Speaker 1: My name is Clay and Nukam and this is a
Speaker 1: production of the bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render,
Speaker 1: where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the
Speaker 1: scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast presented by f
Speaker 1: HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear
Speaker 1: that's designed to be as rugged as the place as
Speaker 1: we explore. Welcome to the Bear Grease Render. We have
Speaker 1: a pretty normal crew of the Render here today and
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about the magnum opus of my life. Wow,
Speaker 1: this podcast is the best podcast that's ever been created,
Speaker 1: none accepted. Wow. Wow, that's that's my opinion. Let me
Speaker 1: introduce who's here today. I have my lovely wife, Missy
Speaker 1: knucom to my left. Hello, great to have you here,
Speaker 1: Great to be here. To Missy's left, Brent Reeves Bent. Okay, glad,
Speaker 1: I want to hear what you think about this this podcast.
Speaker 1: All right? I listened to Brent's left, Ben Lagron, thanks
Speaker 1: for all the time, buddy. You've been here a couple
Speaker 1: of times on the burgera surrender a couple of times,
Speaker 1: one time. If you've been here one time, you've been
Speaker 1: here a couple of times. That's right. That's right. And
Speaker 1: Ben Ben feels particularly familiar today because he has a
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties Bess Pro Shop hat on. Yeah. Those are
Speaker 1: hard to come by these days out here. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: maybe not hard to come out with their popular. That's
Speaker 1: why I wore the meat Eater shirt to make sure
Speaker 1: there wasn't too much of it of companies. You got
Speaker 1: his meat your shirt on two. Ben's laft. Josh Lambridge,
Speaker 1: spillmaker who's been wreck is starting to get wreck nuys
Speaker 1: once every other week. Yes, it's my micro celebrity grows
Speaker 1: by the every other week by weekly tell us where
Speaker 1: someone like I got recognized by a great young man
Speaker 1: by the name of Jacob down at the tool Local
Speaker 1: tool rental business doing some remodel work on my house.
Speaker 1: Had to go rent some tools and he was like,
Speaker 1: are you Landing, Hey, Well, you asked me my name,
Speaker 1: and I was like, Josh Billmaker, and he goes, are
Speaker 1: you familiar with the Bear Grease podcast? I said, way
Speaker 1: too familiar. He said what's your middle name? And you
Speaker 1: were like land Bridge, that's right. One at a time,
Speaker 1: that's great. To your left, the man who's been missing
Speaker 1: for a couple of episodes, the pattern Familius, Gary Believer, NWCAM.
Speaker 1: Good to be here, yeah, man, good to have you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been listening to your stuff at last. Render group
Speaker 1: was really good. Did you like it? Yeah? I really did. Man.
Speaker 1: I'm at the Squirrel yeah camp, Yeah did you Yeah.
Speaker 1: Good to hear, good to hear. Hey, I'm like all
Speaker 1: business today because today is a monumental. This is a
Speaker 1: monumental Beargreas Render because we are well. Let me back,
Speaker 1: let me back up one step. There is such a thing.
Speaker 1: There is such a thing called the Beargrease Hall of Fame,
Speaker 1: which is a very real thing. This isn't a joke.
Speaker 1: Like one day, I believe there will be a mountain
Speaker 1: somewhere in the Ozarks with the faces of these people
Speaker 1: carved into it. Beargrease Hall of Fame. Very real. Men
Speaker 1: who qualify women, who qualify, People who qualify to be
Speaker 1: in the Beargrease Hall of Fame have a very some
Speaker 1: very evident, and some very intangible qualities about their life
Speaker 1: that make them shoe ends. And sometimes these qualities are
Speaker 1: hard to articulate, but when you see it, you know it. Okay.
Speaker 1: The current the current Beargrease Hall of Famers are number one.
Speaker 1: My dear friend James Lawrence from Mina, Arkansas. Yes, long time,
Speaker 1: you know I've used the word mentor. That's probably not
Speaker 1: the best descriptor of him to me. But we love
Speaker 1: James Lawrence. Love James mountain man, backwoods man, incredible, washtam
Speaker 1: mountain deer hunter, humble, honest, hard working, a lot of
Speaker 1: good things about James. Number two Warner Glenn. Warner Glenn,
Speaker 1: eighty seven year old cowboy from Arizona. We got a
Speaker 1: film coming out about him that is going to be
Speaker 1: on the meter and there's a film premiere, yeah, that
Speaker 1: on March the third in Bentonville. You want to be hey,
Speaker 1: give can is it? Is it too soon? I mean
Speaker 1: this time, I'm certain. I hope that all the tickets
Speaker 1: are sold. Well, we only had two hundred tickets. The
Speaker 1: venue we got could just hold two hundred people. We
Speaker 1: we we put it up. Two hundred tickets are sold,
Speaker 1: So if you don't have a ticket, I'm very sorry,
Speaker 1: but maybe will do this again. But Warner Glenn, when
Speaker 1: you meet a cowboy like him, you would think you
Speaker 1: were gonna meet a proud man. Warner Glenn is one
Speaker 1: of the most humble guys I've ever met, hardest working.
Speaker 1: Just no one ever told he was told him he
Speaker 1: was cool. He doesn't to this date, he doesn't know
Speaker 1: that he's cool. When he sees a film about himself,
Speaker 1: he's gonna be like, I'll be darn you know that
Speaker 1: kind of guy? Okay? James Lawrence Warner, Glenn Roy Clark,
Speaker 1: my dear friend, Roy Clark and East Tennessee plot man,
Speaker 1: multi generational plot man and bear hunter. Just a relic
Speaker 1: of a man, a relic of Appalachia. He grew up
Speaker 1: in a family where alcoholism was a pretty big deal.
Speaker 1: Roy Clark made a decision when he was a young
Speaker 1: man that he wasn't going to touch the stuff, and
Speaker 1: he has been a bear hunter's bear hunter ever since.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's ever been out of a pair
Speaker 1: of overalls. I have never seen the man wear a
Speaker 1: pair of pants. Incredible world class bear dogs. But le's
Speaker 1: Roy Clark. Number four. Daniel Boone, God Rest his soul.
Speaker 1: Daniel Boone was one of America's first heroes, and he
Speaker 1: forged much of what, especially people who live close to
Speaker 1: the land and hunting, what we know of the American identity.
Speaker 1: So much of it came from Boone. The love of wilderness.
Speaker 1: People used to be afraid of wilderness. In the dark Ages,
Speaker 1: people wanted to get as far away from wilderness as
Speaker 1: they could. Wilderness is where he went to die. Daniel
Speaker 1: Boone went into the wilderness the American Frontier and came
Speaker 1: back with articulation that the world had never heard before
Speaker 1: about the beauty of the wilderness and the beauty of
Speaker 1: solitude and living one with nature. He was fifty something
Speaker 1: years old before he ever became famous, so all the
Speaker 1: stuff he did that made him famous he did before
Speaker 1: he was ever famous, So he wasn't trying to show
Speaker 1: out incredible incredible man. Daniel Boone lived to be eighty
Speaker 1: four years old and just had scrapes with death that
Speaker 1: would blow your mind. Okay. Number five. Frederick Gerstacker. Frederick
Speaker 1: Gerstaker was a German that came to Arkansas in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven. He stayed here for about six years. He did.
Speaker 1: He spent quite a bit of time within twenty miles
Speaker 1: of where we sit today in the Ozarks. He was
Speaker 1: a young educated German that just kind of wanted to
Speaker 1: get away from his his his background in Europe and
Speaker 1: he you know, they had money and he came to Arkansas,
Speaker 1: and he was the first guy that came to the
Speaker 1: backwoods of Arkansas and came out with this glowing review
Speaker 1: of the people and the way they lived, which was
Speaker 1: massively contrasted with like who we talked about in this
Speaker 1: podcast about Schoolcraft, most guys came down here and went
Speaker 1: and reported back to the world that this was a backwater,
Speaker 1: just rough, dirty place full of scoundrels. Well, Gerstalker came
Speaker 1: here and he said that these were some of the
Speaker 1: finest people on planet Earth. And he and he stayed
Speaker 1: with families and he was a big hunter. In one
Speaker 1: of the first podcasts I did called the Death of
Speaker 1: a bear Hunter. That story we know that story because
Speaker 1: Gerstalker and he was. He was on a bear hunt
Speaker 1: with dogs where his acquaintance Erskine was killed about twenty
Speaker 1: five miles from where we said in the Ozarks. Incredible man,
Speaker 1: incredible writer, an incredible romantic. That's a phrase that people
Speaker 1: would use to describe how someone views reality in a way.
