Speaker 1: My name is Clay Neukleman. This is a production of
Speaker 1: the bear Grease podcast called The bear Grease Render where
Speaker 1: we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes
Speaker 1: of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f HF Gear,
Speaker 1: American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
Speaker 1: to be as rugged as the place as we explore.
Speaker 1: Did you know that one of our friends just got
Speaker 1: struck by lightning?
Speaker 2: Crazy, so it's been on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, I'm not open to violate hippo rules of
Speaker 1: like giving out medical advice here, so I won't tell
Speaker 1: you who got struck by lightning, Josh. But uh yeah,
Speaker 1: one of one of our friends just got struck by
Speaker 1: light and it's like thunder and raining. I was checking
Speaker 1: all the drainage on my property today tests like lots
Speaker 1: of stress points. If it rained a little bit more,
Speaker 1: I probably would have got a little water in my
Speaker 1: house better. That's what you have to do when you're
Speaker 1: an adult and you have like a normal haircut, is
Speaker 1: you as you when it rains. I learned this from
Speaker 1: a guy that was like a better dad, father, landowner,
Speaker 1: patriarch than me. We were the same age, but one
Speaker 1: time we were here at my house and it was raining,
Speaker 1: and he said, he was like, where's your shovel at?
Speaker 1: And I was like shovel and he was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this is when you need to get out in
Speaker 1: your yard and start digging trenches and see how the
Speaker 1: water flows. And I was like, man, this is some
Speaker 1: next level stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 1: And uh it was my friend Josh Barger. I will
Speaker 1: call his name. He had never been struck by lightning.
Speaker 2: We're never been struck by lightning. And I guarantee he's
Speaker 2: got no drainage issues at his house.
Speaker 1: Nothing, wow, nothing. But so that's what you did. So
Speaker 1: that's what I did this morning. I put on all
Speaker 1: my my rain gear and I went outside and was
Speaker 1: standing in the water watching it, and I man, I
Speaker 1: got big ideas for you and me this year. Bear
Speaker 1: on drainage out here. Welcome to the bear Grease Render.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited about today. We're going to talk about
Speaker 1: some of these Turkey stories, but mainly we're going to
Speaker 1: talk to Buck Foster, who's here with us, Doctor Ruk Foster,
Speaker 1: doctor Buck doctor, doctor Buckley T. Foster.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's me and uh and I'm a kind of
Speaker 3: doctor that don't do folks no good.
Speaker 1: As my grandmother would say, don't do folks no good.
Speaker 1: That's correct, Okay, that's what she said.
Speaker 3: But because her her her grandfather was an m D
Speaker 3: and her on the other side of the family, we
Speaker 3: had a great grandfather that was an MD and she
Speaker 3: I was the last. I was the youngest of the grandchildren.
Speaker 3: And she said, I want you to become a doctor.
Speaker 3: And I finally became a puh and came in and
Speaker 3: I said, look, I'm finally a doctor, and she that's
Speaker 3: what she came back with. You're the kind of doctor
Speaker 3: that don't do folks no good.
Speaker 1: Well, I think doctors like you do people a lot
Speaker 1: of good. And that's why you're here. But like, if
Speaker 1: we're looking for medical advice for our buddy that just
Speaker 1: got struck by lightning, maybe we would go elsewhere.
Speaker 3: That'd probably be a good idea.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so we're going to we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about a book that you wrote called So Great
Speaker 1: was the Slaughter, and it's about market hunting specifically in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: But I think we can extrapolate it out. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: a lot of the trends that probably happened here were
Speaker 1: happening in a lot of parts of the country.
Speaker 3: That's correct. Actually, we're one of the kind of the
Speaker 3: late to the party because we remain wild much longer
Speaker 3: than our neighboring states. So they thin out their wildlife
Speaker 3: and then they come looking for hours.
Speaker 1: Wow, that sounds exciting. I can't wait to talk about it.
Speaker 2: Turkey season is in full swing.
Speaker 1: Full swing, full swinging beard.
Speaker 2: Oh look at that shoot.
Speaker 1: I was just in Mississippi this week. So I killed
Speaker 1: a turkey two days ago in Mississippi with Lake pickleady.
Speaker 2: Like taking a test. It was delicious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we ate some of it yesterday some of this morning.
Speaker 1: Made a olmlet.
Speaker 4: Put a little hot sauce on there, that Alaskan hot sauce.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I thought it was gonna be about like tabasco or something,
Speaker 4: and so I like drenched it and it like overtook
Speaker 4: you up. What I did is I is I took
Speaker 4: the I took the drumsticks and the thighs off a
Speaker 4: wild turkey, which a lot of people used to throw away.
Speaker 4: I mean for real, twenty years ago people breasted turkeys
Speaker 4: and they were like that dark meat's no good man,
Speaker 4: that that is done. Like people don't do that anymore.
Speaker 4: We keep the thighs in the drumsticks. And all I
Speaker 4: did yesterday morning was, uh, put them in a crock pot,
Speaker 4: diced up and un onion, and put barbecue sauce on
Speaker 4: them and turned it on low in about seven hours later.
Speaker 1: You know, you could just pull that meat off with a.
Speaker 3: Fork, sure, right out?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you pulled a little man. A wild turkey has
Speaker 1: some serious tendons, like seven or eight big you know,
Speaker 1: cartilaginous tendons that that hard tendons that that go down
Speaker 1: to the feet and pull those out and then I
Speaker 1: just chopped it up and it was good. It was
Speaker 1: super good. But uh, so we did we did this
Speaker 1: Turkey Stories episode. Were you able to listen to it? Bear, yep?
Speaker 1: Yeah you were on there, yep. I forgot about that.
Speaker 2: Featured guests.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Second, what did it feel like?
Speaker 4: The Bushwhacker about the same as the first one? The
Speaker 4: first What do you mean the first time I was
Speaker 4: on the Burgeries podcast? Okay, felt felt like that.
Speaker 3: What was Uh?
Speaker 1: Were you able to listen to it?
Speaker 3: Bushwhacker?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, you know this this episode owed the turkey
Speaker 1: hunting purist, which I mean, I want to be in
Speaker 1: that group of people. There's all there's always a spectrum
Speaker 1: of people that hunt, you know, and and there's the
Speaker 1: guys that just kind of dabble in something, and and
Speaker 1: then there's the guys that really take it serious and
Speaker 1: oftentimes might care a little bit of a hint of
Speaker 1: of uh elitism on their shoulder in the way that
Speaker 1: things are done. I could be that guy. I'm in
Speaker 1: that camp. I want I want things to be done.
Speaker 1: This one had a little bit of kind of redneckery
Speaker 1: in the in this like like wing shooting turkeys. Uh,
Speaker 1: trent allis shooting a turkey at sixty yards like you know,
Speaker 1: you get in trouble for that these days.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: And I get it. I get it. And then Johnny
Speaker 1: Johnston teaching us how to shoot a fly in turkey.
Speaker 1: Johnny Johnston he told me multiple stories, and two of
Speaker 1: them involved him intentionally spooking a turkey so it flew
Speaker 1: so he could shoot it. And I was like, what
Speaker 1: do you mean you wanted it to fly? And he said,
Speaker 1: there's thick brush. I couldn't see him. If he runs,
Speaker 1: he gets away. If you make him fly, these Eastern
Speaker 1: turkeys fly straight up and you shoot him. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like, if you want to get a turkey, that's
Speaker 1: what you do. So so there was a little bit
Speaker 1: of that, so there could be some criticism and then bushwhacken.
Speaker 1: There are people that are like, you shouldn't shoot a
Speaker 1: turkey unless you call it up and it's goblin, and
Speaker 1: that's probably pretty extreme. I mean, but I you know,
Speaker 1: to me, if you're if you're hunting inside the boundaries
Speaker 1: of the wall, you.
Speaker 2: Know, basically you're trying to outwit a turkey. So if
Speaker 2: you're calling him, you're trying to outwit him, make him
Speaker 2: think you're a hen. There just went about outwitting in
Speaker 2: a different way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think it's like you kind of come into the
Speaker 4: world and there's like a set way to kill a turkey.
Speaker 1: But like, you know, that's good. It's a pretty small box.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, baron nuke breaking all the rules and and.
Speaker 1: The thing about what bear situation was is that, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're probably not gonna just call those turkeys up like
Speaker 1: me and Lake did on this piece of private land
Speaker 1: that we were hunting in Mississippi. You know, that's not
Speaker 1: getting a lot of pressure. And these birds, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just a it's different worlds. I mean, he's hunting
Speaker 1: over here in a place with I mean, these birds,
Speaker 1: they're just getting pressured so much. It's like, if you
Speaker 1: want to play the game, you try to, you play
Speaker 1: the game that you're dealt, you know. But it was
Speaker 1: an exciting if oh, and Andy Brown shooting that Jake,
Speaker 1: you know, that would that would get some get could
Speaker 1: get nobody's going to get fired up about that. I mean,
Speaker 1: anybody that's turned down it for more than twenty years
Speaker 1: is killed to Jake. And there's nothing you know where
Speaker 1: it's legal, there's nothing wrong.
Speaker 3: With that, right.
Speaker 1: But uh, but it was a great it was a
Speaker 1: great seria. It was a great great stories.
Speaker 3: Isn't the mark of a good hunter to overcome adapt
Speaker 3: the situation. So if you've got high pressure birds that
Speaker 3: won't come to a call, you figure out what works right,
Speaker 3: just like you would with any other pursuit. You figure
Speaker 3: out what's going on. To me, it's not Yes, it'd
Speaker 3: be great to go out there and sit down and
Speaker 3: you know, you scout, you you sit, you watch, and
Speaker 3: then you call them up and you kill it. I mean, yes,
Speaker 3: that's the way they did it. They've done it all
Speaker 3: that way. But that doesn't mean you had to do it.
Speaker 3: If you can't, if that's not the way the situation unfolds,
Speaker 3: then you go. I mean when I was growing up,
Speaker 3: stalking was new. Go stalk a deer. Nobody did that.
Speaker 3: You know. I grew up in South Logan County and
Speaker 3: basically you hunted with dogs, you know, dog hunting, and
Speaker 3: if you weren't a dog deer, if anybody got up
Speaker 3: in a tree, we laughed at them. You know, that's
Speaker 3: not the way. And then of course have other family
Speaker 3: men that are with bows and this is the only
Speaker 3: way to hunt. This is you know, you guys are
Speaker 3: breaking all the rules. And you know what rules there aren't.
Speaker 3: There are no rules. There's no right and wrong way
Speaker 3: to hunt unless it's illegal, right, So I've always I
Speaker 3: thought that was interesting. So I appreciated Bear's story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, did any of the stories stand out to you
Speaker 1: like you were like that was that was funny? Or
Speaker 1: I enjoyed that?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean all of them had a little bit. Obviously,
Speaker 3: everybody's after turkey. So the big one that I always
Speaker 3: because I'm not a turkey hunter, as I said before
Speaker 3: the podcast, my my father was a fierce turkey hunter,
Speaker 3: so I was familiar with turkey hunting and the pursuit,
Speaker 3: and I know about the repopulation efforts here in Arkansas
Speaker 3: and when all that occurred and things like that. But
Speaker 3: the thing that I guess hit home with me is
Speaker 3: the story of getting out there and having stomach issues.
Speaker 3: Because if you spend any time whatsoever in the woods,
Speaker 3: you're gonna be there, yeah, sooner or later, and sometimes
Speaker 3: much sooner than you expect. And it's again being out
Speaker 3: like in the duck woods. You've got waiters to contend with.
