Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by first Light, Go farther, stay longer.
Speaker 1: All right, welcome everybody. We're joined. Uh, we're gonna We're
Speaker 1: gonna get there real soon. We're joining in by his historian,
Speaker 1: Scott Guiltner, professor at Culver Stockton College, who we've been
Speaker 1: wanting to have you on for a long long time.
Speaker 1: Do we get like derailed by COVID or what happened?
Speaker 1: I can't remember. I'm not sure, but it's it's great
Speaker 1: to be here. This is pretty exciting. But it's been
Speaker 1: a while that we try to get you on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been a while, I think, Uh, he's all. You
Speaker 1: probably don't. You probably wrote a bunch of things, different
Speaker 1: papers and whatnot, a lot of paper. This is the
Speaker 1: only book. I sort of thought when I finished grad school,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna write a book every couple of years. And
Speaker 1: then I taught at a small college and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, life has less time than I thought. And
Speaker 1: here we are years later and still the same book. Dude.
Speaker 1: This book is fascinating though. Man, it's called Hunting and
Speaker 1: Fishing in the New South. Yeah, hunting and fishing in
Speaker 1: the New South, Black labor and white leisure after the
Speaker 1: Civil War. And I'll tell you what I uh, we'll
Speaker 1: get into it in greater detail, but just to kind
Speaker 1: of tease up before we hit a couple of things
Speaker 1: we got to hit. Um. The book covers many things,
Speaker 1: but one of the things I found most fascinating, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of betrays the fact. And I hate to
Speaker 1: admit this to you, like I didn't finish THEMN book.
Speaker 1: I really meant to, and I was getting along good,
Speaker 1: and I was I was folding pages and making notes,
Speaker 1: but then only wanted to check out the book. So
Speaker 1: it's his vault. But I skimmed around. Maybe collectively we
Speaker 1: got probably through. I'll give us. I am very like. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you if you screw. If you went and
Speaker 1: explored my text message exchanges, you would find where I
Speaker 1: sent a picture of that book cover to my brother Matt.
Speaker 1: I sent a picture of that book cover to a
Speaker 1: biologist named Robert Abernathy. I sent it to my brother Danny.
Speaker 1: I don't do that for every book. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: I'm right now, I'm just talked into a history of
Speaker 1: the monk in the Cia, in the Secret Wars and Laos.
Speaker 1: I didn't send that book cover to anybody. A might
Speaker 1: later I like this damn book, but it covers, among
Speaker 1: many of other things, the hunting practices of slaves. It's like,
Speaker 1: of course, and you think about like, of course they
Speaker 1: were engaged in the activity in some areas, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: but like it never really gave it any thought what
Speaker 1: that that aspect of that experience. That's sort of how
Speaker 1: it was, you know, when I first started the project,
Speaker 1: because it was it was such a novel topic for
Speaker 1: some people, you know, their response was, really you want
Speaker 1: to study that? And the other people said, well that's
Speaker 1: so mundane. Of course they hunted and fished for food.
Speaker 1: What's what's the larger significance of that? And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's what I'm gonna find out. I guess I
Speaker 1: combined both those people. I'm a combination of that makes sense,
Speaker 1: of course they did. And then like, but i'd have
Speaker 1: to know more which is the path you went down?
Speaker 1: And we'll get to but it's not exactly something that
Speaker 1: they covered off on in your you know, six studies
Speaker 1: class and then there's the hunting fishing for sure. Well
Speaker 1: you said, we'll get into it later, but like it
Speaker 1: seems like it made such a big impact. I think
Speaker 1: reading reading the book that it maybe should have been covered.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe one of the things that's kind of impressed
Speaker 1: me over the past twelve years, since the twelve years wow,
Speaker 1: since the book came out, is that it was there
Speaker 1: really wasn't much on the topic at the time, and
Speaker 1: since then quite a bit more has come out. And
Speaker 1: then other topics that are sort of conceptually similar, sort
Speaker 1: of odd opics that people would think of as a
Speaker 1: pretty mundane thing that's actually more revealing, whether it's the
Speaker 1: history of African American beaches or the history of black barbers.
Speaker 1: You know, I think there's all these interesting, uh you know,
Speaker 1: studies of environmental use and occupations that haven't really been
Speaker 1: given much attention before, and it's it's kind of cool.
Speaker 1: And when we talk about that, we'll get into kind
Speaker 1: of a twist, an interesting twist or an interesting wrinkle,
Speaker 1: and um, the much celebrated advent of the American conservation movement.
Speaker 1: And you'll see, first we got stuff talking about Yanni
Speaker 1: ran his full his first full marathon, yeah, like like
Speaker 1: in the organized sense or you just counted off. Uh
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's a little bit of a funny story,
Speaker 1: I think because I wasn't. I got into a race
Speaker 1: here in Bozeman called the bridger Ridge Run, which is
Speaker 1: in August, and it's twenty miles but it's across the
Speaker 1: mountains and uh it's uh like the course record is
Speaker 1: somewhere around three hours, which you know people run like
Speaker 1: two hour marathons these days, I believe. Um, So anyways,
Speaker 1: it's a it's an arduous course wrapped the whole day
Speaker 1: of marathon up in two hours. Yeah, when you're running
Speaker 1: like something crazy like four minute miles for twenty six
Speaker 1: miles in a row. Because when I think of running
Speaker 1: a marathon, I think just boring. I did it and
Speaker 1: twice that time took me four hours of running. But
Speaker 1: uh no, So I U meta fella through some works
Speaker 1: kind of unrelated work but not work stuff. Um. I
Speaker 1: won't get into the details. But I meet a fella
Speaker 1: and we kind of became friendly and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should hang out of the initials are his occupation
Speaker 1: or B I correct, yes, yeah, um and Barbara not Barbara.
Speaker 1: We have similarly aged kids. Both happened to be girls,
Speaker 1: and we're like, man, we could probably hang out. And
Speaker 1: not a baker. No, not not a baker. He used
Speaker 1: to live in uh Colorado or I used to live
Speaker 1: so you know, we had a lot of connection. Anyways, Uh,
Speaker 1: a week later after meeting him, I'm running my dog
Speaker 1: on the little like three mile loop that run all
Speaker 1: the time near our house, and he pulls by me
Speaker 1: and then turns around and comes back, and his wife
Speaker 1: rolls down the window and he's like, hey, what's up.
Speaker 1: My buddy, Nick was just talking about you, and then
Speaker 1: we see you running here and uh, you know, we
Speaker 1: didn't know you were a runner and got home at
Speaker 1: home back up, I just got confused. You met the guy, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you had a lot of shared so you had
Speaker 1: some shared experiences. And then you're running with your dog
Speaker 1: later and who runs into you. He his wife and
Speaker 1: his two kids. So the same guy runs in Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're just driving. They just happened to be driving over
Speaker 1: to Paradise Valley, cutting through Trail Creek. I'm with you now,
Speaker 1: and uh so they turned around and they come just
Speaker 1: to chat for a little bit and they're like She's like,
Speaker 1: you know, we're celebrating Nick's forty this weekend, and part
Speaker 1: of the celebration is, uh, Leftover Salmon happened to be
Speaker 1: playing on who all here knows that band, but they
Speaker 1: happen to be playing You never heard of Leftover Salmon,
Speaker 1: like a jam band from the nineties, but they're still
Speaker 1: playing hard in the widespread panic. Exactly. It's a great name,
Speaker 1: there were Salmon is a perfect jam band name for sure.
Speaker 1: It's got the blues. That's okay, thank you. I never
Speaker 1: got into any of that music that I stopped at
Speaker 1: the dead um. Anyways, they're like part of the celebration
Speaker 1: this weekend is Nick wanted to run a marathon for
Speaker 1: his birthday. So tomorrow morning they're gonna run right here
Speaker 1: from Trail Creek down to the Loch Leven camp site
Speaker 1: on the Yellowstone Marathon. You want to go, we could
Speaker 1: use you. We need some people to pace. And if
Speaker 1: it was just an open invitation to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can run the marathon, or you could run like
Speaker 1: ten miles of it, just like calm and have fun.
Speaker 1: We've got eight stations and T shirts and kids with
Speaker 1: bells and and there's gonna be like ten. People are
Speaker 1: so involved. I'm like, yeah, it sounds great. Let me
Speaker 1: see if I can get some babysitters because I was
Speaker 1: running solo. So how to drop the kids off the
Speaker 1: next morning at like six o'clock in the morning at
Speaker 1: my brother in law's house. And then I actually started.
Speaker 1: Didn't they want to spending the night there the night
Speaker 1: before though? That was my understanding. We were hoping to
Speaker 1: do that, but it didn't quite come. I thought I
Speaker 1: called him gonna lie ran that was that was a
Speaker 1: very good plan. Trust, but verify that's what's called. So
Speaker 1: white white kids with bells. This this this makes surprise you.
Speaker 1: I am not a runner, yeah, exactly, just a cheer
Speaker 1: and ring bells and yell and whatever. And so I
Speaker 1: actually started probably half and I caught them half an
Speaker 1: hour into their run, um because I just they were
Speaker 1: starting at I forget what it was seven, and I
Speaker 1: didn't get there untill seven thirty. Sometimes they want to
Speaker 1: get going earlier. Yeah, And so I basically just drove
Speaker 1: until I caught up to him and then found the
Speaker 1: next pull off pulled off. Uh. They gave me a
Speaker 1: Nick Benson uh birthday marathon t shirt. Threw it on
Speaker 1: and we started running. And at that point I didn't like,
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm just gonna do what I can. Like,
Speaker 1: I know that I'm capable of twenty I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'm feeling like I'm gonna pull off twenty six.
Speaker 1: But at the end, like I said, I started roughly
Speaker 1: thirty minutes, which is roughly probably at our pace, three
Speaker 1: miles behind. So at the end of it, I ran
Speaker 1: another three and a half miles by myself, just kept going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those are the hardest three miles because when you're running
Speaker 1: in a group, you're chatting, and everybody's you know, well
Speaker 1: everybody else is now in lounge shares with their shrunning
Speaker 1: shoes off, you know, dumping water on them. And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: just fill my fill my squeeze bottles back up and
Speaker 1: give me some more those salt pills. I'll be back
Speaker 1: in an hour. And so yeah, well, how did you
Speaker 1: know who went? Who went and measured it off for you?
Speaker 1: So another vehicle, Uh, we knew that the dirt road
Speaker 1: that we had uh run in on from the pavement
Speaker 1: to the camp site was exactly a mile, so I
Speaker 1: knew I had roughly three miles to go. So I
Speaker 1: ran out the dirt and then I just timed myself.
Speaker 1: I ran seven minutes down the pavement, turned around, ran
Speaker 1: seven minutes back and then back. So I ran somewhere
Speaker 1: between probably twenty six and twenty seven miles. I can't
Speaker 1: tell you exactly. Good job. Yeah, you just in you
Speaker 1: need to have a race off between you and Durkin. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he is, he is, but I don't. I don't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could beat him in a race. Well, yeah, just
Speaker 1: because of just a pure age thing. We've talked about it.
Speaker 1: He's not he's not seeds. He's just conceded ahead of
Speaker 1: and I've run with him and I'd feel like, do
Speaker 1: you still want to raise the um? No? So yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a lot of fun. Made some
Speaker 1: new friends, some friends that you actually know. Yeah, Jeremy
Speaker 1: and our kids, our kids go to school with their kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. Interesting his um his truck. He was in
Speaker 1: his house in a big windstorm came in a giant
Speaker 1: spruce flattened his truck. I did not hear that. You
Speaker 1: could have been sitting in there texting or something. Man
Speaker 1: would have been the India for sure. He told me
Speaker 1: a great story about how is. I think only like,
Speaker 1: how old is that boy? His tan the same age
Speaker 1: as my kid bugled in like multiple bulls form last
Speaker 1: year into archery range. Really yeah one to that story.
Speaker 1: I'm like, kid, I gotta start training my kids. I'm
Speaker 1: way behind. That's weird because his kid and my kid,
Speaker 1: uh recently got an English sparrow and uh she his
Speaker 1: the guy with that you ran, well, no, she ran
Speaker 1: with you too. Yeah. She cooked up the little breast
Speaker 1: filets for him and some butter. But you think that
Speaker 1: would have inspired him to tell me that story. But
Speaker 1: he never told me that story. The kid didn't either way,
Speaker 1: humble young man. Hit everybody with your crraction, okay, um,
Speaker 1: and then rape phils haircut while you're at him okay,
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean the last time I'll do haircut
Speaker 1: first last time. Last time. Phils kind of had like
Speaker 1: a sideways. Yeah, he looked like he looked not quite.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't go that far, but yeah it looks good,
Speaker 1: looks good and time for summer and short sides. Yeah,
Speaker 1: solid eight point five, I'd say eight point eight. You go,
Speaker 1: you running like a number three on the sides there, Phil, Well, here,
Speaker 1: I've got stick straight here and I hate almost every
Speaker 1: haircut I get. Uh, so this is like this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't mean the clip, the clippers. I used to
Speaker 1: just bring take a number two to my whole head
Speaker 1: when I was growing up. Um, but now I Yeah,
Speaker 1: I asked her to go short, shorter on the sides,
Speaker 1: longer on top. I like, it looks great, Your wife
Speaker 1: like it. Yeah, that's all that matters, exactly, Thanks Steve.
Speaker 1: I'm so jealous why we ask Cram what she thinks
Speaker 1: about it. I've had hair in eight years. I'm so
Speaker 1: jealous of these young guys running around debating. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: still got some though. I can see it growing in
Speaker 1: there just a little bit. But you could grow the
Speaker 1: you could grow the rim out long, I could grow
Speaker 1: the scullet, I suppose if if I wanted to go that.
Speaker 1: I think that when I get there, I'm probably gonna
Speaker 1: do that. Alright, long, that's that long strip. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: just nothing up front. And you know what, I've heard
Speaker 1: that called the Kentucky waterfall. I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: the official PC term, but I like where the correction
Speaker 1: came from. Yeah, that's that's really the point of me
Speaker 1: telling this. So in the spirit of being precise and accurate. Um.
Speaker 1: In our previous episode, when we were talking about dear
Speaker 1: vehicle collisions, I had mentioned a bunch of Wisconsin counties
Speaker 1: ranking up top in terms of the number of collisions,
Speaker 1: and one of them I just completely butchered the pronunciation
Speaker 1: of it's spelled w a u k e s h A,
Speaker 1: and I pronounced it wa keisha. And I did say
Speaker 1: I was probably not saying that correctly. UM. And later
Speaker 1: I I'm not a huge Instagram user, but on it
Speaker 1: for for work and such, and so I I saw
Speaker 1: that I had had a d M. D M Yeah,
Speaker 1: damn me m hmmm. It was important to that person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I would think the only reason I'm surprised by
Speaker 1: that is it seems a good way to have your
Speaker 1: your correction go unnoticed, all right, something like because you're
Speaker 1: relying on someone like digging through d M. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a real hail Mary. I mean, you know, when
Speaker 1: I'm on there, you'll see little notifications. So I paid attention.
Speaker 1: I paid attention. UM. But I think the moral of
Speaker 1: the story here is, if you really want your correction
Speaker 1: to be noted, you should email the meat eater the
Speaker 1: meteator at the meat eator dot com and put in
Speaker 1: big capital letters correction. Yeah, actually sorry, it's a meat
Speaker 1: eater at the Steve people d m me all the
Speaker 1: time trying to get me to feed ideas to you.
Speaker 1: They're like, Steve will never see read if if I
Speaker 1: write to him. But Phil exactly, well, I mean I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't get too many uh d M so I
Speaker 1: will pay attention to those that come through. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the correct pronunciation was pointed out to me in a
Speaker 1: lovely note from from a listener who made himself known.
Speaker 1: So it's NFL linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Joe Shobert.
