Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to
Speaker 1: you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging
Speaker 1: deer stands, or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance
Speaker 1: apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it
Speaker 1: out at first light dot com. F I R S
Speaker 1: T L I T E dot com. Randall, you know
Speaker 1: what problem I'm having in the restroom?
Speaker 2: Continue?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not what you think. It's not like a
Speaker 1: flow issue problem I'm having in the restroom.
Speaker 2: Is it a stopping issue?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: You know how I have that that immaculate Eric von
Speaker 1: Schmidt painting here fell Custer.
Speaker 2: I was just looking at it with chili.
Speaker 1: Well, and you know how there's two urinals. It's a
Speaker 1: long painting. There's two yurnals. There's a short boy and
Speaker 1: the tall boy.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I always go to the tall boy. I always go right.
Speaker 1: So you're only getting so I like have studied every
Speaker 1: single possible detail of half that painting. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: a very like it's a famous painting for really being
Speaker 1: sort of the most accurate representation from looking from from
Speaker 1: Custer Hill, last Stan Hill, whatever the hell they call
Speaker 1: it down, it's like very accurate. I've looked at the
Speaker 1: point where I see now that he's got blood kind
Speaker 1: of staining Custer's groin area of his trousers. Custer's kind
Speaker 1: of already been hit a couple of times. So it's
Speaker 1: like either a plumber comes and switches the journals, yeah,
Speaker 1: or like I get a mirror image of the I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, we.
Speaker 1: Can't think, or you start like I just break to
Speaker 1: the to the tall boy, start going in the low boy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, try that, and then they'll give you like a
Speaker 4: different perspective and experience while you relieve yourself.
Speaker 1: Well that's but what if people come in, when someone
Speaker 1: comes in and they're like, why is he going in
Speaker 1: the low boy? M Can I say something?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I think, like I also go to the tall one
Speaker 3: as well, the tall Boy. Yeah, but I mean I
Speaker 3: don't have any I don't have any like trouble at
Speaker 3: the low boy. If that's my only option, you know,
Speaker 3: you know gravity.
Speaker 1: But even today I went in there are all wrong though,
Speaker 1: angles are all wrong. Yeah, because like I don't want
Speaker 1: you guys now to get a weird idea about anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Even to day. I went in there being like, damn,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go look at the right side of the
Speaker 1: painting again.
Speaker 2: Well, I went in there to start going to the
Speaker 2: I went in there today and I saw I had
Speaker 2: beat and Chile head the door. So I just invited
Speaker 2: him to join me.
Speaker 1: And who went to what side?
Speaker 2: Well, I gave him the courtesy of using the adult
Speaker 2: sized urinal, and I just you know, squatted my knees
Speaker 2: a little bit.
Speaker 1: And then you guys did get out the painting.
Speaker 2: I did get to take in the left side of
Speaker 2: that painting, which I admit was pretty new to me.
Speaker 4: I feel totally left out because I don't know what
Speaker 4: that painting looks like.
Speaker 2: Well, you can go in there. It's a unisex restroom
Speaker 2: now right.
Speaker 4: Oh wait, we were talking about the downstairs.
Speaker 1: One of the the hall here.
Speaker 4: Oh right, And there's a stall in that one too
Speaker 4: that you could get one.
Speaker 1: Of those cups. There's a cup that women. Can you
Speaker 1: use the go at urinals? Yeah, you can just leave
Speaker 1: it hooked at the low boy if you want, or.
Speaker 2: You could just stand there and not use.
Speaker 4: I would definitely lock the door behind.
Speaker 1: Me if you're using that funnel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if I'm using that funnel, I'm not sure I
Speaker 4: care to use the funnel.
Speaker 1: You stand there and look, that might look weird too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Or you lock the door, Just lock the door behind
Speaker 1: you and then you come out and someone says, were
Speaker 1: you in there going to the bathroom, and you'd have.
Speaker 4: To be like, no, no, I was looking at the painting.
Speaker 1: Well, then they'd say, well, why is the door locked?
Speaker 4: Because I want to have my own private viewing experience.
Speaker 1: That's true. That wouldn't seem weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I don't think there's anything weird about this.
Speaker 1: Later today, there are thing about it. I remember hitting
Speaker 1: the year that I remember hitting the year when I
Speaker 1: was the age that Custer died at. Mm, you can't
Speaker 1: remember what it was, not terribly old. I remember being
Speaker 1: that year forties and when Seth got married. Did I
Speaker 1: ever tell you about my speech?
Speaker 4: Yeah? You officiated his wedding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I married Seth. I was there, Oh you were there?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah?
Speaker 1: What can I relive it? For sure?
Speaker 3: I wasn't there really quick Custer.
Speaker 1: Custer died at thirty six. Oh god, but I took
Speaker 1: note when I was Coster's age thirty six, thirty six.
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people are still idiots at
Speaker 1: thirty six. So when I when Seth got married, I realized,
Speaker 1: but I didn't tell anybody. I kept a secret. I
Speaker 1: realized that he was getting married on the anniversary of
Speaker 1: Custer's death twenty fourth June twenty four, June twenty three,
Speaker 1: I can't remember twenty fifth, you sure according to this article,
Speaker 1: twenty fifth and twenty sixth was the battle, Okay, June
Speaker 1: twenty fifth. Seth got married on June twenty fifth. So
Speaker 1: when I get up to do the preaching, I get
Speaker 1: up and say, today will forever mark a day when
Speaker 1: a man made a terrible mistake.
Speaker 4: Sure, Kelsey love that a.
Speaker 1: Man driven by hubris and pride. That's really good. Oh,
Speaker 1: and I buttered it up. Forever people, this day will
Speaker 1: be remembered. And then I was like, I was like,
Speaker 1: of course, I'm referring to the defeat of General Custer
Speaker 1: at the Battle a Little Big Horn one hundred and
Speaker 1: whatever years ago.
Speaker 2: Today, and the wedding party visibly.
Speaker 1: Relaxed, and I heard I don't want to name names,
Speaker 1: but there was a family member there were family members.
Speaker 1: I don't even want to say what side they were on.
Speaker 1: There were family members that were already not happy that
Speaker 1: I was doing it, and then they came away. They
Speaker 1: came away even unhappier.
Speaker 4: Steve Sturing the pot, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Even unhappier.
Speaker 2: I didn't pick up on that vibe.
Speaker 1: That's what I heard later. It was it was divulged
Speaker 1: to me. Uh, if you're listening today and then all
Speaker 1: indications are that you are. At the end, we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about mountain men. We're gonna talk about long hunters,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna talk about mountain men. We're gona talk
Speaker 1: about some other stuff too. We'll explain what those people are,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna you're gonna keep on listening. Me
Speaker 1: and Randall are going to wrap it up. I'm here
Speaker 1: with Randall. He's gonna I'm gonna ask him about Mexico
Speaker 1: in a minute. Me and Randall are going to wrap
Speaker 1: it up. And then in our conversation about market hunting,
Speaker 1: long hunters, mountain men, a little bit of history about
Speaker 1: what we mean when we say those things, and then
Speaker 1: you're gonna hear a chapter called Hunger and Thirst. And
Speaker 1: this chapter is a sneak peek at our new audio release,
Speaker 1: which is part of our Meat Eaters American History. If
Speaker 1: you remember, we did Meet Eaters of American History Volume one,
Speaker 1: the Long Hunters seventy sixty three three to seventeen seventy
Speaker 1: five and a minute. We'll explain why that why those dates.
Speaker 1: Our new volume is volume So now we have Meetaters
Speaker 1: of American History Volume two, and we jump to and
Speaker 1: we'll explain why these dates. We're jumping to the years. Sorry,
Speaker 1: it's Meetater's American History Volume two, The Mountain Men eighteen
Speaker 1: oh six to eighteen forty. We're gonna explain what that means.
Speaker 1: So when you hear the word frontiersman, what does it mean,
Speaker 1: when you hear the word mountain men, what does a
Speaker 1: mountain man actually mean? We're going to talk about what
Speaker 1: a mountain man actually means that We're going to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about the history of these different market hunters,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna go into a chapter from this book,
Speaker 1: this audio original called Hunger and Thirst and it's it's
Speaker 1: Is it available now?
Speaker 2: If this is released on Monday, No, it'll be available on.
Speaker 1: Tuesday, available on the eleventh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And this is this is today is the tenth tenth.
Speaker 1: Effectively, it'll probably be fine now. Yeah, it'll probably available now.
Speaker 1: If not, you buy it and you'll have the next day.
Speaker 1: It's like eleven bucks, eleven twelve bucks, I think, isn't
Speaker 1: eleven ninety nine? I think? I think so chapters? Oh,
Speaker 1: it's five six hours long. It's a five or six
Speaker 1: hour long history of how many hours you think it
Speaker 1: came in at twelve chapters?
Speaker 2: I haven't seen seven hours. I haven't seen it total.
Speaker 2: I would guess it's closer to yes, seven hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it's a seven hour history of the
Speaker 1: mountain men, Jim Bridge, of Jed Smith, John Colter, all
Speaker 1: those guys are explained, like what actually they did, why
Speaker 1: they did it. We're going to talk a bunch about
Speaker 1: the different eras of the market hunters, and then we're
Speaker 1: gonna a little bit talk about what's to come into
Speaker 1: future as we kind of go down the line of
Speaker 1: these American mountain these American market hunters. You know, we
Speaker 1: should talk about two for a minute. Sure is there's
Speaker 1: a weird wrinkle like everyone's smooth with the North American
Speaker 1: model of wild They have conservation and in it is
Speaker 1: this thing about not commodifying wildlife. But then people are like, well,
Speaker 1: why can you sell deer hides? You can still sell
Speaker 1: deer hides, Why can you sell beaver meat? Why can
Speaker 1: you sell skins? Right? Why can you sell taxidermy?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Because in the market hunting world, you know, like everyone
Speaker 1: knows the work that Theodore Roosevelt did for wildlife conservation.
Speaker 1: One of the big things he did. He kind of
Speaker 1: waged war on the market hunters. But we still have
Speaker 1: market hunters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's i mean, even beyond just
Speaker 2: the more obvious examples of like selling meat and selling hides.
Speaker 2: I feel like the commodifying wildlife is one of those
Speaker 2: elements of the North American model that's always people sort
Speaker 2: of debate over what constitutes commodifying wildlife, like if you're
Speaker 2: charging people for access to hunt or whatever. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's one of those things where people like to make
Speaker 2: more expansive arguments about what is a violation of the
Speaker 2: North American model. I feel like it's one of the
Speaker 2: pillars of the North American model where people debit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the scope of it.
Speaker 1: Another pillar of it is is that you take things
Speaker 1: you want to do that don't seem like they fit
Speaker 1: with the North American model, and you argue about how
Speaker 1: they actually kind of do yeah, oh yeah, rather than
Speaker 1: just saying you're right, this doesn't fit with the North
Speaker 1: American model, but I like it. But I like doing this,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to try to tell you that
Speaker 1: it fits yeah, with the North America model of wildlife conservation.
Speaker 1: One thing, one thing to get into here. Make quick note.
Speaker 1: So a lot of times when we're doing the show,
Speaker 1: there's a shitload of people in the room. Right now,
Speaker 1: there's not crams here, Randalls here because we're doing something
Speaker 1: a little bit special today. But a reminder some of
Speaker 1: the people that come in and do the show, you know,
Speaker 1: we have a whole podcast network, so I sometimes fail
Speaker 1: to point out how many of the people you know
Speaker 1: from coming on the show have their own shows that
Speaker 1: are on our network. So Cal is always in here,
Speaker 1: Ryan Callahan old Cal Cal in the Wild. That's a feed,
Speaker 1: that's a podcast feed host Cal's Weekend Review and the
Speaker 1: Foundation's podcast with Tony Peterson, So they'll sit within our
Speaker 1: network under the feed Cal in the Wild. We had
Speaker 1: a Bear Grace, a bear Grease feed, of course, and
Speaker 1: on the show you've met and heard from many times
Speaker 1: Clay and Brent Reeves. So the Bear Grease podcast feed
Speaker 1: has the Bear Grease Podcast has Bear Grease Render episodes
Speaker 1: and This Country Life episodes with Brent Reeves. We have
Speaker 1: a Wired to Hunt feed, the Wired to Hunt podcast feed,
Speaker 1: the Eponymous show with Mark Kenyon, Wired to Hunt, and
Speaker 1: then Foundations with Tony Peterson, and then of course we
Speaker 1: have God's Country with Dan and Reed. Isabel. I got
Speaker 1: a big hunt trip plan with Tony Peterson. Oh that
Speaker 1: whole secret?
Speaker 4: Oh I think I know.
Speaker 1: It's the poverty pat hunt.
Speaker 2: Oh that is going to be.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: Any extra spots on that one?
Speaker 4: You guys?
Speaker 1: Did you have fun on in Mexico? I had a
Speaker 1: great time out in Mexico. What happened? Did you enjoy it?
Speaker 2: Did you love it there?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: My god, I loved every minute of it.
Speaker 1: What did you like? Randall went on his Was it
Speaker 1: your first cous to your hunt? RW, first cuz to
Speaker 1: your hunt, first trip to Mexico? Never been across the
Speaker 1: southern border? Really?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you like it?
Speaker 2: I loved it? I loved it? Uh yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: I thought it was sort of an interesting hunt because
Speaker 2: in some ways it's like a very classic whitetail hunt
Speaker 2: where you got a bunch of guys staying in the
Speaker 2: same house and every.
Speaker 1: Morning smoky house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and every morning you're drinking coffee and saying like, well,
Speaker 2: what do you want to go? Do you want to
Speaker 2: go to that spot or that spot? Do you want
Speaker 2: to go to that spot or that spot? It's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we looked at that yesterday, let's check out this other one.
Speaker 2: So strategically it reminded me of like a very traditional
Speaker 2: whitetail hunt.
Speaker 1: But then.
Speaker 2: You're there's not a ton of hiking, but you're going
Speaker 2: up and down some steep stuff and falling and you know, no,
Speaker 2: busting your ass a little bit here and there on
Speaker 2: because the footing's pretty tricky.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's never ending, thirty degrees slopes covered in gravel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's like there.
Speaker 1: Isn't hooked to end, nothing's hooked to anything.
Speaker 2: You need your sea legs. We're like, there is one
Speaker 2: hike that seth and I did uh, and we sort
Speaker 2: of got to the we got to take a break,
Speaker 2: and you're honest, it's like, man I fell hard. I said, Oh,
Speaker 2: I fell hard too, And we're comparing where we'd fallen.
Speaker 2: And then Seth said, I fell on that one as well,
Speaker 2: and all three of us had taken pretty serious spills
Speaker 2: unbeknownst to one another. So and then you're glassing all day,
Speaker 2: which is like I can be. I mean, I'm just
Speaker 2: like always entertained by glassing, and and so like, there
Speaker 2: are a couple of days, I mean we hiked up
Speaker 2: to a ridge and we only moved one hundred yards
Speaker 2: in the course of the whole day, just behind the tripod,
Speaker 2: glassing and pointing stuff out and finding I mean not
Speaker 2: even just deer, but we were watching some coyotes chase
Speaker 2: some deer. Uh, we're finding ducks, We're finding turkeys and
Speaker 2: mountain lines, no mountain lions. We saw some tracks one day,
Speaker 2: Seth and I went up this crazy I call it
Speaker 2: a road, but really the roads down there are just
Speaker 2: sort of bulldozer cuts. Yeah, and uh, there was some
Speaker 2: fresh tracks we saw. We saw some fresh coups tracks,
Speaker 2: and as soon as we stopped to look at those,
Speaker 2: we realized their lion tracks, you know, right alongside them.
Speaker 2: Then in the no, just in the in the real
Speaker 2: loose dust, because yeah, everything is dust. I haven't really
Speaker 2: brought anything in the house from that hunt. I'm waiting
Speaker 2: till I can fire up the air compressor and just
Speaker 2: blow everything out, cause it's just my trip is a
Speaker 2: different color. My bino harness is a different color. Like
Speaker 2: everything's covered in that real fine dust that just seeps
Speaker 2: its way into like zippers and everything you own.
Speaker 1: For the rest of your life. When you open your
Speaker 1: tripod legs up and pull them out, they're gonna go They're.
Speaker 2: Gonna make a different Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: For sure, it's like a they'll make a gravelly noise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I need to do a good good lens cleaning.