Speaker 1: And I like romantics because you could you could make
Speaker 1: a decision tomorrow that your life is terrible and that
Speaker 1: the world is no good, or you could wake up
Speaker 1: and be like you know what, it's a pretty good place.
Speaker 1: Frederick Gersharker number five, number six. The current last member
Speaker 1: of the Bear Grease Hall of Fame is none other
Speaker 1: than George mcjunkin. He was that He was born a
Speaker 1: slave in the eighteen fifties in Texas, moved out to
Speaker 1: New Mexico after the emancipation, became a landowner, became a
Speaker 1: big ranch hand, and was a very intelligent man, an
Speaker 1: educated man. Learned to read on a chuckwagon cattle drive.
Speaker 1: Was he was a naturalist. He collected bones, and he
Speaker 1: took archaeology. He made he made mechanisms to measure the
Speaker 1: wind speed in direction. And one day he was out
Speaker 1: riding riding his horse, and he came across an unusual
Speaker 1: bone pile sticking out of the ground in this arroyo,
Speaker 1: and he goes, those are not normal bones. He takes
Speaker 1: a couple of the bones home with him. It was
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh eight. He spins the next over t
Speaker 1: In the years trying to get people to come out
Speaker 1: and look at the bones, he'd go back into town
Speaker 1: and talk with people and say, hey, y'all, somebody needs
Speaker 1: to come here and look at this. They never came.
Speaker 1: He dies in nineteen twenty three, so it's fifteen years
Speaker 1: he tried to get people to come out there. He dies,
Speaker 1: and literally three months after he dies, an amateur archaeologist
Speaker 1: goes to this place where they're, like George said, there
Speaker 1: was a pile of bones over here. They see the
Speaker 1: bones and they go, oh my, after they send them
Speaker 1: somewhere and then they go, these are the bones of
Speaker 1: a bison antiquis, which is an ice age bison is
Speaker 1: no longer here, and some museum says, well, we got
Speaker 1: to excavate those bones. They start excavating the bones and
Speaker 1: they find stone points inside inside of the bones indicating
Speaker 1: that these animals weren't This wasn't just a pile of
Speaker 1: dead animals. These animals were killed by humans. And at
Speaker 1: the time, the greatest minds on planet Earth, with all
Speaker 1: the data information, would have been no different today than
Speaker 1: the great minds of our time telling us something that
Speaker 1: was a matter of fact. No different. I mean, it
Speaker 1: would be like them saying, absolutely, this is the truth.
Speaker 1: They believed that humans have been in the North American
Speaker 1: continent for about three thousand years. Well, they knew that
Speaker 1: these bison bones were over ten thousand years old. And
Speaker 1: that these it. By finding these stone points, it meant
Speaker 1: that they had humans had been here for over ten
Speaker 1: thousand years, and it totally rescripted how long humans had
Speaker 1: been in North America, and that became the Folsome point.
Speaker 1: They found folsome points there. And so George mcjunkin African
Speaker 1: American Cowboy found this site and died before we ever
Speaker 1: knew that it was there. Yeah, so those are the
Speaker 1: six current Barghrias Hall of Famers today. This day we
Speaker 1: are going to induct Josh. We're going to h yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: y'all picking up on the wrong intents. Clark wore overalls
Speaker 1: every day. I'm trying to get in. Uh. None of
Speaker 1: them had great must or notable mustaches. Um, so maybe
Speaker 1: that's okay, No, tell me Gerstocker didn't have a notable Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some photos of him later in his life. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna. I'm gonna put on the table
Speaker 1: the proposition to induct not one, but two men into
Speaker 1: the Burghers Hall of Fame. So just works. We're gonna
Speaker 1: give Ben voting rights today because he's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the rules change as as my whims change, so necessarily
Speaker 1: a regular. But I know Ben's character and judgment for
Speaker 1: long enough that we're gonna give him an active vote
Speaker 1: and something that cannot be repealed. No historical revisionists will
Speaker 1: ever be able to come back and tell me that
Speaker 1: Warner Glenn did something wrong. I don't care, all right,
Speaker 1: so irrevocable, once in, always in. Okay, the man that
Speaker 1: I would like to put on the table to be
Speaker 1: inducted into Bargheras Hall of Fame, there would be a vote,
Speaker 1: There would be a we will go one by one
Speaker 1: and you will vote yay or nay. Okay, the man
Speaker 1: I would like to induct into the Burgheras Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: It's it's overdue. Hault Collier Whult Collier was born in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties, died in the eighteenth and died in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, and his story is too long to tell.
Speaker 1: He fought for the Confederate Army. He became a nationally
Speaker 1: renowned bear hunter with dogs in Mississippi. He guided President
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt on multiple bear hunts. Halt Collier was a
Speaker 1: deputy sheriff. Halt Collier shot and kill Old uh two
Speaker 1: white men, shot one white man, and was never acquitted.
Speaker 1: It was acquitted of all charges. He was a brilliant
Speaker 1: man and he was from Greenville, Mississippi. He's buried in Greenville,
Speaker 1: Mississippi to this day. That the series that we did
Speaker 1: on Hulk Caller was incredible. It's learning his story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what's so wild is that his story is hardly
Speaker 1: known by America. There's one book written written by Minor
Speaker 1: Francis Buchanan, a lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, who wrote a
Speaker 1: book on Whult Collier. That's it, and it's hard to get.
Speaker 1: He now has books he made after the podcast, he
Speaker 1: reprinted the book. Awesome because I'm still getting DM ye.
Speaker 1: He reprinted the book and so you can now go
Speaker 1: to Minor Francis Buchanan's website and order the book Hulk Collier. Well,
Speaker 1: so Misty, what say you? Yeah, Brent yay bah yeah,
Speaker 1: Josh yeah, Gary yeah yeah yeah yeah, Clay yea, all right,
Speaker 1: Holt Caller is now officially people in the Bargreas Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame voted twice. Garry voted twice. Yeah he's yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm all in good putting me down for he's
Speaker 1: a worthy candidate, right, Yeah, are we conducting someone else too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is this is a big day, big day
Speaker 1: for Holt Caller. Okay. The second person that I would
Speaker 1: like to induct into the Bear Grease Hall of Fame
Speaker 1: irrevocable by historical revisionists one hundred years from now. If
Speaker 1: you're if you're a hundred years from now listening to
Speaker 1: this on some archival mechanism that you can listen to
Speaker 1: stuff like this, you can't change this. I would like
Speaker 1: to induct to Kumsa, the Shawnee Shawnee leader. Incredible. The Really,
Speaker 1: when I do these series, I just I just get
Speaker 1: into these guys and I just feel like I know him.
Speaker 1: And we did a big three part series just finished it.
Speaker 1: Unti Kumsa. His name means a panther crossing the sky.
Speaker 1: He was a visionary. He was He led the largest
Speaker 1: combined Native American forces against the United States of any
Speaker 1: Indian leader in American history. Basically, he was the biggest
Speaker 1: threat to American expansion westward by Native Americans, and he
Speaker 1: was considered by some to be one of the greatest
Speaker 1: potentially in so speculatives, we don't have no recordings of them,
Speaker 1: but by evidence by the way that he could move people.
Speaker 1: One of the greatest orators in American history, potentially great warrior,
Speaker 1: great hunter, walked with Olympus whole life because when he
Speaker 1: was twenty one, he fell off his horse when he
Speaker 1: was hunting a bison. Incredible man, incredible resoluteness. Died when
Speaker 1: he was forty five years old. Prophesied his own death,
Speaker 1: Shawnee leader to Compson Misty, what say you, yes, as
Speaker 1: long as we call him by his proper name, to come,
Speaker 1: that's right, good answer, good answer. Well say yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'll have to pull a tooth or two to
Speaker 1: get to comforth consecutive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely, one
Speaker 1: hundred percent. Ben, definitely. Ben's in. Josh, I'm in. Absolute,
Speaker 1: you're in. I'm in. All right, let it be heard.