Speaker 1: So thanks Joe. Um. He very clearly spelled out how
Speaker 1: it should be pronounced walk a shaw. He was like,
Speaker 1: I grew up, I grew up there, and you pronounce
Speaker 1: it w a l K dash a H dash dash
Speaker 1: s h a w So I just I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's so clear, and I butchered it. So man, we
Speaker 1: should uh we should have Maybe you should reach out
Speaker 1: to him because we were wanting to get that football
Speaker 1: player that likes to eat squirrels. Maybe he likes eat squirrels,
Speaker 1: but we should have him one and we could do
Speaker 1: a thing where we test uh if if he know,
Speaker 1: like well, we could test my NFL knowledge against his
Speaker 1: outdoor knowledge. Oh boy, I think we've got a lot
Speaker 1: of NFL. We could like rate mine on a sliding
Speaker 1: scale of one. Intend, like rate my NFL knowledge on
Speaker 1: sliding scale one intended and rate his outdoor knowledge on
Speaker 1: sliding scale. Would be so you get the highest score.
Speaker 1: Uh walk a shot sounds like something that we should
Speaker 1: have Clay nucom say, let Clay pronounce it. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: would do a good job at him. Uh. He likes
Speaker 1: those kind of arguments too. A couple of I don't
Speaker 1: know these are crack Yeah, one kind of correction um
Speaker 1: and one note. So we we covered last week. We
Speaker 1: we got to talk for quite a while about fish
Speaker 1: poaching operation at my home state of Michigan, where these
Speaker 1: boys got caught with like way too many fish in
Speaker 1: the freezer. Okay, point there's a couple different points here.
Speaker 1: One is that so these ones that we're talking about,
Speaker 1: how in some states, let's say you have a daily
Speaker 1: bag limit of give me give me something five five.
Speaker 1: But what so people in the South to try to
Speaker 1: you don't have wallet try it's a fish. Um. So
Speaker 1: do you have a daily possession limit of five walleye. No,
Speaker 1: you have a daily bag limit called daily bag limit
Speaker 1: of five wallet. And you might notice in your fishing
Speaker 1: regulations that it says possession limit of two daily bag
Speaker 1: limits that meaning in your possession you cannot have more
Speaker 1: than two daily. You can't have any more than ten walleye.
Speaker 1: But what varies by state to state, what varies from
Speaker 1: state to state is whether or not what varies from
Speaker 1: state to state is whether or not it being cleaned
Speaker 1: and in your freezer counts like in Alaska, it once
Speaker 1: it's processed and at its final place. So it's like
Speaker 1: it gets to its sort of final resting place and
Speaker 1: it's processed, it is no longer part of your daily
Speaker 1: bag limit or the possession limit. I'm sorry, just keeps
Speaker 1: screening that up. It's not part of your possession limit. Um.
Speaker 1: If you're driving home from a fishing trip and you
Speaker 1: have UH and you're in a you're in this five
Speaker 1: walleye a day place, you're driving home from a fishing
Speaker 1: trip and you've got eleven walleye and you're cooler your
Speaker 1: one walleye over um, But you could get home and
Speaker 1: put those eleven Walleye and your freezer, and you may
Speaker 1: or may not be clear, depending on what's going on
Speaker 1: in your state. I even had I took this question
Speaker 1: one time to UH trooper in Alaska. They don't have
Speaker 1: they don't come game wards of the game law are
Speaker 1: done by state troopers, UM, who you know, kind of
Speaker 1: have full breadth of enforcement across all laws. But a
Speaker 1: trooper is telling me. I was like, what if I
Speaker 1: have a fish shack and I can process and free
Speaker 1: stuff at my fish shack, but then I want to
Speaker 1: bring it from my fish shack to home. And he said,
Speaker 1: and he told me that the way they look at
Speaker 1: it would be that if I've processed it and got
Speaker 1: it to you know, it's sort of like final form,
Speaker 1: and I put it in my freezer at my fish shack,
Speaker 1: I'm that it's not then part of my possession limit,
Speaker 1: even though I need to do it, even though I
Speaker 1: need to transport it again to another home. He says,
Speaker 1: you're cool, Uh, Texas, it turns out same thing. You're
Speaker 1: fine once it's in your freezer. Michigan, that's not the case,
Speaker 1: and uh, and apologies. I have to I have to apologize.
Speaker 1: A Michigan conservation officer rhote her to say he was
Speaker 1: pretty disappointed in me for some of my comments about
Speaker 1: this situation. Uh and and here's where he first off,
Speaker 1: he goes on to say that that this freezer search,
Speaker 1: I should probably explain what what it was, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: some guys in here on County, Michigan got caught like
Speaker 1: way to me, fishing the freezer. And they had eighty
Speaker 1: five bags eighty five bags like ziply bags of perch
Speaker 1: and wall i with hundreds and you know, way over
Speaker 1: the possession limit, laid out like a drug bust. One
Speaker 1: of the things I said, that is warranted here, As
Speaker 1: I said, I bet you there was more going on,
Speaker 1: like like it's not like people just show up randomly
Speaker 1: doing freezer checks, like I was saying, there's probably something
Speaker 1: that led to this. And and this guy doesn't want
Speaker 1: to be identified, but this guy said that they had
Speaker 1: been a hundred and twenty fish over their daily limit,
Speaker 1: which led them to wanting to have a look in
Speaker 1: the freezer. So there's that. Do we know what kind
Speaker 1: of fish and wall and panfish which I gathered to
Speaker 1: me like sies, bluegills, whatnot. So the guy was the
Speaker 1: guy's disappointed to me for not condemning having over your
Speaker 1: bag limit, over your possession limit, and I should I
Speaker 1: should be clear like that's the case. What I got
Speaker 1: hung up on. What I got hung up on what
Speaker 1: I expressed and talked about, was I talked about how
Speaker 1: common um that practice was and how unaware when I
Speaker 1: was growing up in that state, how unaware the people
Speaker 1: I grew up with were about that rule. Just it
Speaker 1: just wasn't known. I don't think maybe they didn't go
Speaker 1: out of their way to consider it, but no one.
Speaker 1: I was never part of a conversation as a kid
Speaker 1: in Michigan about I can't fish because I already have
Speaker 1: ten wall I frozen. It just wasn't a thing. And
Speaker 1: so I expressed that, Man, when I see that, I
Speaker 1: just see like everybody I grew up with freezer. Um.
Speaker 1: I didn't mean that to say that I think that
Speaker 1: it's good. I just meant to say that it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, did I I saw something in that, and
Speaker 1: he was saying that I didn't clearly articulate that it's
Speaker 1: simply just not acceptable and that the regulations are there
Speaker 1: for a reason. Correct. I apologize, that's true, don't break
Speaker 1: that law. It's there for a reason, um and not.
Speaker 1: But and when I looked at that, I just couldn't
Speaker 1: help but think of my dad's friends and and they're
Speaker 1: freezer and they're just complete how shocked they would have
Speaker 1: probably have been to realize that there was that was
Speaker 1: a thing, that's all. Was that good enough? I also
Speaker 1: think the way you said and not but it really
Speaker 1: reveals that you've been married for a while. That was yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I feel that you got like a little too
Speaker 1: mad about that situation with the kids. And I'll still
Speaker 1: go to dinner all right there, Yeah, there you go. Um,
Speaker 1: what do you think about that? Just sitting in on
Speaker 1: that apology? I think it was well done. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it was well done. Did feel it felt very diplomatic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What I don't want to do is I don't want
Speaker 1: to like grovel, but I want to be like, you're right, dude,
Speaker 1: you're right. Yeah. It was straight up. Okay, it's coming
Speaker 1: from the academic. It's true. Don't like you know what
Speaker 1: it is, Phil, It's that I took for granted, took
Speaker 1: for granted that people would understand, don't do that, like,
Speaker 1: don't do that right, don't go like follow your state laws,
Speaker 1: like just follow the state laws. Yeah, um, I mean
Speaker 1: you've also never said otherwise, you don't practice otherwise, so
Speaker 1: I know, but but but but I could see that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wasn't he his thing that I was like making
Speaker 1: light of it, And I was just more like, wow,
Speaker 1: I was telling you before the show. I picked up
Speaker 1: on the same vibes he was. He was picking up
Speaker 1: just like it's sort of even though this you just said,
Speaker 1: this isn't what you were saying. It was sort of
Speaker 1: like we did that, like not we but you know,
Speaker 1: I knew people did did this all the time growing up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's whatever. That's sort of the vibe I got. Really, Yeah,
Speaker 1: why don't you flag it? At the time, Phil do
Speaker 1: your show? Man, you couldn't see I couldn't see what
Speaker 1: was going on in your That's right. My eyes are
Speaker 1: open now though. Oh that was taking you to no idea?
Speaker 1: What was going on? Man? What else about possession limits?
Speaker 1: Were were were gonna talk about? Oh? I know, I was
Speaker 1: gonna talk about, um, just observation. So uh, last night
Speaker 1: we fished. We fished for some brook trout and that
Speaker 1: was the native trout you know growing up in Michigan,
Speaker 1: speaking of bring full circle to Michigan does a native
Speaker 1: trout and here in many parts of the West, Like
Speaker 1: when was all that going on when people are turning
Speaker 1: brook trout loose? I think around the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: you know, it was back and like the mindset was like, hey,
Speaker 1: more fish than merrier, you know, if they'll live there
Speaker 1: and put them there, and uh they put They introduced
Speaker 1: brook trout in a lot of these rivers out here,
Speaker 1: the same thing they introduced rainbow trout and brown trout.
Speaker 1: But brook trout are kind of like more accustomed to
Speaker 1: these small, fast flowing, kind of nutrient poor, high elevation
Speaker 1: rivers and the yeah, they compete more aggressively with the
Speaker 1: native trout here, which is the cutthroat trout um an
Speaker 1: eastern cutthroat east slope cutthroat trout, Like east of the
Speaker 1: Content divide, cut throat trout are hurting bad. Um. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of rivers where you can't keep a
Speaker 1: lot of these streams around here in rivers in this district,
Speaker 1: like you can't keep cutthroat out of the river. But
Speaker 1: brook trout, which were introduced on purpose, but now they're frowned.
Speaker 1: Their presence is frowned upon. You're allowed twenty a day.
Speaker 1: So you could imagine we talk about the importance of
Speaker 1: looking at your legs, right, you can imagine a situation
Speaker 1: where someone would be h up in a stream fishing around,
Speaker 1: and you need to understand that that one, you can
Speaker 1: have twenty of that one with a few spots difference
Speaker 1: that one none at all. So luckily they're pretty easy
Speaker 1: to tell a part, that's all. Yeah, Byron was asking
Speaker 1: about that, or someone was asking about that they're worried about,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, you know, you know, just give
Speaker 1: it a good look. Bring your trout chart. You know
Speaker 1: what what sort of tackle were you catching him with? Uh?
Speaker 1: Me personally? Well, yeah, you and the crew that you
Speaker 1: were with, you take kids, you know, there's just a
Speaker 1: couple of work people. Because we had like a meeting
Speaker 1: and then went into that. Um we had fly poles.
Speaker 1: My wife want to try to catch one on a
Speaker 1: fly rod, which she gave up on that, uh, and
Speaker 1: then I showed her how to huk a worm out
Speaker 1: there and let it sit and started railing on him.
Speaker 1: Still water, no beaver ponds still yeah, well that and
Speaker 1: moving water. But there's a big hole, big deep area
Speaker 1: behind a beaver up above a beaver dam, and they
Speaker 1: were in there. It was hot, probably down trying to
Speaker 1: cool off down there A lot them down in there. Um,
Speaker 1: here's an inner us. The thing we're talking about avian
Speaker 1: raptors killing livestock. Someone must have brought in about this.
Speaker 1: The New Zealand Kia make his noise, Johnny. You know,
Speaker 1: I listened to a few on YouTube this morning, and uh,
Speaker 1: they're pretty similar to a cow elk if you take
Speaker 1: out like the first continant, I guess instead of just
Speaker 1: being like a yeah, it's like a kieah yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you know, depending on what they're saying, it's
Speaker 1: louder or you know, back and forth. But yeah, we are.
Speaker 1: We experienced keys when we were in New Zealand, and
Speaker 1: we were always told we did a bunch of backpacking
Speaker 1: and there you instead of beinging Tansey to stay in
Speaker 1: these huts that are all over the place on this
Speaker 1: these trail systems. And what's those huts again? I can't remember.
Speaker 1: Do they have a specific social name. Yeah, they're cool though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're great in American the trash him. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I've told that story about how we were hiking. We
Speaker 1: had Americans ahead of us, and they were trashing the
Speaker 1: cabins ahead of us. Was it was terrible anyways, not all,
Speaker 1: but a lot of Mary's don't know what to do
Speaker 1: with the situation, like that it's too good to be true,
Speaker 1: so screw it up. Uh yeah, free cabin. What's he's
Speaker 1: done with firewood left behind? There's gotta be a catch
Speaker 1: a graffiti. But no, the tip that was given to
Speaker 1: us was like that they will they like shiny objects
Speaker 1: and they'll mess with stuff. So when we would leave
Speaker 1: to go fishing for the day, like don't leave you know,
Speaker 1: anything out on a deck or somewhere, because they if
Speaker 1: they can actually get it away, they will just to
Speaker 1: like mess with it and play with it. But they'll
Speaker 1: also just sit there and peck at it and mess
Speaker 1: with it. And you could have, you know, a hole
Speaker 1: in your backpack or you know, a fly reel completely
Speaker 1: ripped apart. And like they said that they will actually
Speaker 1: get into stuff and just make a mess and whatever.
Speaker 1: So we were very conscious of tucking away things. But
Speaker 1: beautiful bird an alpine parrot. I feel like maybe when
Speaker 1: I was there, I feel like maybe we saw him,
Speaker 1: but I didn't really it didn't really register with me
Speaker 1: that it's I mean, this thing looks like a full
Speaker 1: on parrot, red green, and here he is flying across
Speaker 1: the snow field up in the mountains, an alpine parrot.
Speaker 1: But they'll they'll kill lambs, they'll kill lambs and feet
Speaker 1: on sheet. Yeah, they like land on the back, this
Speaker 1: guy said. They they land on the back and then
Speaker 1: kind of peck through the wool and peck into the
Speaker 1: back fat, peck into the fat around the the kidneys.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's it's been a big deal. What a
Speaker 1: way to go. An alpine parrot backs through to your kidneys.
Speaker 1: Probably didn't see that coming. Like, no one's gonna believe
Speaker 1: this much. People ask you, what happened to my kidney?
Speaker 1: No one's gonna believe me. Um. They have some interesting
Speaker 1: classifications in New Zealand. They had the bird had a
Speaker 1: classification UM at one point in time as naturally uncommon,
Speaker 1: which is an interesting classification if you think about it.
Speaker 1: That's a good one, like you would have you know,
Speaker 1: it would be applied to um all right, you see
Speaker 1: it apply to wolverines, right like, just naturally uncommon. Never
Speaker 1: were many, aren't many? But then they bumped it in two,
Speaker 1: they bumped it to uh nationally endangered but like naturally
Speaker 1: uncommon as a way of describing certain species, and the
Speaker 1: sheep rejoice. Yeah, yeah, it's a good bad day for
Speaker 1: Kia's good day for sheep. I want to cover off
Speaker 1: on one last cist. We kind of officially put this
Speaker 1: to rest, but then the guy wrote in, like, off,
Speaker 1: I find that if you say like, okay, we're not
Speaker 1: talking about I just have to say that's a common
Speaker 1: story on this podcast. Okay, we're never talking about this again.
Speaker 1: Because then someone just wrote in but people, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think a guy out here like they're not talking about anymore.
Speaker 1: And then he'll be like, oh yeah, wait to hear
Speaker 1: about my daughter's sister. And then and then they send
Speaker 1: in pictures, so we're talking about these sisters. I was
Speaker 1: talking about this create like that my brother had a
Speaker 1: girlfriendnamed the Tower of Power and she had his sister
Speaker 1: moving and head teeth in it, and it's this whole thing.