Speaker 3: You've got ice, and many a lot of times you
Speaker 3: have ice, not so much this year, but you have
Speaker 3: ice and snow and all kinds of different things to
Speaker 3: contend with. And water because you're you know a lot
Speaker 3: of times you find yourself and waste deep water, you know,
Speaker 3: not of its not all of us have private land
Speaker 3: and private blinds and things like that, so we basically
Speaker 3: just set up wherever we can. So there's a whole
Speaker 3: lot of pre planning that goes in. As as I
Speaker 3: have become older, I have known that the best it's
Speaker 3: best to pre plan, pre plan, Yes, yeah, just make
Speaker 3: it's gonna happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this episode did have a shocking number of stories
Speaker 2: of people's pants down.
Speaker 1: It's you know what's funny is we don't really I
Speaker 1: wish I could say we planned this. We really didn't
Speaker 1: plan it that way. But you know, the first two
Speaker 1: stories had to do with going to the bathroom in
Speaker 1: the woods, and then Med Palmer had to do you know,
Speaker 1: he had to take his pants off, skin.
Speaker 3: And off, and he kept saying it was super cold.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but he never came, he never circled back to
Speaker 3: it because I thought, oh my lord, he's you know,
Speaker 3: he was saying it was so cold he couldn't even
Speaker 3: hardly see the beat on the end of his barrel. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And I was like, and you just skinned off and
Speaker 3: went into water. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's hardcore when it comes to turkey hunting, that
Speaker 2: guy's hardcore.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would have to say Med's story just kept compounding
Speaker 1: and difficulty. You know, it was in Med. He has
Speaker 1: that southern Mississippi accent, and you know, he's just kind
Speaker 1: of funny. But when he started telling about crossing that
Speaker 1: river on that inflatable mattress, I envisioned a river, you know,
Speaker 1: a little little river, you know, thirty yards across. He
Speaker 1: said it was like two hundred and fifty yards across.
Speaker 1: It's like a huge river, and I would imagine it
Speaker 1: was kind of like a he said it was shallow
Speaker 1: for a long ways, so you know, he's just like
Speaker 1: wading in the water. But finally in the main channel
Speaker 1: he gets out there and off he goes, and it's
Speaker 1: cold and and uh and then gets over there and
Speaker 1: gets his turkey.
Speaker 4: But he did talk about how the wind blew him
Speaker 4: over to that bank. I was just curious about how
Speaker 4: he got back. Me too, That's exactly what I thought.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I guess after you got your turkey, you
Speaker 1: just weren't really that worried about it didn't matter what happened. Josh,
Speaker 1: which story stood out to you?
Speaker 2: I it's a it's a tough one because they were
Speaker 2: good stories this year. I really I really like Trent's
Speaker 2: story because I just think Trent is funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's funny.
Speaker 2: But having got to meet the Clarks, yes, I mean
Speaker 2: just they're the best kind of people, Like, they're the
Speaker 2: kind of people you want to know. And they're custom callmakers.
Speaker 2: I hadn't I had them make me a beautiful custom
Speaker 2: box call. But I think just knowing them them telling
Speaker 2: their stories about about her being taught by him how
Speaker 2: to hunt. She loves to go out there and kill turkeys. Man,
Speaker 2: she is a turkey killing machine.
Speaker 1: She probably undersold herself because as she talks, she's like,
Speaker 1: my husband had just taught me how to turkey hunt. Yep,
Speaker 1: But I mean she she's killed a lot of turkeys.
Speaker 2: When I was at their house, they showed me a
Speaker 2: string of beards that they'd killed, and I think he
Speaker 2: said the last nine or ten years, and they travel
Speaker 2: all over the country, not just killing these turkeys at home,
Speaker 2: but I bet there were sixty beards on that thing,
Speaker 2: and they just they just kill turkeys together, and they
Speaker 2: and the neat thing about him is there there and there.
Speaker 2: I think they said there were seventy two. They've been
Speaker 2: married since nineteen seventy one, and they're just the best
Speaker 2: of friends. They just love doing things together. So I
Speaker 2: really enjoyed their stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I thought they were really good too. I'd
Speaker 1: have to say, man, they were. They were all good.
Speaker 1: I like Johnny Johnson's story of of uh, of getting
Speaker 1: bit in the nose by turkey. I mean it's just like,
Speaker 1: what were you doing, Johnny? And and you'd have to
Speaker 1: know Johnny to kind of know his sense of humor.
Speaker 1: He'd killed this turkey and he he was playing with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, which you know, I don't know, he's celebrating
Speaker 1: this turkey's life and uh, but he's but he's just
Speaker 1: just kind of like pretending like the turkey's talking and
Speaker 1: uh and if you knew Johnny, I don't think that's
Speaker 1: that surprising. And then the thing reaches over and bites
Speaker 1: him in the nose so hard that it basically makes
Speaker 1: him bleed.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that that was that was funny. Yeah, that had
Speaker 1: to be my favorite story. Oh was it really? Did
Speaker 1: it kind of surprise you? Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean getting bit on the nose by a turkey
Speaker 4: and was like you almost couldn't, you know, like think
Speaker 4: of a way that that could even happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh And I love here in the way that people
Speaker 1: talk and the phrases they use. And he he used
Speaker 1: that phrase we went to him like a bidon sow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and when he said it, I just like
Speaker 1: checked it off in my mind. I was like, that's good.
Speaker 1: I mean again, I mean you, I mean, something's coming
Speaker 1: at you like a bidon sal You're backing up and running,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh and then I asked him about
Speaker 1: it at the end. I said, I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1: And he said, that's some serious advance. He said, coming
Speaker 1: at you like a bouton sow is serious advance. And
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 1: But that was a good one. And then hear and
Speaker 1: Andy Brown laugh.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the guy in the story there he it was
Speaker 1: the third story, Andy Brown. He told about the turkey
Speaker 1: that gobbled really low, he said, and he he threw
Speaker 1: a pine nod at a fox and then he shoots
Speaker 1: the bird. He thanks the big one and it's a
Speaker 1: jake and then he just he just cackled. He just laughed. Man.
Speaker 1: Andy is a he's He's been on almost every Turkey
Speaker 1: Stories episode and he just just is a great storyteller.
Speaker 1: And like that was I've said this before. Most really
Speaker 1: good turkey hunters have two or three stories that are
Speaker 1: really good like that that they just want to tell
Speaker 1: you sure that that just something wild happened, and there
Speaker 1: was there was it was funnier. It was a bird
Speaker 1: did something just extraordinary. And that was probably Andy's like
Speaker 1: like uh, s story A B C D E F
Speaker 1: G H, I j k L b q R S.
Speaker 1: He's on S. I mean like he just he just
Speaker 1: he's uh so much and he's just a good and
Speaker 1: he can make any story fun to listen to, just
Speaker 1: with details like the fox and how low the turkey
Speaker 1: gobbled and and uh and when he was telling the
Speaker 1: story to me in person, he had he had his
Speaker 1: arms out like he was set up this way, and
Speaker 1: he said, and the.
Speaker 3: Turkey appeared over here, and I have no idea how.
Speaker 1: It got there. You know, he's just kind of he's
Speaker 1: just a good storytelling.
Speaker 3: Storytellers. Best storytellers have it and you you can visualize
Speaker 3: it in your head exactly what's going on. I saw
Speaker 3: that fox sneaking in when he was telling the story,
Speaker 3: I was like, what are you going to do? Because
Speaker 3: I thought it was going to lead to him shooting
Speaker 3: the turkey and the fox running off with the turkey
Speaker 3: or something like that. I was waiting, anticipating that was
Speaker 3: what was going to happen. And I still it's always
Speaker 3: been amazing. Well just like the bushwhack, I mean, turkey's
Speaker 3: with their amazing eyesight.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: One of the things I remember from my dad telling
Speaker 3: me the story is like you cannot move, and he
Speaker 3: would come home with these whelps across his face where
Speaker 3: the gnats buffalo knats would bite him and he wouldn't
Speaker 3: you know, he wouldn't move, he wouldn't swat, and he
Speaker 3: didn't have a screen, He didn't have a anything to
Speaker 3: mask or anything like. Yeah, like, no, he just went
Speaker 3: out there because he smoked all the time. Anything. He
Speaker 3: was like, the smoke is going to keep him away
Speaker 3: from me, but it didn't.
Speaker 1: Hey, show me your dad's turkey calls, so you brought
Speaker 1: So your dad was a turkey hunter.
Speaker 3: My dad was a turkey hunter and evidently known quite widely.
Speaker 3: This is when I was really young. This is an
Speaker 3: early box call of his and it says on the
Speaker 3: bottom J. L. Foster's name is James Foster, April nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty five. So this was a maid. He didn't make it.
Speaker 3: A fellow made it for him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look at that. I already checked that out. If
Speaker 1: you make it sound.
Speaker 3: He always carried a piece of chalk on the inside
Speaker 3: of it and it rattled around. That's all I can remember.
Speaker 3: And of course you can see his That was a
Speaker 3: rubber band once and it's all rotted off of there now.
Speaker 1: I've never seen one quite like that.
Speaker 3: Now, this is his slate. Call. Of course, it's homemade.
Speaker 3: And he didn't make this pouch. I don't know who
Speaker 3: made the pouch for him. I'm sure it's literally, but
Speaker 3: it's literally literally a piece of slate, a slab of slate,
Speaker 3: that's right. And then his striker is a cone with
Speaker 3: a screw to the end of it. Wow, check that out.
Speaker 2: That's so cool.
Speaker 1: So it's it's like a it's hard to describe it.
Speaker 1: It's a piece of wood that's been drilled out almost
Speaker 1: like a funnel, right like about two and a half
Speaker 1: three inches in diameter, has a screw and then there's
Speaker 1: literally a flat quarter inch thick piece of slave, but
Speaker 1: as big as the palm of your hand.
Speaker 3: And it's got a thumb thumb spot for you right there.
Speaker 1: And uh, let me see if you ever can Yeah,
Speaker 1: go ahead, can you make it make sound?
Speaker 3: It'll make the best thing. I think it can make
Speaker 3: us a purr or a chirp or whatever you call it. Now,
Speaker 3: put that thing here. I'm like I said, I'm not
Speaker 3: a turkey hunner. So here's the thing. Put it like this,
Speaker 3: and by making the cone in your hand bigger, it'll
Speaker 3: be different, it'll change tone. That's the only thing I
Speaker 3: do know. Probably gotta find it, you do, because this
Speaker 3: is this screw is you know, it's old, basically worn
Speaker 3: out on each side.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I can see how you can make
Speaker 1: sounds with that, especially if you got good at it.
Speaker 3: There you go. That's the one I can That's the
Speaker 3: only thing I can do. But he also agrees that
Speaker 3: so that well, I was going to say.
Speaker 1: What I was going to say was a lot of
Speaker 1: times like if this was a slate call that I had,
Speaker 1: I would I would, I would send it.
Speaker 3: Sometimes he spit on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this this brings up an interesting point for turkey hunters.
Speaker 1: The phrase now that people use to describe a circular
Speaker 1: call with a striker is they call him pot calls.
Speaker 1: I never I never even heard it called a pot
Speaker 1: call until I started working at meat Eater, and I
Speaker 1: don't know it somehow entered my vocabulary at that time.
Speaker 1: I would have called every single friction call a slate call,
Speaker 1: even if it had a glass because they use a
Speaker 1: lot of different types. There's some that are actually slate,
Speaker 1: some that are glass, some that are aluminum, and some
Speaker 1: that are you know, like some kind of acrylic or something.