Speaker 1: We've now inducted two new people into the Burghers Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame. There's now eight. I'll have to get the
Speaker 1: engravers over here, say monument, so let it be ridden.
Speaker 1: So let it be done. That's right, this is big,
Speaker 1: this is big. Excellent. Well, now we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about my magnum opus. I'm told that means it's like
Speaker 1: the work of your life. Yeah, okay, um the Big
Speaker 1: Bear of Arkansas. This, uh, this short story. I read
Speaker 1: it years ago and I've most likely learned about it
Speaker 1: from Brooks Blevin's book that I read years and years ago,
Speaker 1: his book Arkansas, Arkansas, which we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: a lot. The book is titled Arkansas Spelled the Normal
Speaker 1: Way with a with a with a hashmark, Arkansas Spelled
Speaker 1: with the W as is that title of the book, Arkansas, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: And he talked about this, this short story the Big
Speaker 1: Bear of Arkansas the Southwest humorists. And what's so interesting
Speaker 1: to me is that everything's so complicated, like stuff just
Speaker 1: you kind of have these simple stories of the way
Speaker 1: things happened, but when you really look into it, it's
Speaker 1: really it's really complicated. In this guy Jet, this fictional
Speaker 1: character Jim Dogget kind of branded Arkansas. Brent, what did
Speaker 1: you think of the podcast? Well, what stood out to you?
Speaker 1: Was there a part that was fun that it was surprising?
Speaker 1: What what stood out to you? Well, I've never heard
Speaker 1: that story before. That was totally ignorant of that amongst
Speaker 1: a volume of things. I'm totally ignorant. But it was
Speaker 1: kind of ironic that he set the tone and the
Speaker 1: idea that people that weren't from your head of Arkansas,
Speaker 1: and it was a guy from New York that did
Speaker 1: it exactly pretty great. Interesting, Yeah, that was totally removed.
Speaker 1: Might as well have been on the other side of
Speaker 1: the planet, you know, as far as his relationship to
Speaker 1: what was going on at that time. Here he was,
Speaker 1: he was is he was coming down the river on
Speaker 1: that boat. He was seeing it for the first time too,
Speaker 1: you know, so I thought that was kind of ironic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he did such a good job. Absolutely, even in
Speaker 1: the way he told the bear hunt, it was clear.
Speaker 1: I don't think people told Thomas Bangthorpe about about bear
Speaker 1: hunting because he knew some of the It was intricate
Speaker 1: details about about the way bear's bay a dog, and
Speaker 1: about the way a big bear will walk a pack
Speaker 1: of bay and dogs. It's something that you would you
Speaker 1: got the or I got the idea he'd seen it before. Well,
Speaker 1: if I described that to someone who had no context
Speaker 1: for bear hunting and then I said, okay, go write
Speaker 1: a story, they wouldn't include that because it's really it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of unusual to see a big old bear
Speaker 1: surrounded by a bunch of dogs and the bear acts
Speaker 1: like they're not even there, nonchalant. Yeah, it's it's it's like,
Speaker 1: what's happening here? And I think he had to have
Speaker 1: seen that and then and then all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, even the way if that was a coincidence,
Speaker 1: it was like a bolt of lightning, and I don't
Speaker 1: think it was. Yeah, I think there's some one of
Speaker 1: the things. You know, when you see somebody else or
Speaker 1: when you see another culture, you pick out things about
Speaker 1: that culture that they don't even realize they do themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so I think that's a piece of this is
Speaker 1: that he the description the man telling the story sounded
Speaker 1: like my uncle's. I mean that it was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I know the type of person that's telling the story.
Speaker 1: I can see it, I can hear it, I can
Speaker 1: I can feel it. And I think it has to
Speaker 1: be you never know what would stand out to someone
Speaker 1: who had never done something before. And so I agree
Speaker 1: he probably did see a bear hunt before, because that
Speaker 1: would stick out, but almost like as an unfamiliar person
Speaker 1: with it, not like a routine bear hunter, but as
Speaker 1: someone who who saw it once and was kind of
Speaker 1: surprised now that it was clear that he was He
Speaker 1: was enamored with folk speech, is what it was said
Speaker 1: about him after literature experts were able to analyze his
Speaker 1: whole the breadth of his life as a writer. So
Speaker 1: he always was like going in somewhere and talking like
Speaker 1: they talked. And so to be able to do that,
Speaker 1: you've got to be an astute observer of culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and these guys that were writers, especially back then, I
Speaker 1: sometimes think the modern media is so easy for us
Speaker 1: to get that it doles our senses about about people
Speaker 1: and perceptions. I don't know, everything spoon fed to us
Speaker 1: so much. These guys the only the only entertainment, the
Speaker 1: only media they had was either going to like a
Speaker 1: live performance of something which would have been rare, and
Speaker 1: the written word. And so a writer like Ronnella said,
Speaker 1: back in those days would have had the average writer
Speaker 1: back in those days would have had a more power
Speaker 1: full command of the English language and of their craft
Speaker 1: than than probably the writer today. Right, And but it's
Speaker 1: clear that he was an observer of typically rural culture. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, if you listen to a if you're traveling
Speaker 1: and you're in Alabama and you watch a newscast, the
Speaker 1: local newscast, they talk just exactly like the people do
Speaker 1: in California, that in Montana, in Arkansas, the there's and
Speaker 1: a lot of them I'm sure from different places. But
Speaker 1: like even the people newscasters, the newscasters that are from
Speaker 1: Arkansas that are on our local statewide television, they all
Speaker 1: they all talk the same. You talk different than me,
Speaker 1: We talk different than Josh and Ben. So it's all
Speaker 1: what I'm saying is, back then he paid a lot
Speaker 1: more at tension to and I guess everything that's now
Speaker 1: is is fed or designed to be appealing to everybody's
Speaker 1: and back then it was, hey, this is exactly what
Speaker 1: this folks, what these people sound like, or this particular
Speaker 1: person in this particular spot. Yeah, so that was cool
Speaker 1: to me. Well, yeah, it's interesting you say that about newscasters.
Speaker 1: They try to find people that have what's what's the
Speaker 1: name for an accent that is just so neutral, like
Speaker 1: a neutral like a neutral American accent. Yeah, Saint Louis, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Midwestern or Midwestern. I think Christie has one. I think
Speaker 1: Christie has one too. Josh's wife Christie accent? Really you
Speaker 1: think so? Yeah, same as she's from the Midwest. Who jet,
Speaker 1: My wife's from the Midwest. This one come across a
Speaker 1: not having an accent. Hm, well, they do that politicians
Speaker 1: typically do better on a national scale if they have
Speaker 1: a generic accent. Is that true. I believe it to
Speaker 1: be true. I don't know if it is. Do you
Speaker 1: have anything to back any I think, to be honest.
Speaker 1: Of all people that I thought would come up on
Speaker 1: the Beargage podcast, I heard them say that Barack Obama
Speaker 1: had a very generic accent, like he wasn't Southern, he
Speaker 1: wasn't northern, he wasn't this, he wasn't that. And they
Speaker 1: say that he's one of the greatest orators of American
Speaker 1: presidents a long time. Yeah, And I think that's true
Speaker 1: when I think about also other other in terms of
Speaker 1: like preferences. You know, I agree one hundred percent with
Speaker 1: a statement. I think Barack Obama was in an incredible order.