Speaker 1: So this guy, he doesn't want to say who he is.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to humiliate his daughter, which I respect.
Speaker 1: His daughter had to go and have one of these
Speaker 1: dermoid sisters removed from her abdomen, he sent in a
Speaker 1: picture of it to back it up. Goodness, sixteen pounder,
Speaker 1: a sixteen pounder. The doctor's hands are holding it and
Speaker 1: it's as though he's holding a deer fawn, but it's
Speaker 1: not spotted or brown. That's hard to look at, sixteen pounder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to look at now, if you'd have done an unboxing
Speaker 1: video of that sixteen pounder where they open it up
Speaker 1: and see what's in there, teeth and jaws and whatnot,
Speaker 1: that would have gotten that little filter they put on
Speaker 1: there that says sensitive content, you would be the first
Speaker 1: to like and subscribe that. I'd like unfollowed the wild
Speaker 1: Turkey Dock and just follow that side. I was gonna
Speaker 1: say no more. Nature is metal. Every day he digs
Speaker 1: a little deeper into that cest and just makes an
Speaker 1: Instagram channel out of it. I would be enraptured. Someone
Speaker 1: who wants, and I do profile to really blow up
Speaker 1: it should be. Yeah, it's really I'm sure that exists already.
Speaker 1: You have that removed and you just lost sixteen pounds. Man,
Speaker 1: I almost want to know a little more backstory, Like
Speaker 1: you think something like that must have been messing with
Speaker 1: her health. Oh, he doesn't really lay out he just
Speaker 1: kind of gets to the cold, hard facts. But there's
Speaker 1: got it. Yeah, I mean just gotta be like it
Speaker 1: can't be like, oh wow, I didn't know. I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, what's what's the timeframe on how quickly do
Speaker 1: these things grow? Before they finally made the call. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's get rid of this thing. You know what,
Speaker 1: We'll never know, folks, We're not gonna talk about it anymore.
Speaker 1: Great points to you know what, when we have next
Speaker 1: time we have Adam Lazar on, maybe he could do
Speaker 1: like a quick final word on dermoid SIPs man. I
Speaker 1: was not I was not expecting pictures of giant sis
Speaker 1: this morning. Have you seen this picture? I just looked
Speaker 1: at it. It's I'm pretty pros if you don't. If
Speaker 1: you showed me that picture, I would and you said, like,
Speaker 1: what are you looking at? I would say it must
Speaker 1: be a someone had a baby and they put the
Speaker 1: baby back in the placenta and took a picture of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like a fetus. Sure I wish I could
Speaker 1: do that. Can you do that? Philm We're like like
Speaker 1: a like a wow, sure, no, that's more. I completely
Speaker 1: understand why why you don't want to talk about this again,
Speaker 1: but that it keeps coming up. Oh, because this is great.
Speaker 1: Oh no, it's it's a it's a it's titillating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's classic train wreck. What's this, Scott speaking of titillating,
Speaker 1: let's talking about hunting fishing in the New South, Oh transition.
Speaker 1: So hit me with hit us with what the book,
Speaker 1: Hit us with the book. I mean, it's funny that
Speaker 1: it's such an old book that we're here talking about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: part I don't know about it until. I think. Part
Speaker 1: of that has to do with, you know, like I
Speaker 1: said at you know, at the beginning, you know, started
Speaker 1: teaching at a small private college, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: all the time I thought I was gonna be spending
Speaker 1: researching and writing, it's just time I spent teaching and
Speaker 1: doing administrative work and things like that. But part of
Speaker 1: it is I didn't know my ass from my elbow
Speaker 1: when I when I published the book, and I didn't
Speaker 1: really know how to you know, how to promote it.
Speaker 1: And the mistake I made at the time, I think,
Speaker 1: was to you know, ship it out to people academics
Speaker 1: who were studying these topics. To be honest with you,
Speaker 1: It never occurred to me to try to connect directly
Speaker 1: with the hunting and fishing community. It just never go on.
Speaker 1: So Field and Stream didn't do a little letter to
Speaker 1: the editor about it or yeah, and then you know
Speaker 1: the press, you know, they basically they didn't say this,
Speaker 1: but I think the implication was, Okay, you know, first
Speaker 1: time academic, you know, publishing academic. Uh, you know, we
Speaker 1: do support and promotional work and lots and lots of
Speaker 1: aggressive stuff for people that are established, so good luck
Speaker 1: with that. I didn't know what I was doing, and
Speaker 1: by then I was focused on teaching more and just
Speaker 1: sort of did some local events and didn't worry about it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, in hindsight, I wish I had
Speaker 1: been a lot more aggressive with getting it out there.
Speaker 1: Is most your work as a historian, you focused on sports, yea,
Speaker 1: you know they allowed you to do that. Well that
Speaker 1: that that's kind of that's kind of an interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: backstory of how I stumbled into the topic because when
Speaker 1: I was finishing college, I thought I was gonna gonna
Speaker 1: go to graduate school and and you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: know much about the profession of history and some of
Speaker 1: these you know, novel topics that I thought would be great.
Speaker 1: People haven't written on this, of course they had, you know,
Speaker 1: I thought, okay, it would be kind of fresh to
Speaker 1: study sports. No, it's not fresh to study sports. Plenty
Speaker 1: of people study sports, and plenty of people historians who
Speaker 1: focus on sports. Yeah, exactly, and and I didn't realize that.
Speaker 1: And uh, for a lot of more traditional academics, you know,
Speaker 1: studying sports is and it's a little frowned on. It's
Speaker 1: seen as frivolous or you know, academics can be elitist,
Speaker 1: you know, d bags sometimes. Yeah, amazingly not me though,
Speaker 1: of course I don't want to lean into that. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't want to lean into this too. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I just said that we have all kinds
Speaker 1: of academics on. But I guess we just filter filter
Speaker 1: all the bad ones. I don't know. You know, do
Speaker 1: you talk to an academic and think he's just not right?
Speaker 1: Did he's a d bag? Rin? Um? No, I don't
Speaker 1: think we've I haven't had that experience yet for this podcast.
Speaker 1: But everybody seems to have a story that they heard
Speaker 1: about an academic elitist or the act community being elitist
Speaker 1: in person. Absolutely, but like for this podcast, I think
Speaker 1: we just we just have a kind of a good
Speaker 1: But it's one of those things that yeah, but it
Speaker 1: is one of those things that everybody's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: those pretentious But then I just the more I think
Speaker 1: about it, it hasn't been my finding. I was recently saying,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I said it here, but if
Speaker 1: there's one story Americans like, it's a story about a
Speaker 1: celebrity who was an asshole. And if there's another story,
Speaker 1: they like, it's about a celebrity who did something really nice.
Speaker 1: But in that order, they prefer one about like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I met him and he was horrible. He was yelling
Speaker 1: at a waiter. But then the other one would be, oh,
Speaker 1: when he gave the kid twenty dollars. Like people love
Speaker 1: those stories, you know, and people love a good story
Speaker 1: about a bad academic. Yeah, And you know, it makes
Speaker 1: me wonder when when you went around the room and said,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I've come across a love of
Speaker 1: academics who are d bags. It reminded me the old
Speaker 1: expression that that if you don't know who the office
Speaker 1: asshole is, it's probably you. So so maybe hey, you
Speaker 1: know what, I uh just pardon me for one second,
Speaker 1: because you might already know this. But when I was
Speaker 1: reading the other day I was reading, I went down
Speaker 1: this kind of like research. I had to research something,
Speaker 1: and that let me to wonder about something else, and
Speaker 1: that let me to wonder about something else. Um, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you a quick what I was doing. I was
Speaker 1: reading about, you know, the guy we bought a lask Off,
Speaker 1: the one of the roman Offs. This is Alexander to
Speaker 1: the second. The Russians are like, we bought a lask
Speaker 1: Off film his kid in eighteen seventy two for his
Speaker 1: twenty second birthday, came out and hunted buffalo with Buffalo
Speaker 1: Bill Cody and Custer went on a hunting trip and
Speaker 1: then Buffalo Bill Cody get that like shortly after got
Speaker 1: a Congressional Medal of Honor in the Indian Wars. It
Speaker 1: was then rescinded and then given back to him. But
Speaker 1: that got me reading about, uh, why they sold us
Speaker 1: Alaska in the first place. And you know that It's
Speaker 1: like how when you learn about that, you learn about
Speaker 1: the Seward's folly, Seward's ice box. That that because like
Speaker 1: Seward was the guy on the US and did the
Speaker 1: purchase and you always hear that people that he was
Speaker 1: ridiculed and lampooned for buying Alaska, and people like to
Speaker 1: point out like and look, no right, but uh, this
Speaker 1: his story was saying that is one of like the
Speaker 1: undying myths in American history was that it was ridiculed
Speaker 1: and lampooned. And he went and looked at newspaper editorials.
Speaker 1: He found like fifty newspaper editorials about the purchase, forty
Speaker 1: nine were overwhelmingly positive. Public opinion was overwhelmingly positive. But
Speaker 1: some guy throughout like the Seward's ice box thing, and
Speaker 1: people latched onto it, and he said, you can't kill
Speaker 1: the myth that Americans. You can't kill the myth that
Speaker 1: somehow Americans didn't want Alaska like they wanted it bad,
Speaker 1: and the Rooski's sold it to us because they were
Speaker 1: in a fight with They were always worn with Britain,
Speaker 1: and they knew that with the British presence in Canada
Speaker 1: that the next time they got to fight, they'd lose
Speaker 1: Alaska anyways, and so they just wanted to dump it
Speaker 1: on us because we'd be able to hang onto it
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to have to deal with that.
Speaker 1: So anyways, hunting, fishing in the New South. So you
Speaker 1: were interested in sports. Yeah, I thought I was gonna
Speaker 1: study sports, and when I went to grad school this
Speaker 1: sort of uh sports. Another guy wants to do baseball,
Speaker 1: and I have interesting idea. I'm sure you do, but baseball?
Speaker 1: Come on, you know, can you can you help us
Speaker 1: understand if you're gonna do sports as a historian, what
Speaker 1: does that mean? Like like, you know, like baseball, like
Speaker 1: what aspect of it? Right? Well, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: really about the kind of the social and cultural implications.
Speaker 1: What larger connections you know, can you draw? Basically For me,
Speaker 1: I always tell people that, you know, we try to
Speaker 1: think of what historians do is as a mirror, you know,
Speaker 1: So what kind of refracting mirror can you get to
Speaker 1: to demonstrate you know, larger social truths, you know, by
Speaker 1: one specific topic. And you know, I think the academics
Speaker 1: have a tendency to be really elitist and they think,
Speaker 1: you know, I've actually heard academics say this at conferences.
Speaker 1: I I when I did a panel on my book
Speaker 1: a number of years ago, somebody said, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I just I just don't get the topic. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because a lot of people hunt. But just
Speaker 1: because a whole bunch of people are really into something,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean it's worthy of study. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: I think you need to think about what you just said.
Speaker 1: You know, if if if a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: are into something, it's by definition worthy of study. And
Speaker 1: who are you know? And historians are famous for sort
Speaker 1: of declaring certain topics acceptable and unacceptable. You back up
Speaker 1: the president of diplomats, kings, popes, generals, that's what we study.
Speaker 1: You know, if you just said, let's study the environment,
Speaker 1: let's study women, let's study sports, they would have said, why,
Speaker 1: you know, what's the point of that, Just because everybody
Speaker 1: in the world loves this stuff, and you know, and
Speaker 1: what the funny thing is And this is maybe off topic,
Speaker 1: but one of the complaints I have about the discipline
Speaker 1: of history is when people indulge that like, well, okay, sports, okay,
Speaker 1: it's popular, but let's let's study something more important. What
Speaker 1: that does is it removes historians further and further away
Speaker 1: from the lived experiences of real people and makes them
Speaker 1: less relevant. And then people wonder, you know, why people
Speaker 1: don't read books anymore? You know, so it's sort of like,
Speaker 1: in my mind, it's embrace the things that are popular.
Speaker 1: If they're popular, that means they're culturally resonant, and it matters.
Speaker 1: So part of the reason, like a lot of people
Speaker 1: like you know, kind of have you know, didn't exactly
Speaker 1: cruise through grad school. It got to be kind of
Speaker 1: a drag after a while finishing the dissertation. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that kept me going every time I
Speaker 1: run across someone who would say, oh god, you're hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing, I'd be like, all right, let's let's finish
Speaker 1: this thing. Sure, just to show I'm gonna steal the
Speaker 1: argument you just made for when I retired, I write
Speaker 1: a book, anti Shakespeare book. I'm gonna kind of adapt
Speaker 1: that argument from my anti Shakespeare book. That sounds removing
Speaker 1: people from things they can even like removing kids at
Speaker 1: an early age, introducing them to the idea of reading
Speaker 1: things they'll never understand. Yeah, and you know, and and
Speaker 1: relate to you use the best example, I think too,
Speaker 1: because I hear this all the time. You know, people
Speaker 1: bring up Shakespeare and they'll say, well, what most people
Speaker 1: don't understand that the voice they would use and they say,
Speaker 1: but no, yeah, exactly, I've heard enough time. Not that
Speaker 1: it doesn't come naturally to me obviously, but but I
Speaker 1: can fake it. I can fake me anti bag um.
Speaker 1: What most people would say, at least the kind of
Speaker 1: arrogant academics as they would say, well, what you need
Speaker 1: to understand end is that Shakespeare was was consumed by
Speaker 1: the masses. It was art for the average person back then.
Speaker 1: That that that means it would have been great for them.
Speaker 1: Exactly was it was great for the average people back then?
Speaker 1: And and what I tell him is what we do
Speaker 1: this is we don't do that exactly. So it's like
Speaker 1: you're saying we should study Shakespeare because the average person
Speaker 1: really connected with that at the time. Well, my thought
Speaker 1: would then be, what does the average person connect with now?
Speaker 1: And let's study that. You know. So, I mean I
Speaker 1: like Shakespeare, don't get me wrong, but but I don't
Speaker 1: think the idea holes that. You know, the sort of
Speaker 1: division between high and low culture always sort of ticked
Speaker 1: me off as as an historian. So because if you're
Speaker 1: if you're not studying history to study people, what what
Speaker 1: the heck are you doing for? But you don't, you don't, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's not like a movement of like populous historians are
Speaker 1: there there, Yeah, there actually is. Um. Actually, part of
Speaker 1: the reason I have a kind of the outlook on
Speaker 1: history that I do is I went to grad school
Speaker 1: at the University of Pittsburgh, and uh, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a movement in in in the discipline of history that's
Speaker 1: been going on now for the past thirty or forty
Speaker 1: years called history from Below, and it's it's emphasizing you know,
Speaker 1: working class people and uh, cultural traditions and political movements
Speaker 1: that start from the bottom as opposed to from the top,
Speaker 1: and looking at history not from that old perspective of kings,
Speaker 1: princess generals, but but the average person. Marcus Reddicker and
Speaker 1: a few other professors that I had when I was
Speaker 1: at PIT were proponents of that, and that's sort of
Speaker 1: where I come from. I try to, you know, try
Speaker 1: to not be one of those academics that's studying something
Speaker 1: that's completely esoteric or you know, completely irrelevant to people's lives.
Speaker 1: Although people would tell me that for them, maybe this
Speaker 1: topics irrelevant, but it's definitely not, you know, high culture.
Speaker 1: Is what I'm trying, is what I'm sure to avoid
Speaker 1: or at least an exclusionary high culture. So how did
Speaker 1: you how did you tell us how you hit on
Speaker 1: the idea eventually as you as you explored the sports landscape. Well,
Speaker 1: I I knew I wanted to stick to sports because
Speaker 1: it was just something I was really into and I
Speaker 1: and I really rejected that idea that because sports is
Speaker 1: so popular that it must not be worthy of study.