Speaker 2: All the I cups and all my optics need a
Speaker 2: good cleaning.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Super fun trip. And uh I've already you know, as
Speaker 2: soon as I text a couple buddies to say that
Speaker 2: I was going down there, and they're all like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's a that's like a bucketless trip for me. And
Speaker 2: so now I'm ever since I got back. Before I
Speaker 2: got back, I was kind of thinking about organizing another
Speaker 2: the next trip down to Old Mexico.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, don't I'm hoped they had on my little
Speaker 1: area there. Well, you know, I'm joking.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the thing that blew me away. Actually,
Speaker 2: one of the things that I was not expecting is like,
Speaker 2: we stay at the Holiday Inn or whatever. It is
Speaker 2: a quarter mile from the border checkpoint on the Arizona side,
Speaker 2: and we got in a little late, like at nine pm.
Speaker 2: You know, there's not a lot of activity. And then
Speaker 2: the morning we get up and Seth and I went
Speaker 2: down to breakfast at McDonald's. No, just in the lobby.
Speaker 2: We did go to McDonald's on the way back, but
Speaker 2: you look out in the parking lot and it's all
Speaker 2: hunting rigs. There's like twelve jacked up pickups with Utah
Speaker 2: Arizona plates. They're all towing side by sides. Every single
Speaker 2: person in the little breakfast nook is wearing camoep and
Speaker 2: they're all like dudes between the age of thirty five
Speaker 2: and sixty. And then you get into the checkpoint line
Speaker 2: and the truck in front of you is a hunter
Speaker 2: and the truck behind you John right for sure, you
Speaker 2: know I was. And then you go to like some
Speaker 2: gas station across the border and the whole thing is
Speaker 2: basically a staging point for for kus deer hunters. And
Speaker 2: so that was that was one thing that was a
Speaker 2: very unexpected wrinkle in It was just like how visible
Speaker 2: it was. You know, it's like being out in eastern
Speaker 2: Montana the week before Thanksgiving, so I.
Speaker 1: Think it's like that all January when they're rutting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was super cool.
Speaker 1: But it's the good old days right now in Mexico. Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean there was some talk about, you know,
Speaker 2: in a couple of occasions, it got brought up, like
Speaker 2: what's going to change, you know, in the next in
Speaker 2: the next couple of years, especially like politically, and yeah,
Speaker 2: the you know, like the role of the cartels down there.
Speaker 2: It's a hunt where like you can't really have your
Speaker 2: blinders on because it happens in this very specific political,
Speaker 2: socio economic context. That all I mean, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm still sort of just wrapping my head around it.
Speaker 2: But aside from that, it's just super fun hunting deer.
Speaker 2: In January, I thought my deer hunting for the year
Speaker 2: was over, and.
Speaker 1: It's the best.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so great time.
Speaker 1: Since I've been working on this History Channel show Hunting History,
Speaker 1: where we'd look into outdoor mysteries, man, people have been
Speaker 1: hitting me up with all kinds of stuff mysteries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, someone sent.
Speaker 1: Me something really interesting the other day, and there was
Speaker 1: a picture of the f So there's a guy like
Speaker 1: like a friend of a friend. His dad was an
Speaker 1: FBI agent who worked on the dB Cooper case. There's
Speaker 1: an FBI agent who interviewed This is so crazy. There's
Speaker 1: an FBI agent who interviewed all of the people that
Speaker 1: dealt with Cooper before they went and did the drawings.
Speaker 1: The famous compott you know when you come in and
Speaker 1: they tell you what you look like. He sends me
Speaker 1: a picture of the guy, the FBI agent who interviews
Speaker 1: everybody leading into that meeting with the artist. The sun
Speaker 1: bitch looks exactly like the picture of DV. Cooper. It
Speaker 1: was like they described the last guy they.
Speaker 2: Saw the impressible.
Speaker 1: All the reading and all the reading and work I
Speaker 1: did on all the reading and work we did on
Speaker 1: like the DV. Cooper story, which is like the most
Speaker 1: the biggest bottomless pit in the world. I just had
Speaker 1: to walk away from it eventually, because you can't. It's
Speaker 1: just it's a bottomless pit. And all the reading I
Speaker 1: did about it, no one ever brought that up to me.
Speaker 1: It's like this dude looks like that. They're like, wow,
Speaker 1: let me think they describe the guy they just they're
Speaker 1: describing the guy that just spoke to.
Speaker 2: That's the power of suggestion.
Speaker 1: A lot of people wrote in and saying, how's their
Speaker 1: dad or whatever. Uh, here's a weird one, just like
Speaker 1: an outdoor mystery. That another one I can't like. I
Speaker 1: can't believe I've never heard of this. Yeah, because this
Speaker 1: is this is my home state. Okay, what is nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine? All right, nineteen fifty nine, William j Wyman.
Speaker 1: Listen to this. This is a crazy story. There's a
Speaker 1: military pilot, right, Yeah, he's a military pilot, a guy
Speaker 1: named William j. Wyman. His plane disappears over Lake Huron
Speaker 1: while he's flying from Saginaw to kin Ross Air Force
Speaker 1: Base in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. So I mean that base
Speaker 1: is still there. There's ken Ross base in the up
Speaker 1: Guys flying from Saginaw up Lake Huron to kin Ross
Speaker 1: Upper Peninsula. His plane goes missing on March five, nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine. They conduct a big search, no sign of
Speaker 1: the plane, never find the plane. He's presumed dead, and
Speaker 1: they call it off on April eight. This is insane.
Speaker 1: I never heard this. On April eight, these lighthouse keepers
Speaker 1: go out to Spectacle Reef to reopen their lighthouse and
Speaker 1: find that someone had been living in the lighthouse. There's
Speaker 1: a note, and the note's explaining it's a note from
Speaker 1: Wyman in the lighthouse explaining his plane's engine had quit
Speaker 1: when he's flying at five thousand feet. His engine quit
Speaker 1: a mile from the lighthouse Wyman's note. This is a
Speaker 1: quote from Wyman's note. I tried to make it in
Speaker 1: but could not stretch my glide this far. I landed
Speaker 1: in the water. I did not try to land on
Speaker 1: the ice, and it did not appear to be thick enough.
Speaker 1: The plane went down within two minutes, but before it did,
Speaker 1: it floated close enough to an ice floe for me
Speaker 1: to jump. The ice was now over two inches thick.
Speaker 1: Another large body of water separated me from the lighthouse,
Speaker 1: so I waited. Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast
Speaker 1: and the ice I was on started to move. At
Speaker 1: the very last moment, one corner of the ice grounded
Speaker 1: against the ice packed around the lighthouse. So the letter
Speaker 1: goes on, but in short Wyman then runs for the
Speaker 1: lighthouse and makes it there, but he gets a little
Speaker 1: wet his clothes, froze before he gets into the door
Speaker 1: of the tower, but in there he finds towels, overshoes,
Speaker 1: gets warmed up. He finds a radio transmitter in the lighthouse,
Speaker 1: but can't get it to work. Set up all night,
Speaker 1: blinking sos with the tower's winter light, manipulating the tower's
Speaker 1: winter light. He doubts if rescuers are ever going to
Speaker 1: find him because he hadn't filed a flight plan, so
Speaker 1: he freezes his ass off in this lighthouse for two nights.
Speaker 1: The ice thickens up in his no he explains he's
Speaker 1: going to try to make the eleven mile track to
Speaker 1: the nearest land. His no ends, I'm going to take
Speaker 1: some equipment with me, binocular's coat, hat, blankets, et cetera.
Speaker 1: I will turn them in to the US Coast Guard
Speaker 1: as soon as I get ashore. They kick off a
Speaker 1: whole other search for Wineman and still today no trace.
Speaker 2: Lost twice twice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hell, I'll never hear that.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, I think like, when you
Speaker 2: get into this realm, there's just a bottomless pit of
Speaker 2: stories and mysteries of you know, planes going down and
Speaker 2: all kinds of weird stuff happening to people. But yeah,
Speaker 2: for it to be in your backyard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a crazy story, man, Yep.
Speaker 2: I uh.
Speaker 1: When I was living in in the Upper I lived
Speaker 1: for a very brief time in the Upper Peninsula. It
Speaker 1: spent a great deal of time over there over a
Speaker 1: bunch of years. I remember There's two things kind of
Speaker 1: interesting when I lived there. Two guys got a shootout
Speaker 1: over bear baits. And the other thing was a guy
Speaker 1: is going to his deer hunting cabin and he parks
Speaker 1: on a steep incline and gets out to open his
Speaker 1: own gate, and as he's fiddling with his own gate,
Speaker 1: his truck slides forward and pins him against his own gate,
Speaker 1: where he then freezes to death.
Speaker 2: I was telling Yanni this story stuck with me because
Speaker 2: down in Mexico they love gates, and they're all every
Speaker 2: single gate has a different mechanical device holding it shut.
Speaker 2: And I was telling Yanni that. At one point, we're
Speaker 2: antelope hunting and I went out to open the gate
Speaker 2: to be a you know, I was driving and Sydney
Speaker 2: was in the passenger seat. I said, oh, I'll get
Speaker 2: the gate for myself. I hopped out forgot to put
Speaker 2: it in park, and as I'm up against the fence.
Speaker 2: I turned around, the truck's rolling at me and I
Speaker 2: barely get back in time to put the brakes on.
Speaker 2: So whenever we opened gates, now, Sydney has like a
Speaker 2: multi part checklist of making sure that I've put the
Speaker 2: truck in part. But he said he has a I
Speaker 2: believe a relative who died the same way, pinned on
Speaker 2: his gate, pinned on I believe a mailbox.
Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, that's how the actor Antony Jelchin died. Do
Speaker 1: you remember that guy?
Speaker 3: He was kind of like a young and upcoming actor,
Speaker 3: and yeah, he's trucked pinned him against a Yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, I remember some people ran over our mailbox one time,
Speaker 1: and my dad was so mad. He went and got
Speaker 1: a big chunk of phone pole and dug and set
Speaker 1: that thing down, darg a six foot pit and sunk
Speaker 1: it in there and put a bunch of concrete in there.
Speaker 2: M h.
Speaker 1: And he said, the next time someone hits his mailbox,
Speaker 1: he's going to be here in the morning. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know in the newspaper article. Whoever has found the old
Speaker 1: newspaper article of the they're abandoning the hunt for the Airmen.
Speaker 1: April thirteenth, they abandoned the search for the airman. Did
Speaker 1: you look at the next article port here on Michigan
Speaker 1: April thirteenth. Patrick Butler, twenty two shot himself in the
Speaker 1: leg last night while practicing a fast draw. Butler told
Speaker 1: deputies his thumb slipped down the hammer, causing the pistol
Speaker 1: to discharge.
Speaker 2: End story, and the headline is wounds himself.
Speaker 1: Here's an interesting one. It is the last thing we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about before we get in them. What we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about. It's kind of crazy one. The Boone
Speaker 1: and Crockett Club has opened up. I shouldn't say crazy interesting.
Speaker 1: This is an interesting one. The Boone and Crockett Club has.
Speaker 1: They've unanimously approved or request by the Fort Peck tribes
Speaker 1: to accept bison entries hunted on the Fort Peck Indian
Speaker 1: Reservation in northern Montana. Most places, if you were going
Speaker 1: to go shoot a buffalo, you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: submit them for Boone and Crockett Club because it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be regarded as a fair chase hunt. Like even if
Speaker 1: you shoot, like if you shoot a high fence deer,
Speaker 1: Boone and Krackett won't accept a high fence deer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of rules to Boone and Crockett club.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of rules that go above and beyond
Speaker 1: the what's legal right. They have their own added requirements.
Speaker 1: For instance, if you're radio hunting using radio communications, Boone
Speaker 1: and Crockett won't accept your score even if you're allowed
Speaker 1: to radio hunt where you're radio hunting. So they've opened
Speaker 1: up there as a way to applaud the work that
Speaker 1: the Fort Pret tribes have done on creating a wild,
Speaker 1: free range bison herd on their reservation and using a
Speaker 1: sustainable management plan. They've had the animals since nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: since nineteen ninety nine. They got him from Yellowstone National Park.
Speaker 1: I actually met Robbie who runs that program. But anyways,
Speaker 1: if you were to draw a fort Pack bison tag
Speaker 1: and kill a big bowl, you could have a bull
Speaker 1: submitted into Boone and Crockett. Boone and Crocket's going to
Speaker 1: start accepting it as a fair chase hunt.
Speaker 2: That's great, It's very cool.
Speaker 1: No, I like it. Man. I was having a conversation
Speaker 1: with a friend of mine who's very involved in the
Speaker 1: conservation movement, and I was complaining to him I was
Speaker 1: complaining to him. He and I have a slight I
Speaker 1: don't want to say that I was complaining to him
Speaker 1: about bison management in the state that I disagree with,
Speaker 1: Like I sort of disagree with the direction the state
Speaker 1: of Montana is going on bison. Man. I'd like there
Speaker 1: to be more bison more. I'd like to find ways
Speaker 1: to reduce conflict with landowners and create more areas for
Speaker 1: them to be more wild bison. And I do it,
Speaker 1: like in my mind, I'm like, it's like I'm doing it,
Speaker 1: like I think that, Like as a hunter, I'm all
Speaker 1: for it. And my buddy's like, but hunters just don't
Speaker 1: see those animals that way. Hunters are gonna you know,
Speaker 1: hunters are gonna go, uh, they're gonna draw blood over elk,
Speaker 1: but they just don't feel that way about buffalo. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, but they should, yeah, and someday they might.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But he say, hunters don't get riled up about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, we we went on the buff buffalo hunt
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks ago when my wife drew the
Speaker 2: tag on an American prairie, and I have to say,
Speaker 2: like that was one of the better like wild ass
Speaker 2: days of hunting that I've had, m M, just like
Speaker 2: out on the prairie, knowing around making stocks on big
Speaker 2: groups of buffalo. It was like antelope hunting, you know.
Speaker 2: And it was just like not really something I'd ever envisioned,
Speaker 2: Like I couldn't really imagine it playing out the way
Speaker 2: it did in my mind. But man, it was super cool.
Speaker 2: It's like, if I could do that every year, I would.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it's funny. There just aren't that many opportunities, no,
Speaker 2: and the opportunities that do exist are so varied in
Speaker 2: sort of nature and how they play out and where
Speaker 2: you're doing it and what happens and who's there. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's tough to it's tough to sort of picture what
Speaker 2: a buffalo hunt's like and picture yourself hunting buffalo. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's interesting. I wish more people were fired up about it.
Speaker 1: Hopefully it will be come.
Speaker 2: There's nothing more Montana than a buffalo hunt.
Speaker 1: I met a dude. I was at this thing not
Speaker 1: long when I met a guy who did the hunt
Speaker 1: that I did in Alaska and he wound up getting
Speaker 1: in such a pickle he had to call the state
Speaker 1: troopers to get them out.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, same same unit.
Speaker 2: I drew river conditions or what.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, ran in all kinds of trouble, got rescued
Speaker 1: by the troopers. So I said, well, did you get one? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like you no, uh yeah, all right, So let's
Speaker 1: dig it on, Randall, do me a favorite. You're gonna
Speaker 1: start out, explain Randall, explain what a long hunter is.
Speaker 2: So the long Hunters were a group of individuals in
Speaker 2: the late colonial period based primarily in western Virginia, you know,
Speaker 2: and and like the New River Valley and sort of
Speaker 2: the area tucked up against the Appalachian Mountains. And at
Speaker 2: the end of the Seven Years War, the end of
Speaker 2: the Anglo Cherokee War, when sort of violence on the
Speaker 2: frontier had quieted down, they went across the mountains into
Speaker 2: what is now Kentucky continent. Year so like the in
Speaker 2: the seventeen sixties, So seventeen sixty three is sort of
Speaker 2: how we periodized it, the end of the Anglo Cherokee
Speaker 2: Wars in seventeen sixty one. But essentially these were like
Speaker 2: cash poor farmers who were basically producing enough crops to
Speaker 2: support themselves and didn't really produce a surplus. And so
Speaker 2: one way that they could actually make cash to buy
Speaker 2: the things they needed was to supply white tailed deerskins
Speaker 2: to basically a leather market in Europe, primarily in Europe.