Speaker 1: I think if you look at our very own Bill Clinton,
Speaker 1: you know, he had an accent, Yeah, and people liked
Speaker 1: them and they found him charming. And you look at
Speaker 1: because people like people from the South, if you look
Speaker 1: at his campaign like that is that is not That's
Speaker 1: not where I was going with that, but not where
Speaker 1: I was going. I didn't say that wasn't true. I
Speaker 1: was saying, that's not where I was going there. But
Speaker 1: I mean, I think he actually appealed to people because
Speaker 1: he had that folksy capacity. Yeah, so I'm kind of
Speaker 1: disagreeing with There's a difference though, between southern and folksy
Speaker 1: because because there was a charm in the way that
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton would speak that drew people in. However, you
Speaker 1: don't always get that just with the with the run
Speaker 1: of the mill southern man. You know what's wild, There
Speaker 1: is no run of the mill Southern accent when I
Speaker 1: go It's true fifteen miles from right here to the
Speaker 1: farm that I've deer huntred on for twenty years and
Speaker 1: talked to that landowner who is is connected to this
Speaker 1: place as it's possible to be. He has a very
Speaker 1: unique Ozark accent. When I interviewed our province thirty five
Speaker 1: miles south of here, very isolated in the Ozark Mountains,
Speaker 1: he had a very unique accent different than this guy
Speaker 1: over here, also in the Ozark Mountains. Um. I mean
Speaker 1: when I when I first left my home, the home
Speaker 1: of Gary and Judy, knew him and went off into
Speaker 1: the world. Um. Misty says that when I would come home,
Speaker 1: we realized how big of an accent like dad had
Speaker 1: in my accent would increase. Yeah, but when I was
Speaker 1: away it was it was kind of less, I mean,
Speaker 1: like totally unconscious of what was having. We have a
Speaker 1: home video of Claying his dad talking and it's almost
Speaker 1: comical to listen to because in the conversation you hear
Speaker 1: Clay talking more newcome southern. Yeah. You know, what's what's
Speaker 1: interesting about that to me is that my dad taught
Speaker 1: what we called a country school back when I lived
Speaker 1: in Hot Springs, you know, a pretty good sized place
Speaker 1: for Arkansas, and he was he was ten or fifteen
Speaker 1: miles out of town at what we called a country school. No,
Speaker 1: it was found like now, it's a big school, you
Speaker 1: know for Arkansas. And uh, I went there third, fourth,
Speaker 1: and fifth grade, and I picked up this accent. My
Speaker 1: oldest sister went there. I guess she was about in
Speaker 1: the seventh grade when we moved there, and she stayed
Speaker 1: there all through high school. She's got the most country
Speaker 1: accent you've ever heard. And my other sisters stay at
Speaker 1: Hot Springs. And she asked what you'd kind of think
Speaker 1: of as a neutral accent and just being being in
Speaker 1: that country school for three years, I developed this country accent,
Speaker 1: which I think it's not as bad as it used
Speaker 1: to be, and bad might not be the right word.
Speaker 1: It's probably not as distinct as it was twenty years ago. Well,
Speaker 1: and then and then you go down into Brent's part
Speaker 1: of the world, which Brent lives three hours from me,
Speaker 1: down in the flat lands, and you used to live
Speaker 1: even further south than that, and that accent down there
Speaker 1: is very different. So point being, there's not really a
Speaker 1: Southern accent that everyone could get behind. Perhaps there's certain words,
Speaker 1: but but anyway, Thorpe was able to pick up on
Speaker 1: something very unique. But truth be known to me, I
Speaker 1: would I would like to think everybody in Arkansas in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty one was like Jim Doggat. But the reason
Speaker 1: that this was a fantastic story is because Jim Doggat
Speaker 1: was exceptional. He was a character. He was he was
Speaker 1: an exaggerated caricature of probably a I'm not gonna say
Speaker 1: a small group of people, because there were a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of backwoods them and then hunters, but
Speaker 1: there were also a lot of people in Little Rock
Speaker 1: that were that we're trying to get away from that
Speaker 1: we're trying to get away from that image that, like
Speaker 1: Bob Cochrane said, they wouldn't have liked this story. They
Speaker 1: would have been like, that's not who we are. And
Speaker 1: there's still people like that today that are trying to
Speaker 1: move away from. Yeah, this this image, but no, that's
Speaker 1: a good that's a that's a good one. Um. I
Speaker 1: want to go around the room and just get your
Speaker 1: just like what stood out to you? Whatever it was, Ben,
Speaker 1: what stood out to you? Well? I think what I
Speaker 1: was pondering a lot during the episode and and I
Speaker 1: look forward to the next episode because I think you're
Speaker 1: probably gonna hit on this a lot is just how
Speaker 1: fast that formed an identity around our Kansans. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I was looking at it from a real broad like
Speaker 1: human picture of like, man, why are we all so
Speaker 1: quick to try to put a certain people in a
Speaker 1: box to understand it? I think there is a desire
Speaker 1: to try to understand and identify the similarity so we
Speaker 1: can relate to people, identify the differences so we can
Speaker 1: better understand them. And sometimes as humans, we try to
Speaker 1: compare ourselves to make ourselves feel better, you know. But
Speaker 1: I thought that was really interesting part of that story
Speaker 1: and how that formed the identity of Americans, And it
Speaker 1: made me think about just in my own travels. I've
Speaker 1: been fortunate to travel the world soon, but I really
Speaker 1: like what the professor said about whenever you shine a
Speaker 1: light you it actually makes the space bigger. Analogy name.
Speaker 1: His name was Bob Cochrane. Okay, Bob. Jessica. My wife
Speaker 1: had like five classes with him. He is like her hero.
Speaker 1: I was listening to in the kitchen during lunch today.
Speaker 1: She's like Bob Cochrane in fact, like he's a cool
Speaker 1: old guy man. He's like seventy five or something. In
Speaker 1: the honor school. Like all these believer all these students
Speaker 1: like loved him, and they had this kind of this
Speaker 1: joke of like does Bob Cochrane know your name? Well,
Speaker 1: he knows my name, Like yeah, yeah, just a brilliant man. Well,
Speaker 1: I really like that. And you know, I'm talking about
Speaker 1: when the light shines on something, You're um, did that analogy?
Speaker 1: I had to think about that a little bit before
Speaker 1: it made sense. Did it make sense to everybody? Yeah
Speaker 1: yeah right away? Yeah yeah, yeah. Well, and I thought
Speaker 1: that smart and I thought about just my experiences in traveling.
Speaker 1: So when I was in college, I taught English in Cairo, Egypt,
Speaker 1: and got to live in a Muslim culture that over
Speaker 1: over in America. Did you wear that bass pro hat?
Speaker 1: I did not, And uh, you know, in America by
Speaker 1: that point that would have been like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like twenty twenty, two thousand and eight something that people
Speaker 1: had a very preconceived notion of Muslim life. And I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed getting to know that culture for real. But
Speaker 1: the more I got to know the culture in Cairo,
Speaker 1: I quickly found out it was very different than the
Speaker 1: Egyptian culture. And Alexandra, you know, only a couple hours
Speaker 1: of north, very different than Jordan or Syria. And but
Speaker 1: the more ignorant you are, you kind of just lump
Speaker 1: everybody into a certain group. Yeah, And so the more ignorant,
Speaker 1: not in a derogatory way, but literally literally like if
Speaker 1: you don't know, yeah, you would think all these people
Speaker 1: the same kind of Like we talked about it on
Speaker 1: the TCMPS episode that in general, a lot of Americans
Speaker 1: would think Native Americans were just one group of yeah,
Speaker 1: but they were actually very vastly different, hundreds of tribes.
Speaker 1: And so it's caused me to do that less like
Speaker 1: less generalized and be genuinely interested when I meet somebody
Speaker 1: from somewhere not stereotyping. Now. I used to get so
Speaker 1: annoyed when I would meet people from big cities and
Speaker 1: you know, they found out was from Arkansas. You hear
Speaker 1: the same glass, they all wear your shoes. Did you
Speaker 1: marry your cousin? I mean this classic stuff that's weird.
Speaker 1: You know, I carried that inferior already complex, like like
Speaker 1: you kind of hinted on by the next episode, But
Speaker 1: I've changed to where now I'm when when I get
Speaker 1: those responses, I almost not pity them, and I was
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh, wow, like you really don't know
Speaker 1: that you're ignorant. You really you've never been in Arkansas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's like, wow, your worldview is really small, because
Speaker 1: what I've learned is this everywhere you go, there's something
Speaker 1: interesting about every place and every person and and so.
Speaker 1: I but you could just see back then, when media
Speaker 1: is so limited, how that one story would catch catch
Speaker 1: fire and that would just brand your way of viewing
Speaker 1: that and these are things we just didn't have time
Speaker 1: to go into on this, but that story just okay,
Speaker 1: let's go back. If there was a company. If there
Speaker 1: was a YouTube channel that did really good in a
Speaker 1: certain space, like in the hunting space, what would happen?