Speaker 1: That seem backwards to me. But I did recognize that
Speaker 1: I gotta I gotta shift gears a little bit. And
Speaker 1: I took a seminar on slavery, and I had the
Speaker 1: idea of maybe i'll, you know, I'll do a research
Speaker 1: paper on slaves and sports. And the professor teaching the
Speaker 1: class said, well, the best place to go there are
Speaker 1: the Works Progress Administration slave interviews. You know, in the
Speaker 1: in the thirties, twenties and thirties, there was a part
Speaker 1: of the you know, the h Worst Progress Administration w
Speaker 1: p A. Uh they sent uh interviewers all over the
Speaker 1: country to interview former slaves before they passed away because
Speaker 1: they were pretty old by then. And UH, he said,
Speaker 1: you know, reading knows is going to be your best
Speaker 1: bet if there's mentions of slaves and sports. I thought,
Speaker 1: maybe i'd find stuff about boxing, you know, so when
Speaker 1: you start looking at the slavery, you were still looking
Speaker 1: at sport, looking at what I don't know, like I
Speaker 1: guess the definition of sports? Yeah, games? Yeah, how how
Speaker 1: did does the slave system you know allow for that?
Speaker 1: And you know, I had been kind of really interested
Speaker 1: into certain certain stories there. For example, there was a
Speaker 1: slave boxer named Tom Mullineux who actually was was sent
Speaker 1: overseas to England by his master, and he actually fought
Speaker 1: the British champion uh in a in a very publicized
Speaker 1: knot match in England that nobody in the States paid
Speaker 1: attention to it all, you know, so there was some
Speaker 1: interesting He was owned by a person, Yeah he was.
Speaker 1: He was an enslaved boxer, and it wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: all that common, but it did exist. And I thought, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna find all kind of interesting stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and I found there wasn't any of that. It was occasional, brief,
Speaker 1: little snippets. But what impressed me was Tom MuLinux. I
Speaker 1: think it's m O L y n e a u X,
Speaker 1: and he was that we had I want to spend
Speaker 1: too much time, Max, That's something we could go find out.
Speaker 1: But you go to a place where there's no slavery,
Speaker 1: like slavers abolished, you think he would get there. He
Speaker 1: just walk out the door. Well that's it, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's I've heard that argument before and this is
Speaker 1: way more than you want. But um, when England, uh
Speaker 1: you know, passed a series of laws after what was
Speaker 1: called the Somerset case in in the early nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the argument that the courts used was that English air
Speaker 1: is too free for a slave to breathe. And there
Speaker 1: were slaves that were set freed when they were brought
Speaker 1: to mainland England by their master, because the judge would rule, hey,
Speaker 1: there's no slavery in England, all the possessions we own. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, but then once they abolished slavery, they
Speaker 1: were setting slaves free that that arrived on British soil
Speaker 1: fairly regularly, uh In in that time period didn't seem
Speaker 1: to happen that way. For Tom Molino, though, it is
Speaker 1: a little different. Situation is bizarre, man, and and it
Speaker 1: actually it actually kind of now I think about it
Speaker 1: sets up the kind of the kind of argument of
Speaker 1: the book a little bit. Because um, a lot of
Speaker 1: people found it strange that a boxer like this guy
Speaker 1: is gonna gonna make a celebrity out of his slave boxer,
Speaker 1: travel with him, let him fight people, fight white men.
Speaker 1: How how that doesn't seem like it would fit with
Speaker 1: the slave system. But the critical thing I think that
Speaker 1: that helps get going with the books argument is that
Speaker 1: so much of how white observers are gonna look at
Speaker 1: the sporting activities and for that matter of subsistence activities
Speaker 1: of slaves and then freed people of color, is what
Speaker 1: is there kind of orientation toward me as the master?
Speaker 1: You know, so you certainly would never want to, Hey,
Speaker 1: look there's a there's a slave and he's over there
Speaker 1: beating the hell out of that white guy. Somebody shoot him.
Speaker 1: That's awful that can happen. But yet the same thing
Speaker 1: is going to happen in a boxing ring because the
Speaker 1: owner of Tom Mullin, who was going to say, well,
Speaker 1: since he's my slave, he's an extension of me. That
Speaker 1: means I have the best boxer in the world. I
Speaker 1: have that status. So sort of more independent assertive activities
Speaker 1: by slaves, if they're done for the benefit of the master,
Speaker 1: we're seeing as pretty okay. Who won the bout when
Speaker 1: he went and fought in England. Uh, of course, I'm
Speaker 1: in a blank on that. I think the English champions
Speaker 1: name was Tom crib cr I B B and I
Speaker 1: think crib one, I think, But I also think now
Speaker 1: that I think I think there was a there was
Speaker 1: a return match. I'm not sure if it was in
Speaker 1: the US or if it was there. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a cool area of expertise. Yeah, it's a cool topic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so I started reading all these these slave interviews
Speaker 1: and our former slave interviews, and it was you know,
Speaker 1: there's several thousand of them, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: fun to read them. And and uh, I was stunned
Speaker 1: by how often hunting and fishing came up. And I
Speaker 1: brought that up to some professors at PIT and you know,
Speaker 1: some of them were like, Okay, that might be might
Speaker 1: be an interesting thing to study, and others were like, well,
Speaker 1: of course, it's a mundane daily activity. Who cares. There's
Speaker 1: probably no larger significance there. Uh So the more I read, though,
Speaker 1: the more I kept thinking, you know, when they when
Speaker 1: they write about these things or talk about it in
Speaker 1: these interviews, they're not just saying Uh, wow, this is great.
Speaker 1: I could feed my family, which which is huge you
Speaker 1: don't of itself, that's a huge thing, you know for
Speaker 1: a slave. If a master is trying to reduce food
Speaker 1: costs and you know, feeding slaves on the cheap, which
Speaker 1: most of them did. You know, slaves were often malnourished,
Speaker 1: and it was you know, it's not a not a
Speaker 1: good scene in that regard. Um. So you know, you could, um,
Speaker 1: you know see a lot of slaves hunting and fishing,
Speaker 1: but they didn't just talk about the nutritional value or
Speaker 1: you know, or the food or even the income from
Speaker 1: selling you know, extra Through some market activities, I started
Speaker 1: to run across more and more little mentions of you know,
Speaker 1: little things like uh, you know I felt free or
Speaker 1: you know, I felt like I was more of a man.
Speaker 1: And those kind of mentions made me think, now there's
Speaker 1: something more here. It's not just about food. There's there's
Speaker 1: there's this story of independence. You know. You know, if
Speaker 1: you're oft in the woods and uh you know you're
Speaker 1: you're hunting small game, um, you may or may not
Speaker 1: be doing something the master wants you to do. And
Speaker 1: if you're doing something he doesn't want you to do, well,
Speaker 1: then that's you know, defying the system, and that's significant
Speaker 1: if you're feeding yourself and your family when the master
Speaker 1: is trying to keep you, you know, slightly mound work,
Speaker 1: so you're more dependent upon upon him than then you're
Speaker 1: pushing back against the system. UM. I think what what
Speaker 1: did it for me was I was reading um a
Speaker 1: published uh diary from from a former slave named Charles Ball.
Speaker 1: I'm forgetting where he would I want to say Georgia,
Speaker 1: but that might not be right. Um. But he had
Speaker 1: this long entry in his in his memoirs because he toured,
Speaker 1: you know, after after emancipation, he toward the country and
Speaker 1: you know, did a lot of speaking about yeah, which
Speaker 1: which was fairly common I'm not fairly common, but I
Speaker 1: mean there's a handful of pretty well known former slaves
Speaker 1: who traveled the country and uh, you know, first as
Speaker 1: abolitionists and then later as you know, kind of reformers
Speaker 1: after emancipation. But Charles Ball wrote about um, the first
Speaker 1: time he got a shotgun because it was you know,
Speaker 1: it was it was prohibited, and he just happened to
Speaker 1: meet someone who had an old, rusty shotgun and he
Speaker 1: had a hiding place and he thought I'll get this,
Speaker 1: and he quietly stashed it away and began to hunt.
Speaker 1: And he talked about the first time he went out
Speaker 1: and hunted with with this old shotgun that he found.
Speaker 1: And I remember the quote because it struck me so much.
Speaker 1: It was short quote too, that helped. But he said,
Speaker 1: but he said, I now began to live well and
Speaker 1: to feel myself, at least in some measure, an independent man.
Speaker 1: And that really struck stuck, stuck with me. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: if that kind of attitude is there, if it was
Speaker 1: seen as as by slaves as in some ways guaranteeing independence,
Speaker 1: while at the same time it was seen as a
Speaker 1: thing from the master's point of view that benefited his operation,
Speaker 1: like it's sort of had both sides to it. I
Speaker 1: was really curious how that would shake out after emancipation,
Speaker 1: you know, basically, like you know, you know, if I
Speaker 1: if I'm a slave owner and I can uh you know, oh,
Speaker 1: you want to go hunt and and and make your
Speaker 1: extra game for your family, go ahead. Look what a wonderful, awesome,
Speaker 1: benevolent master I am. I'm saving money on food provisions,
Speaker 1: and you know this is great? What what could go wrong? Right?
Speaker 1: But then from the slaves point of view, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm feeding myself in a way that you don't intend.
Speaker 1: I'm sneaking off a lot of times to check traps
Speaker 1: or hunt when I'm not supposed to, or you know,
Speaker 1: go fish when I'm not supposed to, uh, engage in
Speaker 1: market activities that are usually not permitted for slaves. So
Speaker 1: for me, it's going to be more about asserting my
Speaker 1: my independence, my mobility, my liberty. Um So there's this
Speaker 1: really deep tradition of sort of different purposes, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of you know, you want to go back to
Speaker 1: the very you know, the older European part of the story.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's no different than you know, the
Speaker 1: poor peasant hunting the king the king's deer, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of same thing, you know, dear for uh, you know,
Speaker 1: for a king, this is a it's a it's a
Speaker 1: it's a thing to be granted as a privilege. It's
Speaker 1: it's a way to control, it's a way to to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, show your standing in society. And as long
Speaker 1: as my slaves are doing it in such a way
Speaker 1: that doesn't mess me up, I am totally fine with it.
Speaker 1: You know, I I I'll cultivate that image. I'll tell
Speaker 1: my friends, I have the best huntsman, I have the
Speaker 1: best dogs, I have the best equipment, because it's an
Speaker 1: extension me as a master, because that was an important
Speaker 1: thing in the minds of elite Southerners back then. Can
Speaker 1: you real quick hit on the word antebellum? Sure, Um,
Speaker 1: just I want to. I want to establish like sort
Speaker 1: of the you know, the timeline a little bit, sure
Speaker 1: what the basic definition of the word just means before
Speaker 1: the war. Um, But when we think about the Antebellum
Speaker 1: period in the US, we we sort of think about
Speaker 1: sort of the period between the Constitution and the Civil War.
Speaker 1: That's sort of the Antebellum period. And more specifically, I
Speaker 1: would say even once we get into the early nineteenth century. Um,
Speaker 1: that's usually what his stories mean when they say Antebellum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's come. It's like, uh, that Antebellum period, Like that
Speaker 1: Antebellum became like the Antebellum Yeah, capital all the cultural
Speaker 1: images and all that. Yeah. Because your book spends a
Speaker 1: chapter or so on the Antebellum period, and then it
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time on the hell's the what's
Speaker 1: the opposite of antibe them. Uh, we'll post bellum. I
Speaker 1: guess that's a little clunkier. People don't use post bellum
Speaker 1: is usually post emancipation is kind of people say in
Speaker 1: these circles. So, uh, explain like what hunting and fishing
Speaker 1: would have looked like m for slaves, Like what what
Speaker 1: kind of activities there? Not what it would look like,
Speaker 1: but what were they actually doing? How are they getting game? Well?
Speaker 1: The kind of the key point I think for both
Speaker 1: slaves that engage in these activities and then and then
Speaker 1: free persons after emancipation is that it's it's a story
Speaker 1: of what's effective and what can I do so that
Speaker 1: you know, there's very little concern for like, well, we
Speaker 1: got to use the proper sporting methods and we've got
Speaker 1: to make sure we you know, we we can't hunt
Speaker 1: with fire, that would be wrong. Now it's like whatever worked,
Speaker 1: whatever we could do, because what mattered was the food.
Speaker 1: What matters was game to sell if they were able
Speaker 1: to do that. So really it was you know, anything,
Speaker 1: you know, any method, any animal that they could get. Um.
Speaker 1: What I think what's interesting about about that question in
Speaker 1: the Antebellum period is because slaves were often limited in
Speaker 1: terms of what they could go after. You know, for example,
Speaker 1: you're not if you're if you're a slave, and even
Speaker 1: if you have permission, you're probably not going to go
Speaker 1: out and start shooting a bunch of deer because local
Speaker 1: planters gonna say, hey, what the heck are you doing.
Speaker 1: That's not for you, you know. Uh. So they developed
Speaker 1: a pretty good reliance on small game, and that was
Speaker 1: a matter of practical necessity. They were abundant, easy, they
Speaker 1: could set simple traps. You know, they could go out
Speaker 1: when they had free time on the weekends. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and do Yeah. Slave dogs were everywhere. It was. It
Speaker 1: was it was just the you know part of the
Speaker 1: scene you know, on on plantations in the South and
Speaker 1: huge part of of of getting extra food. And you could, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, embrace every method imaginable. You know. In some states,
Speaker 1: slaves could hunt with firearms if they had written permission
Speaker 1: from the master and if the master purchased a bond
Speaker 1: basically like okay, you want to have a slave with
Speaker 1: a gun to be an official huntsman for the plantation. Uh.
Speaker 1: We have a state law that says you've got to
Speaker 1: pay a thousand dollar churity. So if something happens if
Speaker 1: that slave does something with that gun that they're not
Speaker 1: supposed to, you gotta pay us a thousand dollars. In
Speaker 1: other words, how secure are you that your slave can
Speaker 1: be trusted with this gun? So it's there that's anti
Speaker 1: to a stuff right there. Well, I mean you can imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, you can imagine the the concern about slaves
Speaker 1: with firearms. It was just it was just not That's why.
Speaker 1: That's one thing that surprising about the book is, Um,
Speaker 1: I would assume like, well, of course not. Then you
Speaker 1: mentioned cases where people that a slave would be allowed
Speaker 1: would have, you know, the resource provided and be able
Speaker 1: allowed to go into the woods and hunt. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: brings up all these which just brings up all these
Speaker 1: practical questions. Um, And I know it's kind of beyond
Speaker 1: the scope of what you did, but uh, how hard
Speaker 1: like how you couldn't just go into the woods and
Speaker 1: then disbanded. I mean, you're separated by hundreds of miles
Speaker 1: of territory. It's just it's just hard to imagine someone
Speaker 1: kind of fluidly moving out of supervision into supervision going
Speaker 1: out at night to hunt. Right, You're you're not supervised,
Speaker 1: You're not but then it's just it's just impossible and practical.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have a family probably, so you'd be
Speaker 1: abandoning your family to take off um and all kinds
Speaker 1: of other obstacles, but just kind of you almost wish
Speaker 1: you could look back and see sort of the parameters
Speaker 1: of it. You know, was going two miles away, Like,
Speaker 1: no way, I can go two miles away. You can
Speaker 1: go down to the river bottom. But yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine sort of epic excursions, the limited time
Speaker 1: that slaves had, you know, because you know, if you're
Speaker 1: in you know, say you know parts of the South
Speaker 1: where they're growing tobacco or cotton um. You know, these
Speaker 1: are what they call the gang system. These are just
Speaker 1: huge groups of slaves in the field, work by an overseer,
Speaker 1: you know, working for when the sun comes up until
Speaker 1: when the sun goes down. There's not a lot of
Speaker 1: time or energy, you know for these kind of activities.
