's this, I mean, we're talking about miles and miles
Speaker 2: and miles of belting in a factory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a photo from after the buffalo hide era.
Speaker 1: And again they used that leather when it was available,
Speaker 1: but the wiping out the buffalo didn't wipe out leather.
Speaker 1: So there's a photo from the Ford plant. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: lathing operation for like the drive shafts at a Ford plant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the caption on the photo points out that what
Speaker 1: you're looking at is fifty miles. It's just a picture
Speaker 1: a bunch of people in a factory, all dressed in
Speaker 1: black and white. As a joke. A bunch of people
Speaker 1: at a factory.
Speaker 3: I'll talking like that.
Speaker 1: Standing at equipment and over their heads is nothing butt belting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because somewhere is a big steam engine running and they're
Speaker 1: transmitting power to all these lathes. And it says you're
Speaker 1: looking at fifty miles of leather belting, but some of
Speaker 1: this leather belting is ten feet wide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And that's so if you picture an old
Speaker 2: like if you've ever seen a drawing of an old factory,
Speaker 2: there's all these people working at machines in neat little rows,
Speaker 2: and overhead there's a bunch of stuff and there's lines
Speaker 2: coming down to their machines, and it almost looks like
Speaker 2: like a puppet theater, right, And so essentially, the way
Speaker 2: that before the age of electricity, the way that this
Speaker 2: worked is you had a steam engine and that's turning
Speaker 2: a huge belt, and that's called the prime mover of
Speaker 2: the factory. Like the steam engine begins moving things, and
Speaker 2: then that belt moves these long shafts that are suspended
Speaker 2: in parallel rows above the factory floor. Those shafts then
Speaker 2: are linked together by belts so that when one turns,
Speaker 2: they all turn. So you have the prime mover, and
Speaker 2: that's moving a big belt that turns one of these shafts,
Speaker 2: and then that shaft is turning all the other shafts,
Speaker 2: and then each individual machine is connected to those moving
Speaker 2: shafts on the ceiling by more belts and if you're
Speaker 2: going to do something at a machine, you essentially have
Speaker 2: like a clutch like in your car, because the whole
Speaker 2: thing is moving continuously, like the things above your moving continuously.
Speaker 2: So if you're all of a sudden, I need to
Speaker 2: use my saw or my hammer or my mill or
Speaker 2: whatever it is, you have like a foot pedal that
Speaker 2: sort of clutches that timing belt onto your machine. And
Speaker 2: now your machine's running, and to stop it you disengage
Speaker 2: it from the belt again with that with that clutch, and.
Speaker 1: That power is always cranking, and they're even running primary
Speaker 1: belts into other buildings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to other buildings. And if you think about it,
Speaker 2: like today, if you have a big manufacturing operation, every
Speaker 2: place you need an outlet or an extension cord before electricity,
Speaker 2: that all has to be connected physically by moving things.
Speaker 2: Like if you want to move whatever, a rock crusher,
Speaker 2: it has to be connected by moving parts to moving
Speaker 2: parts to moving parts to the steam engine or whatever
Speaker 2: is generating your power there. So like when we think
Speaker 2: about the expansion of the industrial economy, like in the
Speaker 2: eighteen seventies, eighties, nineties, it's all predicated on the ability
Speaker 2: of belts to connect machines to steam engines, and so
Speaker 2: that's like it's almost this bottomless demand for leather, and
Speaker 2: buffalo leather does lend itself well to this because of
Speaker 2: its inherent properties. But as Steve pointed out, like the
Speaker 2: Ford is still using leather belts in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 2: and they're not taking them from buffalo like you could have.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not like if we hadn't had buffalo leather,
Speaker 2: we couldn't have built these factories. Buffalo leather just happened
Speaker 2: to sort of fall into the shoot at the right time.
Speaker 1: What kind of feeds this idea of some specific thing
Speaker 1: triggering it? Is this? There's this There is a story
Speaker 1: that comes out of the Kansas Planes and it's very
Speaker 1: well documented and it's a really interesting narrative of how
Speaker 1: this played out. Is a tannery has a desire to
Speaker 1: experiment with some buffalo skins. So they call like a broker,
Speaker 1: a guy that deals in buffalo meet and other things
Speaker 1: out in Kansas, and they're like, hey, we'd like to
Speaker 1: get five hundred hides to mess with.