Speaker 1: And uh, but anyway, I want to call every single
Speaker 1: friction call that'll have a slate call call. But this
Speaker 1: is where it came from. That's really cool, man. I've
Speaker 1: never seen that. Yeah, yep, put it back in the rest.
Speaker 2: How cool is that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Man, it just shows the ingenuity of people. Have you
Speaker 2: ever seen anything like that? No?
Speaker 1: I never have. I've actually never seen one like that.
Speaker 2: Do you know if if he got that idea from
Speaker 2: someone or did he do that on his.
Speaker 3: Own, it was what you know, existed way before me. Wow,
Speaker 3: this is I would bet that this is probably sixty
Speaker 3: or seventy years old.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And of course that one was in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: So and in nineteen sixty five there were hardly any turkeys.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, so he was going, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, the progression of turkey hunting in America. You know
Speaker 1: they they market hunting turkeys and we're shooting them with
Speaker 1: shotguns or I mean rifles, and and it there were
Speaker 1: very few people that were calling spring turkeys like in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds. By like as I understand it, you
Speaker 1: may know this more than me, but like by the
Speaker 1: I think lynch box call company came around in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties nineteen forties, which was which was a commercial
Speaker 1: box call that you goodbye, and so clearly people know
Speaker 1: that you can call these birds, but people were hunting
Speaker 1: them in the fall, not as much as they hunted
Speaker 1: them in the spring, because in the fall you can
Speaker 1: bust up fall flocks and call them back in with
Speaker 1: the Kiki run and lost him call and different things,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people were fall hunting them. And
Speaker 1: then basically in nineteen seventy, Ben rogers Lee started a
Speaker 1: call company that I'm not going to say it was
Speaker 1: the first call company because it wasn't, but he was
Speaker 1: kind of considered one of the first modern, kind of
Speaker 1: modern style spring turkey hunters. And then Will Primo started
Speaker 1: night eighteen seventy six, and after that it was just
Speaker 1: a flurry, and there were a bunch of smaller guys
Speaker 1: that never made big national status that these guys were
Speaker 1: learning from. So it's not like it all started in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, but that's when mainstream spring turkey hunting started,
Speaker 1: it really, you know, and it also coincided with when
Speaker 1: we started having turkeys, you know, It's like turkey started
Speaker 1: to come up, and then so people started to learning
Speaker 1: how to hunt. They made diaphragm calls and and people
Speaker 1: started learning. But before that, people were calling on stuff
Speaker 1: like literally a slab of slate.
Speaker 3: A lot of people. I don't have one. My dad
Speaker 3: didn't use one, but I have a couple of friends,
Speaker 3: and they were talking about they had turkey feather calls
Speaker 3: where they hollow them ount and make them into.
Speaker 1: Oh like a like a wing bone.
Speaker 3: Wing bone. Yeah, wing bone calls, he said. One of
Speaker 3: my friends said his dad had a couple of them. Oh.
Speaker 1: I had a guy send me this week from Georgia
Speaker 1: a pipe call. Oh my gosh, I need to go
Speaker 1: get it.
Speaker 2: Like a trumpet call.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a trumpet call, but it's actually a
Speaker 1: functional pipe. Oh really, you could sweet, you could smoke
Speaker 1: with it. That's what I'm understood.
Speaker 3: If you were someone else, yeah, if you.
Speaker 1: Were if you were into voodoo.
Speaker 2: Yah.
Speaker 1: But uh, it sounds really good and it's a real
Speaker 1: work of art. I'm going to get it at the
Speaker 1: end of the end of the show. I want to.
Speaker 1: I want to show the people. But so, when did
Speaker 1: you tell me about like your uh academic academic ascension,
Speaker 1: Like how did how do you become a college professor?
Speaker 1: And like, what's your specialty?
Speaker 3: Well, you go to school forever, that's one thing. I
Speaker 3: ended up with two degrees from the University of Arkansas,
Speaker 3: bachelor's and master's degree in American history, and then for
Speaker 3: my PhD, I went down to Mississippi State and start. Okay,
Speaker 3: and my mentor there is John Marslac, who is actually
Speaker 3: a biographer of William T. Sherman Civil War. Anyway, I
Speaker 3: am from Arkansas, born and raised in Arkansas. Always wanted
Speaker 3: to come back to Arkansas, and so I found an
Speaker 3: opportunity to do that and ended up at the University
Speaker 3: of Central Arkansas seventeen years ago. I worked on the
Speaker 3: Mississippi Gulf coast for five years, just in time for Katrina. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it was good times. But got back here and I
Speaker 3: was my specially he's nineteenth century South and again pretty
Speaker 3: much I mean we're in Arkansas grade school required to
Speaker 3: take Arkansas history. Yeah, did it in seventh grade? Did
Speaker 3: it in twelfth grade? Had a mentor at University of
Speaker 3: Arkansas who was the Arkansas historian there. Took classes there
Speaker 3: and that was Genie.
Speaker 1: That was Dogannie lay.
Speaker 3: Wane that's correct, and doctor Daniel Sutherland both. So basically
Speaker 3: I was directed to that. So nineteenth century South and
Speaker 3: Arkansas kind of came together. I hunt and grew up
Speaker 3: on a hunting family, and so when I had the opportunity,
Speaker 3: I decided to do more research. So a lot of
Speaker 3: people ask, Okay, why this particular subject or what turned
Speaker 3: you on this? Exactly? I about a decade ago, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 3: it was about ten or twelve years ago. I read
Speaker 3: an article about a war. And it was not a
Speaker 3: war between soldiers on some distance distant battlefield, but it
Speaker 3: was a war between Americans. It was a war between
Speaker 3: market hunters and sportsmen. And the war happened on a
Speaker 3: ten thousand acre lake in northeast Arkansas called Big Lake,
Speaker 3: which was created during the New Matter of earthquake in
Speaker 3: eighteen twelve. So I begin to dig more into that, and.
Speaker 1: This is not a metaphorical war, literally.
Speaker 3: No, it was a war.
Speaker 2: For me.
Speaker 3: They shoot at each other, Well, it's more of the
Speaker 3: market hunter shooting at the sportsman, or actually the people
Speaker 3: who work for the sportsman, because we have a fellow
Speaker 3: named Joseph Acklan who actually happens to be the Tennessee
Speaker 3: game warden State Tennessee game Warden. Also a millionaire, very wealthy,
Speaker 3: also an attorney who is a crack shot, wins all
Speaker 3: kinds of shotgun competitions. That was a big thing back then,
Speaker 3: doing shooting competitions. And he would shoot one hundred glass
Speaker 3: balls thrown into the air, you know, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: And a bunch of his friends. As again I mentioned before,
Speaker 3: as our neighboring states begin to run out of things
Speaker 3: to shoot wild life, they begin to look for places
Speaker 3: to go, and Arkansas was one of those places. And
Speaker 3: so Joseph Acklin and his friends, investors and whatnot approach
Speaker 3: a timber company who owned which timber companies owned quite
Speaker 3: a lot, because we're talking about the same time when
Speaker 3: timber's big, mining's big, you know. Basically, Arkansas's first industries
Speaker 3: are those that can take her natural resources. So it's
Speaker 3: my coal, mining and timber and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Those were the resources. And what happens is wild life
Speaker 3: becomes a resource. It's a resource that is also pursued
Speaker 3: by the market hunters. So Joseph Acklin and his buddies
Speaker 3: they formed a big Lake shooting club and they buy
Speaker 3: a ten feet strip around the lake ten thousand acres,
Speaker 3: and they claim the lake under riparian rights, which is
Speaker 3: basically rights that nobody can be on it because they
Speaker 3: call it non navigable. So they basically say, now this
Speaker 3: ten thousand acre lake is ours and the great and
Speaker 3: they build clubhouses, which market hunters end up burning to
Speaker 3: the ground twice really, And they hire a bunch of people,
Speaker 3: and there's caretakers, and there's pushers, the people that go
Speaker 3: out and push the boats, and they have live decoys.
Speaker 3: I mean, basically everything you would think of anywhere, but
Speaker 3: they do it. All these people are from Nashville or
Speaker 3: the surrounding area in Tennessee, and they own this huge hunting.
Speaker 1: The rich guys that own rich we're from Nashville, that's correct.
Speaker 3: And the locals, of course, a lot of them lived
Speaker 3: right there on the lake, a lot of the market hunters.
Speaker 1: And they're market hunting ducks.
Speaker 3: Market hunting any kind of waterfowl whatsoever. Remember is a
Speaker 3: big market also in plumes, plumage. What year was this
Speaker 3: specific when they come. Well, the war lasts over twenty
Speaker 3: years because it's not only like what we think of
Speaker 3: where they're burning things and things like that. But there
Speaker 3: they go to court. Okay, there's an injunction put forth
Speaker 3: by a judge that says the locals can't be out there,
Speaker 3: and so they get even more angry. The locals get lawyers,
Speaker 3: and it just goes on court cases. And when what
Speaker 3: was that time period basically eighteen eighty five ish until
Speaker 3: the very last part What ends the war that we
Speaker 3: could get to what ends the war in nineteen fifteen
Speaker 3: is that the Big Lake Shooting Club gives the land
Speaker 3: to the federal government, and so that is why it
Speaker 3: is a National Wildlife refuge today. It was a preserve
Speaker 3: at that time, and so that's what they turn it into.
Speaker 3: And so the war against the market hunters moves from
Speaker 3: the Tennessee Sportsman and goes to the US Biological Survey.
Speaker 3: They take over. They still well, they have game wardens there.
Speaker 1: I read in your book that this was kind of
Speaker 1: like just an astonishing figure that kind of puts then
Speaker 1: puts a number on the volume of market hunters. But
Speaker 1: our market hunting. But in nineteen eleven, half a million
Speaker 1: ducks were shipped out of Arkansas from three counties. In
Speaker 1: October and November nineteen twelve, and on one October day
Speaker 1: in nineteen eleven, ninety thousand, six hundred ducks shipped in
Speaker 1: one order. Ninety thousand ducks in a single day.
Speaker 3: That's correct.
Speaker 1: And now where were those ducks going.
Speaker 3: They were going to markets in big cities. Those were
Speaker 3: probably have to look it up those particular ones, but
Speaker 3: they're probably going to Chicago because remember this is the
Speaker 3: exact same time when all the cattle drives are happening
Speaker 3: out west. Chicago's becoming the slaughterhouse capital of the nation,
Speaker 3: and so that is primarily where all those go. And
Speaker 3: they may be sent on further by rail, or they
Speaker 3: may be used to feed the Chicago population. But we
Speaker 3: sell market hunters sell game to the big cities around US.
Speaker 3: Memphis is the closest, Saint Louis, New Orleans, and Chicago.
Speaker 1: Chicago's who's eating that many ducks? We don't eat that
Speaker 1: many ducks today.
Speaker 3: That's true. One of the big things that you had
Speaker 3: to think about is that even though we have you know,
Speaker 3: beef and pork and that sort of thing, that it's available,
Speaker 3: especially if you're wealthy, you want to serve your guests
Speaker 3: these exotics.
Speaker 1: Something so wild game was exotic.
Speaker 3: It wasn't well point necessarily, but poor folks get it
Speaker 3: too because it's so cheap, so you kind of have
Speaker 3: both together. But see, the the canvas backs were the
Speaker 3: ones that were the most pursued because they ate wild
Speaker 3: celery much of the time, and they took on their meat,
Speaker 3: took on that that wild celery taste, and so they
Speaker 3: cans brought more than mallards, which brought more than teal,
Speaker 3: and were that.
Speaker 1: Was based on taste to taste, volume of meat, the
Speaker 1: size of the bird.