Speaker 1: You know, Sunday's you know, you had to give slaves
Speaker 1: Sunday off because you know, good Christians. Uh so, uh,
Speaker 1: Sundays would be a day you could do it if
Speaker 1: you had young kids that that weren't working out in
Speaker 1: the field yet. They could certainly go out there and
Speaker 1: fish and you know, trap small game and things like that.
Speaker 1: But a lot of it depended upon where you were.
Speaker 1: You know, if you were a slave in like South Carolina,
Speaker 1: for example, and you're on what they called the task system,
Speaker 1: where you know, rice cultivation and some other crops, tended
Speaker 1: to rather than just say, get as many slaves as
Speaker 1: you can, put them out in the field and work
Speaker 1: them with an overseer, there's too many individual small tasks
Speaker 1: that need to be done in say rice cultivation, so
Speaker 1: instead you would just make a list of all the
Speaker 1: work that needed to be done, give individual slaves individual tasks,
Speaker 1: and then tell them as soon as you're finished, you're
Speaker 1: done for the day. So then slaves in those parts
Speaker 1: of the South had motivation finished the task system, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you were Then you then became a specialist at
Speaker 1: a task well not necessarily a specialist, but you were
Speaker 1: basically told on a daily basis, like not like a
Speaker 1: this is your deal for the year. Now, it's like,
Speaker 1: make a daily list, here's what I want you to do.
Speaker 1: As soon as you're done, you can go do your
Speaker 1: own thing. Um. Of course, the catch was that was
Speaker 1: a system where you know, if I could have the
Speaker 1: time to go off and hunt or fish or do
Speaker 1: whatever on my own time. Uh, the system was built
Speaker 1: to put in some pretty severe punishments if I stepped
Speaker 1: out a line. So in in the gang system, there
Speaker 1: was less time for these activities. They still did them,
Speaker 1: but there was less time. And then in the task
Speaker 1: and there's a lot more time. But slaves are limited
Speaker 1: by not wanting to push it too much because the
Speaker 1: you know, the task system had the most brutal punishments
Speaker 1: of any you know, slavery system in the US. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the book, you have so many quotes from interviews, right,
Speaker 1: so like slaves recounting experiences, newspaper articles, a lot of editorials,
Speaker 1: letters to the editor, opinion pieces. There's some magazines that
Speaker 1: just come up again and again and again and again,
Speaker 1: these old sporting magazines. Yeah, Forest and Stream and you know,
Speaker 1: Spirit of the Time and then cartoons and other things.
Speaker 1: But you do get, uh, you kind of get a
Speaker 1: sense of the things people did would be uh, and
Speaker 1: talking about that not having guns would be that they
Speaker 1: would hunt with hounds and tree possums and raccoons. And
Speaker 1: then you need to go get the thing you can't
Speaker 1: shoot it down, so you'd climb up and get it.
Speaker 1: And then it just certain like practices. Uh. I was
Speaker 1: surprised by that. You catch a possum and bring it
Speaker 1: back live, you know, and how they cut a stick
Speaker 1: to hold its tail and you kind of like walk
Speaker 1: around like bring it home like a you know, like
Speaker 1: ready to go like a live creature. And then netting, fish, netting,
Speaker 1: running lines. Yeah, I mean I've come across any method
Speaker 1: you could think of. They clearly talked about trapping, but
Speaker 1: you know, different people talk about trapping. All they used
Speaker 1: to poison stream to you know, get as many fish
Speaker 1: at once as they could and fish with dynamite. Slaves
Speaker 1: couldn't do that because you know, you have a hard
Speaker 1: time getting dynamite. But uh, you know, it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that points to one of the real
Speaker 1: kind of divisions, points of division uh in in you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the hunting and fishing, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: the discussions of emerging conservation. You know, it comes along
Speaker 1: in the nineteen centuries. Um. You know, poor people, whether
Speaker 1: they're slaves or you know whoever that are independent beyond slaves,
Speaker 1: you know, they don't care about you know, I'm going
Speaker 1: going to use the best weapons and the and the
Speaker 1: most pure sporting methods, and I'm going to make sure
Speaker 1: that all the codes are now. They want they want
Speaker 1: to catch as much as they can. They want that
Speaker 1: freezer full of you know, eighty bags of Walleye or
Speaker 1: whatever it is, right, so you know that, you know,
Speaker 1: they're really focusing on on methods that work. So the
Speaker 1: interesting thing that happens is, um, you know, when when
Speaker 1: you read about the hunting methods of of you know,
Speaker 1: of of lower class people from the perspective of elites,
Speaker 1: you know, during slavery, you know they're they're other little
Speaker 1: hard on it, and you know they criticize it, but
Speaker 1: it's like, of course, poor they hunt, you know, they
Speaker 1: need the food. We won't give them guns. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: fortunately we don't have to do that, but the poor
Speaker 1: people do. And uh. But what's interesting and the good
Speaker 1: question that kind of got me thinking about it, you know,
Speaker 1: for the dissertation and then eventually the book was okay,
Speaker 1: so they're not too critical of these activities now, but
Speaker 1: what happens when the boards reset with emancipation. You know,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm okay with a slave having a gun
Speaker 1: as long as I can think of them as an
Speaker 1: extension of me, or I'm okay with them going off
Speaker 1: on their own and hunting and fishing because it benefits
Speaker 1: my operation. I don't mind that they have these skills.
Speaker 1: And you know, people starting are starting to think of
Speaker 1: African American sportsmen as among the very best in the region.
Speaker 1: I'm okay with that. Because of slavery, what I really
Speaker 1: wondered was is that going to switch, Is that gonna
Speaker 1: is that going to remain consistent, or is there going
Speaker 1: to be a mental shift on the part of elite
Speaker 1: white Southerners. And then on from the slave perspective, I
Speaker 1: was really curious if if emancipation would mean well, these
Speaker 1: are the extra things we had to do because the
Speaker 1: system of slavery wouldn't allow us to take care of ourselves. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: will they still indulge those traditions as much as they
Speaker 1: to participate still? Yeah, So I was really curious how
Speaker 1: things would shake out, you know, after emancipation. And that's
Speaker 1: and then, as I mentioned to Current the other day,
Speaker 1: um yeah, I was prepared to write a dissertation on
Speaker 1: just the question of slavery and hunting and fishing, and
Speaker 1: then somebody wrote another book about it, and I cursed
Speaker 1: a little bit and then set my sights on the
Speaker 1: post emancipation periods. I hate it, almost asked, because we're
Speaker 1: talking about your book. Oh no, it's a great book.
Speaker 1: And he's a great guy. Actually, so the books called
Speaker 1: Bathed in Blood. It's a great title. It's called Bathe
Speaker 1: and Blood, Hunting and Mastering in the Old South, And
Speaker 1: it got even Nick Proctor really interesting. And his deals
Speaker 1: deals with with slavery hunting and not the Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it ends, it ends, uh, you know, with with slavery
Speaker 1: still around. Well, let's let's jump do mancipatient and I'll
Speaker 1: I'll set up another thing that it's very obvious. It's
Speaker 1: very obvious, but I just hadn't given it much thought.
Speaker 1: Would be that after the war and after Lincoln emancipation UM,
Speaker 1: there was still demand for cotton, there was still demand
Speaker 1: for rice, right, so people don't need to resource. I
Speaker 1: never thought about just the simple practical thing of what
Speaker 1: do you do now that you need to attract labors?
Speaker 1: And the tension that that set up, Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: that was you know, in the late eighteen sixties. That
Speaker 1: was like kind of the like the question, and they
Speaker 1: called it the labor question right right to the point,
Speaker 1: what do we do now? And you know we we
Speaker 1: we need to find a way to make sure that
Speaker 1: we have enough labor. Federal government was intensely interested in that.
Speaker 1: And of course, I don't don't want to sound like
Speaker 1: a liberal that says anti government things. I'm not supposed
Speaker 1: to do that right as a liberal, but um, federal
Speaker 1: government can screwed this up. Right after emancipation, they were thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: we need work. You know, we need cotton. We need
Speaker 1: the Southern economy to get going again, which makes sense.
Speaker 1: We know that former slaves don't want to work, uh
Speaker 1: for their former masters, and we know that former masters.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't really want to do this either,
Speaker 1: but we have to get the Southern economy going. So
Speaker 1: what the federal government mandated during the reconstruction period was that, uh, look,
Speaker 1: former slaves, you will go back to work, and former
Speaker 1: masters you will pay cash. That's just all there is
Speaker 1: to it. They're free, you're gonna pay them their wage
Speaker 1: workers now, so you're gonna work and you're gonna pay cash.
Speaker 1: And both of them want to go. When you say that,
Speaker 1: people didn't want to go work for their former master.
Speaker 1: Do you mean like specifically for their former master or
Speaker 1: do you mean for former masters? Well? Both, Like some
Speaker 1: people were like, um, I'm done my days of laboring,
Speaker 1: you know, for you were over. And some people just
Speaker 1: hit the road and split and that was that. And
Speaker 1: other people it was more like, hey, you know now
Speaker 1: that I'm free, and I you know, I want to
Speaker 1: stay here. It's home. And many people did. But you know,
Speaker 1: the guy that owned me was a real tough piece
Speaker 1: of work. I don't want to work for him, so
Speaker 1: I ability I'm gonna go somewhere else and find someone
Speaker 1: else to work with. So you started to see this
Speaker 1: kind of mobility and people criss crossing parts of the South.
Speaker 1: Did you just just curious? Did you counter cases where
Speaker 1: a slave was emancipated and then turned around and the
Speaker 1: masters like all right, I give up and then like
Speaker 1: puts them on payroll and they stay in work for
Speaker 1: the same place. Yeah, not that happened quite a bit. Man.
Speaker 1: That when it strange strange experience, it's a very strange experience,
Speaker 1: and it's easy to use that that fact to sort of,
Speaker 1: I think run off in the wrong direction. I've heard
Speaker 1: people say like, oh, well then there must have been
Speaker 1: a lot of slaves who were finally they love their master.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, no, it's like you live in in
Speaker 1: southern Mississippi, you know, you know, migrating to the north,
Speaker 1: which you know, a huge percentage of the black population
Speaker 1: does later. But in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seven,
Speaker 1: this is where we live. This is where home and
Speaker 1: family is, you know, this is this is where I'm at.
Speaker 1: So you know, I've got to just make the best
Speaker 1: I can and if my best option is I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go back to work for the same guy, you know,
Speaker 1: then I will. But the problem was with that, with
Speaker 1: that contract system that forced by the federal government is uh,
Speaker 1: former slavelwers didn't have any money because of the war
Speaker 1: just you know, wrecked the South, and then former slaves
Speaker 1: by and large would rather not be forced to go
Speaker 1: back to work for the same people that they wanted.
Speaker 1: They wanted more freedom. So that contract system kind of
Speaker 1: limped along for a few years with everybody hating it.
Speaker 1: The established like a minimum wage equivalent. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know much about that, but I know the
Speaker 1: individual states did that because there were you know, the
Speaker 1: South was divided into military districts. Yeah, there was sort
Speaker 1: of a kind of a general thought about that and
Speaker 1: to get to get to get back to the to
Speaker 1: the hunting and fishing question. Um, the sort of the
Speaker 1: solution that emerged to this contract problem was the sharecropping system,
Speaker 1: right people. You know, people always talk about how bad
Speaker 1: share cropping wasn't it was, And you could argue that
Speaker 1: it wrecked the Southern economy by the ninet fifties, But
Speaker 1: at the time it came out, it was a great compromise, Like, oh,
Speaker 1: so I don't have to work when you say, and
Speaker 1: I can pull my wife out of the field if
Speaker 1: I want to, and I control what I grow and
Speaker 1: when I grow it, and I can sell it, and
Speaker 1: I can keep a lot of the money. Great, and
Speaker 1: then the master's like, oh so I'll give you the
Speaker 1: tools and you can work the land and you give
Speaker 1: me a cut of it. Okay, that sounds fine, that's
Speaker 1: a good description. But just like very quickly hit like
Speaker 1: what sharecropping is. So basically behind sharecropping is you know,
Speaker 1: so if I'm a landowner and I don't have the
Speaker 1: capital to pay wages to workers, what I can do
Speaker 1: is I can say Okay, look, I'm gonna break my
Speaker 1: my my farm up into ten different parcels. I'm going
Speaker 1: to sign a contract with ten different families and they'll
Speaker 1: work those parts of my acreage and uh in exchange
Speaker 1: for a share of the crop. So you know, whether
Speaker 1: it was you know, a quarter or a third or
Speaker 1: whatever the individual contract was, so like the landowner gets
Speaker 1: a third. It depended. Usually usually it was it was
Speaker 1: the landowner, um. And the idea was, I'm gonna front
Speaker 1: you all the tools, equipment, livestock, whatever you need, and
Speaker 1: then at the end of the season, sell the crop,
Speaker 1: pay me back out of the profits. I keep my proceeds,
Speaker 1: Your keep your proceeds. Everybody's happy. And former slaves thought, well,
Speaker 1: that sounds great because what I'll do is I'll save
Speaker 1: money up a year to year and then eventually I'll
Speaker 1: buy my own land. And then you know, American dream
Speaker 1: um and about of of former slaves managed to acquire
Speaker 1: their own land, which is not a great percentage. The
Speaker 1: problem is, uh, that's a good system. When it's a
Speaker 1: good year, prices are high, there's no bowlwevil um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's no drought, you know whatever. But years where there's
Speaker 1: bad prices, bad weather, bad crop yield for some reason, Uh,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna make enough money even to pay back
Speaker 1: what you owe. So you wind up seeing this kind
Speaker 1: of cycle of perpetual debt and it winds up being
Speaker 1: a disastrous economic system. But for everybody involved, landowners weren't
Speaker 1: getting rich. Now, landowners saw you know, really really valuable land,
Speaker 1: especially the really the real story here is the the
Speaker 1: international cotton market. You know, you start to see cotton
Speaker 1: from India and a few other places come on the
Speaker 1: market in the late nineteenth century, and prices just go
Speaker 1: on the toilet, and pretty soon the economy the South
Speaker 1: isn't is in shambles. But we still see, you know,
Speaker 1: former slave owners that don't want to pay wages. They
Speaker 1: just I'm not acknowledging this. I don't want to pay
Speaker 1: money to these these guys. This isn't right, this isn't
Speaker 1: the way it used to be. And then former slaves,
Speaker 1: uh still wanted that freedom. So even though the system
Speaker 1: was inefficient, from the former slaves point of view, beat
Speaker 1: the hell out of slavery. And then from the former
Speaker 1: master's point of at least you weren't shelling out, you know,
Speaker 1: hard cash to your laborers. So it was a share
Speaker 1: was a system that was supposed to be a really
Speaker 1: good thing for the South, but it didn't work out
Speaker 1: that way. And then they in your book you described
Speaker 1: this this thing that becomes like a very articulated problem. Um,
Speaker 1: and there's magazine articles written about how to deal with
Speaker 1: the problem. But people start landowners start pointing fingers at things, conditions, behaviors,
Speaker 1: activities that are enabling people to not come work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and among these is this propensity for like going out
Speaker 1: and shooting your own food. Like that's a problem because
Speaker 1: if they weren't doing that, then they'd be more obligated
Speaker 1: to come work for me. Absolutely, you know. Um, the
Speaker 1: title of the last chapter of the book, the one
Speaker 1: about the conservation, which I guess we get to, but um,
Speaker 1: the title of that last chapter is when he should
Speaker 1: be between the plow handles, which basically you know that
Speaker 1: there's so many you know, mentions I came across in
Speaker 1: sporting magazines and legal debates and things like that, you know,
Speaker 1: really pointing it at you know, self subsistence activities. There
Speaker 1: is a real problem. You're like, hey, if this guy
Speaker 1: can can feed himself and his family without working, for me,
Speaker 1: what kind of leverage does that give me? So I
Speaker 1: need I need more control. And uh, it's also eventually
Speaker 1: going to provide a pretty handy kind of cover for
Speaker 1: convincing reluctant Southerners to embrace conservation laws. We're not really
Speaker 1: going after you, we're going after former slaves because they're
Speaker 1: the ones that we're concerned about. So, you know it
Speaker 1: also and this is maybe too much at once here.