Speaker 2: He's not a hunter.
Speaker 1: He goes to one of these railroad meat hunters and
Speaker 1: says to a railroad meat hunter. Hey, can you get
Speaker 1: me the five hundred?
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: So here's a guy. He takes the order, he needs
Speaker 1: to find someone to fulfill the order. He contracts a guy,
Speaker 1: a meat hunter, to fulfill his order for five hundred.
Speaker 1: The meat hunter shoots I think five hundred and fifty one,
Speaker 1: turns the five hundred into the guy that bought him
Speaker 1: for him, but he's got this extra fifty to burn
Speaker 1: sends the extra fifty to a brother and austin New York,
Speaker 1: sorry New York. But the buyer who then sold, yeah,
Speaker 1: sends the other fifty to a brother who then's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'll go try to find someone that wants them. He
Speaker 1: sells them to a tannery. So now you have two
Speaker 1: tanneries that are sitting on some There's a tannery sitting
Speaker 1: at about five hundred. There's a tannery sitting at about fifty.
Speaker 1: Both of these tanneries mess around with the hides and
Speaker 1: both come back and say, we'd like a lot.
Speaker 2: Gimme Elia gott we'd like a lot.
Speaker 1: And that starts it. Yeah, that is it is a
Speaker 1: very distinct like beginning. Yeah, that broadus's the beginning.
Speaker 2: That brother in New York as soon as he sells
Speaker 2: them and the company says, we want two thousand more
Speaker 2: and probably more. After that, he just gets on a
Speaker 2: train to Kansas and he finds his brother in Dodge City.
Speaker 2: He said, this is just the business now. Yep, it's
Speaker 2: game on. Yeah, yeah, it's game on.
Speaker 1: And it caught. It happened so fast that it caught
Speaker 1: meat hunters by surprise. There's hide hunters that talk about that.
Speaker 1: There's hide hunters that like, remember the day they they
Speaker 1: got the news. Yeah, like the day they got the
Speaker 1: news where people are like, no, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's the hides dummy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a guy. There's a guy who's out shooting
Speaker 2: meat and he's complaining to some other hunters that it's
Speaker 2: too hot out because all of his meat's spoiling before
Speaker 2: he could sell it. And they look at him and
Speaker 2: they're like, why are you still hunting for meat? You
Speaker 2: could just screak me, take the hides off, and bring
Speaker 2: him to here and it'll buy everyone he can bring him.
Speaker 2: And he he's like dumbfounded. He because he's still out
Speaker 2: there trying to cure hams and stuff on the planes
Speaker 2: and and sort of his the world has moved past that.
Speaker 1: Uh, another one this kind of this is the last
Speaker 1: part of this that we'll get into right now. Uh,
Speaker 1: there is if you study this area this, if you
Speaker 1: study this era on like a superficial level, you'll always
Speaker 1: find out about all the waste and without wanting to
Speaker 1: without wanting to do a sort of revisionist history. You know,
Speaker 1: let me better explain what I'm saying. The hide hunters
Speaker 1: waste the enormous quantities of meat. But there's more to
Speaker 1: the story.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: You could picture someone coming to this, depending on their motivations,
Speaker 1: you could picture someone coming to this and saying.
Speaker 2: Like, it's all a lie.
Speaker 1: They didn't waste all that meat. They sold a lot
Speaker 1: of meat. Like, they sold a lot of meat. And
Speaker 1: as we gotten into this for like, let me tell
Speaker 1: you two things that are real true. Man, they sold
Speaker 1: a lot of meat, but man, they wasted a lot,
Speaker 1: a lot, a lot more. Yeah, you could get into,
Speaker 1: like we get into all the numbers on this, you
Speaker 1: can get into what seems like staggering quantities of sold meat.
Speaker 1: When you get into the tonnages, like the counts on tongues,
Speaker 1: the barrels of tongues, the trainloads of meat, right, the
Speaker 1: vast quantities of smoked hams.
Speaker 2: And they talk about it a lot, and you'd look
Speaker 2: and be like, my god, strain resourceful train cars full
Speaker 2: of meat, right, And you could spend this whole narrative
Speaker 2: about all this meat, or you can start going like, okay,
Speaker 2: let's start trying.
Speaker 1: To do a little math. Let's do a little math.