Speaker 3: Big time, big Lake one day shipped out ten thousand,
Speaker 3: ten thousand.
Speaker 1: And these guys are killing them with punt guns at nights.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, That's one of the things that's very
Speaker 3: interesting is that punk guns primarily that I at least
Speaker 3: I've researched. I've seen one example of a punk gun
Speaker 3: in Arkansas. Really story of a punk gun.
Speaker 1: Yep, how are they killed them? They're basically shot gunning them,
Speaker 1: I mean like calling them in. No, they don't have to,
Speaker 1: they're just coming in.
Speaker 3: One of the most I guess you could say the
Speaker 3: one that the one way that they did it the most,
Speaker 3: that probably killed the most is killing them on the roost.
Speaker 3: They catch them, they go back in the trees and
Speaker 3: there would be a big open area in there. There
Speaker 3: might be ten twenty thousand waterfowling there and they go
Speaker 3: in there in the night and just blast them.
Speaker 1: So they're doing it at night.
Speaker 3: Yes, And another thing is you got to remember you're
Speaker 3: talking about turkey hunting with spring hunting and things like that.
Speaker 3: They were killing them both ways. On the migration. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they kill them. They had a spring the spring shoot,
Speaker 3: which which is one of the things that one of
Speaker 3: the first things that they attempt as far as lawmakers go,
Speaker 3: is to stop spring shooting because that's when they're pairing
Speaker 3: up and you know, trying to go back and have babies. Wow, hatch.
Speaker 3: But yes, the number is incredible. And let me let
Speaker 3: me tell you something about that number that can be
Speaker 3: potentially misleading. It's like, you know, not all those ducks
Speaker 3: were killed in that county or those three counties. They
Speaker 3: were just so they were shipped out from there because
Speaker 3: there is a bill that has passed. Because when Arkansas
Speaker 3: starts trying to pass game laws, they're doing it piecemeal.
Speaker 3: They don't have a general game law per se, and
Speaker 3: so they'll do something that covers maybe two counties or
Speaker 3: three counties or half a counties or whatever. And if
Speaker 3: the if the representative from that county didn't want that law,
Speaker 3: they would get an exempt from their county. Okay. So
Speaker 3: one of the biggest, I guess counties that's most guilty
Speaker 3: of flaunting all game laws and saying we want to
Speaker 3: be exempt was the county that Big Lake was in
Speaker 3: and so, and I knew you'd say that, and they
Speaker 3: just left me.
Speaker 1: It's not Is that in northeast It.
Speaker 3: Is, yes, northeast Arkansas. No, Nope, not correct. I don't
Speaker 3: think of in a minute. The man I can remember
Speaker 3: them and represented it was named little I do remember that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, they exempted themselves. Well that was kind of the
Speaker 3: not only and one of the reasons they did that
Speaker 3: is because the market hunters pressured his money. It was
Speaker 3: a bunch of money involved, and so he made sure
Speaker 3: that they were exempt. So if anybody wanted to, if
Speaker 3: any market hunter in any other part of the state
Speaker 3: wanted to ship out of the state, they sent it there.
Speaker 3: And so they piled them on, put them on trains
Speaker 3: and sent.
Speaker 1: Them because there was the laws were different in that county.
Speaker 5: In that county, that's right, Okay, if you were if
Speaker 5: you were given just like a high level overview of
Speaker 5: the animals that were that were market hunted in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: What was the biggest thing, what what was the prime animal?
Speaker 3: Depends on the time, Okay, it depends on the time period,
Speaker 3: because of course we have had market hunters or some
Speaker 3: sembilans thereof market hunting since Arkansas, since Europeans came to Arkansas. Uh.
Speaker 3: That's why Arkansas Post was established, was to make trade
Speaker 3: with the Native Americans and bring fur to them.
Speaker 1: And then so Arkansas just to Arkansas Post is a
Speaker 1: town at the confluence of the Arkansas White Mississippi River.
Speaker 3: That's correct.
Speaker 1: And it was established in like the mid sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: truck six, Yeah, it was at the time it was
Speaker 1: the Furthest.
Speaker 3: Yes, this was the very first further.
Speaker 1: It was like the Furthest West European outpost on the
Speaker 1: cop at the time.
Speaker 3: Yes. And the man who established it was Enre de Tonty,
Speaker 3: and he basically set up he was given what's called
Speaker 3: the seniory, which LaSalle was his boss, and he gave
Speaker 3: him this land and two and so he's going to
Speaker 3: make his fortune. So he sets up this post.
Speaker 2: And we've got a town named after him, just right
Speaker 2: up here, Tonty Town.
Speaker 3: There you go. So he sets us up and that's
Speaker 3: what they're doing. So you could say the first real
Speaker 3: occupation in Arkansas hunting, I mean it truly is the
Speaker 3: Spanish do it. Primarily it's the French that come in
Speaker 3: and do it. So it doesn't really matter whether it's
Speaker 3: under the French colonial system or the Spanish colonial system.
Speaker 3: The French don't leave when the Spanish take over. The
Speaker 3: French are the French hunters are still hunting and doing
Speaker 3: all their all their operations around And so to get
Speaker 3: back to your question, thereafter the fur so whatever fur
Speaker 3: bearing animal you want to think of with primarily beaver
Speaker 3: though here's a big one for that, because there's such
Speaker 3: a demand.
Speaker 1: And that would have been I mean it would have
Speaker 1: I mean the sixteen hundreds, I mean there were just
Speaker 1: so few Europeans in the trade network was not as strong,
Speaker 1: but by the seventeen hundreds it was rocking and rolling.
Speaker 3: Yes it is. And there actually is a great study
Speaker 3: by a lady by the name of a professor, sorry,
Speaker 3: by the name of Kathleen Duval, who explores the hunting
Speaker 3: war that happens in the Arkansas River Valley between the
Speaker 3: Oceage Qua Paul, the Cherokee, the French, the Spanish, and
Speaker 3: the Americans. It's basically a war over fur in the
Speaker 3: Arkansas River Valley through the seventeen hundreds, where the Osage
Speaker 3: are the dominant and everybody else tries to team up
Speaker 3: to drive the Oceage out. Wow, because they claim Arkansas
Speaker 3: are good majority of Arkansas as they're hunting ground, but
Speaker 3: they don't live here full time.
Speaker 1: That's like their area, like non resident h Yes.
Speaker 3: And even after the first treaty between the oce Age
Speaker 3: and the United States, they seed fifty million acres over
Speaker 3: the United States. But and so here, this chunk of
Speaker 3: land is and so they decide, the American government decides,
Speaker 3: let's send some Cherokee over. You're driving the Eastern Indians
Speaker 3: over to the west. And so the Cherokee come over
Speaker 3: and settle on some of that old o Sage hunting ground.
Speaker 3: And the oce Age say, whoa, whoa, we gave you
Speaker 3: the land, but we didn't give you the hunting rights. Oh,
Speaker 3: and so we don't like the Cherokee hunting this. This
Speaker 3: is still our game. They can live here, but they
Speaker 3: can't hunt our game, and so it becomes like I said,
Speaker 3: then by that time, the Cherokees jumping on the fight
Speaker 3: that's been going on between the Coapau and the French,
Speaker 3: and then the o s Age, so they had another
Speaker 3: player in the game. So it's a long drawn out.
Speaker 1: I probably did the same thing. I'd be like, you
Speaker 1: can have the land, but we're gonna hunt it. Wow.
Speaker 1: So there they are. So that that early Arkansas post
Speaker 1: stuff that was when there, that's right, that's there after
Speaker 1: the would the progression be that as civilization as as
Speaker 1: as larger European based cities began to form closer to
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River, there were these big cities that needed meat.
Speaker 1: I mean, because it switches from fur to meat correct correct,
Speaker 1: And then they're they're probably still shipping some firs.
Speaker 3: Yes, it basically becomes an opportunity, a target of opportunity
Speaker 3: when you do the fur. Uh. And that continues, of
Speaker 3: course all the way until the nineteen hundreds and beyond.
Speaker 3: But yes, it makes a transition. Uh. So those early
Speaker 3: guys are after fur, and like I said, beaver's a
Speaker 3: big one, but they're also hunting bear and selling bear meat,
Speaker 3: bear grease, bear oil bison are killed out. By then
Speaker 3: we have our last five when the last reported bison
Speaker 3: that I have found. Now that doesn't mean that I'm
Speaker 3: the expert on the bison because that was not my area,
Speaker 3: but the last ones I found were in a cane
Speaker 3: break on the White River in eighteen thirty five. That
Speaker 3: was the last recorded report that I found, and it
Speaker 3: was just a small number, very small number. So you
Speaker 3: could probably argue that most of the bison were killed
Speaker 3: out before eighteen hundred, for the majority.
Speaker 1: I mean, what about Gershtocker killed the bison when he
Speaker 1: was in Arkansas.
Speaker 3: Possible? Yeah, absolutely, I mean there are limited locations, but
Speaker 3: it's not like you can make a living by killing
Speaker 3: bison by then. What I'm saying, yeah, you got to
Speaker 3: have a there's a transition that goes through as the
Speaker 3: Bison league. Those are truly making living by bison. When
Speaker 3: the bison are killed out, they move, just like many
Speaker 3: of the most professional market hunters keep moving or change
Speaker 3: their quarry one of the other. So the big game
Speaker 3: begins to be killed out very very early because there's
Speaker 3: a market for it. Beavers of course go uh and
Speaker 3: then as we go and begin to transition post Civil War.
Speaker 3: That's when industrialization, urbanization, immigration, more numbers and there's more,
Speaker 3: and then the fair bears are beginning to be gone.
Speaker 3: And so it changes over to where a true market
Speaker 3: hunter is not after first per se there instead after
Speaker 3: meat and its various meats that you killing deer, deer, deer,
Speaker 3: as much as they can beer continue. The bear continue
Speaker 3: to be killed out. The deer which had been killed
Speaker 3: out there continue to be killed out, uh kind of
Speaker 3: putting a I don't know what you call final nail,
Speaker 3: the coffin to use something. And then they go after
Speaker 3: they begin to go after birds. One of the first really,
Speaker 3: I guess the species that you would see that disappears
Speaker 3: the first that's that's not I mean the past your pigeon.
Speaker 3: We've always are, you know, heard the story of the
Speaker 3: past your pigeon. You know. Right across the border in
Speaker 3: oak Homa was what they call a stool, a giant stool,
Speaker 3: which basically that they said that there were you know,
Speaker 3: upwards millions of birds that would roost there, and there
Speaker 3: were people that would from Arkansas that would go over
Speaker 3: there and they'd catch them at night. They're all up
Speaker 3: in the roost in the trees. They'd set fires underneath them,
Speaker 3: smoke them out, and they just hit the ground and
Speaker 3: they just pick them up in baskets by the thousands.
Speaker 3: So that's one of the things one of the things
Speaker 3: that's pursued very early for food. Another is and the
Speaker 3: first one that really catches the attention of Arkansas lawmakers
Speaker 3: actually is the prairie chicken or the Panadi.
Speaker 1: Grouse, which we don't even have here anymore.
Speaker 3: There's a reason for that because they were all killed
Speaker 3: out back then. Yeah, they were completely killed out and
Speaker 3: they even that was really the first, I would say,
Speaker 3: other than fish. Now, fish is kind of the first
Speaker 3: where we see our first transition of any kind of
Speaker 3: laws whatsoever, because everybody was fishing. Every single person was fishing.
Speaker 3: It wasn't just market hunterson or sportsmen or things like that.
Speaker 3: Everybody was fishing, so they could see those effects the earliest.