Speaker 2: And so guys like Daniel Boone and these groups Casper
Speaker 2: Mansker and and it's in the Henry Skaggs. You know,
Speaker 2: they're these kind of like remote clan based settlements and
Speaker 2: they would get together groups of like thirty or forty
Speaker 2: guys cross over the mountains on horseback and white tail
Speaker 2: deer hunt for up to a year or more than
Speaker 2: a year. And Boone famously spent like two years across
Speaker 2: the mountains on a long hunt. But you know, they're
Speaker 2: going over into territory where they're not supposed to be,
Speaker 2: and they're shooting deer by the hundreds. I mean, they're
Speaker 2: accumulating thousands of deer skin pelts, thousands of deer skins
Speaker 2: in the course of a hunt and hauling them all
Speaker 2: back on horseback and then selling them off. And that's
Speaker 2: sort of the cash economy of western Virginia and western
Speaker 2: North Carolina during that period was largely based on white
Speaker 2: tailed deer skins. So these are market hunters, they're rural people.
Speaker 2: They didn't leave behind a lot of records. A lot
Speaker 2: of times what you hear about them is sort of
Speaker 2: based on what was written, you know, a couple decades
Speaker 2: later when people are writing down stories about the early
Speaker 2: settlers in this county or that county, and they say, like,
Speaker 2: when he was a young man, he was a long hunter.
Speaker 2: But it's sort of this fleeting moment of our history
Speaker 2: of market hunting where yeah, hunting deer across the Appalachian
Speaker 2: Mountains was, uh, the way you could make a fair
Speaker 2: bit of money as someone without a lot of means
Speaker 2: who basically and you also have to have a little
Speaker 2: bit of gerr in you too to go out and
Speaker 2: do that. You know, it's a dangerous proposition. Yeah, a
Speaker 2: lot of gumption, but yeah, that's the long hunters, I think. Uh.
Speaker 2: And then the end of the long hunting era really
Speaker 2: is brought about, uh, with the onset of hostilities in
Speaker 2: the in out the lead up to the American Revolution,
Speaker 2: because the frontier becomes a very violent place and it
Speaker 2: becomes exceedingly dangerous to grab a couple dozen guys and
Speaker 2: go out on your own for a year at a
Speaker 2: time and sort of no man's land when there's a
Speaker 2: lot of hostilities going on between tribes that had aligned
Speaker 2: themselves with Great Britain, and you know, you're a colonial
Speaker 2: land hungry, colonial Westerner, you're kind of the bad guy.
Speaker 2: So that's that's sort of what brings an end to it.
Speaker 2: There's still some Long Hunters, but a lot of them
Speaker 2: are either called into military service, or they stay home
Speaker 2: to protect their household, or they're just too scared to
Speaker 2: go west.
Speaker 1: So there's a few geopolitical wrinkles within the Long Hunters
Speaker 1: that I found to be very interesting. Randall's talking about
Speaker 1: these sort of if you picture he's talking about these
Speaker 1: years that it will lead up to the American Revolution,
Speaker 1: And when you hear about like revolutionary fervor and the
Speaker 1: building of the like American patriotic movement, you're thinking of like,
Speaker 1: you know, Boston and the Boston Tea part already and
Speaker 1: the establishment of the the Mini Men and Paul Revere
Speaker 1: right and Thomas Paine writing Common Sense, and all these
Speaker 1: people who are sort of yearning for liberty and imagining
Speaker 1: this country that would get free of England, and you
Speaker 1: sort of want to extend that sentiment out to those
Speaker 1: frontier settlements, like to to Boon's clan, and these other
Speaker 1: clans that live way out on the frontier. That is
Speaker 1: not really how they're feeling. These are, by and large
Speaker 1: like groups of people who I mean, they've they've been
Speaker 1: born colonists, you know. There many of them are US
Speaker 1: born colonists. But they're they're much more aligned in their
Speaker 1: own little frontier world than they are tied to any
Speaker 1: sense of like the brewing sense of America. But man,
Speaker 1: they cannot escape, like they do not escape the war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like Randall mentioned that when they're going off into
Speaker 1: the first fart what we call the first far West,
Speaker 1: when they're going off over the Appalachians to hunt deer,
Speaker 1: Randall said, they're not supposed to be there. They're not
Speaker 1: supposed to be there for two things. There's one that's
Speaker 1: kind of obvious. Now. They're not supposed to be there
Speaker 1: because there's Native American tribes who claim the land and
Speaker 1: and some like protect it violently protected. But what Randall's
Speaker 1: referring to is under own their own colonial law. The
Speaker 1: British don't want their American subjects going over there and
Speaker 1: causing trouble with tribes, so they're always like Britain is
Speaker 1: always trying to like deal with the tribes and try
Speaker 1: to like find a sort of I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: like a sort of some kind of static agreement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wars are expensive, they're costly in lives and and
Speaker 2: sort of the attention of the colonial administrators and it
Speaker 2: just it's bad for business. And you know, empires rgually
Speaker 2: a money making enterprise and so yeah, as if they
Speaker 2: can have peaceful borders with the tribes and maintain sort
Speaker 2: of stable relationships with the tribes, that's what's best for
Speaker 2: the crown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you and and tribes are basically saying, like,
Speaker 1: what what is with your these crazy redneck hillbilly American
Speaker 1: guys pouring over like they're not supposed to be here
Speaker 1: m hm. But they're often met with hostilities. And then
Speaker 1: as all these tensions start to rise between America and England, uh,
Speaker 1: well that is a little more complicated because it's like
Speaker 1: such a mess on the frontier for a long time.
Speaker 1: The French to the north and the British are at
Speaker 1: odds and they each have mercenary forces. Like if if
Speaker 1: you've paid attention, if you ever paid attention to what
Speaker 1: was going on, and if you're looked at like what
Speaker 1: was going on? And portions of Vietnam and Laos and
Speaker 1: Cambodia during the Vietnam War, where we would have these
Speaker 1: proxy wars, right, Like the US wasn't supposed to be
Speaker 1: operating in Cambodian Laos, so we would align with indigenous
Speaker 1: groups in Cambodian Laos to like fight the communists. So
Speaker 1: we allied with the Mong, like I think, there's like
Speaker 1: Montinee forces we allied with, and we would arm them
Speaker 1: and give them direction and they would like kind of
Speaker 1: do our bidding. So in the American frontier, it was
Speaker 1: always this really complex thing because there was tribes aligned
Speaker 1: with the French and they would attack English colonists. And
Speaker 1: then later you had, later as the war did get
Speaker 1: going and stop this stop the sort of long hunting era,
Speaker 1: you had tribes aligned with the British who would come
Speaker 1: and attack American settlements.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think too the you know, there's also
Speaker 2: a larger recognition by the seventeen seventies among native people
Speaker 2: that with the French out of the picture largely that
Speaker 2: if British governance in North America goes away, these Americans
Speaker 2: are going to be unrestrained, right, And I think like
Speaker 2: a lot of tribes along that line recognized that the
Speaker 2: crown was trying to hold back all these settlers, and
Speaker 2: if America gains its independence, there's going to be no
Speaker 2: restraining force preventing them from gobbling up more land and
Speaker 2: more land. So I think like, in addition to working
Speaker 2: as proxies, there's also an understanding among Native people that, like,
Speaker 2: this war is for control of North America, and it's
Speaker 2: part of this longer, much longer struggle for indigenous autonomy.
Speaker 1: When we got done, if you listen to our Long
Speaker 1: Hunters piece, we end it in an interesting I don't
Speaker 1: want to call I want to say, it's interesting because
Speaker 1: we did it, but we end it in a very
Speaker 1: deliberate way.
Speaker 2: Go ahead.
Speaker 1: We end the Long Hunters in a very deliberate way
Speaker 1: because we end it at a time when the First
Speaker 1: Far West, which we'll call what we call the First
Speaker 1: Far West, sort of melds into what you might think
Speaker 1: of when you think of the West. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: you're sitting there right now at home and someone says
Speaker 1: you the West, you're typically thinking of the Rocky Mountain
Speaker 1: West in terms of like an American history terms. You're
Speaker 1: thinking of the Rocky Mountain West at the time the
Speaker 1: West at the time of the colonial period, the wild
Speaker 1: West was Kentucky. The wild West was basically south of
Speaker 1: the Ohio River, south of the Ohio River, west of
Speaker 1: the Appalachian Mountains. It was like that was kind of
Speaker 1: the first what we call the first far West, and
Speaker 1: many of the same sort of attitudes play out about it. Right,
Speaker 1: It was like the land of Promise. It started out
Speaker 1: where hunters started kind of like poking holes into it
Speaker 1: and finding ways in it because they were hunting. And
Speaker 1: then they're coming back and saying, hey, that place is
Speaker 1: pretty sweet. There's a lot of money you made there.
Speaker 1: And so following the tracks of the hunters you have
Speaker 1: settlers and people trying to establish towns. And then we
Speaker 1: repeat that same thing in the Rockies when we end
Speaker 1: the Long Hunters. The way we kind of mainly explained
Speaker 1: that what these Long Hunters were is we do much
Speaker 1: of it through the lens of one individual, Daniel Boone.
Speaker 1: The name Daniel more than any other name in the book.
Speaker 1: You hear the name Daniel Boone because he's come to
Speaker 1: in many ways exemplify the period, the period, and exemplify
Speaker 1: the Long Hunters. And A and was esteemed in his
Speaker 1: own time as a hunter Boone. As Kentucky filled up,
Speaker 1: Boone got very bitter about America, and he got very
Speaker 1: bitter about Kentucky. Boone had made a lot of land
Speaker 1: claims and had like bought land from guys that didn't
Speaker 1: actually own it and made claims, and then other people
Speaker 1: made claims on top of his claims, and at a
Speaker 1: point he would have been on paper extraordinarily wealthy with
Speaker 1: land holdings. But he gets into the legal battle after
Speaker 1: legal battle after legal battle, where it's like, well, sure
Speaker 1: you bought it from so and so, but so and
Speaker 1: so didn't really own it, right, Like so and so
Speaker 1: bought it under some dubious stuff. Congress undid the purchase.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you bought it, but you bought it from
Speaker 1: a guy that didn't have it. I don't know what
Speaker 1: to tell you about your money, but the land's not yours.
Speaker 1: And or he marked areas and then he didn't file it,
Speaker 1: which is.
Speaker 2: A very common thing throughout America. Like when you talk
Speaker 2: about these rolling frontiers, there's layers and layers of land
Speaker 2: speculators and fraudulent claims and battles over who has rightful
Speaker 2: ownership of land. So Boone is just wrapped up in
Speaker 2: all of this and on the losing.
Speaker 1: End comes out of it like Boone comes out of
Speaker 1: it broke. He leaves the first far West and goes
Speaker 1: to kind of the new western frontier of Missouri. But
Speaker 1: he goes to Missouri before the Louisiana purchase. He says
Speaker 1: he's never going back to Kentucky. And one of the
Speaker 1: things we talked about in Long Hunters is you have
Speaker 1: this idea of that there's this historian that even said,
Speaker 1: or a commentator maybe you remember who it was, who said,
Speaker 1: not only is Daniel Boone, he says he's a Kentucky emotion,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but he says that he's an honorary founding father.
Speaker 1: He's become, in the American imagination, an honorary founding father.
Speaker 1: But Boone one of his final acts as an American
Speaker 1: is to be like, I'm done with America. Yeah, done
Speaker 1: with Kentucky, done with America. I'm going to live under
Speaker 1: the Spanish crown.
Speaker 2: And be a subject of the Spanish king.
Speaker 1: And the Spain said to Boone, hey, come live in Spain,
Speaker 1: come you up, come live in Missouri. We'll give you
Speaker 1: land here. And he's like Audio's America.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: So it's funny like this the way that he's that
Speaker 1: Boone is this regarded now as this. You know, there's
Speaker 1: paintings of Boone going through the Cumberland Gap and they
Speaker 1: kind of set it up like he's like Moses. It's
Speaker 1: like he's like a Moses figure bringing his people to
Speaker 1: the Promised Land, you know, Like going through the Cumberland
Speaker 1: Gap is like the Red Sea being parted, right, And
Speaker 1: Boone became very celebrated like this, like a leader of men,
Speaker 1: you know, and he was, but he's like kind of
Speaker 1: in it for himself, in it for his family, not
Speaker 1: did not identify as an American patriot. But I'm kind
Speaker 1: of getting to the main thing is Boone winds up
Speaker 1: in Missouri and then completely out of his own control,
Speaker 1: he winds up back in THEE rids up back in
Speaker 1: the US, simply because before he dies, the US buys
Speaker 1: does the Louisiana purchase, and thereby takes possession of Boone's
Speaker 1: new place in Missouri.
Speaker 2: The Frontier caught up with him.
Speaker 1: We end the Long Hunters with this with this place,
Speaker 1: like I said, where the first far West melds into
Speaker 1: the new into the new Far West, the second Far West,
Speaker 1: the American West is uh, we get into the the
Speaker 1: the myth perhaps reality. No one's quite sure that Boone
Speaker 1: as an old man. Uh, he starts hunting with a
Speaker 1: he has a slave, and he starts hunting with his
Speaker 1: a slave and goes on a bunch of trips with
Speaker 1: a slave toward the end of his life. But before
Speaker 1: he gets too terribly old, he hooks up with some
Speaker 1: guys and does or doesn't go up the Missouri all
Speaker 1: the way to the Rockies. People are still like, it's
Speaker 1: really not known. He definitely would go up the Missouri
Speaker 1: to hunt. Some people think he made it all the
Speaker 1: way to the up the Yellowstone River. Perhaps. The historian
Speaker 1: Ted Franklin Blue has written about what is the evidence
Speaker 1: that he did? What is the evidence that he didn't?
Speaker 1: But like Boone, the Long Hunter could have been like
Speaker 1: a very early version of a mountain man or not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you looked into it, what did you what did
Speaker 1: you wind up feeling about it?
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there's he obviously went up river,
Speaker 2: and uh, my sense is that most people are skeptical
Speaker 2: of the idea that he made it up to like
Speaker 2: see the Rockies. For himself. Yeah, but I think regardless
Speaker 2: of whether or not he saw the rockies, that parallel
Speaker 2: is really astounding. That Like, he's going up the Missouri
Speaker 2: River in the early eighteen hundreds right as this new
Speaker 2: sort of like ball of like frontier energy is getting
Speaker 2: unleashed westward up that river. And I might be jumping
Speaker 2: the gun here a little bit. But one of the
Speaker 2: interesting things that I found in the research for the
Speaker 2: new book is that as Boone is an old man
Speaker 2: living in I believe Saint Charles, Missouri, sort of in
Speaker 2: the Saint Louis area, one of his neighbors.
Speaker 1: No, he stayed there at the boat art. He his
Speaker 1: family stayed at the mouth there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but one of his neighbors there towards the end
Speaker 2: of his life was a man named John Coulter who
Speaker 2: settled there after he lived out one of the most
Speaker 2: legendary careers as a mountain man.
Speaker 1: Oh is that where Culture wuld up right nearby?
Speaker 2: Culture Culter and Boone were neighbors for a brief period,
Speaker 2: because Culter died shortly after coming back from the mountains.
Speaker 2: But there's all these weird it's a small world, like
Speaker 2: a small little fraternity when you in the grand scheme
Speaker 2: of things. And so there's all these weird overlaps and parallels.
Speaker 2: But Boone's Boone's life especially is like really interesting for
Speaker 2: just mapping all of this historical transformation that unfolds from
Speaker 2: east to west in the course of a you know,
Speaker 2: a lifespan. Uh.
Speaker 1: If I was to become a playwright, and I won't,
Speaker 1: but if I did, I would do a play maybe
Speaker 1: Phil it helped me out and we turn into a musical.
Speaker 2: Well, I've already got the one. We've already got the
Speaker 2: one play idea in our Uh remember this, We're going
Speaker 2: to do a Glengarry Glenn Ross Deer camp.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, epic.
Speaker 1: Oh, my buddy's going to see I'm so jealous. Bill
Speaker 1: Burr is doing Glengary Glenn.
Speaker 3: He's just it's a stacked lineup. It's bil Bert, Bob Odenkirk,
Speaker 3: Michael McKeon, Kieran Coulkin's nuts. My buddy's going cool, It's
Speaker 3: gonna be awesome. I met Bilbert very briefly, and he
Speaker 3: was he seemed to be annoyed with me.
Speaker 1: Does I think you should be? I think that's a compliment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well I was because I was talking to him. I
Speaker 1: was at I was I was back at I was
Speaker 1: at Joe Rogan was doing a comedy club bit. So
Speaker 1: I was there hanging out and I got to come back.
Speaker 1: And you know, you hang out with all the comedians,
Speaker 1: you just stand there because you're not funny like they are.
Speaker 1: Just try to be like. I don't say ship because
Speaker 1: I don't want them to think that I think I'm funny,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, just standing there.