Speaker 1: Like here's a guy. And these guys had meticulous records
Speaker 1: because they're getting receipts when they sell this stuff. Like
Speaker 1: the receipts are out there be like, you know, a
Speaker 1: receipt to Bob, but it's like what Bob got for
Speaker 1: his cow hides for his bull hides for his kIPS
Speaker 1: or calf hides for his meat, and like how many
Speaker 1: pounds of meat and what perr?
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like these are like we are very much like
Speaker 1: we talked with long hunters. A lot of the information
Speaker 1: about the long hunters is because a historian later went
Speaker 1: and talked to their grandkid and he's like, no, I
Speaker 1: swear grandpa said that he got two dollars for his
Speaker 1: deer hides or whatever, you know, and that becomes like
Speaker 1: the historic record some dude's recollection about what his dad
Speaker 1: told him or his grandpa told him. Here, it's like
Speaker 1: there's too much material. There's tons of material. So you
Speaker 1: can get into these staggering quantities of meat that really does.
Speaker 1: But then you get into like, let's look at it
Speaker 1: as percentages, you know, and when you start looking at
Speaker 1: certain outfits and this is just the outfits that did
Speaker 1: sell me. Plenty of outfits didn't sell me. When you
Speaker 1: get into the outfits that did sell meat and you
Speaker 1: start looking at their numbers, it's like, man, they sold
Speaker 1: a lot of meat, but like it seems like about
Speaker 1: ninety nine percent it's wasted. Like be like, okay, so
Speaker 1: they're selling about six pounds. Yeah, they're selling maybe like
Speaker 1: if you look at his whole hide hole and then
Speaker 1: you look at his meat receipts, you're like, okay, he's
Speaker 1: selling about six pounds per animal.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, at six pounds an animals,
Speaker 2: he's selling ten twenty thousand pounds of meat in a year.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's just like it's a real roller coaster
Speaker 1: because you're going to like, ah, they wasted all the meat.
Speaker 1: Then you get into this like holy cow, they sold
Speaker 1: a lot of meat, and you're like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: they wasted a lot of meat.
Speaker 2: But again it's like the reason they did this is
Speaker 2: to make money. And so wherever they could squeeze a
Speaker 2: little extra profit or a little extra revenue to get
Speaker 2: the stuff that they needed or tuck little money like
Speaker 2: away for a slow season, like if they could, if
Speaker 2: they could halt some meat to a to a railroad
Speaker 2: pretty easily, they did it. You know, if they're hunting
Speaker 2: in super remote areas, they're not trading and meat, but
Speaker 2: like if you can get an extra couple bucks off
Speaker 2: an animal by by curing its hands and hump and stuff,
Speaker 2: like they did that.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 2: There's it's a there's a real complicated explanation of it all.
Speaker 1: But yeah, here's here's an interesting piece of this, this
Speaker 1: kind of show, like the the hard scrabble nature, but
Speaker 1: also the uh a kind of persnickety quality of these
Speaker 1: individuals when it comes to or like a penny pinching
Speaker 1: kind of miserly quality to like the economics. There was
Speaker 1: a product that came from the buffalo that was a
Speaker 1: stuffing of mattress stuffing material and it was if you
Speaker 1: picture the forehead on a buffalo is called the mop
Speaker 1: okay that had value, and it was used to stuff mattresses,
Speaker 1: stuff of polstery. It was hard to get out, hard
Speaker 1: to pull out, Like they didn't want the mop's skin,
Speaker 1: they just wanted the hair and bags. So these hide
Speaker 1: hunters like you couldn't pull it. But if anyone is
Speaker 1: dealt with animals a lot, you know that we have
Speaker 1: a term when the hair starts to slip. Like fire
Speaker 1: your picture, you're walking along the bank of a river
Speaker 1: and you see a deer and he's like, you know,
Speaker 1: dead on the side of the river, drown on the
Speaker 1: river and washed out, and you go grab a handful
Speaker 1: of hair on that thing.
Speaker 2: What happens when you grab a handful of that hair
Speaker 2: and pull comes right out, comes right.
Speaker 1: It's called the hair is slipping. So in the high
Speaker 1: trade even today, the worst thing. Talk to your tax
Speaker 1: nermost if you're bringing in a deer cape, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to sell a skunk hide, it doesn't matter. Hair
Speaker 1: slippage means too late, it's rotten. Like if you go
Speaker 1: to your tax nermous with a bear rug or a
Speaker 1: deer cape and he grabs a tough to that hair
Speaker 1: and pulls, and half the hair in his hand comes free,
Speaker 1: just you messed up. Yeah, it's slipping. It's no good.