Speaker 1: But the other thing that that's that's really interesting to
Speaker 1: me about that that transition, immediate transition from slavery to
Speaker 1: freedom is um, you know, slaves, you know, reliance on
Speaker 1: small game, on whatever method worked on you know, uh
Speaker 1: effective you know, hunting and fishing. Uh. That was understood
Speaker 1: at the time by white observers like, yeah, well they're slaves.
Speaker 1: They they're they're limited in what they can do and
Speaker 1: that's the stuff they hunt and you know, they make
Speaker 1: the most of it. And then some of those same
Speaker 1: observers when they're writing in the post emancipation period, it's
Speaker 1: no longer well slaves privileged practical sport methods. It's all Africans.
Speaker 1: They're just by design they're incapable of appreciating the finer
Speaker 1: sporting traditions of the elites, so they do small game
Speaker 1: and they don't understand sporting methods and honor and things
Speaker 1: like that. So it becomes a handy way of kind
Speaker 1: of hanging some racial stereotypes. The thought is, it was
Speaker 1: at the time. If former slaves have complete freedom to
Speaker 1: just feed themselves, you know, however they want to, not
Speaker 1: only does that hurt our ability to control labor. But
Speaker 1: the interesting thing is, if I've got a really fantastic
Speaker 1: slave plantation huntsman, I can tell my friends about this guy,
Speaker 1: I can brag about it. I know we're gonna have
Speaker 1: great supplies of meat, and it's just gonna be a
Speaker 1: really good thing for the plantation. But I don't want
Speaker 1: to acknowledge this guy's sporting prowess after emancipation. It's like,
Speaker 1: after emancipation, here's a guy whose abilities threatened my operation,
Speaker 1: someone whose skill flies in the face of the emerging
Speaker 1: idea that white sportsmen are the best an African sportsman.
Speaker 1: African American sportsmen are a level lower. So if you
Speaker 1: want to maintain the sort of white supremacy that's sort
Speaker 1: of emerging as the Jim Crow period, you know, begins,
Speaker 1: to deepen um. All of a sudden, the same activities
Speaker 1: that for some people weren't that really big of a problem,
Speaker 1: they're a big problem now because not only does it
Speaker 1: does it you know, the master slave relationship is gone
Speaker 1: because of because of emancipation and the methods that we
Speaker 1: used to celebrate slaves using, we are now seeing as
Speaker 1: as dangerous to the supply of game, which is eventually
Speaker 1: gonna be really bad for tourism because once the Southern
Speaker 1: economy goes down in the late eighteen eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: tourism becomes their big they're big source of revenue. So
Speaker 1: there's what was sort of a quaint feature of the
Speaker 1: Antebellum period, Oh, loyal slaves out in the woods hunting
Speaker 1: because I allow it. After emancipation, independent people out in
Speaker 1: the woods making a living away from me, hunting in
Speaker 1: ways that I don't think are appropriate, and that could
Speaker 1: even be dangerous because you know, because of firearms. You know,
Speaker 1: I was just gonna ask I add a question related
Speaker 1: to that and just if you can explain it with that,
Speaker 1: because it was cool to write like before during Antimellon period,
Speaker 1: right to have like a slave, that was a great
Speaker 1: huntsman and you you talk about how when people would
Speaker 1: come in from other places, how that was part of
Speaker 1: the whole experience to go hunt in the South, which
Speaker 1: to be to hunt. But you but but it would
Speaker 1: include these black slaves. Did that Did that same feeling
Speaker 1: continue after emancipation, like for for just a general like
Speaker 1: hunting tourism industry. So it was like a double conundrum
Speaker 1: at that point, right, because they still wanted them for that,
Speaker 1: but again they didn't they would maybe have to start
Speaker 1: paying them or or do you get my question? I do,
Speaker 1: And it's a good one. So that the double conundrum issue,
Speaker 1: it's it's a really tricky one because you know, think
Speaker 1: about it from the point of view of a slave
Speaker 1: owner and you know, so you've got uh slaves working
Speaker 1: for you that are engaging in all of these activities,
Speaker 1: and you have no problem with it, right maybe you
Speaker 1: know some in some cases they did. They were masters
Speaker 1: who didn't want their slaves to hunt because they're not
Speaker 1: too much independence. I want them dependent on me. I
Speaker 1: don't want them out running around. But if you were
Speaker 1: a slave owner who said, um nah, I can't trust
Speaker 1: my slaves to go out and hunt and fish, somebody
Speaker 1: might say, why can't you trust your slaves? Are you
Speaker 1: a crappy slave owner? I mean, if you were a
Speaker 1: good master, you'd be able to let them do these
Speaker 1: things and it would be to your benefit. So there
Speaker 1: was almost this sense of you know, they're an extension
Speaker 1: of me, so it's okay, but that that that connection
Speaker 1: is broken by emancipation. And the interesting thing is it
Speaker 1: becomes more important after emancipation, is what I discovered because um,
Speaker 1: in the minds of saying northern tourists, you know, the
Speaker 1: Antebellum period doesn't really become the Antabellum period until you know,
Speaker 1: later in the nineteenth century when we start to get
Speaker 1: that sort of gone with the wind rose colored glasses,
Speaker 1: romantic notion of what the South used to be, and
Speaker 1: that was really appealing to northern visitors. You know, countries industrializing,
Speaker 1: changing rapidly. You know what's what's traditional in the country, Well,
Speaker 1: the Annabellum South, quaint plantations, women in fancy dresses, you know,
Speaker 1: all all those images exactly know, and part and parcel
Speaker 1: of that memory for a lot of Americans was the
Speaker 1: presence of people of color. So what what landowners in
Speaker 1: the South started to realize you know, after the Civil War,
Speaker 1: is the land is not very good in some spots
Speaker 1: here for plantation agriculture anymore. But we've got all these
Speaker 1: Northerners that want to come down here and consume the
Speaker 1: old South or at least yeah, they want to hunt,
Speaker 1: they wanna you know, they want to get out there
Speaker 1: and feel and feel like a Southerner of old. And
Speaker 1: from the white perspective back then, what better way to
Speaker 1: feel like a Southerner of old than to have black
Speaker 1: laborers attending you, just like white masters did before emancipation.
Speaker 1: So it was almost like recreating that scene, and it
Speaker 1: really became, you know, away for white Southerners who were
Speaker 1: especially former slaves, to to kind of convince themselves, Okay,
Speaker 1: the world is still right, it's still us here, we're
Speaker 1: still served by people of color, just like the old days.
Speaker 1: Um so, so they were just like at that point,
Speaker 1: did they become hired like help because it was post emancipation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when when you started and then get and can on
Speaker 1: the on the heels of that can answer like what
Speaker 1: did it look like then? Did the African Americans like
Speaker 1: work as guides or were they like cooks or like
Speaker 1: how did it how what did that little scene look
Speaker 1: like when someone from the north came down to to Shoever, Well,
Speaker 1: that really started kind of in the eighteen seventies and
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties, and uh, you started to see the kind
Speaker 1: of the trickle of of visitors to the south that
Speaker 1: we're interested in going there specifically for sporting reasons. Uh,
Speaker 1: really turns into a flood. It's just a huge number
Speaker 1: of people start going there. And the reason that is
Speaker 1: is because as the farmland, especially rice, rice was one
Speaker 1: of the crops that was just becoming really difficult. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then coastal cotton was also becoming a tough sell. Um.
Speaker 1: So it hits some of these landowners. I bet we
Speaker 1: could sell our land to a developer who wants to,
Speaker 1: you know, make a tourist retreat out of this, or
Speaker 1: I could even run it myself as a as a
Speaker 1: as a sporting operation. And what they found is when
Speaker 1: these visitors started to come down, they expected black labors.
Speaker 1: That was the way to complete the scene. And so
Speaker 1: basically you name it. I mean you would have people
Speaker 1: of color on plantations to serve as cooks, guides, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of basic laborers. People carry the tents, people to
Speaker 1: carry the guns, people that manage the dogs right up
Speaker 1: into you know, the larger outfits would have, you know,
Speaker 1: choruses and performers of color that could entertain their guests
Speaker 1: while they were there. So it's almost like blackness was
Speaker 1: a big part of the scene. And I came across
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of references and national sporting magazines that
Speaker 1: are basically like, oh man, you've got to go down
Speaker 1: to Mississippi. It's like eight thirty down there. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: So you can really see the racism and the sort
Speaker 1: of racial attitudes alive and well. And that was something
Speaker 1: else that surprised me when I switched to the post
Speaker 1: emancipation period. I didn't realize how much race would be
Speaker 1: discussed in national public Incredible. It's one of these that
Speaker 1: blew my mind about it. And like, if you're listening
Speaker 1: to us talking about this, you got to understand that
Speaker 1: when you go read the book, it's not like he's
Speaker 1: it's not like Scott the author is drawing wild conclusions.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's all it's documented. It's like all laid
Speaker 1: out quote for quote for quote, like what people said,
Speaker 1: how things were advertised, how they described your experiences, what
Speaker 1: the articles wrote about it is amazing. Um, it's funny
Speaker 1: you you wouldn't now, you wouldn't be able to read
Speaker 1: out loud newspaper articles because they used a certain language.
Speaker 1: It was just talked about blatantly, like you always kind
Speaker 1: of can't believe what you're reading when you read some
Speaker 1: people's attitudes total the human beings that they decided was
Speaker 1: fit to write in a letter to the editor, to
Speaker 1: the hunting and fishing bag and just say insane like
Speaker 1: not even you shouldn't call the saning, just say blatantly,
Speaker 1: like blatant, horrific racist stuff in a letter to the editor,
Speaker 1: pointing the finger at certain individuals who don't conform to
Speaker 1: whatever kind of hunting and fishing standards ahead. Another thing,
Speaker 1: and you actually bring this up, is people struggling with
Speaker 1: to just the pro wess of some former slaves who
Speaker 1: are who are They would admit like this guy's the
Speaker 1: best hunter ever, which which is okay to say in
Speaker 1: the Annabellum period. Yeah, or anyway, just got like, oh man,
Speaker 1: this guy is really something to watch in the woods
Speaker 1: and always knows where the game is. But at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, he's a black guy. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it was like there's like they just come out and
Speaker 1: like kind of like balance it out. They want to
Speaker 1: like there's a there's an element of praise and then
Speaker 1: there's an element of like context. Yeah, and then I
Speaker 1: you see people just struggle with it. Yeah, my my,
Speaker 1: so real quick. There's there's two two little episodes. I'll mention.
Speaker 1: One is on the first thing you mentioned about these
Speaker 1: letters to the editors of sporting magazines. There was a
Speaker 1: really well known uh sportsman in the nineteenth century named
Speaker 1: Emerson Huff. I think it's pronounced tough for how I'm
Speaker 1: not sure which one, but he's from Chicago, and he
Speaker 1: wrote pretty frequently to to Forest and Stream and Uh.
Speaker 1: He was writing about his thoughts on the very best
Speaker 1: place to go to to hunt and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: for my money, you got to go to the South.
Speaker 1: And he talked about the game and the conditions and
Speaker 1: the sort of the technical stuff. But then he said,
Speaker 1: and you know the best thing about it is there
Speaker 1: are all these former slaves, he said, negroes, with all
Speaker 1: his negroes, and they're great, and my god, they're incredible
Speaker 1: servants because that's you know, that's their their history and uh,
Speaker 1: it's this the best. You go down there and they
Speaker 1: do whatever you say, and it's just the most amazing experience.
Speaker 1: You feel so served and you feel like a king.
Speaker 1: And then he wrapped up his editorial by saying, um,
Speaker 1: you know, if I could have one of the fondest
Speaker 1: wishes of my heart fulfilled, and I'm quoting somehow the
Speaker 1: quotes in my head, if I could have one of
Speaker 1: the fondest wishes of my heart fulfilled, I would expert
Speaker 1: export four thirds of Chicago negroes. And I wouldn't send
Speaker 1: them to Liberia either. In other words, I'd love to
Speaker 1: set them back down to the South where they still
Speaker 1: know about white supremacy and hierarchy and in servitude. And
Speaker 1: that sort of praising of of the old South was
Speaker 1: really common in sporting publications nationally. Was a huge part
Speaker 1: of the draw. And they're they're hu Kail and Deer, right.
Speaker 1: Quail and Deer were two were two of the big ones.
Speaker 1: Black Bear in the Deep South was a big one.
Speaker 1: But that was you know, that was a big money
Speaker 1: you know, usually the the the elite elites were the
Speaker 1: ones who went on big excursions for Black Bear. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: Quail and and deer were sort of the big ones
Speaker 1: explain the gun rights issue back then, because um, the
Speaker 1: Second Amendment was well understood, but man was not applied uniformly, No,
Speaker 1: not at all, and that's what they really want, you know,
Speaker 1: really one of the one of the big you know,
Speaker 1: one of the big sticking points, you know, as you
Speaker 1: could imagine, because when you start to get you know,
Speaker 1: there's just this big tension that emerges right after emancipation
Speaker 1: in the South. So we started to see the emergence
Speaker 1: of this really popular resort tourism based on on hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing, particularly hunting in the South, and that's making
Speaker 1: a lot of money for this for Southern landowners and
Speaker 1: Southern you know, proprietors, and that really kind of put
Speaker 1: certain demands on them. One is to make sure there's
Speaker 1: an available supply of black labor to satisfy, you know,
Speaker 1: the image the public wants. The other thing is we've
Speaker 1: got to protect this play game because if if this
Speaker 1: kind of tourism is going to be where our livelihood
Speaker 1: comes from for the foreseeable future, we've got to protect it.
Speaker 1: So Southern Southern started talking about the need for conservation
Speaker 1: laws and the need for you know, state licensing or
Speaker 1: bag limits or you know, restrictions on guns, things like that,
Speaker 1: and most average Southerners, especially non elites, were like, hell, no,
Speaker 1: no way, we want no part of this, and there
Speaker 1: was massive resistance to it. So conservation in the South
Speaker 1: lags behind really the whole rest of the country. You're saying,
Speaker 1: so just make sure poor like poor white Southerners were
Speaker 1: not hip to game regulations being handed down from elite
Speaker 1: plantation operators. No, not at all, because you know, really
Speaker 1: the you know, removing race from the equation. For a second,
Speaker 1: when when hunting sort of arrives in the colonial period, uh,
Speaker 1: and not everyone hunted. I mean it was you know,
Speaker 1: everyone did it because it was a practical thing. But
Speaker 1: when elite Southerners, when plantation owners began to hunt, they
Speaker 1: were not shy or elusive at all about saying, we're
Speaker 1: doing this because aristocrats hunt. So we're gonna hunt fox,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna hunt stags, and we're gonna pretend like
Speaker 1: we're just old school European privileged nobles. That's how they
Speaker 1: set it up. And poor Southerners knew that, and they
Speaker 1: were deeply suspicious of any attempt to regulate. Uh, access
Speaker 1: to our methods for acquiring game, because they thought it
Speaker 1: was just old school, these elite guys trying to control things,
Speaker 1: so we don't get our fair share. So when the process,
Speaker 1: you know, in the early twentieth century, then becomes Okay,
Speaker 1: these pan the ass poor whites are existing these conservation laws.
Speaker 1: They just don't get it, why it's valuable and why
Speaker 1: it's necessary. So okay, fine, what can we do to
Speaker 1: convince them? Hey, everyone, here's the race car. Let's let's
Speaker 1: put this right in front of your face. You know, hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to control the black population, make sure
Speaker 1: they're in their place. Make sure they're not owning guns
Speaker 1: they shouldn't have. Make sure they're not killing all the
Speaker 1: big game that we want to kill. We need these conservations.