Speaker 2: But I've got an idea.
Speaker 1: You really wanted to talk to Joe and you could
Speaker 1: tell he was very annoyed that I was like back, like,
Speaker 1: it's like, who's this idiot?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's not.
Speaker 1: Well, he probably knows it. Bill Burr he figured that
Speaker 1: out on her. Uh oh the play, Yeah, it's Boon
Speaker 1: Hunt with his slave mm hm as old man and
Speaker 1: they have a lot of deep conversations. Another play. Because
Speaker 1: I'm developing this theory that John Colter, that John Colter had, uh,
Speaker 1: that John Colter had horrible post traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's.
Speaker 1: A stretch now, going through what he went through, and
Speaker 1: then the timing of when he quit being a mountain
Speaker 1: man and how short his life was after he after
Speaker 1: that happened to him. I think that it. I think
Speaker 1: that it kind of blew his mind out. And I
Speaker 1: might do another play, follow up play. But I don't
Speaker 1: know how to write plays. But you know if I did, Phil, Phil.
Speaker 3: No one knows how to write plays until you, until
Speaker 3: you start writing a play. Anyone can be a play, right,
Speaker 3: anyone can write book, Steve.
Speaker 2: No, No, oh, damn. You feel.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about market hunters. You know, let's jump
Speaker 1: ahead for a minute. We just wrapped up what long
Speaker 1: hunters are. So there's an interesting way that American history flows,
Speaker 1: and we're trying to like kind of follow this line
Speaker 1: of American history where you'll see we have these bracketed
Speaker 1: chunks of dates and they're imperfect, but we say eighteen
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty three to seventeen seventy five, meaning there's a
Speaker 1: big frontier war, you know, a big war between colonists
Speaker 1: and tribes on the frontier, and it's just way too
Speaker 1: hostile for long hunters to go hunt to the west.
Speaker 1: The war dies down, it gets like you're like you
Speaker 1: it'd be like, hey, you can go over there and
Speaker 1: not die. And they hit it real hard. Probably yeah,
Speaker 1: well they let them die. You have less of a
Speaker 1: chance you're gonna die if you go on the first
Speaker 1: Far West and then all of a sudden war blows
Speaker 1: up again. It's just it's like suicide to go hunt
Speaker 1: the first Far West. And so the era ends, and
Speaker 1: the primary thing they're after is they're after deer skins.
Speaker 1: When I say, it's imperfect because they're also trapping a
Speaker 1: lot of beaver and they're trapping otter because they only
Speaker 1: want the deer skins in the off season. You want
Speaker 1: thin deer skins, not winter skins. So they would they
Speaker 1: would hunt deer, and then at some point beaver furs
Speaker 1: had come prime and they would trap beaver and otter
Speaker 1: and some other fur bears. But they're mainly after deer skins.
Speaker 1: When we pick up this next big commodity push, this
Speaker 1: next big market hunting push, is when you get into
Speaker 1: the strictly the beaver trade and we talk about the
Speaker 1: mountain in which we're going to talk about the mountain Men.
Speaker 1: When you go through all the mountain Man stories, they
Speaker 1: are fixated on beaver skins. They do some odter, for sure,
Speaker 1: but they are not also hunting deer. They are not
Speaker 1: hunting deer hides. They're eating all kinds of stuff, but
Speaker 1: they're very, very focused on beaver.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you read like a journal and they arrive
Speaker 2: at a new river valley, they don't say like, oh,
Speaker 2: there's no beaver, but it's still kind of cool. There's
Speaker 2: some elk and buffalo and a couple otter here and there.
Speaker 2: They just say, no beaver, moving on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what they're after. As It's funny because we
Speaker 1: talk about we'll explain these date ranges, but we talk
Speaker 1: about the main mountain Man air run in eighteen oh
Speaker 1: six to eighteen forty. What you get when you get
Speaker 1: outside of when you go on the far end of that,
Speaker 1: you get where you wind up having these like mountain
Speaker 1: Man type figures or what they would call trapper traders
Speaker 1: at the time, and you start to see that they're
Speaker 1: getting very interested in trading buffalo ropes. So all that,
Speaker 1: like Larpenteur, Charles Larpentntuer got is trader. It's like they're
Speaker 1: doing some traffic in beaver hides, but there's a there's
Speaker 1: an emerging market for buffalo, and they're engaging with tribes
Speaker 1: to get buffalo. They'll still talk about beaver, but they're
Speaker 1: into buffalo and then if you drift a little while
Speaker 1: later and you drift up into the eighteen seventies, it's
Speaker 1: just all buffalo like, that's it. It's the buffalo trade.
Speaker 1: So we're going to do one where we explore the
Speaker 1: buffalo trade. And it's funny because when we do that,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have this segue where these like beaver where
Speaker 1: the like the American West and the beaver trade in
Speaker 1: the West kind of transitions into a buffalo industry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the trade in buffalo robes, because initially the
Speaker 2: most valuable commodity you can get is a skin with
Speaker 2: the hair on. In all buffalo robe, that's an extension
Speaker 2: of this bigger umbrella of the fur trade. But by
Speaker 2: the eighteen seventies it's a totally different animal. It's a
Speaker 2: fully industrialized slaughter for just this skin yeap TV used
Speaker 2: in leather making.
Speaker 1: Later, when we get into the buffalo hide hunters, the
Speaker 1: buffalo hunters, you'll see this. There's this thing that switches. Early,
Speaker 1: there's like this thing called there's an air called where
Speaker 1: they're they're interested in what they call the robe trade.
Speaker 1: And in the eighteen sixties, the robe trade was a
Speaker 1: big deal what they mean by the robe trade is
Speaker 1: you are American. The American economy wants what they would
Speaker 1: call Indian tanned robes. So tribal hunters that's who drove
Speaker 1: this market. Is like tribal hunters great planes. Tribes would
Speaker 1: go and kill buffalo in the winter time and they
Speaker 1: would they would tan the hides and sell a completely tanned,
Speaker 1: ready to go hide, and that was the robe trade.
Speaker 1: The robe trade eventually moves to the hide trade, where
Speaker 1: you're just selling dried skins, tacked out, dried from any season,
Speaker 1: didn't matter. We're going to explore that whole thing. But
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of setting up the way that I
Speaker 1: guess the point I'm trying to make is when we're
Speaker 1: looking at like this history of market hunting in the
Speaker 1: West and all these different things they're after, we're trying
Speaker 1: to bracket it. But like I said, it's imperfect bracketing
Speaker 1: because these things bleed into each other. Daniel Boone was
Speaker 1: a beaver trapper in Kentucky and a deer skin hunter.
Speaker 1: A guy like Jim Bridger was a beaver trapper in Wolming, Montana, Colorado, Idaho.
Speaker 1: Whatever became a robe trader right It's not like one
Speaker 1: generation of these people dies and a new generation starts
Speaker 1: up at like it switches. But what we're doing is
Speaker 1: we're trying to look at the most with hunters and trappers,
Speaker 1: kind of like what are the most sought after commodities
Speaker 1: and when do these commodity markets peak? And so with that,
Speaker 1: Randall talk about why explain why we wound up when
Speaker 1: we kicked it around, Why we decided the eighteen oh
Speaker 1: six to eighteen forty was the Mountain Man era, because
Speaker 1: someone might go like, well, they were trapped beaver before that,
Speaker 1: they trapped beaver after yeah.
Speaker 2: And they're yeah, exactly, And I think for the purposes
Speaker 2: of our project, we chose eighteen oh six. I think
Speaker 2: maybe August seventeenth. Yeah, we have an exact day eighteen
Speaker 2: oh six, because that's the date when John Colter turns
Speaker 2: around and heads back up to Missouri to trap beaver.
Speaker 2: And so so really the beginning of our story is
Speaker 2: the Louisiana purchase and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition,
Speaker 2: the core of Discovery, sent by Jefferson to explore a
Speaker 2: water route to the Pacific and among the different sort
Speaker 2: of economic opportunities and commodities that they're taking note of
Speaker 2: in their journals as they make this you know, unimaginable
Speaker 2: journey to the Posi I can back is there, they're
Speaker 2: noting that there's a lot of beaver and at the time,
Speaker 2: beaver is a very valuable commodity. Beaver fur used to
Speaker 2: make felt. And so by the time they're on their
Speaker 2: way back to Missouri, the Lewis and Clark expedition, they
Speaker 2: have a hunter with them named John Colter, who was
Speaker 2: recruited specifically for this UH mission. And as they're on
Speaker 2: their way back to Saint Louis, the expedition encounters two
Speaker 2: trappers and traders who are headed up the Missouri and
Speaker 2: they want to check out some of the stuff that
Speaker 2: Lewis and Clark and the gang had just been through.
Speaker 2: And so John Coulter seeks to end his term of
Speaker 2: service with the expedition because he wants to join these
Speaker 2: guys and head back up river to the you know,
Speaker 2: quote unquote untouched trap in country that they'd seen near
Speaker 2: the Three Forks of the Missouri outside of present day Bozeman, Montana.
Speaker 1: By Cecils Sets House.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he basically just wants to go to Set's house
Speaker 2: and yeah, and that kicks off, I mean for culture,
Speaker 2: that kicks off a several years of some of the
Speaker 2: most harrowing and uh sort of just job dropping wilderness
Speaker 2: adventures that you can imagine, you know, solo journeys across
Speaker 2: fast expanses, running for his life from a group of
Speaker 2: blackfeet who had captured him.
Speaker 1: I mean, culture is sort of like having his buddy's
Speaker 1: gut smeared all over him.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Culture is sort of like a I mean, he's almost
Speaker 2: like a comic book character of just like astounding feats.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's funny how little is known about him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, there's very little known about him. You can
Speaker 1: kind of tell that he at least got drunk once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he got in trouble. He got Yeah, as did
Speaker 2: you know several of the Lewis and Clark expedition members
Speaker 2: when there's and they're waiting to head up river because
Speaker 2: they come down to Saint Louis prior the winner, prior
Speaker 2: to departing to the Pacific, and so sitting around in
Speaker 2: their camp, there's a lot of disciplinary action required to
Speaker 2: keep these guys in line.
Speaker 1: But yeah, detail about the Culture deal is when Lewis
Speaker 1: and Clark Expeditions coming down in the Missouri and they're
Speaker 1: getting close to getting back, you know, they're kind of
Speaker 1: in the smooth sailing portion of the trip. Colter runs
Speaker 1: into these trappers and he wants to go back up
Speaker 1: with them, and he asked permission, and I was like
Speaker 1: this little detail. Yeah, Lewis and Clark, the leaders say,
Speaker 1: if everyone else here will promise not to ask the
Speaker 1: same thing, you can go. And everyone agrees, I won't
Speaker 1: ask to leave it, and thereby they let culteru go.
Speaker 1: If everybody everyone had to promise, they wouldn't ask to.
Speaker 2: If everybody wants to this, we're gonna have a real issue.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start doing that with my kids. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: of them asks to do something, I'll say, if you
Speaker 1: can get your brother and sister to promise not to
Speaker 1: ask me the same thing, that's fine.
Speaker 2: It's a good system.
Speaker 1: Nothing would happen.
Speaker 2: It maintains it maintains order. Uh. But yeah, we kind
Speaker 2: of kicked that. That's cult turning up river is why
Speaker 2: we start with that year of eighteen oh six. And
Speaker 2: you know, when we're talking about mountain men, we're talking
Speaker 2: about a type of individual who is a nomadic beaver trapper,
Speaker 2: and so Culter sort of turning around and heading back
Speaker 2: up river without a real destination in mind, just wants
Speaker 2: to get out there and accumulate furs. We're sort of
Speaker 2: calling him the first mountain Man. And obviously, like anybody
Speaker 2: could you know, someone could make any number of arguments
Speaker 2: pointing to other figures. This is like one of the
Speaker 2: choices you make when you're telling a story, is where
Speaker 2: do you start? Where do you end? But I think culture, symbolically,
Speaker 2: especially as associated as he is with the Lewis and
Speaker 2: Clark expedition, the opening up of the Upper Missouri River,
Speaker 2: the Upper Missouri region, and his exploration of the Northern Rockies,
Speaker 2: like culture is as good as anybody for sort of
Speaker 2: the honor of the first mountain man.
Speaker 1: You're hear the Kentucky writer Chris Offitt.
Speaker 2: The name's familiar.
Speaker 1: He wrote a book and a bunch of people had
Speaker 1: a problem with some of the things he said in
Speaker 1: his book, and his response was, you should write your
Speaker 1: own book. Yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 2: That's totally fair.
Speaker 1: So that's how we decided. That's that's what that's our
Speaker 1: that's our choice. Yeah, we debated it. We weighed the
Speaker 1: pros and cons.
Speaker 2: And we're not the first ones to make that argument.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think a lot of a lot of
Speaker 2: historians over the years have argued that Culter, you know,
Speaker 2: symbolically represents the beginning of a new era.
Speaker 1: It also helps me know his name, Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, because there's other dudes, you know, those dudes
Speaker 1: that could slip through the cracks. Yeah, but he's just
Speaker 1: he's convenient because we know about him. And then he
Speaker 1: did a lot of things to kind of set up
Speaker 1: the trade. Yes, he did a lot of things that
Speaker 1: would sort of push how this would go down.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I think before we get into the where
Speaker 2: we end up in eighteen forty, the sort of arc
Speaker 2: of this Mountain Man era is important to understand sor
Speaker 2: of the general contours of how it goes because initially,
Speaker 2: people who want to capitalize on the furs of the
Speaker 2: Upper Missouri attempt to mimic a model that had been
Speaker 2: established by the Hudson's Bay Company, which is the Canadian
Speaker 2: fur trading monopoly, and it had largely operated with big
Speaker 2: forts controlled by traders.
Speaker 1: Can can you hold taitwem? You folks listen to no
Speaker 1: doubt you've in some way heard Hudson Bay Company. So
Speaker 1: just just as America has their holdings okay to the north.
Speaker 1: Kind of basically you think of it like, basically the
Speaker 1: line was pretty well established our boarder with Canada.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some fuzzy areas, but you could sketch it
Speaker 2: on a map without too much inaccuracy, like on your
Speaker 2: understanding of contemporary borders.
Speaker 1: Like roughly imagine the US Canada border that remained British.
Speaker 1: And when you hear the word Hudson Bay Company, people
Speaker 1: kind of think of it like synonymous with the Crown.
Speaker 1: But what it was is they basically gave a charter.
Speaker 1: It'd be like like let's say we were to seize
Speaker 1: Greenland and we then said to a company Bechtel, I
Speaker 1: don't know, we say to a company, you have soul ability,
Speaker 1: Greenland is effectively yours to conduct business on. It's yours. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going to control competition to you right for a time,
Speaker 1: and it's like you have the license to conduct business.
Speaker 1: So Hudson Bay Company was a company, but it held
Speaker 1: the like charter from the Crown to exploit the resource.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had a monopoly on all the waters flowing
Speaker 2: into Hudson's Bank, which stretches a real long way into
Speaker 2: Western Canada.
Speaker 1: So they weren't the government. Well it gets tricky because
Speaker 1: I mean they kind of were the government. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they operated with the blessing of the government, with
Speaker 1: the force of the government, but they were a company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not. The Hudson's Bay Company is much are
Speaker 2: too sort of an empire in its own right than
Speaker 2: it is to like a trading post.
Speaker 1: But there's no American parallel.
Speaker 2: Not at that time, not an obvious one. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean, like you could compare it to maybe Exxon
Speaker 2: As in terms of like it's yeah, not at the time,
Speaker 2: but like a company that has the power to sort
Speaker 2: of move the needle in terms of international affairs and
Speaker 2: control over a huge swat the territory. And but yeah,
Speaker 2: the Hudson's Bay Company was founded in the late sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: and it set the standard for efficiency and profitability and
Speaker 2: running a fur trade at a scale that no one
Speaker 2: had ever really seen before. So they have this network
Speaker 2: of forts extending to the west through the Great Lakes,
Speaker 2: and what's happening at these is Native people are the
Speaker 2: ones supplying the furs and then their trade, the Hudson's
Speaker 2: Bay Company is trading with Native people for manufactured goods
Speaker 2: and commodities from Europe. And so the Hudson's Bay Company
Speaker 2: is this huge logistical like octopus reaching into Western Canada
Speaker 2: and bringing huge quantities of furs to the east for
Speaker 2: shipment onto Britain.