Speaker 3: But as far as the panadd grouse goes, they're the
Speaker 3: very first species that gets a species specific game law
Speaker 3: on a five year moratorium. You couldn't shoot them for
Speaker 3: five years, and that like took it was too late.
Speaker 3: I mean, there wasn't a sustainable population. So when it
Speaker 3: came back in five years later Boddy killed anything because
Speaker 3: they were already gone. They're gone.
Speaker 1: What timeframe was that?
Speaker 3: That's that's very early. That's like eighteen eighty compared to
Speaker 3: the study. And I shouldn't say very.
Speaker 1: Early, because we just have how do you say that grouse.
Speaker 3: Penated grouse, woodland grouse. It's it's, you know, like a
Speaker 3: prairie about West Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in now East Arkansas's where we would have had
Speaker 1: like prairie though.
Speaker 3: That's true, But there's a lot there's actually I just
Speaker 3: saw a a presentation the other day about how many
Speaker 3: thousands of acres. It's a lot more than you think
Speaker 3: there are prairie. There were prairies all over the place.
Speaker 3: But yes, I mean the Grand Prairie of course, is
Speaker 3: the one that we think of when we think about
Speaker 3: around Stuttgarten and that area. But there are other pockets
Speaker 3: of prairies, ye for sure. And where we are on
Speaker 3: the west as well, there's some over there too. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there were some over there too.
Speaker 1: You know what surprised me inside of this is how
Speaker 1: much talk there is of squirrels in market hunting huge well,
Speaker 1: I mean, describe who is Josh Barr like they're like
Speaker 1: talking like putting specific regulations and like shipping huge quantities
Speaker 1: of squirrels out of Arkansas. Who's eating squirrels?
Speaker 3: Okay, so again we have to look back at our
Speaker 3: time and not think about it as food because local
Speaker 3: folks eat eat the squirrels. But the market hunters are
Speaker 3: killing squirrels for the tails because this is the birth
Speaker 3: of sports fishing, and they would they want they want
Speaker 3: the tails when when you were growing up, you didn't
Speaker 3: look in the back of the magazines and they would
Speaker 3: like maps would buy squirrel tails from Yeah, yeah, well
Speaker 3: that's what it was about.
Speaker 1: They're not shipping meat at no.
Speaker 3: No, I mean there were no pumped.
Speaker 1: People in like Saint Louis were eating a squirrel.
Speaker 3: Now does that say that that they didn't ever do that?
Speaker 3: The ever ship meat. I'm sure they shipped some squirrel meat,
Speaker 3: but it would probably have been across the river because
Speaker 3: it wouldn't have been worth the time and the effort
Speaker 3: to deal with them. But it would kind of like
Speaker 3: the kind of like why would you kill herring? You know,
Speaker 3: why would you kill the sorry, the blue heron, Why
Speaker 3: would you kill the heron? It's because they're not eating
Speaker 3: the heron. They're after the plumage, you know, because that's
Speaker 3: also coinciding at the time when all the women are
Speaker 3: wearing the big hats, giant hats with the big plumes
Speaker 3: on them, Right, that's what it is. We had one
Speaker 3: of our very first wildlife refuges preserves, what it was
Speaker 3: called then, it was called walker Walker Lake and it
Speaker 3: was over in East Arkansas and it was a nationally
Speaker 3: protected heron. Rookery and market hunter snuck in there and
Speaker 3: killed them all out till they here, and they they
Speaker 3: removed Walker Lake from the preserve because they were all gone, wow, wow,
Speaker 3: killed them all. Yeah, it's pretty. It's just, uh, there's
Speaker 3: so many things again digging through this, so I'll circle
Speaker 3: back around to the original thing. And so I went
Speaker 3: into Big Lake trying to want I wanted to write
Speaker 3: a book links story of.
Speaker 1: Big that's correct.
Speaker 3: And so when I begin to dig I began to
Speaker 3: realize and there's nothing out there that has been published
Speaker 3: that I can piggyback on to talk about Big Lake
Speaker 3: until I build this big contextual story. There has to
Speaker 3: be placed in context, and that story, all the stories
Speaker 3: that you read in that book, the whole fight about
Speaker 3: the Arkansas game and fish Commission. There are some little
Speaker 3: small articles here and there about market hunting in Arkansas
Speaker 3: and that sort of thing. But this is all for
Speaker 3: the most part, really because I tried to stay Arkansas
Speaker 3: specific as much as possible, but put it in a state,
Speaker 3: a regional and a national context around it. What's happening
Speaker 3: all that sort of thing, And so I knew I
Speaker 3: had to write this book before I could tackle.
Speaker 1: So you got another book coming out.
Speaker 3: The next book actually coming out for me in this
Speaker 3: area is the federal side. This is all state. I'm
Speaker 3: going to talk about the federal side and the next book,
Speaker 3: which Big Leg's going to be prominent in it.
Speaker 1: But like that when you say federally mean.
Speaker 3: Like no federal efforts in Arkansas. In Arkansas, correct, Because
Speaker 3: interestingly enough, we had the very first Jewish federal court
Speaker 3: judge named Traber, and he will the very first national
Speaker 3: bird law is passed, migratory bird law, not the Migratory
Speaker 3: Bird Act, but the Minatory Bird Law. And it was
Speaker 3: passed and in Traybor's courtroom in Arkansas, he declared it
Speaker 3: unconstitutional and it was struck down in Arkansas a national law.
Speaker 1: Now tell me why that's significant.
Speaker 3: It's significant in that it forced the United States to
Speaker 3: go back and create the Migratory Bird Treaty because you
Speaker 3: cannot strike down a treaty because of unconstitutional grounds. Now
Speaker 3: I'm really starting to get outside my area of expertise here,
Speaker 3: but say, let me say this. When states join the
Speaker 3: United States, they give up their ability to make deals
Speaker 3: or negotiate with other countries. Understood, Therefore, the United States
Speaker 3: can so when it makes a deal with another country,
Speaker 3: it cannot be declared unconstituted because the Constitution dictates the
Speaker 3: state power.
Speaker 1: So did this judge here in Arkansas be like, hey,
Speaker 1: we can't we can't regulate these birds because they don't
Speaker 1: live here all the time. Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1: Like interpret for me, I don't fully understand, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's not worth going into.
Speaker 3: But right, he just said that the Federal Gunment was
Speaker 3: overstepping its powers, that it didn't have the ability to
Speaker 3: do what it was trying to do, and so it
Speaker 3: was struck down there, and like I said, it forced
Speaker 3: them to go back in. And this is some stuff
Speaker 3: that I haven't had a chance to research fully either. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's but that's what I want to do in
Speaker 3: the next book. And the thing was is Trabor was
Speaker 3: an incredible early conservationist, but he was following what he
Speaker 3: thought was a letter of the law. And he was
Speaker 3: a one when you broke federal law. I told you
Speaker 3: Big Lake became a preserve when they went in there
Speaker 3: and broke the law. He was the one many times
Speaker 3: that the poachers ended up in front of and he
Speaker 3: would you know, hammer them because he thought that was
Speaker 3: the right thing to do. Yeah, that was one of
Speaker 3: the steps that I want to look into. And there's
Speaker 3: a lot of other players that get involved. And our
Speaker 3: buddy Vizard, who is kind of he has a chapter
Speaker 3: of his Arsaw's first game, Arkansas's first game, ward not Arkansas's. Well,
Speaker 3: he covered the whole state, but he was not hired
Speaker 3: by the state. He was hired by a sportsman's Associationly,
Speaker 3: that's right. They saved money and they were like, the
Speaker 3: state's not going to do anything about it, and so
Speaker 3: we're going to hire this guy to be enforced the
Speaker 3: game laws that exist.
Speaker 1: But he couldn't arrest people, he couldn't give them tickets,
Speaker 1: and he didn't really have any power. He'd just kind
Speaker 1: of be like he would do that kind of like
Speaker 1: me shaming people for shooting Turkey to the podcast. Yeah
Speaker 1: he had to go get a local deputy. Oh really, Yes,
Speaker 1: he had to go get a local deputy. So he
Speaker 1: basically went around and gathered information and turned it over
Speaker 1: the local deputy and and that deputy would would handle it.
Speaker 1: But he was he was a real hero though, I
Speaker 1: mean he really was. He was really what was his
Speaker 1: full name, Ernest Vivian Vizard and he was from like
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six to nineteen fifteen or something.
Speaker 3: He was, Yes, because he becomes a federal warden. So
Speaker 3: he actually gets the job for the federal warden and
Speaker 3: the very first enforcing mytor bird law. And so he
Speaker 3: ends up back in Arkansas doing enforcement for this said.
Speaker 1: This is a picture of him, but he actually had
Speaker 1: quite a bit of philosophy for it, felt like he did.
Speaker 1: I mean, just like he kind of cast vision for
Speaker 1: why people why it was advantageous for people to preserve game,
Speaker 1: and why we wanted them and if we just obey
Speaker 1: the laws, there's going to be more game. I mean,
Speaker 1: he was a pretty he was kind of a visionary.
Speaker 3: He really trying to do the best he could with
Speaker 3: what he had, which wasn't much. He was very much underfunded.
Speaker 3: And if you read the chapter where he is, it's
Speaker 3: called the Prince and the Pauper, which is when his
Speaker 3: relationship with Tabasco air McElhenney, Yeah, you have the millionaire.
Speaker 3: And then he basically on this before it's all over with,
Speaker 3: he has sold his furniture. Vizard has trying to continue
Speaker 3: to fight and make pamphlets and and and all that
Speaker 3: sort of thing. When he's begging mclelhenny for a job
Speaker 3: or anything, any mclhenny suggests he starts selling magazines, sporting
Speaker 3: magazines door to door. Really, as he goes around the
Speaker 3: state the enforced laws, he's like, why don't you just
Speaker 3: you got a captive audience, why don't you sell magazine subscriptions.
Speaker 3: So he does that for a while while he's still
Speaker 3: the state game warden. But yes, he has no power,
Speaker 3: and here's the here's the kicker, and I'll even get you.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read you tell me well.
Speaker 3: I was just going to say, I'll tie it in
Speaker 3: even more. When when the game is fish commission finally
Speaker 3: is established and we finally have wardens number one, we
Speaker 3: only have eight wardens for the entire state, and they
Speaker 3: won't let them have any more. But there will be
Speaker 3: a time when you look at the last few chapters
Speaker 3: where there's a fight against it to destroy it. They
Speaker 3: make the arrest powers away from the wardens.
Speaker 1: Interesting. I want to read the quote that you opened
Speaker 1: up this chapter six with, and this is Ernest V.
Speaker 1: Vissert in nineteen ten, Arkansas's first game warden, hired by
Speaker 1: this private company.
Speaker 3: Arkansas State and Sports Association.
Speaker 1: And he writes, I will guarantee that if the good
Speaker 1: farmers of the country will assist in securing the passage
Speaker 1: of a bill that will protect the game and fish
Speaker 1: of the state, as they have assisted in the enforcement
Speaker 1: of our present laws for the past six months, that
Speaker 1: within five years our fields will swarm with pheasants and
Speaker 1: other game birds that will aid them in the destruction
Speaker 1: of insect life. There was a big deal about birds
Speaker 1: killing insects.
Speaker 3: Big and Bolt Weaver was the big farmer for quail.
Speaker 1: And so they were leaning on farmers. And he says,
Speaker 1: our streams will be filled with the choicest fish, and
Speaker 1: their children may enjoy a few hours of sport with
Speaker 1: hook and line, as like their forefathers did a few
Speaker 1: years ago. So I mean he was like a he's
Speaker 1: kind of like a he was casting vision and just
Speaker 1: then interesting guy for no doubt.