Speaker 1: We're not coming after you, we promise. So it was
Speaker 1: sort of using that how is that actually how is
Speaker 1: that actually articulated? Well, it's interesting, so articulated or enforced
Speaker 1: or it's it's rarely, if ever articulated in the law.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the interesting things about the whole
Speaker 1: post war period. Uh, you know, as Jim Crow becomes um,
Speaker 1: you know, more and more powerful, you know, for example,
Speaker 1: by nine you know, African Americans are largely disfranchised across
Speaker 1: the South. Hardly any black people are voting because of
Speaker 1: the new state constitutions. But those new state constitutions don't
Speaker 1: say black people can't vote. They say you can't vote
Speaker 1: if your grandfather couldn't vote, or you have to pay
Speaker 1: a ten dollar poll text to vote, or a bunch
Speaker 1: of measures designed to keep black people from voting. And
Speaker 1: the same thing with the conservation laws. You're not going
Speaker 1: to see. Um, you know, you have to pay ten
Speaker 1: dollars to UH to buy an instate hunting permit now
Speaker 1: so we can keep people of color and check it
Speaker 1: basically just says ten dollar. You know, in state licensing
Speaker 1: with South Carolina nineteen o six or whatever past a
Speaker 1: ten dollar licensing fee. And I'm sorry it was a
Speaker 1: dollar for a dollar for residents, ten dollars for non residents.
Speaker 1: That's what it was. And they didn't mention race at
Speaker 1: all in the law. But it would be a simple
Speaker 1: matter of Okay, you gotta go buy your permit, and
Speaker 1: then a white person shows up to buy the permit
Speaker 1: and they gotta worry about it, or or they're out
Speaker 1: in the woods and uh, they come across a person
Speaker 1: of color doesn't have a permit, Well, I'm gonna find them,
Speaker 1: poor white guy or whatever. So it's sort of the
Speaker 1: enforcement where that the flexibility was there. But then it's
Speaker 1: funny because that might be the case and in terms
Speaker 1: of how it's codified, like how it's actually spelled out
Speaker 1: the law. But then, as you demonstrate in your book
Speaker 1: with Just With again, people in their own voices giving
Speaker 1: their own perspectives. At the same time, it's being articulated
Speaker 1: in public opinion very differently, very explicitly. Yeah, absolutely, and
Speaker 1: like they're explicit, like what the people are explicit about
Speaker 1: what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah, when you know the
Speaker 1: rules they draft aren't explicit, but you look at like
Speaker 1: the people pushing for it, and they make no bones
Speaker 1: about it what they want to see happen. You know.
Speaker 1: South Carolina is a good example. I'm drawing. I want
Speaker 1: to say it was Richardson was his last name, anyway,
Speaker 1: he was he was chief game warden for South Carolina.
Speaker 1: This is really early twentieth century and basically he's on
Speaker 1: a pr campaign. He's traveling across the state speaking at
Speaker 1: farmers clubs and sportsmen organizations talking about this new licensing
Speaker 1: system and some of these new laws. And even though
Speaker 1: the law itself doesn't say it, you don't find those
Speaker 1: descriptions and any kind of official government application. But I
Speaker 1: have some transcripts that I quote in the book from
Speaker 1: some of those speeches he gives, and he explicitly says,
Speaker 1: you know, look, we want to get guns out of
Speaker 1: the hands of former slaves, and these kind of laws
Speaker 1: is kind of the only way we can do it
Speaker 1: that looks remotely constitutional. So help us out here, folks,
Speaker 1: we gotta play the game. It was really obvious when
Speaker 1: it was spoken, because you know, and the reason they
Speaker 1: didn't bother putting it and they didn't want to put
Speaker 1: it in the laws is the sort of big picture
Speaker 1: fear that hung over all Southerners back then as Jim
Speaker 1: Crow was emerging, is that the federal government would come back.
Speaker 1: You know, when reconstruction ended, in military rule ended, and
Speaker 1: this you know, the North pulled out of the South
Speaker 1: and states were given control back of their individual operations.
Speaker 1: You know that the the Senatement was basically, Okay, let's
Speaker 1: let's find a comfortable level of control that we can
Speaker 1: assert over people of color in a way that doesn't
Speaker 1: risk the federal government getting back involved in we don't
Speaker 1: want them in the civil rights business. And it worked
Speaker 1: right because the federal government sends troops, you know, in
Speaker 1: the South with a civil war, and they withdraw in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy seven. Federal troops don't go to the South
Speaker 1: to enforce black civil rights again until nineteen fifty five
Speaker 1: with Central High School and Little Rock when they integrated.
Speaker 1: Uh So they were trying to to get what they
Speaker 1: wanted without being too overt about it. At the local level,
Speaker 1: they were just you know what this is about, please
Speaker 1: support this, and even that it was a tough sell.
Speaker 1: I mean it was. I thought about doing another book
Speaker 1: on just the conservation movement in the South. You still will,
Speaker 1: but um, that's kind That's where my next question goes,
Speaker 1: because there's a thing I feel like you don't not
Speaker 1: that you don't get it right, but I feel like
Speaker 1: you you didn't like accentuated enough. And and he already
Speaker 1: told you I didn't read it in its entirety, but
Speaker 1: did a thorough like you know, so maybe you'll just
Speaker 1: prove me. Hopefully it'll just prove me that I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: Is it the same conversations though, or when you get
Speaker 1: into the early the same conversations even outside of say
Speaker 1: that better, the same conversations about certain hunting practices, the
Speaker 1: same conversations about commercial market hunting, the same conversations about
Speaker 1: bag limits, the same conversations about netting game are all
Speaker 1: happening in the North, where there is not a master
Speaker 1: slave history. Right, But it's simply people like Roosevelt. And sure,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not aware of it. There's no doubt
Speaker 1: it exists that Roosevelt probably had as someone to lie
Speaker 1: when he was alive, probably had racist sentiments like I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's probably books written about it. But he was
Speaker 1: from a hunting perspective, and there here's a celebrated conservation
Speaker 1: figure from a hunting perspective. He's like, if we're going
Speaker 1: to continue to hunt into the future, if it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a thing, then we need to put up real
Speaker 1: serious guardrails, and we're gonna introduce all kinds of stuff, licenses, seasons,
Speaker 1: ban on commercial sale of wild game, right, and really
Speaker 1: clamped down or would kiss the whole thing about it.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, like, and maybe maybe you can
Speaker 1: tell me that you did. I don't know that if
Speaker 1: you're accurately kind of like divorcing that that that it
Speaker 1: perhaps wasn't entirely like a racially motivated thing, that it
Speaker 1: was coming from a legitimate place. That we have to
Speaker 1: stop the bleeding. Oh for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to see in the book Eater, I don't do this.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to suggest that conservation was completely a
Speaker 1: racial thing, but rather than in the South, there was
Speaker 1: this racial dimension, particularly in in in the selling it
Speaker 1: to the general public. Yeah, you make that and again
Speaker 1: you make that case clear just through letting people say
Speaker 1: say their own thing, like you put down here's what's said,
Speaker 1: here's what said, here's what said, Like you lay that out. Um,
Speaker 1: the more of Asia was there, but it's just like
Speaker 1: I look, I'm like, man, but the exact same things
Speaker 1: were elsewhere, but they just weren't selling it that way. Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. It's interesting you say that though, because and
Speaker 1: interesting full disclosure. I'll just you know, just to get
Speaker 1: it down. I don't want this to be a freezer
Speaker 1: full of fish issue. I am a big fan of
Speaker 1: a conservation model. I think the conservation system that we
Speaker 1: developed in that period is one of the great achievements
Speaker 1: of the American system really is I really believe that. Um,
Speaker 1: this is side trip, but I mean, like, if I
Speaker 1: got to choose between a conservation model and a wallet
Speaker 1: off and nobody can touch at model, conservation models better
Speaker 1: just in my mind. Um, But what's interesting when you
Speaker 1: look at how conservation was sold in other parts of
Speaker 1: the country, there was a racial angle to it, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't African Americans. You know. I've read articles, you know,
Speaker 1: complaining about the need for tougher laws in the West,
Speaker 1: and they're talking about Native Americans that are abusing things
Speaker 1: and they're the reason we have to pass this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In New York, Realy had episode with a mong hunter
Speaker 1: and I talked to him about, Um, just the conversations
Speaker 1: I've had with people where it's like, well, you know
Speaker 1: who kills all the game? It's among guys. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was it was European immigrants in New York State
Speaker 1: right up in the cat Skills. You know. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: these immigrants are gone in all the game down and
Speaker 1: so it seemed like it was just people that were
Speaker 1: poorer than you. Um, we're by death if they're poorer
Speaker 1: than you, by definition, they're more likely to be game poachers.
Speaker 1: Someone probably someone certainly thought you were a poacher, and
Speaker 1: then you thought the next guy down the line, he
Speaker 1: was the poacher. It was very class based. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and and that that is what what struck me initially,
Speaker 1: you know, leaving race out out of the equation for
Speaker 1: a second. When I first started reading all these sporting
Speaker 1: publications so intensely, I was amazed at the obvious class
Speaker 1: dimensions at work here and tension in the individual sporting
Speaker 1: put even like in Forest and Stream that was written
Speaker 1: about a lot like who does this thing really serve?
Speaker 1: If this is this about America and democracy and open access,
Speaker 1: in which case, hey, rich guy, you shouldn't always get
Speaker 1: the system you want. And then the elites would say, hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to preserve this system, you know, for
Speaker 1: future generations, we've got to start being more strict about this.
Speaker 1: And some of the people on the on the lower
Speaker 1: class end of things were like, na, we're just not
Speaker 1: going to buy that. And it seems like in different
Speaker 1: parts of the country they needed the little extra nudge
Speaker 1: from from the boogeyman. Right, if you're afraid of you
Speaker 1: live in the West, and Native Americans and your big nuisance.
Speaker 1: They're the problem. The Italian immigrants in New York. It's
Speaker 1: Hispanic immigrants in Arizona. It's an easy way of, you know,
Speaker 1: getting a little extra support for what you're trying to
Speaker 1: see by kind of racializing. That was pretty common, actually
Speaker 1: identifying the people that just don't get it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it does. It doesn't diminish, you know, the value of
Speaker 1: the conservation laws, um, but it just shows that, you know,
Speaker 1: who are the convenient scapegoats that are available. And definitely
Speaker 1: in the South, the main scapegoat. Uh, it was African Americans,
Speaker 1: especially because they had they had two argumentative tracks they
Speaker 1: could take with people that were you know, let's say
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a poor, poor white and I'm just not
Speaker 1: buying into this this licensing system. I could say, look,
Speaker 1: you know, they would say to me intern like, look, one,
Speaker 1: this is about control. We're trying to keep guns out
Speaker 1: of the hands of people of color, keep them working
Speaker 1: for us. And on the other hand, this is about
Speaker 1: protecting our new tourist economy. We have got to protect
Speaker 1: this because the region will collapse if we don't preserve this.
Speaker 1: So it was sort of a kind of a double whammy,
Speaker 1: and there was a reason to make sure that as
Speaker 1: much as possible. If African Americans are going to have
Speaker 1: a big place in the southern sporting field, it's got
Speaker 1: to be in a subordinate place, working for us, not independent.
Speaker 1: And if they are hunting and fishing independently, let's set
Speaker 1: up a system where they are limited to small game,
Speaker 1: we get rid of methods that they prefer that we
Speaker 1: don't like, and we control it as much as humanly possible.
Speaker 1: So again it goes back to that issue of how
Speaker 1: far away from the white observer are they they're working
Speaker 1: for me, or they're doing things I approve of, fine,
Speaker 1: but when they use it to avoid work, or whether
Speaker 1: you know, doing methods that don't approve of, then it's
Speaker 1: a problem. You don't want to area where the double
Speaker 1: standard I think uh came through real clear as you
Speaker 1: spend a little bit of time talking about. I think
Speaker 1: it was kind of more in the immediate post warriors
Speaker 1: do you'd have people who go out the swamps and
Speaker 1: basically set up camp encampment's families camped just living off
Speaker 1: the land. Man, you can imagine it'd be easy to
Speaker 1: romanticize that right. Often a swamp living off the land.
Speaker 1: But man, folks are not like that. Yeah. That was like, Holy,
Speaker 1: what does the world come into? Yeah, there were so
Speaker 1: many interesting uh visuals that came out of that research.
Speaker 1: You know, you might read about a very elaborate hunt
Speaker 1: that is essentially you know, a bunch of locals. They're
Speaker 1: not rich, they're just some Southern guys that like a hunt.
Speaker 1: So they hire a bunch of laborers and they go
Speaker 1: off into the woods for a week and they bring
Speaker 1: tents and you know, they live off the land, and
Speaker 1: you know, and they you know, they just they just
Speaker 1: do what they do. But then you hear these descriptions
Speaker 1: of these like massive hunting parties. I can't think of
Speaker 1: a guy's name, but the guy was a CEO of DuPont.
Speaker 1: He bought an island off of South Carolina just for
Speaker 1: the point the purpose of hunting, and you know, he
Speaker 1: would bring these giant retinues down there with them and
Speaker 1: they would head off, you know, head off into the
Speaker 1: woods and the black laborers would be carrying you know,
Speaker 1: everything you can know that you don't know that retinue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so's it's a fancy word for like the your your
Speaker 1: your posse. Yeah, you're you're your entourage. That's the retinue.
Speaker 1: They would have called it a retinue because that was
Speaker 1: the fancy makes me sound like an aristocratic term they
Speaker 1: wanted to use. The more guys that are with me,
Speaker 1: the more people carrying my stuff, the more my hunting
Speaker 1: camp looks like my house, the more that means you know,
Speaker 1: I've made it. So it's sort of that, you know,
Speaker 1: sett it yourself up as an aristocrat kind of thing
Speaker 1: that visitors were so drawn to back then. Um, what
Speaker 1: what are there? I mean, there's a ton of miss
Speaker 1: because it's a big book, But are there where you're
Speaker 1: from where you're sitting right now? Are there questions you
Speaker 1: wish I'd ask you to explain various aspects of this book? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think one that there's a couple of
Speaker 1: things that that I think would be good to talk about.
Speaker 1: So one is, um, what was you know, the pot Why?
Speaker 1: What I didn't mention yet was the was the positives? Right,
Speaker 1: So we're talking about, you know, the concerns that landowners
Speaker 1: had or the conservation has had, or you know, white
Speaker 1: Southerners in general had, and why they wanted to kind
Speaker 1: of restrict these practices. But on the other side of
Speaker 1: the equation is um the benefit, right, So it isn't
Speaker 1: like it's just I'm forced to work mission because you
Speaker 1: have some amazing stories of people getting established in business
Speaker 1: and stuff, and yeah, there's a there's a big benefit.
Speaker 1: So um. For one thing, it's it's a rare thing
Speaker 1: during the Jim Crow period for a person of color
Speaker 1: to have sort of a public way to demonstrate I'm
Speaker 1: better at something than a white person. And that was
Speaker 1: a no, no, can you tell people specifically what Jim
Speaker 1: Crow means? Sure? So Jim Crow is sort of the
Speaker 1: shorthand for segregation. Uh, these sort of both formal and
Speaker 1: informal laws and practices that popped up starting in the
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties that sort of governed black and white social interactions.
Speaker 1: And it was if you don't know much about the
Speaker 1: Jim Crow system, it's it's pretty mind blowing. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: you know the big picture stuff, you know, like you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, whites only water fountains and things like that
Speaker 1: that we think of most commonly. But then you know
Speaker 1: chain gangs and you know, lots and lots of strange
Speaker 1: social rules. You know, black person can't work at a
Speaker 1: shoe store that caters to white customers, because you don't
Speaker 1: want black people to work with white people's feet. Um,
Speaker 1: you know black barbers, you know generally uh would uh
Speaker 1: would have white customers, but the reverse usually wouldn't be true.