Speaker 1: And if our symbol of the American West becomes the horse,
Speaker 1: the symbol of the Hudson Bay Company is the canoe. Yes,
Speaker 1: they run a water they run a water based system,
Speaker 1: and they've developed this whole culture of the voyagers, paddlers,
Speaker 1: sixty strokes a minute. Yeah, all this shit has moved
Speaker 1: in giant canoes with dudes that can carry at portages,
Speaker 1: dudes that can carry two hundred pounds that you can
Speaker 1: portage two hundred pounds at a time. And they run
Speaker 1: this whole thing. I mean not there's exceptions, but jenerally,
Speaker 1: this whole thing is run in canoes.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And and I think too like the in addition
Speaker 2: to canoes, the essential ingredient in their operation is having
Speaker 2: these trade relationships with tribes in the areas where they operated.
Speaker 2: And they're not always good, like there's obviously flare ups
Speaker 2: of violence and hostility. But there's there's sort.
Speaker 1: Of this.
Speaker 2: Underlying everything they do is they are able to get
Speaker 2: indigenous people to produce the furs they want wherever they go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, unlike the Americans who tend to start every negotiation
Speaker 1: with a shootout.
Speaker 2: Yes, and so that's what. So that's sort of the
Speaker 2: start of our story. Is like, all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: the Louisiana Purchase happens. The United States claims ownership to
Speaker 2: all these lands west of the miss Sippy River, and
Speaker 2: people who want to capitalize on the beaver firs there
Speaker 2: begin to imagine like their own domestic counterpart to the
Speaker 2: Hudson's Bay Company, and they don't really They sort of
Speaker 2: just try to reproduce this model, and it doesn't work
Speaker 2: the same on the Great Plains and in the Rockies
Speaker 2: as it did up in Canada.
Speaker 1: One.
Speaker 2: The political situation is more fraught, and they are running into,
Speaker 2: you know, violence and getting themselves on the wrong side
Speaker 2: of tribes like the Blackfeet, who are more resistant to
Speaker 2: white incursion. And then the other thing that's sort of
Speaker 2: interesting when you look at it is that a lot
Speaker 2: of tribes that they encounter aren't that interested in upending
Speaker 2: their LifeWay to become beaver trappers. At this point in time,
Speaker 2: a lot of the people that they're encountering are equestrian
Speaker 2: buffalo hunting people, and they have a system that works
Speaker 2: for them, and it's just not compatible with breaking up
Speaker 2: into small little bands of beaver hunters and hitting every
Speaker 2: creek and river in the neighborhood and bring them all
Speaker 2: back to these trading posts.
Speaker 1: So some felt it was demeaning. Yeah, some thought, why bother,
Speaker 1: I get everything I need from buffalo hunting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's there's one there's one coat we have
Speaker 2: in there that's from a tribal member who I believe
Speaker 2: is talking to an emissary from the Hudson's Bay Company.
Speaker 2: He's kind of gone down to the Dakotas, and he
Speaker 2: says something like, you know, I could get on board
Speaker 2: with beaver hunting if you could do it on horseback,
Speaker 2: like if this was like a real hunt, Like, but
Speaker 2: I'm just not interested in crawling around, as he puts it,
Speaker 2: in the bowels of the earth, on my hands and
Speaker 2: knees to catch these beavers. So it's just like not,
Speaker 2: you know, the American interests are not as readily able
Speaker 2: to establish productive trade with the tribes encounter as the
Speaker 2: Hudson's Bay Company has been.
Speaker 1: So there's there's another kind of cool wrinkle in it
Speaker 1: is they encounter later beaver trappers encounter some big horned
Speaker 1: sheep hunting specialists, a Shoshone band that peop would call
Speaker 1: the sheep eaters later maybe at the time they call
Speaker 1: them sheep eaters high mountain people. And when they's the
Speaker 1: mountain men, the trappers explain to him that, you know,
Speaker 1: they were after this giant road and they were kind
Speaker 1: of like, oh shit, we ate all those yeah, And
Speaker 1: then he pointed out that they actually burned the hair
Speaker 1: off and when they get them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is the valuable part and the only part
Speaker 2: that they're interested in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, my bad, we ate them. And I
Speaker 1: think he.
Speaker 2: Says they burned the hair off of him because they
Speaker 2: could get better drippings that way from the meat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, keep the fat in. We talked about Colter, like
Speaker 1: why he's a good guy to talk about, why Colter's
Speaker 1: help them, talk about the mountain men. Colture kind of
Speaker 1: has these two besides his time with Lewis Clark Culter,
Speaker 1: John Colter has these two big adventures. It's sort of
Speaker 1: the most celebrated adventures of John Colter. One is Colter's Run,
Speaker 1: which has been reenacted and reenacted in every documentary show
Speaker 1: about the West like ad nauseum, right Cultures Run. The
Speaker 1: other thing is is Coulters. Colter maybe may or may
Speaker 1: not have been the first European to go through Yelsow
Speaker 1: National Park, which is called Coulter's Hell. Of these two
Speaker 1: famous things, it's kind of like one happens like really
Speaker 1: as a mountain man, and one happens in a pre
Speaker 1: mountain era, because when Colter did his big megahike a
Speaker 1: midwinter oftentimes solo megahike through the Tetons, through the Absorca's
Speaker 1: like all over damn place to Yelso National Park. He's
Speaker 1: trying to establish this Hudson Bay thing. They go up
Speaker 1: and they build a fort where the Big Corn River
Speaker 1: flows into the Yellowstone right around there, and they need
Speaker 1: to go find tribes who want to trap beaver in trade.
Speaker 1: So that big loop Coulter does is trying to talk
Speaker 1: tribes into becoming beaver trappers.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: And then you see just a couple of years later
Speaker 1: at the Coulter's Run period, the Coulter is trapping beavers
Speaker 1: and he probably always trapped some beavers. But you see
Speaker 1: the switch where they're like, it's not that thing Coulter
Speaker 1: tried to go do, like say hey, boys, trap beavers,
Speaker 1: come sell them to us. Like it just doesn't take off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's one historian has described this period as
Speaker 2: a period of trial and error where for interests are
Speaker 2: trying to figure out how they're going to get these
Speaker 2: beavers to market.
Speaker 1: And to make a.
Speaker 2: Long story short, by the eighteen twenties, it's clear that
Speaker 2: if the US is going to take advantage of this resource,
Speaker 2: they're going to send American trappers out to trap the
Speaker 2: beavers themselves.
Speaker 1: Tribes be damned, and yeah, not work through the tribes.
Speaker 1: And the result of that is they need a way
Speaker 1: to if they're not operating from fixed posts and fixed
Speaker 1: bases where the furs come to them, they need to
Speaker 1: find another way to get these huge quantities of furs
Speaker 1: back to Saint Louis. And so that leads to the
Speaker 1: invention of the rendezvous, which is a logistical invention whereby
Speaker 1: every summer there's a fixed location and all these trappers
Speaker 1: spread acrowd spread across hundreds of miles come together and
Speaker 1: trade the furs that've accumulated for what they need.
Speaker 2: To survive the year aheads. So these trappers are basically
Speaker 2: and these are the mountain meen. They're living year round
Speaker 2: in the Rockies. They're not traveling back and forth to
Speaker 2: quote unquote civilization with their harvest. They're living in the
Speaker 2: Rockies year round, providing all their own meat and shelter
Speaker 2: and all that. And then once a year they bring
Speaker 2: their accumulated harvest to this gathering that's like a huge encampment,
Speaker 2: trading them to the fur companies who come out in
Speaker 2: caravans with supplies, and then the caravan brings the furs
Speaker 2: back to market. So this rendezvous is kind of the
Speaker 2: like the beating heart of the mountain man era. And
Speaker 2: the first real rendezvous is like in eighteen twenty five,
Speaker 2: and the last real rendezvous is in eighteen forty, and
Speaker 2: so that's the end the bookends of like the Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountain rendezvous system. So that's where you get to circle
Speaker 2: us all the way back around. That's how we get
Speaker 2: to the end date of eighteen oh forty. So eighteen
Speaker 2: oh six to eighteen forty, and yeah, there's certainly beaver
Speaker 2: trappers after eighteen forty some of these guys go out to.
Speaker 1: Oregon and the little meetings.
Speaker 2: They had their own little spinoff rendezvous. Right. But like
Speaker 2: this like fabled age of the mountain Men that you
Speaker 2: know was getting headlines in newspapers in New York and
Speaker 2: you know, international interest in these strange figures who are
Speaker 2: nomadic trappers. That Golden Age is really the rendezvous period.
Speaker 1: The one of the reasons that people that grow up hunting,
Speaker 1: you know, it's true of me, It's true Iran, Like
Speaker 1: you grow up hunting and you grow up admiring the
Speaker 1: mountain men. However, like superficially your understanding is of when
Speaker 1: you're a kid. I kind of got it, but there's
Speaker 1: parts of it I didn't understand. But I knew enough
Speaker 1: to know that they were the epitome of self sufficient
Speaker 1: hunters and trappers, right. They were like the gold standard
Speaker 1: of American backwoodsman. Part of that is that self sufficiency,
Speaker 1: Like well, we talked about that Hudson Bay model where
Speaker 1: you have these big river systems and you have hired canoers,
Speaker 1: and you have people that live in forts and they
Speaker 1: grow crops. They might hire hunters. They're supplied with food, right,
Speaker 1: so you come in in the summer. They get all
Speaker 1: you bring in, all the flour and sugar and coffee.
Speaker 1: And if you work out a fort for the Hudson
Speaker 1: Bay Company, you might not really need to leave the fort.
Speaker 1: And they're fed by Hudson Bay Company. The employees are
Speaker 1: what's so crazy about the mountainin thing is when they
Speaker 1: finally hit on this system that works for him, they
Speaker 1: just say, you boys are gonna have to figure it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you'll have trappers, You'll have mountain men that'll do three, four,
Speaker 1: five years and it's it is a diet of wild meat,
Speaker 1: no support, no structures, no cabins, no support with food whatsoever.
Speaker 1: They have one chance to resupply, and they have a
Speaker 1: horse and a pack horse, yeah, or maybe a couple
Speaker 1: of pack animals, one chance to resupply, one chance to
Speaker 1: g any news from the outside world, and then they're
Speaker 1: just figuring it out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Three hundred and fifty days a year. They are
Speaker 2: living off of what they have on their pack horse,
Speaker 2: which is basically a couple of traps, a rifle, a blanket,
Speaker 2: a knife, maybe an axe. It's a very limited kit
Speaker 2: and they're simply going where the beaver are and it's
Speaker 2: really like a day to day existence. There often aren't
Speaker 2: long plans of like we're going to hit here, here
Speaker 2: and here. It's like, we're going to go to this
Speaker 2: valley see if anybody's trapped at recently we get there,
Speaker 2: someone tells you, oh. And a lot of times too,
Speaker 2: they're encountering tribes who might point them in the direction
Speaker 2: of a place they might want to go, or point
Speaker 2: out to them that they might not want to go
Speaker 2: to this other place where they're thinking of going because
Speaker 2: they're going to get killed if they go there. So
Speaker 2: it's a very it's.
Speaker 1: A very.
Speaker 2: Like improvisational life like it. There's it's the only dates
Speaker 2: on their calendar are the rendezvous. Other than that, it's like,
Speaker 2: how can we get as many beaver as we as
Speaker 2: we can between now and then we do.
Speaker 1: We have a chapter in the book called Strangers in
Speaker 1: a Strange Land, and it's in it we explore this
Speaker 1: very very complex relationship that the mountain men develop with
Speaker 1: the tribes. Complex. I'll give you a handful of reasons
Speaker 1: why it's very complex. There are some tribes Flatheads Nez Perce,
Speaker 1: who throw in really heavily with the mountain men. They
Speaker 1: kind of become mountain men. They ride with the mountain men.
Speaker 1: There groups of camp with the mountain men, like they
Speaker 1: throw in and become like trappers. Some tribes just absolutely
Speaker 1: resist them, like the most classic not the most classic,
Speaker 1: but so like if there was a primary enemy to
Speaker 1: the mountain mentos the Blackfeet, the Blackfeet never got comfortable
Speaker 1: with the mountain men trapping beaver on their land. There
Speaker 1: were other tribes where it was a little more touch
Speaker 1: and go, like things of the crow is a little
Speaker 1: more touch and go, but it is very like a
Speaker 1: very complex part of it. If you look at some
Speaker 1: of these expeditions, they seem like rolling gunfights. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: gonna shootouts all the time, but they're often in shootouts
Speaker 1: where they're with members from one tribe and they're fighting
Speaker 1: with the tribe's ancestral enemies, or just trappers are fighting
Speaker 1: with a tribe, or just trappers are fighting with a
Speaker 1: faction of a tribe, But then there's other factions of
Speaker 1: the same tribe that they're not in conflict with. At
Speaker 1: the same time, they're adopting Native mannerisms, adopting Native dress,
Speaker 1: marrying Native women, adopting Native religion. At the same time,
Speaker 1: they're using ways of describing Native Americans, which is like
Speaker 1: highly derogatory. But then you look like they grow their
Speaker 1: hair long, they have feathers in their hair, they decorate
Speaker 1: their horses, they marry Native women, they learn native languages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a there's a quote from one of
Speaker 2: the accounts that we looked at where they basically say,
Speaker 2: you can't pay a free trapper a higher compliment than
Speaker 2: to tell them you'd mistaken him for an Indian.
Speaker 1: Yep. Even guys commenting they start walking the mountain men
Speaker 1: would start walking like an Indian. So it's just this,
Speaker 1: it's like you can't. On one hand, you want to
Speaker 1: go like, oh, there were these these great egalitarians, you know,
Speaker 1: and like totally adapted to this lifestyle. But then what
Speaker 1: contradicts that is they demonstrate at times a very hostile
Speaker 1: relationship to tribal members, stereotyping tribal members all the time,
Speaker 1: not giving people the benefit of the doubt. Then the
Speaker 1: other hand, you want to go, oh, they were like
Speaker 1: these rapacious marauders, but what complicates that vision is all
Speaker 1: the contradictory material about how well they interwove with some tribes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think I think to maybe just step
Speaker 2: back and look at the bigger picture. It's not like
Speaker 2: the Mountain Men were this big wave of white quote
Speaker 2: unquote civilization, you know, coming head to head with Native America.
Speaker 2: Like there's this pre existing politics in the Northern Rockies
Speaker 2: in Upper Missouri. All these tribes had these pre existing
Speaker 2: relationships and power struggles with one another. And it's a
Speaker 2: very dynamic period of time in Native history because of
Speaker 2: the instruction of firearms and horse culture has only been
Speaker 2: there for you know, one hundred and fifty years maybe,
Speaker 2: and there's trade goods coming down, like firearms coming down
Speaker 2: from the north from Hudson's Bay Company. And so if
Speaker 2: you're a tribe like the Blackfeet, and you see American
Speaker 2: traders and trappers developing good relationships or at least trading
Speaker 2: material goods with your historic rivals, like all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: these interlopers are a threat to you. And so the
Speaker 2: Mountain Men are pretty insignificant in the relative numbers, but
Speaker 2: like what they represent in terms of upsetting the status
Speaker 2: quo in Native America is pretty significant. And so I
Speaker 2: think like part of what we do in that chapter
Speaker 2: is to explain the underlying dynamics that shape day to
Speaker 2: day encounters between a mountain man who runs into a
Speaker 2: band of Shoshone hunters or who runs into a band
Speaker 2: of Blackfeet hunters or whatever else, because it varies widely,
Speaker 2: and it also depends on the individuals involved. You know,
Speaker 2: there are some individuals within tribes who are much more
Speaker 2: hostile to white incursion, and there are some individuals and
Speaker 2: those same tribes who are perhaps more accommodating. And so
Speaker 2: it's just like you never really know what you're going
Speaker 2: to get.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a good way to think about it. Like random
Speaker 1: makes a good point that there was no starting point
Speaker 1: with Euro American tribal relations. There is, but you have
Speaker 1: to go back hundreds of years, and even then it's fuzzy.
Speaker 1: But like earlier we talked about Lewis and Clark, Lewis Clark,
Speaker 1: they really hit it off with the Nez Perce, right,
Speaker 1: They kind of made it like a little packed. We
Speaker 1: would later violate that pack, but long hour to the
Speaker 1: mountainn Era, we would violate that pack in the mid
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies. But they made a pack and the nets
Speaker 1: per stay true to it. They're like, we're friendly with
Speaker 1: the Americans, and they held that for a long time.