Speaker 3: And what's even more interesting is he has no background.
Speaker 3: He's not a biology he's not a scientist, he's not
Speaker 3: he's not anything as is in that area. He's a
Speaker 3: failed businessman basically.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 3: His father was a doctor from Arkansas County that's stuck
Speaker 3: Art over by Stuttgart, who evidently was well known for
Speaker 3: his malaria treatments. And his father, that would be his
Speaker 3: visit's grandfather, was an exile from Belgium and he was
Speaker 3: a part of the aristocratic class over there, and evidently
Speaker 3: there was a scandal where there was an assassination and
Speaker 3: the VisArt family became kind of soiled, and so he
Speaker 3: picked up and left and came to all places Arkansas
Speaker 3: County and started a californ cattle farm. Wow.
Speaker 1: And so let me let me back up a little
Speaker 1: bit and and give me a maybe a little bit
Speaker 1: of an of an overview. It's kind of tough an
Speaker 1: overview of Well, I guess we've kind of already done it.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of the best way to describe
Speaker 1: like Arkansas would would have the first game laws that
Speaker 1: would start after the Civil War? Is that about right? Like, yes,
Speaker 1: where were the first game laws started?
Speaker 3: The very very first that that wasn't like a local
Speaker 3: but a statewide was eighteen seventy five and it was
Speaker 3: a non resident license law. We were the first state
Speaker 3: state in the nation to require non residents to purchase
Speaker 3: a license. Really and it was you know, not in forest.
Speaker 1: And but that was because all the states around this, Missouri, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: Mississippi had depleted a lot of their resources. In Arkansas
Speaker 1: was this destination correct? It's so interesting. In the book
Speaker 1: he talks about how the rail companies in Saint Louis,
Speaker 1: in Memphis and different places, they were advertising hunting packages
Speaker 1: like trips like round trip, like leave tonight being Arkansas,
Speaker 1: shooting ducks in the morning. And basically they had this
Speaker 1: package deal where you would buy a ticket on the
Speaker 1: train and you could carry one hundred pounds again and
Speaker 1: your dogs and your dogs, and they would take you
Speaker 1: to Arkansas and kick you out for a week or
Speaker 1: two weeks.
Speaker 3: Or a month however long you wanted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so what was happening was that the people
Speaker 1: were coming here for recreation. People were buying land from
Speaker 1: out of state. And because Arkansas was just this like
Speaker 1: no man's land in a way. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: just this underdeveloped, non progress I didn't have real strong
Speaker 1: government at the time, probably crippled up from the from
Speaker 1: the Civil War and infrastructure, and it was just like
Speaker 1: but it was this wild place that had yet to
Speaker 1: be really logged out much of much around us because
Speaker 1: of the massive swamps in the in the mountains. A
Speaker 1: lot of Arkansas wasn't heavily law I mean it was
Speaker 1: starting to be.
Speaker 3: For sure, Right, that's happening. At the same time this
Speaker 3: is happening, all of our resources are going out of
Speaker 3: the state.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's because of these railroads, that's right.
Speaker 3: Railroads is a big one.
Speaker 1: Railroads are bringing out lumber and goods and game, but
Speaker 1: also bringing in sport hunters, right, so basically everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything that we could export, we were, that's right, And
Speaker 1: we were, but we were other people from other places
Speaker 1: were saying, come to Arkansas and hunting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And and the railroads were that advertising those packages.
Speaker 3: But then they had pamphlets that they would publish and
Speaker 3: it would say what is your game pursuit And it
Speaker 3: would say, well, I want to go after you know quail,
Speaker 3: and it would say, well, this is where, this is
Speaker 3: the three stations you need to stop at. And then
Speaker 3: it would say you need to hire mister Jones for
Speaker 3: his wagon, and mister Jones will carry you four miles
Speaker 3: away this direction and bring outfits to camp for a week.
Speaker 3: And so it's a total guide on how to exploit
Speaker 3: the resources wildlife resources of Arkansas. And they were making bank,
Speaker 3: you know, because they would then haul them back. But
Speaker 3: on the backside of that, you know, you've got the
Speaker 3: market hunters that are also being brought by train. There
Speaker 3: is a man in Chicago that becomes kind of the
Speaker 3: meat man of the day. He is the meat King,
Speaker 3: and he hires one hundred market hunters, hires a private train,
Speaker 3: puts some market hunters on the Canadian border, and they
Speaker 3: follow the migration down on the train with one hundred hunters,
Speaker 3: and he sends railcars down with ammunition supplies and empty
Speaker 3: boxes of ice. They pack up the goods, they send
Speaker 3: it back and it comes just basically and they follow
Speaker 3: it all the migration all the way down. Holy kill
Speaker 3: kill kill kill Wow, ducks, ducks and geese and anything
Speaker 3: that flies plover anything all the way up and down.
Speaker 3: And that's just one example. There's no I mean, this
Speaker 3: is an example of what's happening in many places that
Speaker 3: had already happened. Yeah, you know, we're really as far
Speaker 3: as now obviously if you go far west that that
Speaker 3: happens post you know, in time, post nineteen hundred. But
Speaker 3: as far as the east goes, this had already done it.
Speaker 3: This has already happened.
Speaker 6: So we're like the last holdout in the We truly are,
Speaker 6: we're I mean, we're we're on the edge that that
Speaker 6: right butting up against the Mississippi River, Oklahoma, Indian Territory.
Speaker 3: Oklahoma is pretty much with us because if you take
Speaker 3: a snapshot, like eighteen twenty, Arkansas Territory includes Oklahoma. And
Speaker 3: so they talk about, well, as this began, these animals
Speaker 3: begin to kind of disappear, a lot of people begin
Speaker 3: to talk about, let's go to Indian Territory instead. And
Speaker 3: so it's that really, to me, is the last vestage
Speaker 3: unless you go well out west what we would consider
Speaker 3: west today. Remember we're west at the time. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: we're considered the west.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it always it took me a long time to
Speaker 1: wrap my mind right. Book, my favorite book, this booked
Speaker 1: by Frederick Gerstacker. Yeah, he you know, his book was
Speaker 1: called Wild Sports of the Far West.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: And you don't think of Arkansas as the far West,
Speaker 1: but yeah, in the eighteen thirties it.
Speaker 3: Was, yes, and people thought when they jumped the Mississippi River,
Speaker 3: they were and separated from the from the east. So
Speaker 3: one of the great things when you're talking about Gerstacker
Speaker 3: and all those early travelers to Arkansas, there's a family,
Speaker 3: all the billings Leaves, and they come very early to Arkansas,
Speaker 3: and they come down to Cadron, which is Conway modern
Speaker 3: day Conway, and they run into two families that have
Speaker 3: two patriarchs. Who are they They feed their families from
Speaker 3: the woods exclusively. They don't ho a row, they don't
Speaker 3: do any kind of agriculture whatsoever. And one of them
Speaker 3: is called Flanagan. One of them's called massing Gill. Well.
Speaker 3: I began to I thought that those guys are pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: Let me find out more about them. Each of them
Speaker 3: had two wives and they had both had sack full kids.
Speaker 3: They were Tories, they were loyalists really in the American Revolution,
Speaker 3: and when they lost, when the Brits lost, they ran
Speaker 3: instead of going to Canada or going you know, back
Speaker 3: somewhere else, they ran and jumped the Mississippi River and
Speaker 3: got to our back. Of course, they were outside of
Speaker 3: the United States and thought they were safe, and that's
Speaker 3: that's what put them here. Interesting they were Conway, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and Conway, Arkansas ran off from the American post American
Speaker 3: Revolution and came all over here. Wow. And I have
Speaker 3: been told by some of my folks from Conway that
Speaker 3: those families are still there. Is that right? That's right?
Speaker 3: That name is the Flanagans and Masson Gills, and there's
Speaker 3: a couple of others. They're still known in Conway.
Speaker 1: That is interesting. When we did our series on the
Speaker 1: Bear State, and we kind of did this Arkansas. We
Speaker 1: did two podcasts in Arkansas several a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago on Bear Grease, and I mean, yeah, you you
Speaker 1: you started to see the immigration patterns into Arkansas usually
Speaker 1: was people that were running from something, were impoverished. This
Speaker 1: was like not the place you wanted to go. And
Speaker 1: that's that explains though, in a functional way, why why
Speaker 1: wildness and wild game populations kind of held out for
Speaker 1: an eastern region Because I mean, there just weren't a
Speaker 1: lot of people here. I mean I think by I
Speaker 1: think in eighteen twenty, I mean they were like I
Speaker 1: want to say, there were like thirty thousand people in
Speaker 1: Arkansas or something.
Speaker 3: I could be wrong about that, But in eighteen ten,
Speaker 3: there's one thousand and sixty four.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow, Okay, so I think I'm right. Then by
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty it was like.
Speaker 3: Eighteen twenty it had gone up considerably, but it was only.
Speaker 1: Still that's an astonishingly low number it is of people.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the big one of the big things
Speaker 3: for Arkansas is our geography is a problem because if
Speaker 3: you're let's say, depending on the time, let's just use
Speaker 3: the goal Rush Mine or forty nine er. All right,
Speaker 3: when people are going and they want to go farther west,
Speaker 3: they're going to come across and if you look at
Speaker 3: up map, the correct map from the time, let's say
Speaker 3: an eighteen twenty map, then they're literally on the map
Speaker 3: it says the Great Swamp on the eastern side of Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: So if you're going to go to Oregon, California, you
Speaker 3: know all that sort of thing, do you want to
Speaker 3: go through the Great Swamp? Well, no, you're either going
Speaker 3: to go north of that, or you're gonna go south there. Well,
Speaker 3: how many times do these people actually make it to
Speaker 3: their destination way out wherever they may go along and
Speaker 3: all of a sudden you go along your trip and
Speaker 3: Paul die. We need to set down roots right here,
Speaker 3: We need to be right here. Well, if you've gone there,
Speaker 3: you're setting up roots in Missouri. If you've gone down here,
Speaker 3: you're setting roots in Louisiana. You don't have a chance
Speaker 3: to set up roots in Arkansas because you never went there.
Speaker 3: You never you were turned off by the so truly
Speaker 3: for a long period of time, if you're in Arkansas,
Speaker 3: you wanted to be in Arkansas, you had you wanted
Speaker 3: to come to.
Speaker 1: The Arkansas saying is that the Delta region of Arkansas,
Speaker 1: the swamp, made a barrier to entry, so people were
Speaker 1: going north of it or south of correct.
Speaker 3: And then when Indian territory is set up, who wants
Speaker 3: you know, you hear all the terrible stories. People with
Speaker 3: terrible stories will be killed by Indians, will be killed
Speaker 3: by natives Native Americans over there, and so we are
Speaker 3: not even going to take a chance because that's on
Speaker 3: the other side of the Great Swamp. Even if we
Speaker 3: even get through the Great Swamp, we're not going to
Speaker 3: go through Indian territory. We'll be murdered. Yeah, and so
Speaker 3: there's a double I think there was a historian. I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure there was a historian called it basically call
Speaker 3: it a mill Pon effect. Yeah, you know, it's basically
Speaker 3: what it was, and that's one of the reasons our population.
Speaker 1: Was So now I've heard that, I agreed with you
Speaker 1: and said, yeah, Millpon I guess I don't really even
Speaker 1: know what that means, though.
Speaker 3: It's basically a build up where just stagnant, stagnated place.