Speaker 1: That YouTube channel would be copied and other guys will
Speaker 1: start doing the same stuff. I mean, there's a thousand examples,
Speaker 1: from meat eater to the hunting public to I mean,
Speaker 1: just like a thousand, like everybody kind of well, when
Speaker 1: this story came out and it did so good, it
Speaker 1: was published in New York City and went all across
Speaker 1: the country, and everybody talked about everybody loved it. And
Speaker 1: then so what happened is that a bunch of boys
Speaker 1: in Arkansas started writing about bear hunting, and so it
Speaker 1: kind of fed on its own, on its own gravy,
Speaker 1: you know. Well and yeah, and then later Mark Twain
Speaker 1: was kicked up on that, on that type of stuff.
Speaker 1: But um, what I what me and doctor Blevins talked
Speaker 1: about which wasn't on the cut, which is what's so
Speaker 1: great about the beargars renders we can talk about this
Speaker 1: is that as much as I would love to say
Speaker 1: Arkansas was the bear hunting capital of the world during
Speaker 1: that time, it was, I mean, it was as good
Speaker 1: as there was anywhere, but it certainly wasn't the best.
Speaker 1: They were bear hunting everywhere. It was the creation state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know in Mississippi they were killing bears like crazy.
Speaker 1: In Missouri they were killing bears. In Kentucky they were
Speaker 1: killing bears. So it us becoming the bear state was
Speaker 1: really tied to this media branding it and and that
Speaker 1: is really interesting. And I said on the podcast that
Speaker 1: this is a pretty darn near new to earth experience
Speaker 1: of media and in Beargrease, in the Beargrease world, we
Speaker 1: think about the world and the massive big picture of history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: humans have been around for a long long time, and
Speaker 1: media with printing and audio and video is an extremely
Speaker 1: new thing. To be kind not the idea of marketing.
Speaker 1: I'm sure the fulsome hunters would have gone to their
Speaker 1: neighbors and been like, dude, you should try out this.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so I mean they were marketing. They were
Speaker 1: they were, but but and not that marketing media are
Speaker 1: different things. They're kind of lumped together. But point being,
Speaker 1: it's pretty new in the media like we have today
Speaker 1: is a completely new human experiment, really is there has
Speaker 1: never been anything like this before. Ye or you're being
Speaker 1: so you're being you're being told so many stories and
Speaker 1: they all have in a agenda. I mean, just like
Speaker 1: the Big Bear of Arkansas. I don't think Thomas bang
Speaker 1: Thorpe's was. Thomas Bangsthorpe was wanting to brand Arkansas as
Speaker 1: a bear state. That was the last thing in his mind.
Speaker 1: But it did it. People took it for that, you know.
Speaker 1: And then there's another real famous guy that was actually
Speaker 1: more famous than Thomas Bangsthorpe named Pete Wetstone. He wrote
Speaker 1: under the name Pete Whetstone and wrote hundreds of articles.
Speaker 1: He was from Batesville, Arkansas, and he talked about bear
Speaker 1: hunting all the time. A little bit later, a little
Speaker 1: bit later, just like maybe just even a few years later.
Speaker 1: But I thought it was interesting that Thorpe this was
Speaker 1: the pinnacle of his writing career and the second best
Speaker 1: was Did y'all understand what Cochran was saying. He said
Speaker 1: that The Big Bear of Arkansas was the pinnacle of
Speaker 1: Thorpe's career, and it happened early on in his career.
Speaker 1: And he said the second best, most receipt well received
Speaker 1: short story that he wrote was called A Piano in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: He said it was trivial compared to it took him.
Speaker 1: It took a minute to tell. Yeah, what did a
Speaker 1: good story though, but it was a story like we
Speaker 1: would tell today. It didn't have all that Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like the chandelier story that Jerry Clover told.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was that quick. I think. I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that I really appreciated about the
Speaker 1: story is my when I was in high school, I
Speaker 1: had a teacher named Missus, Missus Shoemaker, and she was
Speaker 1: a very strict English teacher, but there was something about
Speaker 1: her that made you love English, made you love vocabulary.
Speaker 1: She just she built that into us. So I've always
Speaker 1: had a great appreciation for someone who could paint a
Speaker 1: picture in your mind. And I love the way it's
Speaker 1: not just the story, it's everything surrounding it. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so when you when you picture him on the riverboat
Speaker 1: and you you know, you picture him tall, you picture
Speaker 1: him boots, you know what I mean when he tells
Speaker 1: when he says, the line that I liked was, um,
Speaker 1: I didn't know whether the dog was made front and bear. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I loved that. I loved those those phrases that just
Speaker 1: make you it's a really novel idea, you know. And
Speaker 1: I appreciate that about the story. This podcast. We're recording
Speaker 1: this podcast. You're listening to you right now. On the
Speaker 1: day that this podcast came out, I've already been somebody's
Speaker 1: already sent me a post that someone put on Instagram
Speaker 1: and they have their their squirrel dogs sitting in the
Speaker 1: driver's seat of their truck and they take a picture
Speaker 1: of him and he's all astute looking out the window
Speaker 1: at squirrels and it says, I don't know if he
Speaker 1: was made for him Instagram. So yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: I mean, the story of the piano in Arkansas, it's
Speaker 1: a cute story, but it doesn't create the It's almost
Speaker 1: like as you hear him tell the story, it's like
Speaker 1: it's like the pictures are unfolding and like someone's painting
Speaker 1: it as you're walking through it. And I really I
Speaker 1: have a great appreciation for that. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: was to me one of the I really enjoyed the
Speaker 1: part where you and Steve Rannella talked about just language
Speaker 1: and and how how they had such a strong command
Speaker 1: of the language, and I think it really is something
Speaker 1: that is missing in modern in modern discourse, and I
Speaker 1: you know, brit In Clay sometimes get on these these
Speaker 1: kicks where they write each other via text in old
Speaker 1: English format, so they'll write things like lengthy messages it's
Speaker 1: been a fortnight since and I am privileged sometimes to
Speaker 1: be cced on these messages and I get to enjoy them,
Speaker 1: but you know they were there is something to be
Speaker 1: said about just like as an educator, and Ben can
Speaker 1: probably back me up on this, like when you are writing,
Speaker 1: it is doing something different inside your brain than when
Speaker 1: you're speaking, or then when you're receiving knowledge, when when
Speaker 1: like Josh talks to me, different activities are happening in
Speaker 1: my brain than when I write something out, and those
Speaker 1: when you're creating things. That's how you become a good speaker.
Speaker 1: That's how you become a good writer. Is the brain
Speaker 1: activity that's happening when you frequently write. And these guys
Speaker 1: were writing all the time. I mean, that's it's it's
Speaker 1: becoming a lost art in our culture. And if you
Speaker 1: even look at the difference inside of education and curriculum
Speaker 1: today versus fifty years ago versus one hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: it was much more focused and centered on writing than
Speaker 1: it would than what we're doing now. And even as
Speaker 1: an educator, you think about the amount of and I'm
Speaker 1: not opposed to this, like I'm not one hundred percent
Speaker 1: posts of this, but a lot of the emphasis for
Speaker 1: us as educators is to be entertainers, like education should
Speaker 1: be engaging and entertaining. And yeah, and it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: all of those little tiny choices that we've made over
Speaker 1: the last whether it's you know, you look at the Internet,
Speaker 1: of course that has a big impact. You have smartphones
Speaker 1: that has a big impact, but also just even the
Speaker 1: basic decisions we're making about how we instruct and how
Speaker 1: we teach people. It's taking this wonderful, beautiful thing that
Speaker 1: we have in written language that translates to beautiful oratorical feats,
Speaker 1: and it's we're losing that as a culture. We're losing that, mister.
Speaker 1: I don't know if anybody in here is familiar with it,
Speaker 1: but Abraham there's a famous letter that he wrote to
Speaker 1: a mother of I think it's a letter to missus Bixby. Yes,
Speaker 1: have you read that? I have? I couldn't quote it
Speaker 1: for link and wrote one called by first Night. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: part of the loss. Most eloquent letters I've ever written.