Speaker 1: The only Indians Lewis and Clark killed Blackfeet yep, and
Speaker 1: Blackfeet did not have a friendly packed with the Americans.
Speaker 1: So even then, like this guy like Culter, who is
Speaker 1: part of the Lewis and Clark expedition in our first
Speaker 1: Mountain man, like he has some exposure to how complex
Speaker 1: relationships were, right, there's not like a pan tribal I
Speaker 1: guess the thing people try to picture is that there's
Speaker 1: like a sort of pan tribal attitude to euro Americans
Speaker 1: or a pan tribal attitude to the mountain men. It
Speaker 1: was not. It was allegiances and hostilities and those things
Speaker 1: that change all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's another there's another quote we use in
Speaker 2: the book from Elliott West who's been on the podcast,
Speaker 2: who's a Western historian, and he says, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of times, sort of unconsciously, people think about Native Americans
Speaker 2: as sort of just waiting in the background for Europeans
Speaker 2: to show up on the scene, as if they're apart
Speaker 2: from history until Europeans arrived there, when really, like Europeans
Speaker 2: are walking into a political and cultural and socioeconomic environment
Speaker 2: that is just as complicated as any you know, relationship
Speaker 2: between royal families in France, or you know, you think
Speaker 2: about Europe and you think about all this palace intrigue
Speaker 2: and rivaling factions, and you know, these relationships that go
Speaker 2: back hundreds of years, and how all this factors into
Speaker 2: the decisions that are made on the ground. And like
Speaker 2: that's the same environment that the mountain men are walking into,
Speaker 2: but they're ignorant to all of that, and so it's
Speaker 2: really hard to just simplify and say mountain men did this,
Speaker 2: Native people did this, or there's no like real model
Speaker 2: of relations that can be simplified between the mountain men
Speaker 2: and the and the people they encounter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in the book, we really spelled this out
Speaker 1: by talking by looking at a period of a few
Speaker 1: months where a mountain man who kept the Meticulous Journal
Speaker 1: named Osborne Russell, a period of a few months of
Speaker 1: examining his interactions with Native Americans wildly varied.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they shoot at him, He shoots at them. Some
Speaker 2: of them save his ass, some of them they party,
Speaker 2: They feed him, they tell him where to go, they save,
Speaker 2: they steal his stuff, you know, And they were using
Speaker 2: they in quotes because like he's encountering people from different
Speaker 2: cultures in different political groups.
Speaker 1: But he never knows what he's gonna get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he never knows what he's gonna get. But the
Speaker 2: one thing you can say is that his life during
Speaker 2: those few months is profoundly shaped by his encounters with
Speaker 2: Native people. And he also one of the things we
Speaker 2: point out in there is he has learned the Shoshone language,
Speaker 2: and he takes great pride in the fact that he
Speaker 2: can speak Shoshone and that he's able to repay his
Speaker 2: a chief who hosts him for a few days. He
Speaker 2: says he can repay him by telling jokes in his
Speaker 2: own language to him, and like that's the mark of
Speaker 2: a good guest. So it's like, whatever you might assume
Speaker 2: about how Matin men and Native people interacted, it's probably
Speaker 2: a lot more. It's a lot messier than you think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that every every aspect of the story,
Speaker 1: no matter how well you think you know it, every
Speaker 1: as to the story, you're gonna you're gonna come away
Speaker 1: from this with being like, oh, there's like a lot
Speaker 1: more to it than I thought. The way we divided
Speaker 1: it up, we divided the whole project out. We're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna share one of them right now, We're gonna
Speaker 1: share chapter six out of twelve chapters. But the way
Speaker 1: it rolls is we talk about mountain man country, meaning, uh,
Speaker 1: there's an introduction, and then that introduces the mountain man there,
Speaker 1: and then we talk about mountain man country meaning since
Speaker 1: we narrowly define what a mountain man is, we define
Speaker 1: where the mountain man was. Right. What why at a
Speaker 1: certain point north you weren't a mountain man. Why at
Speaker 1: a certain point east you weren't a mountain man. Why
Speaker 1: at a certain point west you weren't a mountain man.
Speaker 1: And why at a certain point south you weren't a
Speaker 1: mountain man. I'll give a clue to one. You go
Speaker 1: much for it her south? There ain't no beavers, not many.
Speaker 1: I have two clues. You go north, and you got
Speaker 1: problems with the British. We explained all that. We explained
Speaker 1: the start of the mountain man era in a chapter
Speaker 1: called up the Missouri. We explained kind of who the
Speaker 1: mountain men were, like, like what kind of dude became
Speaker 1: a mountain man. It's mixed a lot of orphans and
Speaker 1: surprising number of people who are escaping indentured servitude is
Speaker 1: kind of a theme.
Speaker 2: And we also talk about in that chapter how they
Speaker 2: become a mountain man. Yeah, how they how they insert
Speaker 2: themselves into this whole sprawling, logistical, financial, corporate operation.
Speaker 1: We could have called it, so you want to be
Speaker 1: a mountain Man?
Speaker 2: Maybe we'll save that for Volume.
Speaker 1: Three, Chapter five. Running the Line it's about, like, you know,
Speaker 1: with all this crazy intrigue and all this you know,
Speaker 1: tribal interactions and hunting and starving to death and dying
Speaker 1: and gunfights, we keep reminding people that they were there
Speaker 1: to catch beavers. Running the Line is like, how were
Speaker 1: they catching the beavers? How did they trap beaver? And
Speaker 1: you'll you'll be a little surprised about how much guesswork
Speaker 1: goes into that. There's a thing we run into working
Speaker 1: on these projects where there's some things that are so
Speaker 1: mundane that no one there's some things that are perceived
Speaker 1: to be so mundane that no one explains it. Like
Speaker 1: picture one hundred years from now, someone trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how we flost. Yeah, or and you'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: I see it says he flost. Well did he start
Speaker 1: like with his molars? Well, I don't know, just as
Speaker 1: he f lost Like there's not a really like like
Speaker 1: the right people weren't writing it down.
Speaker 2: Or somebody somebody shows up today and they're like, they're
Speaker 2: on their phones all the time, and someone who's using
Speaker 2: a phone in their diary, they're not going to say, well,
Speaker 2: I got on my phone and I opened Instagram and
Speaker 2: then I got a few emails and when you want
Speaker 2: to send an email, you have to go click this
Speaker 2: button and click that button. And so they're not writing
Speaker 2: that down. But someone who arrives there and goes, holy shit,
Speaker 2: these guys are on their phones all the time. That
Speaker 2: person probably has no idea what he's looking at when
Speaker 2: someone's on their phone. And so a lot of the
Speaker 2: more detailed accounts we get of like setting traps and
Speaker 2: trapping operations, they're written by outside observers who find this fascinating,
Speaker 2: but they don't know what they're looking at necessarily.
Speaker 1: The analogy we use is picture that you have a plumber,
Speaker 1: very skilled plumber, and he comes in to do a
Speaker 1: repair in your house, and then you have a land
Speaker 1: to a homeowner who has no idea about any of it.
Speaker 1: And later you say to the homeowner, hey, how did
Speaker 1: he fix that? I mean, you had like a wrench, Hey,
Speaker 1: terry turned something.
Speaker 2: The thing about toilets is.
Speaker 1: I don't really know. Took about an hour.
Speaker 2: There's two heights of ur and oil.
Speaker 1: And often the accounts of like how they did what
Speaker 1: they did are from people later, outsiders who had no idea,
Speaker 1: trying to offer up their sort of synopsis of what
Speaker 1: it was that they saw happening. But we get we
Speaker 1: get somewhere in it.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The chatter we're gonna share with you guys is hunger
Speaker 1: and thirst. It's about being in a land of feast
Speaker 1: and famine. We have a chapter about the rendezvous, so
Speaker 1: that collection of days at that couple of weeks every year.
Speaker 1: We have a chapter about the fur. What happens to
Speaker 1: the fur? How does the fur get to Europe? What
Speaker 1: does it used for? How does it? Basically this is
Speaker 1: everything of like how does it get from a tra
Speaker 1: rappers hands, how does it get turned into a product,
Speaker 1: and how does that product flow through time and space?
Speaker 1: Tricks of the trade is just all the crazy shit
Speaker 1: they knew how to do and how they knew how
Speaker 1: to do it, amputations, whatever like stuff they had to
Speaker 1: know and where they got it from. Chapter ten is
Speaker 1: about what happens in the wintertime, they would spend months
Speaker 1: just stuck in places. There would spend months stuck in valleys.
Speaker 1: Every ten days is about death. We pull that name from.
Speaker 1: There was a historian what was.
Speaker 2: His name, it's I believe it's from Stanley Vestil's. That's
Speaker 2: biography of Bridger.
Speaker 1: There's this one historian who who takes a look at it,
Speaker 1: and he's he he comes. He has this idea that
Speaker 1: when he when he takes a look at the time
Speaker 1: period and the people involved, he throws out that it
Speaker 1: seems like a mountain man died every ten days. Randall
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on that. Randall doesn't think
Speaker 1: that that's right. But what does seem right is one
Speaker 1: and ten died of violent death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I would point out too, like there's a
Speaker 2: whole there's so many secondary sources when you're researching this stuff.
Speaker 2: Like there's a historian who's published article in the journal
Speaker 2: put out by the Museum of the Mountain Man, where
Speaker 2: he has cataloged every reference to every mountain man dying
Speaker 2: and cause of death date, what we know about him,
Speaker 2: what happened, And so he has like quantitative findings about
Speaker 2: what killed mountain men and when and why and so
Speaker 2: when you look at something like that, it's it's tougher
Speaker 2: to believe sort of the anecdotal like Stanley Vestal argument.
Speaker 2: But there's no question that a lot of them died.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we we've we're in this. We're able to
Speaker 1: put some numbers around things. You might be surprised that
Speaker 1: there's numbers around YEA. One thing that surprised me is
Speaker 1: is there's about the way we define what a mountain
Speaker 1: man was. There was there was probably three or four
Speaker 1: thousand mountain men. Yeah, during the period of talking about it,
Speaker 1: probably three or four three or four thousand mountain men.
Speaker 1: Three or four thousand people would have kind of met
Speaker 1: that definition.
Speaker 2: At some point in their life, and.
Speaker 1: And hundreds of them died violently. Yeah. Uh. Chapter twelve,
Speaker 1: the last one is trapped out, and it's about the
Speaker 1: it's about the sort of two things. There's the thing
Speaker 1: that killed the mountain man era, and then there's the
Speaker 1: other thing that would have killed it if that hadn't
Speaker 1: killed it.
Speaker 2: In the end, economics and ecology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, economics and ecology what we didn't do. If we
Speaker 1: were smart, we would have done this. I'm only just
Speaker 1: current to me now. We will have found a way
Speaker 1: to bleed into the buffalo trade.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe we can do that. Maybe we can do
Speaker 2: that bleeding in chapter one of volume three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll bleed it. That's how it goes. That in
Speaker 1: short is Yeah, when you hear the term of frontiersmen,
Speaker 1: which is kind of synonymous with the long hunter, when
Speaker 1: you hear the term of long hunter, when you hear
Speaker 1: the term of the mountain man, that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Dig in more. Check out the chapter where check out
Speaker 1: the chapter that's coming at you right now, Hunger and Thirst,
Speaker 1: and then well twelve bucks loven twelve bucks, I think.
Speaker 1: So to get the complete thing, Meetater's of American History,
Speaker 1: The Mountain Men, eighteen oh six to eighteen forty dropping now.
Speaker 2: And if you're listening on the day this comes out,
Speaker 2: you can pre order and it'll download on your phone
Speaker 2: at midnight.
Speaker 1: My guess is you can just buy it. I don't know, yep,
Speaker 1: it'll I think it'll just be there all of a sudden.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But for those of you who listen to this
Speaker 2: the day after it drops, you can go by it
Speaker 2: and listen right away.
Speaker 1: Yep, and trust that we are working away on the
Speaker 1: next one. We're going to jump up to This closes
Speaker 1: at eighteen forty. So the Long Hunters closed at seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy five. This picks up at eighteen six, eighteen oh six,
Speaker 1: This closes at eighteen forty. The next one is going
Speaker 1: to pick up eighteen sixty five with the end of
Speaker 1: the Civil War, and it will conclude in the winter
Speaker 1: of eighty one eighty two, So it'll rap probably in
Speaker 1: the end. We haven't figured it out yet, but it'll
Speaker 1: probably wrap of March eighteen eighty two, and that era.
Speaker 2: Will close outside of Miles City.
Speaker 1: Perhaps more dramatically than any other era. That era has
Speaker 1: like a a end, like an end and like an
Speaker 1: end end, and a very visible legacy, yeah, ecological legacy.
Speaker 1: And in that one, we're talking about the Buffalo Hide
Speaker 1: Hunters man, you just kind of start running out of heroes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you got Long Hunter heroes, Boom American hero got Mountain
Speaker 1: Man heroes. Jim Bridger American hero There is no Hide
Speaker 1: Hunter hero. No, They're all villains. No.
Speaker 2: And it's I mean, I think that's one interesting tension
Speaker 2: in this whole larger project is just like when we
Speaker 2: think of Market Hunters today, it's we think of it
Speaker 2: as a bad deal for wildlife, and it is, but
Speaker 2: throughout American history, these people who are engaging in this
Speaker 2: trade in its various forms also leave behind some of
Speaker 2: the craziest stories of wilderness adventure that we have. And
Speaker 2: so you're kind of always wrestling with that tension of like,
Speaker 2: you don't want to completely romanticize these figures. You know,
Speaker 2: you want to understand them, why they're actually doing what
Speaker 2: they're doing, and and and what the consequences of that were.
Speaker 2: But also it's not interesting if you write a book
Speaker 2: about how bad the buffalo hunters are, so so you know,
Speaker 2: especially in that volume, it's kind of a tricky line
Speaker 2: to toe of like you're not going to write a
Speaker 2: book condemning the buffalo hunters for the bad things that
Speaker 2: they obviously did, but you're also not going to write
Speaker 2: a book celebrating how many buffalo they killed. So it's
Speaker 2: kind of a yeah, it's a it's a it's a
Speaker 2: trickier subject, I think in our contemporary perspective.
Speaker 1: The other day, I was writing a thing where I
Speaker 1: had to try to talk about try to sum up
Speaker 1: these different groups, and the best thing I could come
Speaker 1: up with when I got to the hide hunters as
Speaker 1: I was like, they're the kind of the greasiest, most
Speaker 1: louse ridden group.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is which is a standard of evaluation that
Speaker 2: I often use.
Speaker 1: On greasy louse riddenness.
Speaker 2: They are high and just like it's like from a
Speaker 2: different planet, some of those stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you're getting into You're getting into like some
Speaker 1: Cormatt McCarthy blood meridian type shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, like very sort of post apocalyptic scenes of destruction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, uh okay, here it is Chapter six,
Speaker 1: Hunger and Thirst dig In Chapter six Hunger and Thirst,
Speaker 1: Despite the rugged, unforgiving landscape on which they made their living,
Speaker 1: the existence of a mountain man wasn't all scarcity and suffering.
Speaker 1: Gluttony and excess were a staple of life for these
Speaker 1: isolated wilderness travelers. In chapter three, I mentioned the most
Speaker 1: famous mountain man movie of all time, Jeremiah Johnson. You'll
Speaker 1: have to pardon me as a return to it again,
Speaker 1: this time to the final conversation of the film, which
Speaker 1: is the saddest and loneliest one hundred and twenty seconds
Speaker 1: in the history of American cinema. In it, we find
Speaker 1: Johnson in the high country pondering with a surprise visitor
Speaker 1: what month of the year it might be. He's cooking
Speaker 1: a rabbit on a spit. While nitpicky viewers might note
Speaker 1: that no wild rabbit on earth would tear as tenderly
Speaker 1: as that one when cooked in such a fashion, you
Speaker 1: have to give credit to the filmmakers for capturing the
Speaker 1: breadth of the diet of the mountain men. By this
Speaker 1: point in the movie, Jeremiah Johnson has dined on grizzly
Speaker 1: bear meat, attempted to dine on cutthroat trout, eating elk,
Speaker 1: eating buffalo, and eating beaver, which he refers to as
Speaker 1: proper food. One thing that Jeremiah Johnson never eats in
Speaker 1: the film is the mountain man delicacy known as budant,
Speaker 1: which was described in real life by the British explorer
Speaker 1: and writer George Ruxton, who witnessed a memorable scene during
Speaker 1: his Western travels in the mid eighteen hundreds. Ruxton had
Speaker 1: been all over the world by this point in his life.