Speaker 1: They would at times when there's nothing else to do,
Speaker 1: they would wait till all these like when they skin
Speaker 1: the carcass, as we explained how they skin them. When
Speaker 1: they skin the carcass, they'd stop behind the ears. So
Speaker 1: a buffalo hide went to the market is missing, it's
Speaker 1: missing its face, it's cut off behind the ears. They
Speaker 1: would wait till the carcasses rotten enough that the hair
Speaker 1: would start to slip, and then they would go back
Speaker 1: out into the field and pull mops and stuff it
Speaker 1: into sacks.
Speaker 2: When they're good and rotten, meaning.
Speaker 1: Where there's money to be made. They were there to
Speaker 1: make the money. It's just at times it's like it's
Speaker 1: just it wasn't efficient, but you could. It's it's really
Speaker 1: hard to look at their lives and point out places
Speaker 1: where you're lazy. Yeah, Like this wasn't like a laziness thing.
Speaker 1: It was just business man. It was business. It was business.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And on top of that, not to not to
Speaker 2: get into more details, but there's all kinds of wild
Speaker 2: stories in this, just like the weird you know, people
Speaker 2: getting charged by buffalo, people getting pounded in hailstorms, people
Speaker 2: getting killed, people finding bodies, people doing really weird stuff,
Speaker 2: people eating weird stuff, people playing pranks on each other,
Speaker 2: dying weird ways, dying in weird ways. We got a guy.
Speaker 1: We have a big section about all the people killed
Speaker 1: by buffaloes that they wounded. We're working on an animation project. Anyways,
Speaker 1: there's a guy who shoots a buffalo, gets up through
Speaker 1: it's still alive, pulls out his pistol to finish it off.
Speaker 1: As he pulls out his pistol, the buffalo jumps up
Speaker 1: and starts coming for him. He really quickly tries to
Speaker 1: mount his horse to get away, and in mounting us
Speaker 1: because he's got his pistol out now and it's cocked.
Speaker 1: In mounting his horse, he has a negligent discharge and
Speaker 1: shoots his own horse. So now the horse takes off wounded.
Speaker 1: The buffalo is wounded, chasing the horse, and then both
Speaker 1: the horse and the buffalo.
Speaker 2: Die and he walks walks away.
Speaker 1: Other guys, other hide hunters, they go miss him. This
Speaker 1: is the kind of we give a handful of these
Speaker 1: stories that play out very similarly. Bob is off hunting,
Speaker 1: Bob don't come home at night. In the morning, you
Speaker 1: go looking for Bob and lo and behold, there's a
Speaker 1: dead buffalo laying there, and there's a dead Bob laying
Speaker 1: next to it. Yeah, and Bob is in bad shape.
Speaker 2: It turns out that when you shoot buffalo by the dozens,
Speaker 2: you make some bad shots and you end up encountering
Speaker 2: some angry buffalo.
Speaker 1: Yep, and Bob is badly bruised.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyhow, me Inter's American.
Speaker 1: History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: We never explained eighteen eighty three. So you know, when
Speaker 1: you hear an interview with an author and they don't
Speaker 1: want to tell the end, Well, you're in the end.
Speaker 1: You're like, so did they catch them? They're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna tell. Does he die in the end?
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna tell.
Speaker 2: Well, oh you can do this. Do the buffalo die
Speaker 2: in the end?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: But what year not telling? Not telling?
Speaker 1: I let out to my I'm a huge fury Road
Speaker 1: and Furiosa fan. I let out to my daughter early
Speaker 1: on in furios that her boyfrid friend doesn't make it
Speaker 1: through to the end. She was very upset with me
Speaker 1: for letting that leak. So I hope you're not watching
Speaker 1: that one can leave that out till thanks for joining me.
Speaker 1: There's American history, of course, go back the Long Hunters,
Speaker 1: then check out The Mountain Men, and then dig into
Speaker 1: the new one available now, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: five to eighteen eighty three. We were going to talk
Speaker 1: about what's next, or we're going to talk about how
Speaker 1: we're trying to decide what's next, but wait and see.
Speaker 1: When it happens, we will tell you about it. Thank
Speaker 1: you very much for listening.