Speaker 1: It's it's a short paragraph he wrote to this lady
Speaker 1: who had five sons that were killed during during the
Speaker 1: Civil War. I do remember that it is uns you
Speaker 1: know what. I think it actually in a movie. I
Speaker 1: can read it right here, it's so sure. Yeah, Rinella
Speaker 1: brought up Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, that's what made me think
Speaker 1: about this letter. Read it all right. I've got like
Speaker 1: the original version here, and I'm trying to see I've
Speaker 1: been dear madam. I have been shown in the files
Speaker 1: of the War Department a statement of the Adjudant General
Speaker 1: of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons
Speaker 1: who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I
Speaker 1: feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of
Speaker 1: mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief
Speaker 1: of loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering
Speaker 1: to you the consolation that may be found in the
Speaker 1: thanks of the republic they die to save. I pray
Speaker 1: that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
Speaker 1: bereavement and leave you only the cherish memory of the
Speaker 1: loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be
Speaker 1: yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the
Speaker 1: altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully a Lincoln.
Speaker 1: He wrote that he didn't have a speech writer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that is Yeah, that's pretty emotional without without backspacing,
Speaker 1: and exactly, yeah dad, what did you think? Well, man,
Speaker 1: you off said at all. But oh you know, I
Speaker 1: really really really really really really like this. It was
Speaker 1: just I don't mean it was it just created at
Speaker 1: all of that culture where orators ran the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: they were the ones. They were the powerful ones, you know,
Speaker 1: you think hunters, you warriors, whatever. Uh. The way he
Speaker 1: spoke what was that called the southern something he's Southern dialect. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: folk type deal speech, you know, his his little comments
Speaker 1: that he would make about the beard had moved and yeah,
Speaker 1: you know I loved him like a brother and yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh and and we've I think we've lost that, you know.
Speaker 1: Um one of them mentioned Mark Twain and Huck Finn
Speaker 1: and Tom Sawyer. I mean, how many kids grew up
Speaker 1: thinking they were real people, right? I mean I mean
Speaker 1: they they created disillusion that that you know, these are
Speaker 1: real people, you know, and uh, today we don't need that.
Speaker 1: We don't have time for that. I want to turn
Speaker 1: on the news, get it quick, you know. Uh. So
Speaker 1: I was intrigued by that change in our culture where
Speaker 1: you know, writing the written word was powerful. Now you
Speaker 1: know the sound yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. So uh anyway, and I made little notes
Speaker 1: on all these little comments are so what are you?
Speaker 1: What's in your notes? So you know? Uh uh? I
Speaker 1: mean because it helps me to remind me of some
Speaker 1: of the stuffing. Okay, so much. Actually Jiuju did this
Speaker 1: as we were coming up here, I said, make some
Speaker 1: notes here. Um, the bar was an unhuntable bear bar
Speaker 1: who died when his time had come. And in other words,
Speaker 1: I could I could envision that so much. You know,
Speaker 1: we hear about a guy killing or a girl killing
Speaker 1: a big old buck and you know, they don't know
Speaker 1: what they're doing, they look up and shoot it, shooted
Speaker 1: off the front porch. And when we go that that
Speaker 1: animals should not have died that way, right right, And
Speaker 1: and you know his analogy was that that the bear
Speaker 1: knew his time had come, and there was a spiritual
Speaker 1: aspect to it that, yeah, don't when you're with your buddies,
Speaker 1: don't talk about how are you gonna hunt this bear?
Speaker 1: Because he might hear, he might hear you. Man, I
Speaker 1: love that so much. I'm total speculation, but that's what
Speaker 1: literary critics do, is that he and Sid I mean, basically,
Speaker 1: Jim Dogget said, the bear might have heard me talking
Speaker 1: about what I was gonna do. And that is a
Speaker 1: legitimate thing inside of for sure the Coukon people, but
Speaker 1: probably if you really dissected, would be in other Native
Speaker 1: American ideas. But the Coukon, you know, we have this
Speaker 1: research and they absolutely believed like you don't you don't
Speaker 1: talk about it bear, you speak in code. That the
Speaker 1: example they give in the book. Nelson gave him the bookcase.
Speaker 1: He said that Josh, if me, if I went out
Speaker 1: today and found some bear tracks in the snow and
Speaker 1: tomorrow I wanted to go and hunt them, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say, hey, Josh, let's go hunt that bear.
Speaker 1: I would say, Josh, tomorrow, I'm gonna go around the
Speaker 1: mountain and probably carry a gun with me. You're interested
Speaker 1: in going definitely, And you would know, yeah, wink, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't know what I was talking about. I mean, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a joke to them. They lived in a very
Speaker 1: spiritual world. And I just thought that was so interesting.
Speaker 1: And then Moore is going to come out in later episodes.
Speaker 1: But dog gets doctrine about the creation bearing the creation state,
Speaker 1: very very Native American feel and what you're gonna learn,
Speaker 1: and this is foreshadowing, but I'm shining a light on
Speaker 1: the shadow so that you see what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: There's a deep one is that in the in the
Speaker 1: Arkansas Delta, there was a thing that was happening that
Speaker 1: was really unique where some of the first Europeans that
Speaker 1: came there were that occupied there, were French and they
Speaker 1: lived with the claw poles, and they actually intermarried and
Speaker 1: kind of had this weird thing going on where they
Speaker 1: just all kind of lived together and got along and traded,
Speaker 1: you know, for a pretty short period of time. But
Speaker 1: there was a deep indoctrination of some of those backwoods
Speaker 1: folks and with Native Americans. So it's like dogg It
Speaker 1: for sure had some Native American doctrine running in his blood. Dad,
Speaker 1: tell me what else is on your list? Up? Eyes
Speaker 1: flashed with so much fire it would have scorched a
Speaker 1: cat talking about bear shot. Bear shot in forehead and
Speaker 1: walked down the tree as gently as a lady from
Speaker 1: a carriage. Yeah, can't you just see it? Just kind
Speaker 1: of just kind of just kind of and that that point,
Speaker 1: I think he slapped a dog out of sight. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you something. Going back to Thorpe knowing bear hunting, right,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you there's one group of people in the
Speaker 1: world who are experts on bears climbing and coming out
Speaker 1: of trees. Do you know who it is? And the
Speaker 1: first time that I saw a big black bear up
Speaker 1: a tree I was in I was in Appalachia and
Speaker 1: West Virginia and there was a bear that was tree.
Speaker 1: I bet he was sixty foot up in some big
Speaker 1: old gum, you know, big big tree, setting up there
Speaker 1: on a limb, and we pulled the dogs off the
Speaker 1: We weren't hunting, it wasn't hunting season, it was training season.
Speaker 1: We pulled the dogs back off the tree, and the
Speaker 1: bear could have come down this pole. This is just
Speaker 1: this big limbless tree. But he walked across a limb
Speaker 1: about as big as my leg, probably seven or eight feet,
Speaker 1: walked across it like a squirrel, jumped onto a little
Speaker 1: sycamore about as big as a tell phone poll, and
Speaker 1: came down at least fifty foot as fast as a
Speaker 1: gray squirrel could have well I'm not kidding you. I've
Speaker 1: never seen I mean, a bear hunter is going to
Speaker 1: be like, well yeah, but Thorpe saying and it was
Speaker 1: just this one smooth motion and it was so weird
Speaker 1: because he walked out on this limb, just walked across
Speaker 1: this limb, jumped on a tree, and slid down like
Speaker 1: a fireman. Hey, right, there is a perfect example of
Speaker 1: our culture telling that story. If Thorpe had told that story,
Speaker 1: I mean, you would really be glued to your seat,
Speaker 1: and it probably would have taken five minutes. You know.
Speaker 1: Uh now, I who would have told it? Thorpe? Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean if he'd have told what's the story you
Speaker 1: just told? Right right, it would have been so much combellished. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well so we we you're saying, he made a good
Speaker 1: metaphor that painted it for us, kind of yeah, in
Speaker 1: as more simple way as that would. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: this stuff I'm reading. Yeah, this bear moaned in a
Speaker 1: thing like a thousand centers. Man, I mean, this guy
Speaker 1: had some spirituality. But later he said Sampson, Hey man,
Speaker 1: if this bear if Samson, Yeah, there was so much
Speaker 1: to talk about. But when he said, uh, he said
Speaker 1: that this bear groaned like a thousand centers. This was
Speaker 1: written in eighteen forty one. This was a time of
Speaker 1: massive revival in in frontier America. This was something that
Speaker 1: was connecting with people because there were these kind of
Speaker 1: charismatic revivals and people would go into these sessions of
Speaker 1: repentance and be loud and showy, and so him saying
Speaker 1: that connected to people. Oh but he knew that a
Speaker 1: bear death moaned. How many Americans could you walk up
Speaker 1: to today and say, is there anything peculiar that happens
Speaker 1: when you shoot a bear? And it does? I mean, I,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: how many out of a thousand a thousand random Americans,
Speaker 1: I would say ten, maybe maybe probably. I didn't know that. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: they have a wild death moan. One of the few animals.