Speaker 1: Between the ages of seventeen and twenty seven. He'd served
Speaker 1: in combat in Europe, hunted with indigenous people in northern Canada,
Speaker 1: and journeyed into the heart of the African continent. But
Speaker 1: of all those places, none captured his imagination like the
Speaker 1: rocky Mountain West, and no figure fascinated him more than
Speaker 1: the American mountain man. At one point in his travels,
Speaker 1: Roxie and washed as two trappers sat on a dirty
Speaker 1: saddle blanket with a long coil of budan between them. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've traveled much in Louisiana, you might have encountered budan,
Speaker 1: a type of sausage built on a base of hog, liver,
Speaker 1: and rice. But mountain Man budan was different. They would
Speaker 1: take the intestine of a buffalo and invert it. Ruxton
Speaker 1: notes that it would often be partially cleaned, but that
Speaker 1: this step is quote not thought indispensable. They then fill
Speaker 1: it with diced buffalo meat, liver, kidneys, whatever, and brown
Speaker 1: it over the ember of the fire, like a crude sausage.
Speaker 1: So these two trappers are sitting across from each other
Speaker 1: on a filthy saddle blanket between them, quote, like the
Speaker 1: coil of a huge snake. Ruxtan writes, Since one of
Speaker 1: these budans, and they are eating it from opposite ends,
Speaker 1: So that quote, the serpent on the saddlecloth was dwindling
Speaker 1: from an anaconda to a modern sized rattlesnake. The two
Speaker 1: guys start hurrying to try to eat more of the
Speaker 1: bu dan than the other before they run out of intestine.
Speaker 1: Such were the culinary exploits of the mountain men. For them,
Speaker 1: food was more than just sustenance. It was a source
Speaker 1: of pleasure, a badge of honor, and a currency of
Speaker 1: camaraderie in a world where survival often hinged on the
Speaker 1: strength of one's stomach. But as one historian observed, the
Speaker 1: mountain man would often spend one month quote luxuriating in
Speaker 1: the wealth of buffalo meat, and the next quote reduced
Speaker 1: to the very brink of starvation. They got wild fruits
Speaker 1: when and where they could. Wild plums and service berries
Speaker 1: were favorites of Western travelers, but they lived a mostly
Speaker 1: carnivorous existence. They had a saying, meat's meat, which demonstrates
Speaker 1: a certain gastronomic open mindedness, the fact that its meat
Speaker 1: matters more than what kind of meat it is. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean they didn't appreciate the idiosyncratic qualities of
Speaker 1: each Rufus Sage, an American journalists who traveled west to
Speaker 1: document the culture of the mountain men, shared a sentiment
Speaker 1: of the era on the qualities of prairie dogs. Quote
Speaker 1: the flesh of these animals is tender and quite palatable,
Speaker 1: and their oil is superior in fineness and absence from
Speaker 1: all grosser ingredients. As we know, the mountain men were
Speaker 1: living year round in the wilderness. They're staying mobile, enabling
Speaker 1: them to move from stream to stream in search of
Speaker 1: fresh beaver sign and they're limited in what they can
Speaker 1: carry with them in terms of supplies. So the difference
Speaker 1: between life and death was what sort of food they
Speaker 1: could pull from the land around them. Hunting, of course,
Speaker 1: offered the most practical solution to this challenge, and the
Speaker 1: mountain men were legendary for their ability to put away
Speaker 1: vast quantities of the meat they killed. William H. Ashley,
Speaker 1: who you'll remember was one of the partners behind the
Speaker 1: expedition that led to the creation of the rendezvous system
Speaker 1: in the first place, claim that quote nothing is actually
Speaker 1: necessary for the support of men in the wilderness than
Speaker 1: a plentiful supply of good fresh meat. It is all
Speaker 1: that our mountaineers ever require, or even seem to wish.
Speaker 1: Ashley drove the point home with additional clarity. Quote the
Speaker 1: circumstance of the uninterrupted health of these people, who generally
Speaker 1: eat unreasonable quantities of meat at their meals, proves it
Speaker 1: to be the most wholesome and best adapted food to
Speaker 1: the constitution of man. In the different concerns which I
Speaker 1: have had in the Indian country, where not less than
Speaker 1: one hundred men have been annually employed for the last
Speaker 1: four years and subsists all together upon meat, I have
Speaker 1: not known at any time a single instance of bilious
Speaker 1: fever among them. That means a fever with nausea and vomiting,
Speaker 1: like the flu or any other disease prevalent in the
Speaker 1: settled parts of our country, except a few instances, and
Speaker 1: but very few of slight fevers produced by colds or
Speaker 1: rheumatic affections contracted while in the discharge of guard duty
Speaker 1: on cold and inclement nights. Of course, Ashley's observation about
Speaker 1: a lack of infectious disease is likely attributed as much
Speaker 1: to a lack of outside contact as it was to diet.
Speaker 1: The mountain men lived in quarantine bubbles to borrow a
Speaker 1: phrase from the COVID nineteen pandemic, But it wasn't just
Speaker 1: these white trappers who believed in the supremacy of living
Speaker 1: off wild game. The planes tribes had long recognized the
Speaker 1: power of eating meat, and even looked down upon tribes
Speaker 1: who practiced agriculture or relied on white man's food. Again
Speaker 1: and again in the historic record you find accounts from
Speaker 1: white Easterners coming to the West and experiencing a new
Speaker 1: vitality when adopting the strict diet of wild meat that
Speaker 1: supported Native American nomadic hunters. A few decades after the
Speaker 1: close of the Mountain Men era, when sickly malnourished veterans
Speaker 1: of the Civil War were coming west to try to
Speaker 1: expel Indians from their buffalo hunting grounds, they encountered in
Speaker 1: their enemies a level of strength and physical endurance that
Speaker 1: they could overcome only through advanced firepower and superior numbers.
Speaker 1: One on one, a white soldier fed on beans and
Speaker 1: salt pork en hardened bread riddled with larva was little
Speaker 1: match for a Native combatant raised on buffalo meat. In
Speaker 1: Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which is,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, the best thing that ever has been,
Speaker 1: or likely ever will be, written, about General Custer's humiliating
Speaker 1: defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The author
Speaker 1: describes an unk Papa Sioux warrior named Gall, who played
Speaker 1: a central role in that fight. Gall happened to have
Speaker 1: his portrait taken in the infancy of photography. Conall writes, quote,
Speaker 1: Gall was a man of such explosive strength that he
Speaker 1: fairly cracks the photographer's glass. Every plate reveals a leader
Speaker 1: of prodigious psychic and physical energy. Full length photos make
Speaker 1: him look squat with short, bent legs and a torso
Speaker 1: the size of a beer keg. Twelve years after the
Speaker 1: Great Fight, he stepped on a scale. He weighed two
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty pounds at the Little Big Horn, with
Speaker 1: white stripes painted on his arms and a hatchet in
Speaker 1: one thick hand, and the fullness of manhood. He must
Speaker 1: have galloped through Custer's desperate troopers like a wolf through
Speaker 1: a flock of sheep. How's that for a buffalo meat testimonial?
Speaker 1: And when it came to the preferences of the mountain men,
Speaker 1: buffalo was top choice. With their wooly hides, massive hump
Speaker 1: and sharply curved horns, these creatures roamed the great plains
Speaker 1: and inner mountain valleys of the rockies in herds numbering
Speaker 1: in the thousands. At the beginning of the mountain Man era,
Speaker 1: the total population was perhaps as high as thirty million.
Speaker 1: The animals were seemingly everywhere in mountain Man country, so
Speaker 1: much so that their absence, rather than presents, would be
Speaker 1: noted in journals, unless, of course, they were two present.
Speaker 1: Then you'll encounter mentions of an annoying abundance. One traveler wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: during our progress, we were obliged to keep men in
Speaker 1: advance to frighten the buffaloes in our path. That day,
Speaker 1: the author mentioned his party killed one hundred and ten buffalo,
Speaker 1: saving only the tongues and hump ribs. I could fill
Speaker 1: this whole chapter with nothing but accounts of people trying
Speaker 1: to describe the immensity of the herds, and I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to fit them all in. Here's just one
Speaker 1: about a herd of unfathomable size trying to cross a river.
Speaker 1: There was quote such a dense and continuous column that
Speaker 1: it formed a temporary dam, causing the current to quote
Speaker 1: rise and rush over their backs. The roaring and rushing
Speaker 1: sound of one of these vast herds crossing a river
Speaker 1: may sometimes in a still night be heard for miles.
Speaker 1: In my own book about the animals American Buffalo, in
Speaker 1: Search of a Lost Icon, I described the immensities through
Speaker 1: witness accounts of mass buffalo drownings that occurred as a
Speaker 1: result of these chaotic river crossings. In May seventeen ninety five,
Speaker 1: a man counted seven thousand, six hundred and thirty that
Speaker 1: drowned en Mass in Saskatchewan. In eighteen twenty nine, another
Speaker 1: man in Saskatchewan counted ten thousand dead in the river.
Speaker 1: In the early eighteen thirties, a traveler along the Missouri
Speaker 1: River found multiple sleughs holding eighteen hundred or more drowned carcasses.
Speaker 1: Another traveler watched thousands of carcasses drift by in a
Speaker 1: river in a continuous line, where the stench was so
Speaker 1: bad he couldn't eat dinner. The Indians he traveled with
Speaker 1: told him every spring was about the same. Given the
Speaker 1: sheer abundance of these animals at the time, there aren't
Speaker 1: a lot of mountain man stories about wild and daring
Speaker 1: buffalo hunts. For the most part, they rode up on them,
Speaker 1: or did a short down wind sneak on them and
Speaker 1: shot them through the lungs. Of the rifle slug. There
Speaker 1: just wasn't much to it. Hunting buffalo was often more
Speaker 1: of a grocery run than anything else. The mountain men
Speaker 1: butchered buffalo in what was known as the Indian manner,
Speaker 1: which wasn't terribly dissimilar to what's known as the gutlass
Speaker 1: method among big game hunters today, positioning the animal on
Speaker 1: its belly with the knees folded and legs propped out
Speaker 1: on either side. To hold the body upright. They'd cock
Speaker 1: the neck around sideways so it looked like the animal
Speaker 1: was watching its back trail. This stabilized the animal from
Speaker 1: rolling in that direction. You could wedge a rock or
Speaker 1: an old buffalo skull opposite the head to prop it
Speaker 1: up on the other side. It's hard to generalize about
Speaker 1: what the mountain men would and wouldn't use from a
Speaker 1: buffalo carcass once they got started, because it depended a
Speaker 1: little bit on personal taste and depended a lot on
Speaker 1: how hard up for food they were. They got picky
Speaker 1: when resources were abundant. One observer described how men were
Speaker 1: quote rendered dainty by profusion and would cook only the
Speaker 1: choicest pieces. So in relatively normal times, when a buffalo
Speaker 1: was meant to provide a knight's meal for a small
Speaker 1: band of trappers who weren't worried about what they'd eat tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Here's what might happen. They'd open up the animal's hide
Speaker 1: with a cut along the spine. Then they'd peel the
Speaker 1: hide back on either side, exposing the backstraps, and also
Speaker 1: a sometimes two inch thick layer of fat along each
Speaker 1: side of the hump that they would call the depui.
Speaker 1: This layer of fat was a favorite cut of the
Speaker 1: mountain men and native people alike. Beneath the fat were
Speaker 1: the hump ribs, the protrusions of muscle on either side
Speaker 1: of a buffalo's spine just behind its head. Removing the
Speaker 1: hump ribs required the use of a hatchet or tomahawk.
Speaker 1: The Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg described using a buffalo's legs
Speaker 1: as a mallet to bust off the hump ribs, and
Speaker 1: he pointed out that the hump ribs were the only
Speaker 1: bones he'd typically remove from the kill site. Same with
Speaker 1: the mountain men, who'd often satisfy themselves with just this
Speaker 1: cut alone, plus maybe the tongue removed through the triangle
Speaker 1: of soft hide underneath the animal's lower jaw. If more
Speaker 1: meat was kneeded, or if buffalo were scarce, they would
Speaker 1: de bone the front and rear quarters as well and
Speaker 1: bundle it all up, maybe twenty large pieces or so
Speaker 1: inside folded sacks made from the buffalo's hide. Depending a
Speaker 1: mood and taste and need, they might also remove the
Speaker 1: fleece a word for additional layers of fat found beneath
Speaker 1: the hide. They'd take the femurs and shin bones to
Speaker 1: be roasted in coals before smacking them open with a
Speaker 1: rock or hatchet to get out the marrow. They'd crack
Speaker 1: the skull open with a hatchet and eat the brains raw.
Speaker 1: They'd drink the blood. They might mimic the planes tribes
Speaker 1: and drink the mother's milk from ripened mammaries. They'd squeeze
Speaker 1: the contents of the gall bladder over the liver and
Speaker 1: eat it raw as well. Sometimes they just drank the
Speaker 1: gall straight, as one account suggests quote a man could
Speaker 1: get quite a glow if he took it straight on
Speaker 1: an empty stomach. The mountain men did not travel with
Speaker 1: an assortment of cast iron pots and pans and wire grates,
Speaker 1: which would have been too heavy and cumbersome. Instead, they
Speaker 1: had a minimalist kit. They demonstrated a fondness for spit
Speaker 1: roasting meat, often skewing great hunks of buffalo on a
Speaker 1: green stick and slow cooking it over the glowing embers
Speaker 1: of a campfire. Out on the prayer, where firewood was
Speaker 1: hard to find, Buffalo dung served as a substitute. A
Speaker 1: common technique would be to alternate chunks of fat with
Speaker 1: chunks of lean meat on a sharpened stick, which would
Speaker 1: then either be held over the fire or pushed into
Speaker 1: the ground next to it. In other instances, a big
Speaker 1: hunk of meat would simply be placed in the coals
Speaker 1: of a fire directly the mountain man Osbourne Russell described
Speaker 1: a camp keeper rolling out a quote ponderous mass of
Speaker 1: bull beef meaning meat from a male buffalo, from a
Speaker 1: smoldering fire pit, and then smacking it with a club
Speaker 1: to knock the ashes off of it. Each whack with
Speaker 1: the club made the chunk of meat fly in the
Speaker 1: air quote like a huge ball of gum elastic. Once
Speaker 1: the man dropped his club, the others knew it was
Speaker 1: time to pull out their knives and dig in. Most
Speaker 1: accounts suggest that buffalo was typically consumed rare, probably in
Speaker 1: part because they were too impatient to wait very long
Speaker 1: for their meals, but also because game meat dries out
Speaker 1: quickly when overcooked. John Ball wrote a feasting on buffalo
Speaker 1: meat quote uncooked or slightly roasted on the coals, taking
Speaker 1: a bite of the fat part with the lean, eating
Speaker 1: it like bread and cheese. In another instance, George Ruxton
Speaker 1: observed several men quote retreating from the campfire to enjoy
Speaker 1: solo their half cooked morsels. Trappers also made jerky and
Speaker 1: pemmican to preserve their harvests against spoilage. To make jerky
Speaker 1: or jerk, thin strips of meat cut along the grain
Speaker 1: would be hung on racks of cottonwood branches or willow stems.
Speaker 1: Sun Wind and a slow fire underneath the racks would
Speaker 1: dry out these lean strips into a product that kept
Speaker 1: well in the aired climb of the west. Pemmican would
Speaker 1: be produced by removing connective tissue from the jerky, which
Speaker 1: was then pounded into a sawdust like powder using a
Speaker 1: wooden mortar. The dried powdered meat would then be mixed
Speaker 1: with melted fat and or bone marrow inside a sewn
Speaker 1: up bag made from buffalo hide, with the stitching sealed
Speaker 1: with buffalo fat like seam sealer on your tent. Other times,
Speaker 1: the meat, dust and fat or melted marrow would be
Speaker 1: packed into separate sacks or, as was often the case,
Speaker 1: buffalo bladders, and then mixed together at meal time. One
Speaker 1: account mentioned that pemmican was quote used throughout the country
Speaker 1: as familiarly as we use bread in the civilized world.