Speaker 1: Just stagnant. And so but that caused us, I mean
Speaker 1: for wildlife, that was good. We held that, we held out,
Speaker 1: but then we became this destination, a hunting place. And
Speaker 1: so your book deals a lot with this conflict between
Speaker 1: market hunters and sport hunters right at the at the
Speaker 1: around the turn of the century, that's correct, and when when?
Speaker 1: And it's such an interesting time for those of us
Speaker 1: interested in wildlife today because so many of the modern
Speaker 1: ideas about wildlife conservation were being forged, you know, with
Speaker 1: the Boone and Crocket Club and Teddy Roosevelt and all
Speaker 1: these great patriarchs of the conservation movement who were you know,
Speaker 1: kind of rewriting the way that people thought about wild game.
Speaker 1: And so there was this like fifty years of I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was fifty years, but probably
Speaker 1: of just conflict between people that would have viewed wildlife
Speaker 1: in a certain way as a commodity, not as a resource,
Speaker 1: not as something to be to be protected intentionally. And
Speaker 1: then you had these guys like Roosevelt that we that
Speaker 1: were trying to that were sportsmen that wanted fair chase,
Speaker 1: that wanted to have an experience with the wild and
Speaker 1: go hunt, and it meant more than just getting game.
Speaker 1: It meant, you know, some kind of quest in a way.
Speaker 1: And so it was like these this and that's a
Speaker 1: lot of what you're book talks about and the legislation
Speaker 1: around quantifying that those ideas.
Speaker 3: Yes, and you remember this is also a time when, uh,
Speaker 3: the government's trying to get you to dip your cattle,
Speaker 3: and so there's you know, all these sort of governmental
Speaker 3: regulations and trying to you know, I do a lot
Speaker 3: of change, uh, And there's a lot of pushback, a
Speaker 3: lot of pushback from from a variety of different reasons.
Speaker 3: There's a people, there's politicians that don't want that that
Speaker 3: are actually making money from the market uh, selling selling
Speaker 3: game and fish. Uh. And there's folks, of course, and
Speaker 3: you can if you're from Arkansas, you can relate with
Speaker 3: this statement. There are people, uh common folk in Arkansas
Speaker 3: believe that if their grandfather hunted and this time of
Speaker 3: year and this game, then by GOLLI ought to be
Speaker 3: able to do it, and no regulation is going to
Speaker 3: stop me. Yes, you know that still happens today, that's right.
Speaker 3: And and so that's that mentality. And that's one of
Speaker 3: the things when you're talking about Vizard trying that was
Speaker 3: like a newspaper article. He's basically trying to convince everybody
Speaker 3: he can on the benefits of doing that. And that's
Speaker 3: also what a lot of are new organizations. There's a
Speaker 3: women's organization and what they do is see visits trying
Speaker 3: to convince adults and the smaller women's organizations, they're about
Speaker 3: songbirds and things like that. They're educating children in schools.
Speaker 3: They're putting out pamphlets about the benefits of the robin,
Speaker 3: the benefits of the songbirds, because most of those are
Speaker 3: migratory birds. Too, and so there's a big effort basically
Speaker 3: to educate the public on a lot of different levels,
Speaker 3: and of course some refuse to accept it.
Speaker 1: You know, to this day, I'm amazed at the lingering
Speaker 1: ideology of families of just groups of people that lasts
Speaker 1: so long. I mean, all foreshadow a touch on the
Speaker 1: podcast that's going to come out next week on Bear Grease.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast about a particular man's engagement and views
Speaker 1: on wildlife law. Essentially, it's about a modern guy that
Speaker 1: basically was a pretty bad turkey outlaw. This guy still
Speaker 1: alive and we interviewed him and he's not a turkey
Speaker 1: outlaw anymore, and that's kind of why we talked about him.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a human interest story more than anything.
Speaker 3: And evolution of a man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I made a statement when I was writing
Speaker 1: that podcast. The part that I write is I said,
Speaker 1: it feels like people like when I look back on
Speaker 1: people that I know and I engage with, it feels
Speaker 1: like people that were adults by the nineteen sixties typically,
Speaker 1: or there's a group of them that can have a
Speaker 1: very different view on game laws than people born later.
Speaker 1: I mean, like game laws are kind of just a suggestion,
Speaker 1: and it's and it's it's it's interesting because as I'm
Speaker 1: reading your book and talking to you today after I
Speaker 1: wrote that, it's like we were having game laws in
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies. I mean, it's not like this guy's
Speaker 1: granddad was a market hunter. Well I guess he could
Speaker 1: have been that. Maybe that proves my point is that
Speaker 1: that it feels like something. It feels like y'all just
Speaker 1: be able to wake up and be like, all right, guys, hey,
Speaker 1: we can't shoot ninety thousand ducks and ship them to
Speaker 1: Chicago anymore. Okay, we're gonna become sport hunters. We're gonna
Speaker 1: go out and obey the laws, and you're each gonna
Speaker 1: kill six but only for ninety days a year. And
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, okay, that's great, let's do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, man, I mean there are guys.
Speaker 2: Some significant pushback.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, remember that's their job. That's how they're
Speaker 3: making live and feeding their families and things like that.
Speaker 3: And and so that's the that's attitude saying you're taking
Speaker 3: my job away after change what I may have done
Speaker 3: for twenty years, and so you're saying that I can't
Speaker 3: do that anymore, and I'm not you know, it's not
Speaker 3: gonna work. Man.
Speaker 1: I Like, it's really easy on this side of it
Speaker 1: to be like, I know exactly where I would have stood.
Speaker 1: I would have I would have I would have said
Speaker 1: game laws, But man, I would have bid I had
Speaker 1: a hard time not standing with the people that it
Speaker 1: probably would have mattered who I loved. Yeah, like if
Speaker 1: my I mean, I I find I'm really empathetic towards
Speaker 1: people that I that I that I love and I'm
Speaker 1: connected to. And it's like, at that time, it really
Speaker 1: wasn't a moral Maybe maybe they were starting to make
Speaker 1: it kind of a moral issue, but it was more
Speaker 1: like a maybe almost like a business issue.
Speaker 3: You know, definitely economics involved. Of course. One of the
Speaker 3: interesting things is, uh, there it depends, just like you said,
Speaker 3: depends on where you stand and who you're with. But
Speaker 3: if let's say your grandfather was a timberman and had
Speaker 3: done timber all his life, and all of a sudden
Speaker 3: they said no more timber cutting ever, or you can
Speaker 3: only cut so much timber but it's not enough to
Speaker 3: make a living from, then that's the pushback. I think
Speaker 3: you had to think of wildlife as a natural, as
Speaker 3: a resource as a commodity like coal and timber and
Speaker 3: now this, and so that's the mentality of the market.
Speaker 3: So when there's rumblings of possible game law to slow
Speaker 3: that down, they kill even more because they think it's
Speaker 3: gonna go away so or or not even game all.
Speaker 3: They're disappearing like the grouse. It's like this stop, not
Speaker 3: not let's stop, it's kill all we can before they
Speaker 3: go away.
Speaker 1: Isn't that wild?
Speaker 3: That's totally different things, you know, because the sportsman was like,
Speaker 3: oh no, we must pass these laws. But the market
Speaker 3: hunters are going to kill them all before they're gone.
Speaker 1: Better, we better get them before and again.
Speaker 3: And that was a whole deal. That was one of
Speaker 3: the big push you know, big pushbacks, is they're they're
Speaker 3: simply not going to stop. And what was interesting is
Speaker 3: even after the the biological survey took over places like
Speaker 3: Big Lake, they kept showing up and kept shooting illegally. Wow,
Speaker 3: you know. And the big one of the things I
Speaker 3: said that fishing was kind of the first place where
Speaker 3: they started. And that was nationally too. Uh. During the
Speaker 3: colonial American colonial period, they were passing laws on the
Speaker 3: East coast about fishing because they were fishing out the
Speaker 3: streams and salmon runs. Uh. That was very early is
Speaker 3: where they started, was fishing, and it's one of the
Speaker 3: places they started with Arkansas because I remember remember, like
Speaker 3: I said, we're talking about the same time. So they're
Speaker 3: building infrastructure, trying to build infrastructure at the same time. Right.
Speaker 3: One of the big infrastructure pushes, of course as roads. Well,
Speaker 3: you build a road up here in the ozarks and washtalls.
Speaker 3: What's the number one tool to build roads before mechanization
Speaker 3: dynamite m So every shaft along a road, stretch of
Speaker 3: road had dynamite in it, so he was everybody. And
Speaker 3: back then you could go buy dynamite, so you could
Speaker 3: steal it or buy it, and they just let's go fishing.
Speaker 3: Went fishing with it, absolutely, and that was one of
Speaker 3: the big things that was I saw over and over
Speaker 3: and over again as some of the very first trying
Speaker 3: to make statewide game laws was against dynamite fishing because
Speaker 3: they were destroying, completely destroying rivers, wow, with dynamite. And
Speaker 3: they finally make it a felony to use dynamite. Really, yep,
Speaker 3: they make it a felony, and then they realize it's
Speaker 3: a mistake.
Speaker 2: What would have been that time period.
Speaker 3: That probably would have been Oh if I had I
Speaker 3: wouldn't know off the top of my head, but it
Speaker 3: would be probably around eighteen ninety, give or take. There's
Speaker 3: a man that kills another fella in World War One.
Speaker 3: During World One, two soldiers get a hold of some
Speaker 3: dynamite and they're off, they're out on like leave or whatever.
Speaker 3: And he thought he had a regular fuse. He was
Speaker 3: unfamiliar with dynamite and he had a fast fuse and
Speaker 3: blew him up and killed the guy next to him.
Speaker 3: But that he was gonna get tried for murder. But
Speaker 3: that was a big one. They tried to do that,
Speaker 3: didn't They realized it was a mistake to make it
Speaker 3: a felony because no jury would send a man to
Speaker 3: prison for catching blowing up fish. So juries wouldn't convict
Speaker 3: because they would not send him. It was mandatory one
Speaker 3: year in prison for a felony. So they're like, we
Speaker 3: have to change that back and lessen the penalty.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, because a man would stand up and he
Speaker 1: would be like his lawyer would be like, hey, this
Speaker 1: guy was trying to feed his fans, that's right to
Speaker 1: send him to prison for his feet and trying to
Speaker 1: feed his family.
Speaker 3: Exactly whether it would be true or not.
Speaker 2: Right, Wow, fascinating.
Speaker 1: Game laws to me are are so interesting, and because
Speaker 1: we're so focused on conservation and hunting, this is the
Speaker 1: thing that we've dedicated a big chunk of our lives too,
Speaker 1: that we we love wildlife. We view it as like
Speaker 1: essential for us to have the quality of life that
Speaker 1: we want to have. I mean, wildlife to a lot
Speaker 1: of people that are listening to this is like really important.
Speaker 1: But the truth is, I mean it's not existential in
Speaker 1: a way. I mean, like I'm thinking about a jury
Speaker 1: that's going to convict the guy for dynamiting when probably
Speaker 1: the week before they were trying a guy for for murder,
Speaker 1: or for or for for robbing a bank or for
Speaker 1: something even worse maybe and it's like.
Speaker 2: The game laws just didn't seem very egregious.
Speaker 1: Well I mean yeah, but it's like today, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm like, send him to jail, you know. But it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of sometimes you have to. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting we should have lesser game game laws. I
Speaker 1: think sometimes they're way too light, but I think that
Speaker 1: so it's it. That's why it's interesting. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's that these things are so important and guys, guys
Speaker 1: commit their lives to wildlife management and so you kind
Speaker 1: of have in today. I mean, there's people whose careers
Speaker 1: are involved around wildlife management, and so somebody that doesn't
Speaker 1: take the laws seriously, that's breaking the law. Like he's
Speaker 1: he's violating more than just killing an extra turkey. He's
Speaker 1: messing with people's lives.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: That's that's the way one way to think about it.