Speaker 1: I tried to look up all the animals that do it.
Speaker 1: The only one I know for sure that does is
Speaker 1: a Kpe buffalo. That's the only one that's that. I
Speaker 1: did not know that. But Dad and I the first
Speaker 1: bear that we ever killed, death moaned, and we didn't
Speaker 1: know that they did that. And uh, but the way
Speaker 1: he described it was so was so what else is
Speaker 1: on your list. Good. Hey, hey, one thing you triggered
Speaker 1: my thought was I was really um caught up in
Speaker 1: the fact that people from the east wanted these stories.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was like, please deliver something to us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we want to know what y'are doing, you know out west.
Speaker 1: Out west was Mississippi, Arkansas. You know, um, and you
Speaker 1: know we're the same way today. I want to get
Speaker 1: on the news and I want to find out stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, and they were hungry for these type of stories.
Speaker 1: The bear fell through a fence like a tree falling
Speaker 1: through a cobweb. I mean, you know, we just don't
Speaker 1: talk that way. Every every little thought he had he created,
Speaker 1: it's an own image in your mind. You know, you're
Speaker 1: going like, wow, it's a heck of a bear. Well,
Speaker 1: when he came over the fence, he came over like
Speaker 1: black smoke. Yeah, And I mean it's like, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, your mind just goes like black smoke being
Speaker 1: graceful to barbaric when he lived there. So I tell
Speaker 1: the story. Josh tells a story. We go, we tell
Speaker 1: the story. You know, we put us off in a room,
Speaker 1: we tell the story. We tell it in five minutes.
Speaker 1: Hunting stories over this guy. I mean he's created ten, fifteen,
Speaker 1: twenty thirty different stories. My mind just sees this bear
Speaker 1: running through the woods being followed by a pack of hands.
Speaker 1: Only reason he's running, in my mind, it's entertainment. Once
Speaker 1: he gets tired, he goes, okay, boys, gigs up, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna slap you out of sight or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, if you've ever seen a bear navigate and obstacle,
Speaker 1: it's shocking if you if I don't think he would
Speaker 1: have described a deer jumping a fence like a tree
Speaker 1: falling through a cobboy, he would have described it different.
Speaker 1: But a bear, they are extremely articulate with all their
Speaker 1: feet and they can just move through stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: they are some of the most mobile animals and able
Speaker 1: to move their body. In the description of it coming
Speaker 1: over the fence like a black mist, it's just kind
Speaker 1: of like it's kind of like a ball of jello,
Speaker 1: just like yeah, just kind of like how did he
Speaker 1: do that? What? Look up on YouTube a bear climbing
Speaker 1: a chain link fence and it just you're just like,
Speaker 1: how did he do that? So Thorpe interesting, Thorpe had
Speaker 1: been around bears. I think I think so too. He
Speaker 1: almost had to to know that a bear would just
Speaker 1: stop after a little bit, just goes man, I'm tired
Speaker 1: of playing this game, yep. And only big bears do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the little bears. The little bears typically today anyway, we
Speaker 1: will run and run and run and run and not
Speaker 1: even tree. The big ones often stay on the ground
Speaker 1: or just barely get up in trees. The midsize bears
Speaker 1: are usually I mean a small You can tree a
Speaker 1: small bear, but rarely would you tree a big giant
Speaker 1: like five or six hundred pound bear. That bear is
Speaker 1: almost always going to stay on the ground. Yeah, but interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting the conversation you guys had
Speaker 1: about you know, the one that got away or the
Speaker 1: order the you know, after killing the trophy there's a
Speaker 1: sense of loss, which made me think that that's why
Speaker 1: angling is superior to hunting. So just one everything. You
Speaker 1: can catch him release. I mean I can catch a
Speaker 1: trophy fish on my fire rod, put him back and
Speaker 1: dream about catching him again. Well, now if you want
Speaker 1: to go there now with bear hunting with the hounds, though,
Speaker 1: it's the catching release sport man, you only kill the
Speaker 1: ones you want. It's like you with fishing. There you go.
Speaker 1: So it really is you can treat him and let
Speaker 1: them go. It's tough to tree a deer, though, Well,
Speaker 1: yeah you can, I guess. Let them walk, you let him,
Speaker 1: you can let him watch something. Something I never did
Speaker 1: a whole house. I had a guy I want to
Speaker 1: play off something. I had a guy right in you
Speaker 1: Remember I asked people, I said, what do you think
Speaker 1: he meant by creation, bear, creation state and finishing up state?
Speaker 1: What do you think, dad? I think he was putting
Speaker 1: a spiritual connotation. It was such a magnificent animal. It
Speaker 1: was beyond belief, especially to the Eastern nurse. They would
Speaker 1: not believe what he was seeing in the wild. So
Speaker 1: it had to be here from the beginning, Sampson, he
Speaker 1: would have got whipped by this bear in the state
Speaker 1: was the same way. It was such a magnificent place.
Speaker 1: That's the way I saw it. I'm gonna see what
Speaker 1: do y'all? What do y'all think? It's a tough one.
Speaker 1: I kind of thought. I kind of thought a similar
Speaker 1: thing like like this bear was was spoken spoken from
Speaker 1: the word of God, you know what I mean, into
Speaker 1: the earth, and he had just been a fixture you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, he was such a magnificent creature
Speaker 1: that he'd been a fixture on the earth. You know, Ben,
Speaker 1: I honestly didn't know, because and I used to study
Speaker 1: a lot of history in that time period. People use
Speaker 1: words in ways that we don't know, right, and so
Speaker 1: just because we think think that's what creation means, I
Speaker 1: honestly have literally no idea what he might have said.
Speaker 1: I've never read it. Didn't it do exactly what you
Speaker 1: feel like the author wanted it to do? Probably? So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's no doubt, Like you don't hear that
Speaker 1: and think, oh, this was a inconsequential bear? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You hear it and you're like, oh, this is a
Speaker 1: special Yeah, it was very biblical to me listening or
Speaker 1: my interpretation of what he was saying. Okay, a guy
Speaker 1: from Pennsylvania sent me this. He must listened to the
Speaker 1: podcast at four am. Clay, I hope this voice memo
Speaker 1: reaches you. Well, Um, I just listened to your podcast
Speaker 1: on on the bear, um the creation Bear, and I
Speaker 1: just wanted to share my thoughts on on the what
Speaker 1: I think the creation bear means and what the creation
Speaker 1: state means. I think it's the platonic ideal of a bear. Um.
Speaker 1: I think he saw that bear as not only sort
Speaker 1: of the perfect representation physically, but also culturally and spiritually
Speaker 1: of a bear. U. And I think he used to
Speaker 1: Creation's interesting because the same with Arkansas. I believe he
Speaker 1: sees it as a as you know, these are two
Speaker 1: things that represents God's hand and they aren't muddied up
Speaker 1: by worldly impurities. So that guy's name is Martin Highly
Speaker 1: from Pennsylvania. But what he was saying was that it
Speaker 1: was the representative bear, undefiled by anything else, undefiled by
Speaker 1: the world. And that fits with him saying Arkansas is
Speaker 1: the creation state, the perfect state, undefiled by the world,
Speaker 1: like Eden. I guess, yeah, like a like an Eden.
Speaker 1: We'll say. Yeah. That's the beauty of the way he
Speaker 1: wrote is that you create your own answer. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you see a bear walking down a tree like a
Speaker 1: lady climbing it off a carriage slaps a bear into wherever.