Speaker 1: Of course, buffalo was rarely the only thing on the
Speaker 1: mountain man's menu. Elk was probably the second most commonly
Speaker 1: eaten meat after buffalo, Either that or, depending on the area,
Speaker 1: bighorn sheep they ate, mule de or two and bears
Speaker 1: both black and grizzly, and pronghorn or antelope. Mountain lion
Speaker 1: meat or painter meat was especially prized. There were far
Speaker 1: far more big horn sheep on the landscape back then,
Speaker 1: before huge numbers of the animals were killed off by
Speaker 1: a strain of pneumonia introduced to the West by domesticated
Speaker 1: sheep from Europe. Places that now hold decent herds of
Speaker 1: elk used to hold tremendous herds of big horns osbourne
Speaker 1: and russell were called sitting atop a mountain where quote
Speaker 1: and I could scarcely be cast in any direction around,
Speaker 1: or above or below without seeing fat sheep gazing at
Speaker 1: us with anxious curiosity, or lazily feeding among the rocks
Speaker 1: and scrubby pines. Numerous accounts compare the meat of bighorn
Speaker 1: or mountain sheep as they were known to mutton. Frequently.
Speaker 1: Stories about killing sheep remark on the difficulty of getting
Speaker 1: a shot at and recovering these animals. William H. Ashley
Speaker 1: observed that quote they were so wild, and the country
Speaker 1: so rugged, we found it impossible to approach them. Likewise,
Speaker 1: the artist George Catlan observed that bighorn sheep had a
Speaker 1: tendency to make themselves quote secure from their enemies, to
Speaker 1: whom the sides and slopes of these bluffs around which
Speaker 1: they fearlessly bound are nearly inaccessible. Pursuing these creatures was
Speaker 1: quote attended with great danger. Osborne and Russell wrote, especially
Speaker 1: in the winter season, when the rocks and precipices are
Speaker 1: covered with snow and ice, these efforts were worth the rewards. However,
Speaker 1: Washington Irving noted that the quote gormands of the camp
Speaker 1: pronounced big horns to have the flo of excellent mutton,
Speaker 1: while another count states that sheep were known as quote
Speaker 1: the game part excellence of the Rocky Mountains, which takes
Speaker 1: precedence in a commescible point of view. George Ruxton declared
Speaker 1: it to be a choice supply of meat, certainly the
Speaker 1: best I had eaten in the mountains. One winter, Osborne
Speaker 1: Russell and some fifteen of his fellow mountain men attempted
Speaker 1: to stay as long as they could at a place
Speaker 1: they called Mutton Hill, forty miles southeast of Fort Hall
Speaker 1: in southeast Idaho. There they lived on big horn sheep
Speaker 1: until heavy snows drove the trappers out of the area
Speaker 1: in February. Another time, in eighteen thirty nine, Russell and
Speaker 1: some other mountain men attempted to overwinter at Fort Hall,
Speaker 1: where they figured they could live off buffalo meat. When
Speaker 1: they got tired of dried buffalo, instead of going lower
Speaker 1: to seek milder weather, they actually push higher into the
Speaker 1: mountains to the head of the south fork of the
Speaker 1: Snake River, and quote spent the remainder of the winter
Speaker 1: killing and eating mountain sheep. While Ruxton preferred big horn,
Speaker 1: he was cool with pronghorn as well. The animal, he wrote,
Speaker 1: quote affords the hunter a sweet and nutritious meat, when
Speaker 1: that of nearly every other description of game from the
Speaker 1: poorness and scarcity of the grass during the winter, is
Speaker 1: barely eatable. Among those barely eatable critters, according to Ruxton,
Speaker 1: were elk killed midwinter. Quote. The meat of the elk
Speaker 1: is strong flavored, and more like poor bull than venison.
Speaker 1: It is only eatable when the animal is fat and
Speaker 1: in good condition. At other times it is strong, tasted
Speaker 1: and stringy. The three elk Jedediah Smith killed in mid
Speaker 1: June of eighteen twenty eight were probably in great shape,
Speaker 1: as he recorded that quote, men could be seen in
Speaker 1: every part of the camp with meat raw and half
Speaker 1: roasted in their hands, devouring it with the greatest alacrity.
Speaker 1: Bear meat, both black and grizzly, was well regarded. According
Speaker 1: to Rufus Sage, bear meat quote to be tender and good,
Speaker 1: should be boiled at least ten hours. Sage recounted an
Speaker 1: episode when a bear was drawn into camp by the
Speaker 1: smell of fresh buffalo meat. After several of the men
Speaker 1: shot and wounded it, the bear charged and spooked off
Speaker 1: their horses, while the trappers climbed trees for safety until
Speaker 1: one managed to kill the bear with a pistol shot
Speaker 1: to the head. They then butchered there quote greasy victim,
Speaker 1: and enjoyed a ample feast of bear's liver, heart and
Speaker 1: kidneys basted with fat. Then they filled a large kettle
Speaker 1: with its fleece and ribs, which they boiled overnight and
Speaker 1: enjoyed the following day. Osbourne Russell described the preparation of
Speaker 1: a stew made from two fat grizzly bears. Kettles filled
Speaker 1: with bear meat and fat were hung over a fire,
Speaker 1: and the group appointed one of the old trappers to
Speaker 1: determine when it was done. Having not had much to
Speaker 1: eat for the past few days, Russell noted that quote,
Speaker 1: I thought with my comrades that it took longer to
Speaker 1: cook than any meal I ever saw prepared. Beaver carcasses,
Speaker 1: being as central to a mountain man's existence as grease
Speaker 1: to a short order cook, trappers had their preferred ways
Speaker 1: of dealing with them. The mountain man's passion for beaver
Speaker 1: tail is well documented. When you pierce a beaver tail
Speaker 1: on a skewer and let it roast next to a fire,
Speaker 1: the blackish scaly skinned bubbles and peels away to reveal
Speaker 1: a tailbone encased and gristle in fat. That's not unlike
Speaker 1: someone might leave behind on their plate after enjoying a
Speaker 1: steak during lean times of eating poor or thin game meat,
Speaker 1: that fat would have been heavenly. As one account described it,
Speaker 1: the beaver tail was quote considered even a greater dainty
Speaker 1: than the tongue or the marrow bone of a buffalo.
Speaker 1: We get another picture of what hungry mountain men were
Speaker 1: forced to eat from the trapper James O. Paddy, who
Speaker 1: was born in Kentucky and worked the beaver streams of
Speaker 1: the Southwest in the late eighteen twenties. He was a
Speaker 1: fellow I mentioned earlier who cleaned up while trapping on
Speaker 1: the lower Colorado River, catching thirty six beavers and forty sets.
Speaker 1: At one point while traveling through some tough country, Paddy
Speaker 1: and his party got caught for four and a half
Speaker 1: days without anything to eat, except for a small jack
Speaker 1: rabbit caught by his dog. It didn't go far. When
Speaker 1: split among seven men, Patty noted that we were all
Speaker 1: reluctant to begin to partake of the horse flesh, but
Speaker 1: they apparently got over whatever uneasiness they felt. Unfortunately, they
Speaker 1: found that quote the actual thing without bread or salt
Speaker 1: was as bad as the anticipation of it. Later, Patty's
Speaker 1: men would kill and eat a raven, which he described
Speaker 1: as a nauseous bird with unsavory flesh, a buzzard which
Speaker 1: was disagreeable, and finally, after a bit of heartbreak, a dog.
Speaker 1: The men drew lots like drawing straws to decide who
Speaker 1: would be responsible for killing their canine companion. But Paddy
Speaker 1: noted that the meat was sweet, nutritive, and strengthening rufus sage,
Speaker 1: couldn't in good conscience hide his affinity for dog meat.
Speaker 1: Quote justice impels me to say, the flesh of a
Speaker 1: fat Indian dog, suitably cooked, is not inferior to fresh pork,
Speaker 1: And by placing side by side select parts of the two,
Speaker 1: it would be no easy task, even for a good
Speaker 1: judge to tell the difference whether they liked it or not.
Speaker 2: The mountain Men.
Speaker 1: Would have had a hard time avoiding dog because some
Speaker 1: of the tribes they interacted with would honor visitors by
Speaker 1: preparing a meal of dog. Right after the mountain Man
Speaker 1: era in eighteen forty six, the writer and historian Francis
Speaker 1: Parkman partook of the meal with the sioux. He described
Speaker 1: the ceremony rather unceremoniously. A woman with a stone headed
Speaker 1: mallet approached a quote litter of well grown black puppies
Speaker 1: comfortably nested among some buffalo robes. Seizing one of them
Speaker 1: by the hind paw, she dragged him out, and, carrying
Speaker 1: him to the entrance of the lodge, hammered him on
Speaker 1: the head till she killed him. Holding the puppy by
Speaker 1: the legs, she was swinging him to and fro through
Speaker 1: the blaze of a fire until the hair was singed off.
Speaker 1: This done, she unsheathed her knife and cut him into
Speaker 1: small pieces, which she dropped into a kettle to boil.
Speaker 1: In a few moments, a large wooden dish was set
Speaker 1: before us, filled with this delicate preparation. A dog feast
Speaker 1: is the greatest compliment a Dakota can offer to his guest, and,
Speaker 1: knowing that to refuse eating would be an affront, we
Speaker 1: attacked the little dog and devoured him before the eyes
Speaker 1: of his unconscious parent. But let's return to the subject
Speaker 1: of starvation. Patty's account of eating ravens and buzzards opens
Speaker 1: a window into how bad things could get, even though
Speaker 1: we know they could get way worse. Anyone wanting to
Speaker 1: explore the incremental steps of desperation taken by starving folks
Speaker 1: might look to the infamous story of the Donner Party,
Speaker 1: which is fair game and in a out of the
Speaker 1: mountain Men because Jim Bridger himself provided them with some
Speaker 1: poor advice on their root selection, and doing so he
Speaker 1: helped them along toward their agonizing ordeal. When stranded and
Speaker 1: snow bound high in the Sierra Nevadas of California, there
Speaker 1: the party is forced to eat the starved oxen that
Speaker 1: were supposed to pull their wagons. They use the ox
Speaker 1: hides to cover their makeshift shelters, but soon they're boiling
Speaker 1: and eating dried strips of the ox hide roofs. Then
Speaker 1: they're eating one another. First they're scavenging the carcasses of
Speaker 1: the already deceased, but before long they're hurrying one another
Speaker 1: long to death with the help of a bullet. If
Speaker 1: dead mountain men could talk, no doubt they'd have better,
Speaker 1: which is to say, worse stories to tell. But the
Speaker 1: mountain man Jedediah Smith, who is no stranger to horrible
Speaker 1: experiences observed that starving men prefer to keep quiet. According
Speaker 1: to Smith quote, men suffering from hunger never talk much,
Speaker 1: but rather bare their sorrows in moody silence, which is
Speaker 1: more preferable to fruitless complaints. One time, a group of
Speaker 1: mountain men traveling along a tributary of the San Juan
Speaker 1: River in present day Colorado was caught without food and
Speaker 1: tried roasting some cactus in a fire. They must have
Speaker 1: chosen one of the several poisonous varieties on the landscape.
Speaker 1: A few hours later, the men felt weak and then
Speaker 1: began to shiver and vomit. An overwhelming sensation of pain
Speaker 1: took hold in their bowels, and three or four of
Speaker 1: the men, according to this account, began rolling around on
Speaker 1: the ground writhing in pain. At this point, the other
Speaker 1: men and the party decided to kill one of their
Speaker 1: mules in an attempt to restore their comrades and reduce
Speaker 1: the suffering of the rest of the group, which by
Speaker 1: that point had gone without food for nearly seven days.
Speaker 1: The mule meat quote proved both sweet and tender, and
Speaker 1: scarcely inferior to beef. Now this is something that you'll
Speaker 1: see again and again in accounts from this period a
Speaker 1: hungry party killing and eating their horses and mules, but
Speaker 1: not everyone gave such rave reviews to the flesh of
Speaker 1: their domesticated animals. Charles Larpentur described eating the liver and
Speaker 1: ribs of an old mare shot by one of his
Speaker 1: comrades as quote, needing a great deal of seasoning to
Speaker 1: make it palatable. The liver had been thrown into the coals,
Speaker 1: and quote turned so very black that at first I
Speaker 1: thought it was impossible to eat any But Larpentur was
Speaker 1: a generous food critic. He was starving another time and
Speaker 1: went three days without food. That's when he quote thought
Speaker 1: of a dried buffalo sinew, which I had in my
Speaker 1: bullet pouch to men moccasins. I pulled it out out
Speaker 1: and cut it in two, offering my hunter, meaning his companion,
Speaker 1: a part of it, which he refused. So without asking
Speaker 1: a second time, I demolished the sinew, which I found excellent,
Speaker 1: except that it was too small. In desperate moments like these,
Speaker 1: the mountain men were liable to devour anything they came
Speaker 1: across that resembled food, whether they had any right to
Speaker 1: it or not. Joseph Walker, a Tennessee born trapper who
Speaker 1: worked out of Taos, New Mexico, and later made his
Speaker 1: way to the Green River Country, recalled stumbling upon a
Speaker 1: small Native village in the Great Basin region today's Nevada,
Speaker 1: whose occupants fled at the site of a party of
Speaker 1: white men. The mountain men were in rough shape, having
Speaker 1: been out of food for several days, and they were
Speaker 1: delighted to discover among the abandoned lodges several bags made
Speaker 1: of animal skins filled with quote what appeared to be fish,
Speaker 1: dried and pounded. They stole the bags and ate hartily
Speaker 1: that night around the campfire. In the morning, they were
Speaker 1: startled to find that the bags had in fact been
Speaker 1: filled with insect larvae. In another instant, several trappers, among
Speaker 1: them Richard Lacy Wooden known as Uncle Dick, were traveling
Speaker 1: along the Colorado River in eighteen thirty eight when they
Speaker 1: approached a Yuma village in hopes of securing something to eat.
Speaker 1: A few of the men brought back to the rest
Speaker 1: of the party what they assumed to be bred, but
Speaker 1: noted that it had a very unfamiliar taste. Upon closer examination,
Speaker 1: the biscuits were in fact cakes made of crushed red ants,
Speaker 1: mashed together and dried in the sun. Starvation was not
Speaker 1: the only danger that lurked in the wilderness. There was
Speaker 1: also the ever present threat of thirst, which is far
Speaker 1: worse than hunger. When traveling across the prairie on the
Speaker 1: way back to Missouri, Rufus Sage and his men ran
Speaker 1: out of water, still fifteen miles away from the nearest river,
Speaker 1: under the high July sun. He found it to be maddening. Quote.
Speaker 1: I can endure hunger for many days in succession without
Speaker 1: experiencing any very painful sensations. I can lie down and
Speaker 1: forget it in the sweet unconsciousness of sleep, or feast
Speaker 1: my imagination upon the rich spread tables of dreams. But
Speaker 1: not so with thirst. It cannot be forgotten sleeping or waking.
Speaker 1: It will make itself known and felt. It will part
Speaker 1: your tongue and burn your throat. Despite your utmost endeavors
Speaker 1: to thrust it from memory. The mountain men did have
Speaker 1: tricks to get through it. They'd drink the blood of
Speaker 1: freshly killed game, or even their own piss or. They'd
Speaker 1: chew the roots of Oregon grape, which were said to
Speaker 1: have medicinal properties that could stave off the worst effects
Speaker 1: of dehydration when offered the heart of a dead bison.
Speaker 1: One man wrote that quote immediately as it touched my lips,
Speaker 1: my burning thirst got the better of my abhorrence. I
Speaker 1: plunged my head into the reeking ventricles and drank until
Speaker 1: forced to stop for breath. But you still just had
Speaker 1: to press on. That's what Nathaniel Wyis Rendezvous Bound Expedition
Speaker 1: did in eighteen thirty four. When they went for several
Speaker 1: days without water in Wyoming, it was miserable. Their tongues
Speaker 1: were swollen, and their lips were cracked and bleeding from
Speaker 1: the relentless sun. According to our source, a man by
Speaker 1: the name of Richardson was quote masticating a leaden bullet
Speaker 1: to excite the salivary glands. Finally, they took a mangled
Speaker 1: buffalo and tipped it on its side. One of the
Speaker 1: men stuck his knife into the air animal's distended belly
Speaker 1: and was rewarded with a gush of quote green and
Speaker 1: gelatinous juices mingled with the half digested contents of its stomach. Gagging,
Speaker 1: the thirst crazed men half heartedly strained the liquid into
Speaker 1: a tin pan. Hoping to remove the worst of the impurities.
Speaker 1: And then, with trembling hands, they raised the dripping pan
Speaker 1: to their lips and drank deep, quote with the satisfaction
Speaker 1: of a man taking his wine after dinner, a desperate
Speaker 1: act of survival in a land that knew little mercy.