Speaker 1: So like the punishment should be pretty severe, you know. Oh, man,
Speaker 1: I can't wait till next week. When we were coming
Speaker 1: out with an episode next week that tried me as
Speaker 1: a podcaster in a way, and Josh helped me quite
Speaker 1: a bit with it. And uh, because it's it's a
Speaker 1: really interesting story with it with a man that I
Speaker 1: actually really have a lot of respect for.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: But it's a it's a it's it's an interesting story.
Speaker 1: It's about game law violation.
Speaker 3: I look forward to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how long I have no idea this has been
Speaker 1: so interesting out zero concept of how long we've been talking. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: this Uh, we didn't even scratch the surface of the book.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm I think one of the if you
Speaker 3: take a look at the I think it's the very
Speaker 3: first blurb on the back. I think that gives me
Speaker 3: the most pride. Is it? Is it the one?
Speaker 1: Which one is? I'll read it.
Speaker 3: That's it? Yeah, it says.
Speaker 1: Foster's passion for Arkansas wildlife and conservation shines through in
Speaker 1: this book. His research and primary materials is simply outstanding.
Speaker 1: I doubt anyone has read and assembled more material in
Speaker 1: Arkansas hunting and fishing in the late nineteenth and early
Speaker 1: twentieth centuries.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think that's the thing I'm most proud about,
Speaker 3: because I truly tried to search every single source that
Speaker 3: you could potentially reach, and I'm sure I miss some.
Speaker 3: But I was in Maryland at the National Archives for
Speaker 3: two weeks and just gathering information on the federal side,
Speaker 3: and these records had never been touched.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Since they had been placed there in the nineteen teen's,
Speaker 3: twenties and thirties, they had never been open. The reason
Speaker 3: I knew that is because they were all staple together,
Speaker 3: and you can't use the staple materials, so you have
Speaker 3: to take them up. You can't remove them yourself, so
Speaker 3: you have to take them up there. Well, the first
Speaker 3: week all I did was stand in line to get
Speaker 3: the staples removed. And it was very interesting because they
Speaker 3: were game and fish. There were some Arkansas game and
Speaker 3: fish stuff too. US Biological survey primarily is what I
Speaker 3: was looking at the management of Big Lake and that
Speaker 3: sort of thing. And there was a turkey feather somebody.
Speaker 3: There was a vendor who was a propagation guy who
Speaker 3: was basically raising turkeys that wanted to bring them to Arkansas.
Speaker 3: And so it was like his calling was a paper
Speaker 3: and it was his calling card and it had a
Speaker 3: turkey feather stuck in it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And I pulled it out and it was like I
Speaker 3: had just pulled out a nuclear bomb. They had people
Speaker 3: coming from underneath the basements with lab coats on and
Speaker 3: all kinds of stuff. It's like biological material must be
Speaker 3: whatever they had gloves on, and it was it was
Speaker 3: so interesting that they there. They didn't know it was
Speaker 3: there because it had never been undone. Why these done
Speaker 3: that had been there over one hundred years? That turkey feather?
Speaker 1: Wow, that's cool.
Speaker 3: And so that was interesting. Went to Fort Worth to
Speaker 3: the National Archives. Down there, there are different branches that
Speaker 3: was lawbreakers who broke federal law. The court records were down.
Speaker 3: There been to just just lots and lots and lots
Speaker 3: of places little every I tried to go to every
Speaker 3: single county historical society that had any kind of archives
Speaker 3: whatsoever about any sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I think we've got our new friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 1: For really we need you back on the burgeries probably
Speaker 1: the render just as a guest.
Speaker 3: Well, it's I've dug a lot of places, and like
Speaker 3: I said earlier, this book's about fifty seven fifty eight
Speaker 3: thousand words, and I removed seventy thousand the requests simply
Speaker 3: because it was just too much for academic study.
Speaker 2: You know, it's serious one. That's too much for an
Speaker 2: academic study.
Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, dial it back down a little bit,
Speaker 1: doctor Foster.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's like I said, that's one of the
Speaker 3: things that I really have tried to work on is
Speaker 3: is finding and if you look at some of those people,
Speaker 3: they're really identified. They're not just like this guy was
Speaker 3: a judge. I'll try to say what he did for
Speaker 3: his whole career, what he did for a living, where
Speaker 3: he was at at the time, and all different pieces
Speaker 3: and aspects to really give. You know, again, I'm an
Speaker 3: I'm Arkansawyer and I'm trying to I mean, I was
Speaker 3: looking at myself as an Arkansas hunter who would want
Speaker 3: to read this book, and I want to know everything.
Speaker 3: Whatever happened to that guy? Yeah, I want to look
Speaker 3: in the notes and say, what happened to that guy? Yeah?
Speaker 3: You know, the desert becomes my hero. I mean, I
Speaker 3: guess I'm a defender of vizard. He has this bad
Speaker 3: side too, but he really if you had to point
Speaker 3: to one person during that period, he would be the guy.
Speaker 1: He'd be the guy.
Speaker 3: He would be the guy. And I want I'll tell
Speaker 3: you another piece of information that people I guarantee you know,
Speaker 3: very very few people know about this. So Tabasco Air mcklehenny, right,
Speaker 3: he is a bird. He is a bird conservationist. His
Speaker 3: the island, Avery Island down there. He turns it into
Speaker 3: a bird refuge and he connects with a couple of
Speaker 3: wealthy the one's a widow, railroad widow, Tycoons widow, and
Speaker 3: then another person they're both they're all three of these conservationists.
Speaker 3: Mclehenny's dream is to have bird refuges all up the
Speaker 3: Mississippi Flyway from Canada all the way down, and so
Speaker 3: they'll have places to rest and live. Okay. He connects,
Speaker 3: Visit connects with Vizard. They get together and mclehenny says,
Speaker 3: if Arkansas will pass meaningful game legislation to protect the birds,
Speaker 3: I will give them one hundred thousand acres. I will
Speaker 3: purchase the acreage in Arkansas and give it to the
Speaker 3: state if they'll pass loss to protect it. Wow. And
Speaker 3: Arkansas doesn't do it. Wow. And so he does it
Speaker 3: for Mississippi hm hm.
Speaker 1: And what land is that today in Mississippi.
Speaker 3: I do not know.
Speaker 1: Okay, Wow.
Speaker 3: It would probably be either a reserve preserve or a forest.
Speaker 1: He's probably split up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's probably in pieces and parts, that's correct. Be
Speaker 3: hard to get one hundred thousans.
Speaker 1: At least he did it somewhere on the flyway.
Speaker 3: He did, and he did it. They did it down
Speaker 3: there in Louisiana too. Most of much of the state
Speaker 3: land down there in Louisiana is old mccahoney ground. If
Speaker 3: it's around the Mississippi.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't buy to Alaska hot sauce you were using
Speaker 1: on the turkey thwack. Let's go back to Tabasco. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the conservationists.
Speaker 3: He came to Arkansas several times. He had a little
Speaker 3: traveling slide show and he would the glass slides and
Speaker 3: he had a projector that would project him up and
Speaker 3: he would do, you know, conserve the animals, Conserve the birds.
Speaker 3: He was a big bird guy. Conserve the birds. And
Speaker 3: he had all these different birds on these slides. And
Speaker 3: I'm sure the probably I bet Tabasco Archives, there's a
Speaker 3: great historian down there. And he helped me a lot
Speaker 3: on the on the some of the conversations. There were letters,
Speaker 3: lots and lots of letters between visit and maclahenny, and
Speaker 3: he helped me find some letters and things like that,
Speaker 3: send them to me. I bet they still have some
Speaker 3: of those slides.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: I would bet you they do. Wow.
Speaker 1: Well, hey, this has been fantastic. You can if you
Speaker 1: can check out this book. So great was the slaughter Market, Hunters,
Speaker 1: Sportsmen and Wildlife Conservation in Arkansas, Buckley T. Foster that
Speaker 1: you can order that probably.
Speaker 3: Just Amazon, University of Valbamba, Press, Barnes and Noble, all
Speaker 3: of them. Yeah, or you know, I'm going across the
Speaker 3: state one venue at a time doing book talks and signings,
Speaker 3: so they can book you and they can contact me.
Speaker 3: My website is Arkansas Wildlife hisstory dot com. You can
Speaker 3: contact me through there and also has a Facebook page
Speaker 3: same thing, and you can, yes, you can contact me
Speaker 3: through there. One last thing before we wrap it up.
Speaker 3: We get to nineteen twenty five. And it's one of
Speaker 3: the reasons I end to my book in nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 3: when you take a snapshot in nineteen twenty five, and
Speaker 3: again I'm going to go back to say when I
Speaker 3: say there are none, I don't mean zero, but I
Speaker 3: mean not enough to do anything with. We get to
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty five, bearer gone, bison or gone. We have
Speaker 3: two thousand deer left in the entire state. There's over
Speaker 3: a million now. Turkey are gone, Quail are basically gone,
Speaker 3: panad grouse is extinct for the most part. The only
Speaker 3: thing really we have left are squirrels and rabbits. That's it.
Speaker 3: And of course migratory anything migratory we still have access
Speaker 3: to that. I mean, I'm talking about animals that were here. Yeah,
Speaker 3: all that's gone. So if it wasn't for the if
Speaker 3: it wasn't for the efforts, and I don't want to
Speaker 3: sound like a game and fish, Arkansas game and fish
Speaker 3: hoo rah. But really during this time and what follows after,
Speaker 3: if it wasn't for the Arkansas game and fish propagation
Speaker 3: efforts in the thirties, forties and beyond, there would be
Speaker 3: no game here to hunt or get after. They just
Speaker 3: wouldn't be here. They're gone. They're gone by twenty five,
Speaker 3: and people don't one.
Speaker 1: Hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: That's right, they were gone. And see we you know,
Speaker 3: you get on social media message boards there's a lot
Speaker 3: of bashing against the game and fish commissions all over
Speaker 3: place like that. And I'm not talking about modern But
Speaker 3: if it wasn't for the early efforts of the early
Speaker 3: game and fish, there would there would be no game
Speaker 3: to hunt. I mean, that's a bottom line. Yeah, they
Speaker 3: did it. They brought back turkeys in the seventies, that
Speaker 3: brought back black Bear. I mentioned in the book my
Speaker 3: dad was born in thirty six. He never saw a lot,
Speaker 3: and he was all over the washingtalls. His grandpa ran
Speaker 3: Faral hogs and so they were all over chasing Farrell
Speaker 3: hogs in the washingtalls. And he don't never saw a
Speaker 3: bear in the woods until he was seventy years old. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because they weren't here. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, it's astonishing when you understand the context of what
Speaker 1: we've got today that we can walk out of these
Speaker 1: doors and there's probably a deer within two hundred yards
Speaker 1: of us right now, you know.
Speaker 3: Anway, I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a true pleasure. I'm glad we finally connected
Speaker 1: and it won't be the last time for real.
Speaker 3: I just right the road and I thought you were
Speaker 3: further away, all right, sure, Yeah, it's our fifteen minutes
Speaker 3: to your door from my door.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: Well, hey, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Before we go, everybody needs to check out the Meat
Speaker 2: Eater store. We've got new Bear Grease merch.
Speaker 1: Hitting what kind of stuff do we have?
Speaker 2: Hats, shirts, all kinds of stuff, So definitely check it out.
Speaker 2: That'll be going live Monday before this podcast comes out.
Speaker 1: New Bear Grease Merch yep, excellent
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