Speaker 1: I mean, so you can take that. I think your
Speaker 1: answer would be correct. We don't know what that means,
Speaker 1: but to me that's what it meant. It was, you know,
Speaker 1: it was bigger than life. It created an image of
Speaker 1: dogg It that we wouldn't have had before because it's like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this guy, this guy knows something we don't know he
Speaker 1: And that's that was Bob Cochrane. We weren't able to
Speaker 1: include it, but he talked about how this story from
Speaker 1: a literary perspective is really unique and how dog It
Speaker 1: is set up. And it's because the city slicker from
Speaker 1: New Orleans is so anonymous and vanilla, like, there's no
Speaker 1: personality to this guy from New Orleans, like everybody is
Speaker 1: like little, and dog It is huge, and dog It
Speaker 1: becomes the envy and people see him and they're enamored
Speaker 1: with him. And there there it breaks the stereotypes like
Speaker 1: Ronella said of this country bumpkin, rural backwoodsman and Kylie.
Speaker 1: This guy's deeper than all of us. This guy has
Speaker 1: this robust life. He talks about his dog Bowie Knife,
Speaker 1: being the most modest dog, but only because he can't
Speaker 1: talk and he's the best bear dog in the world.
Speaker 1: I mean, just he was able to describe life and
Speaker 1: like Ronella said, he lived it with this robust lust
Speaker 1: for life. Yeah, but that created that the creation state
Speaker 1: and creation bar so interesting. Well, guys, yeah, Dad, I
Speaker 1: was just I think you might have alluded to this,
Speaker 1: but it was Arkansas created for the world or the
Speaker 1: world for really, my hat's off to both of you
Speaker 1: guys on this deal. I think Ronella really hit it hard,
Speaker 1: you know, to the heart. Steve so sharp man. He
Speaker 1: you know, he's never read that before, had no knowledge
Speaker 1: of Thomas Bangsthorpe. Um. I gave him that essay. Well,
Speaker 1: I sent it to him. He printed it off. We
Speaker 1: were hunting together in Mexico. Here's a bad story. We're
Speaker 1: hunting together in Mexico. And I knew I was going
Speaker 1: to be with him and have my podcast stuff, and
Speaker 1: I said, I want to hear what you have to
Speaker 1: say about this essay. All I told him. I told
Speaker 1: him it was influential, and you know, and gave it
Speaker 1: to him. He prints it off, takes it to Mexico
Speaker 1: and like we're like, okay, we got to do this
Speaker 1: like this afternoon, and he's like, okay, well let me
Speaker 1: read that essay, and so he reads it and then
Speaker 1: we go right into it and he has like some
Speaker 1: pretty in depth analysis of it, you know. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's sharp with literature stuff, and yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He was cool to have on there. I was disappointed
Speaker 1: only in one aspect that well, they said Jim's last
Speaker 1: name Wooden Reeves. That's what I was waiting for. We
Speaker 1: we wanted him all to all to be our last name. Man.
Speaker 1: I uh, it's it's it's to me. So as Newcombs,
Speaker 1: we're lucky that we had somebody did a pretty extensive
Speaker 1: genealogy search of the Nukembs, like our last name, and uh,
Speaker 1: there's a book. Uh, I think it's Thomas Joseph Nwcomb
Speaker 1: has written on the front of it, one guy from
Speaker 1: Scotland that came over and it's his genealogy and it
Speaker 1: goes and Gary Newcomb's name is in the book. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know. And and that's how that's how we know
Speaker 1: our history. History gets lost so easy. I mean, it
Speaker 1: would be nice to say how easily it gets lost
Speaker 1: even in modern day. Yeah. Yeah. And it's neat for
Speaker 1: me to think that the first Nuncambs came here right
Speaker 1: about the time this was written and all this was
Speaker 1: going down, and it was in the early eighteen thirties
Speaker 1: before Arkansas was the state, and you know, been here
Speaker 1: ever since. I love being connected to place. The next podcast,
Speaker 1: if you ever thought you wouldn't be interested in something,
Speaker 1: you'd be wrong on this one. And if you think
Speaker 1: I don't care anything about Arkansas, you're wrong. You do
Speaker 1: and just don't know it because nobody ever told you.
Speaker 1: The next episode is going to be on Arkansas identity,
Speaker 1: and it's fascinating and I think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things to be learned. It's about human nature, but also
Speaker 1: America inside of this story, which I said it on
Speaker 1: this one, Arkansas in the twentieth century the nineteen hundreds
Speaker 1: was proclaimed by scholars like documentably the most ridiculed state
Speaker 1: in America. That's right where we live. So closing thoughts anybody,
Speaker 1: I would just say I love it. Gave me a
Speaker 1: new appreciation for literature and how artists capture the complexity
Speaker 1: of an experience. I was thinking about experiences I've had
Speaker 1: standing next to somebody and have a totally different perspective.
Speaker 1: And I remember one time working on an airplane in
Speaker 1: my buddies business where they refurbished airplanes, and it was
Speaker 1: he needed some quick help and called me and another
Speaker 1: guy in and we'd never had any experience there. Worked
Speaker 1: there for like ten hours left, and I was like,
Speaker 1: that is I never want to do that again in
Speaker 1: my life. The guy next to me, he was like,
Speaker 1: that was amazing. On the car ride home, all he
Speaker 1: could talk about is how much you want to work
Speaker 1: on airplanes? How much he loved that work, And it
Speaker 1: just it shows that there's people with a gift that
Speaker 1: can slow things down and capture the complexity of something.
Speaker 1: And it makes me want to be more aware of
Speaker 1: the experiences I have because there's beauty in it that
Speaker 1: I may not have seen before. I liked that about
Speaker 1: the writer. That's good. You know, we have a choice
Speaker 1: of how we let the modern world impact us. I mean,
Speaker 1: just because we talk about all these things coming at
Speaker 1: us and a media pounding us every direction. We get
Speaker 1: to choose how we live and how we develop ourselves.
Speaker 1: Like Misty was talking about how people are. They developed
Speaker 1: the skill to be able to interpret the world in
Speaker 1: such a way and communicate that to other people through language,
Speaker 1: and that was a skill that was built and it's
Speaker 1: less now. Well, I mean, you got a decision of
Speaker 1: what you do tonight after the sun goes down, whether
Speaker 1: you're gonna go you know, and not that there's anything
Speaker 1: wrong with watching television, but you know, you got a
Speaker 1: decision of whether you're gonna do that, or whether you're
Speaker 1: gonna read a book, or whether you're gonna talk to
Speaker 1: talk to your family, like actually talk with your family
Speaker 1: and build build culture inside of your family. And these
Speaker 1: are things I think about. And I don't claim to
Speaker 1: have it dialed in, but it's things I think about.
Speaker 1: I'm like, man, how can I how can I not
Speaker 1: just talk about some of the stuff that we admire
Speaker 1: in the past, but like, we don't. We don't have
Speaker 1: to be pushed around by by modernity. Ye, so Dad,
Speaker 1: good to see you, Hey, good to be here. Man.
Speaker 1: My dad lives two hours for me, So I don't
Speaker 1: see Dad unless he's coming up here. I go down
Speaker 1: there and I've been a little while. Yep. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: kicked him out of the house and they never came back.
Speaker 1: And they never came back. It's like my brother told
Speaker 1: my nephews, boys, when you graduate school, you ain't got
Speaker 1: to go to college. You ain't even got to go
Speaker 1: to work. You just got to go. Hey. This podcast
Speaker 1: comes out on a couple of days before the Black
Speaker 1: Bear Bonanza in Bentonville. It's it's Bentonville, Arkansas, big all
Speaker 1: day event. I'll be there, Brent will be there, Ben'll
Speaker 1: be there, Josh'll be there, Gary believe in Knucom'll be there.
Speaker 1: Missy'll be there. Missy had to leave. Um we it's
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a big deal. We're doing a live
Speaker 1: Burgers rendered podcast there on site. Major big event. Lots
Speaker 1: of vent enders and stuff going on, al hooting contest
Speaker 1: and you can buy tickets at the door, and it'd
Speaker 1: be good if you bought them before you get there,
Speaker 1: but you don't have to. You can just show up.
Speaker 1: And so that's all day Bentonville, Arkansas. You have to
Speaker 1: go to the website to get all the details, but
Speaker 1: just the website. They'll figure it out. Coil Bar, Arkansas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they'll figure it out all right, guys, Thank you,