Speaker 1: Usually you have to have good to old black barber
Speaker 1: if if you were a black person. Yeah, and all
Speaker 1: that stuff segregated. So Jim Crow was basically just a
Speaker 1: way of making sure that everybody was was kept in
Speaker 1: their proper place. Was that a guy's name Jim Crow
Speaker 1: was was a minstrel performers. His name was Charles. His
Speaker 1: name Daddy Rice was that might be Charles Daddy ricen't remember.
Speaker 1: Daddy Rice was a famous minstrel performer in the twenties
Speaker 1: and eighteen thirties, and he became world famous, traveled the
Speaker 1: world by blacking his face in his hands, putting on rags,
Speaker 1: and then performing in ways that whites would have recognized
Speaker 1: as stereotypically slave. So he's a white guy, Yeah, white
Speaker 1: guy performing in hand. Yeah. That was the character's name,
Speaker 1: Jim Crow. And you know there's books published about this character,
Speaker 1: Jim Crow. It becomes this hugely popular thing, and then
Speaker 1: the interesting thing is that that's yes, somehow that I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like, I don't know, I was like Paul
Speaker 1: Fitition politicians from the time. You know, the basic idea is, um,
Speaker 1: you know, these this Jim Crow character is kind of
Speaker 1: based on the idea that people of color are childlike, stupid, uncivilized.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's very negative, very racist. You know that
Speaker 1: this this character and it fits what white audiences wanted
Speaker 1: to believe about people of color. Uh So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a character designed to show, uh, you know, this
Speaker 1: is what what we're dealing with here, folks. It sort
Speaker 1: of became an easy shorthand in the eight nineties. Well
Speaker 1: these laws designed to keep black people where they belong,
Speaker 1: let's call him Jim Crow laws. So that's sort of
Speaker 1: organically how it evolved. Yeah, and then you were going
Speaker 1: to get into and there was a handful of things
Speaker 1: you have in there of people that um, maybe established
Speaker 1: a fishing business, and then it became out of that
Speaker 1: like owned multiple vessels, bought land, established businesses, like people
Speaker 1: who had like real success stories. Yeah, there's great that
Speaker 1: came out of hunting and fishing that went on to
Speaker 1: be have generational impact. Yeah. I'll take about whole Collier
Speaker 1: in a minute. That that's my my my favorite individual
Speaker 1: person from the book, but my individual favorite story. It's
Speaker 1: not very long, but I just love this one. And
Speaker 1: this is the kind of freedom you could have with um,
Speaker 1: the kind of weird relationships that emerged in the post
Speaker 1: emancipation period, right Like, on the one hand, you know
Speaker 1: that your guides, your laborers are really amazing at this,
Speaker 1: but acknowledging that it's going to sort of threaten the
Speaker 1: white on top sort of white supremacy model that we
Speaker 1: have by then in the South. So there's this great
Speaker 1: story it came across where a guy from uh I
Speaker 1: think he's from Philadelphia, is out on a duck hunter,
Speaker 1: a quail hunt whatever it was, with with one black
Speaker 1: guide and they're they're, you know, scaring up birds and birds.
Speaker 1: You know, he's scared up alright, birds flushed, thank you?
Speaker 1: And uh, I know words like retinue, not words like flushed.
Speaker 1: Uh So birds are scared up. White guy jumps up,
Speaker 1: takes a shot, misses, the guide stands up, shoots it
Speaker 1: and says, good shot. They scare up another bird. The
Speaker 1: white guy misses. The guy's a great shot, sir. And
Speaker 1: then that went on. That went on the whole day,
Speaker 1: and then they're walking home and uh, the the guy
Speaker 1: was was talking about how how piste off this white
Speaker 1: guy was walking in front of him the whole time,
Speaker 1: knowing that he didn't do a very good job with
Speaker 1: those birds, and only imagining how pleased the guide must
Speaker 1: have been, thinking like, yeah, we both know that I'm
Speaker 1: better at this than you. But I can play the
Speaker 1: game if I have to. So I really like that
Speaker 1: one example because it was just a nice little leg
Speaker 1: I can. I can dig you a little bit in
Speaker 1: the way that I couldn't before, you know. But the
Speaker 1: one that the one that stands out, and it's just
Speaker 1: it's just one of the great stories of all time.
Speaker 1: And I'm not the first person to talk about Whole
Speaker 1: call Here. There's been a book written about him, and
Speaker 1: some children's books actually, but Whole call Here is I think,
Speaker 1: what I would say, the most famous sportsman in the South,
Speaker 1: probably of all time, unless he counts someone like Daniel
Speaker 1: Boone or you know some of those, some of those folks.
Speaker 1: But um, the whole Collier was a slave in Mississippi
Speaker 1: and his stories just absolutely incredible. Um before before he
Speaker 1: was he was a famous hunting guide. Um, he was
Speaker 1: a slave in Mississippi, and his master was nicknamed Colonel
Speaker 1: Howell Hines. And when the Hines family, you know, goes
Speaker 1: off to war, when the Civil War starts, they took
Speaker 1: whole collier with him as a servant. And he wound
Speaker 1: up working as a scout for whatever army outfit that
Speaker 1: his that his that his master belonged to, scouting against
Speaker 1: the Northern Army, against the Northern Army. And he yeah,
Speaker 1: and he is officially recognized by the Daughters of the
Speaker 1: Confederacy as a Confederate veteran. I mean, it's it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: And he continued after they and and that's the whole
Speaker 1: when you take a whole collier above and beyond the
Speaker 1: call of duty, he was he was loyal servant, and
Speaker 1: then he was a loyal soldier. And then when the
Speaker 1: war ended, he went to work on the Hines plantation
Speaker 1: as a sporting guide and was was so good that
Speaker 1: he's one of these ridiculous figures that you hear about
Speaker 1: his sporting uh prowess, and you think, really, did you
Speaker 1: really kill five hundred bears? That seems like a lot,
Speaker 1: you know, So he they're all these legends about him,
Speaker 1: and the reason he becomes so well known is because
Speaker 1: when Um the Roosevelt Hunts, as they were known, Roosevelt
Speaker 1: had these huge, two huge hunting excursions in the South
Speaker 1: and almost like nineteen o three, almost like nineteen o seven,
Speaker 1: when he contacted uh, some of his buddies down in
Speaker 1: the South, Hey, I want to do a really big,
Speaker 1: elaborate hunt. Put it together for me. They did what
Speaker 1: what we've talked about before. They got some guys that
Speaker 1: knew the best places to go, and they said, Okay,
Speaker 1: who's going to assemble the army of African Americans that
Speaker 1: we need to provide the setting the president needs and
Speaker 1: they tapped whole Callier to head the hunt. So he
Speaker 1: was he was the guy in charge of both of
Speaker 1: those Roosevelt hunts, and that the space ciphic story that
Speaker 1: makes him so famous is um apparently for four or
Speaker 1: five days this was one hunt was in the Louisian
Speaker 1: Cane Brakes and one was in the Yazoo Delta. I
Speaker 1: can't recall which one was which, but the first of
Speaker 1: the two, apparently whole Collier. They didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of luck finding the bear because Roosevelt had dreamed of
Speaker 1: a Southern black bear forever, he said. So Collier apparently
Speaker 1: had gone off to do some scouting to see if
Speaker 1: they could switch locations. While he was gone, apparently some
Speaker 1: of the other guys had captured a black bear, which
Speaker 1: was weirdly common back then because people would capture bears
Speaker 1: and then they would use it for bear baiting, the
Speaker 1: grossest sport ever. We just get sick dogs on a
Speaker 1: bear and then bet on how many dogs it would take,
Speaker 1: you know, to kill it. Um. So they captured this
Speaker 1: black bear so Roosevelt could kill it, and Whole Collier
Speaker 1: got back to camp and he said, whoa you you
Speaker 1: can't this is a chained up animal. You can't shoot this.
Speaker 1: It's not sporting. And Roosevelt was, yeah, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: a great idea. That's not sporting. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: do it. So Rosebolt ordered that they released the Teddy bear,
Speaker 1: and that's the Teddy Bear incident. So it was it
Speaker 1: was Whole Collier that apparently told Roosevelt that he shouldn't
Speaker 1: kill the bear. So the cartoon of Teddy's Bear, uh
Speaker 1: comes from from Whole Collier that and then he sent
Speaker 1: he sent Collier some kind of heard at times, but
Speaker 1: I never knew that the guy that involved it was
Speaker 1: was I had that story. Uh well, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I never knew any I never knew anybody involved him
Speaker 1: besides Roosevelt. Right, yeah, well, you know, I guess what
Speaker 1: in the future if you come across kind of stories
Speaker 1: from from this time period, Um, you know, how often
Speaker 1: did they really go into discussions of the guys, whether
Speaker 1: they're white or black? Right? Usually just the guys, we're
Speaker 1: the ones that we talk about. And then you're not
Speaker 1: going to talk about your labors that much, especially if
Speaker 1: if there are people of color and um. In the
Speaker 1: aftermath of this hunt, Roosevelt was so grateful that he
Speaker 1: fired because later in the honey got his black Bear,
Speaker 1: and he was so grateful that he sent whole Collier
Speaker 1: a I can't remember the exact model, but I got
Speaker 1: a brand new Winchester rifle and that Collier used that
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life because it was the
Speaker 1: rifle the Roosevelt. It's probably that way. Wouldn't be surprised. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds about right. It was like, that's Roosevelt's rifle Winchester.
Speaker 1: Where uh, if I if I'm not mistaken. I think
Speaker 1: it's in I think it's in a in a historical
Speaker 1: society somewhere in Mississippi. I thought I may have read
Speaker 1: somewhere that they have that I like to fire a
Speaker 1: couple of cracks of that gun man. But it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty amazing, and it brought him to some to some
Speaker 1: national prominence. And when, uh, there was a little bit
Speaker 1: of a blowback on Roosevelt. He was publicly praising this
Speaker 1: guy he sent him this rifle, uh, and some people
Speaker 1: were like, what's the president doing hanging out with this
Speaker 1: black guy? What? What? This isn't right? A lot of
Speaker 1: people in the South were kind of angry about this,
Speaker 1: and it just didn't visually match what they thought the
Speaker 1: president United States should be doing. And editorials appeared in
Speaker 1: southern newspapers after that and they were like, look, you understand,
Speaker 1: this guy was the best slave ever. This guy was
Speaker 1: a soldier for us. He's the best, He's the perfect servant.
Speaker 1: If anybody deserved to be talked about by the president,
Speaker 1: it's whole Collier. So the question that got me thinking was, Okay,
Speaker 1: did Roosevelt ever weigh in on it anymore? Basically, he
Speaker 1: would just kind of he didn't. I don't think rose
Speaker 1: he were palsering and he does. He basically would just
Speaker 1: say like, look, this is just one of the best
Speaker 1: sports when I ever saw. But he he's like engaged
Speaker 1: in that conversation. That just the one line here from
Speaker 1: Wikipedia about how badass he was. He killed more than
Speaker 1: three thousand bears during his lifetime, more than those this
Speaker 1: is the real hum more than those taken by Davy
Speaker 1: Crockett and Daniel Boone combined. So his fake his fake
Speaker 1: number was better than Boone and Crockett, his fake number Wickuldee.
Speaker 1: It does have things wrong sometimes, but you know, for me,
Speaker 1: it's it's the extraordinary question is about whole Collier undeniably
Speaker 1: an amazing sportsman, even if his numbers are you know,
Speaker 1: wildly exaggerated, prominent, famous for his day, fairly wealthy, fairly
Speaker 1: well known. There's not a whole lot of African Americans
Speaker 1: sportsman who becomes celebrities in that time period. He did it.
Speaker 1: So it's a great thing, and what a great way
Speaker 1: for him to uh support his family and you know,
Speaker 1: and carve out a niche. But then I also wondered, like,
Speaker 1: but what's the cost of that you know, if your
Speaker 1: whole collier, you basically have to position yourself as the
Speaker 1: quintessential servant. And for a lot of white Southerners, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, they would look at that relationship and they
Speaker 1: would see a whole collier and they would see see
Speaker 1: that that's alive, and well, the old master slave thing,
Speaker 1: it's alive, and well it's like the way it should be.
Speaker 1: So for a lot of Southerners, they really looked at
Speaker 1: the sporting field, you know, not just the way of
Speaker 1: preserving the sporting tradition, but to preserve the racial tradition.
Speaker 1: You know, where else can you find that pure I'm
Speaker 1: always going to have people of color around me serving me.
Speaker 1: Now that emancipation is here, we're still going to find
Speaker 1: it in the sporting field. So it was a way
Speaker 1: of kind of resurrecting that old South and keeping it alive.
Speaker 1: So on the one hand, if if you're that that
Speaker 1: sporting guy who can make fun of of of the
Speaker 1: white guy, yeah that's a good thing, and I'm sure
Speaker 1: that's pretty satisfying. But isn't it interesting that basically you
Speaker 1: you you find a niche for yourself in an occupation
Speaker 1: that demands subservience and that must have been tough. That
Speaker 1: must have been a real double edged sword. Now that
Speaker 1: Yan he's brought Boone into it, did you read about
Speaker 1: or just consider writing about Boone's relationship with his old slave,
Speaker 1: like when Boo got old and he was going blind.
Speaker 1: He I don't want to hate to use them. I
Speaker 1: don't know. They were like people around them describe them
Speaker 1: as best friends. However true that is. But it's like
Speaker 1: Boone out a slave that was his hunting people described
Speaker 1: that that was his hunting buddy, that was his hunting partner,
Speaker 1: Like the two of them would go on big canoe
Speaker 1: based hunting trips. Did you ever spend any time on
Speaker 1: like what that what the hell that relationship was? I haven't.
Speaker 1: I haven't jumped into into that much. It's an interesting topic, though,
Speaker 1: I should check that out. Yeah, Boone would hunt in
Speaker 1: his later years, Boone would like that's who he hung
Speaker 1: out with. I mean he could have hung out with Virtue.
Speaker 1: I mean he was famous in his time. That's who
Speaker 1: we hung with. Yeah, I mean go on these trips,
Speaker 1: you know, And I could be totally misremembering this. Didn't
Speaker 1: he take that guy with him to the Alamo? Boone
Speaker 1: going to the Alamo. Sorry, I thought you mentioned Crockett.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, because Croc had brought a bunch of pals
Speaker 1: of his that were hunting buddies. They didn't stay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but those two get those who get tangled up a lot.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he died, and he died in Missouri. Um.
Speaker 1: And one more question for you. Have you ever spent
Speaker 1: time reading about the slave that Lewis and Clark brought
Speaker 1: with him. No, I've not done that either, but I
Speaker 1: would like to. It's you know, it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: fascinating freedom afterwards. Yeah, so they got like they got
Speaker 1: like whatever our guys on payroll, they got the ones,
Speaker 1: they got like one dude who's not just weird. It's
Speaker 1: one of the things that's that's so tough to to
Speaker 1: tease out in these stories. You know, like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: you mentioned Boone and his slave, and I don't know
Speaker 1: this story, but what I what I can probably say
Speaker 1: with some certainty is that we've based our our view
Speaker 1: of that relationship pretty much from white sources, because that's
Speaker 1: probably all we have. So what's interesting about when you
Speaker 1: when you read about these these uh you know, these
Speaker 1: master servant relationships in the post war sporting field, you
Speaker 1: never get or rarely get the laborer's perspective. It's almost
Speaker 1: always the white guys. Know what that guys? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: like how he comprehended his relationship with this like very
Speaker 1: very famous person. Yeah, like what is what is? Uh?
Speaker 1: What does that guy say when he walks away? Right? If?
Speaker 1: Oh they're they're best friends? There, what a great relationship.
Speaker 1: Maybe he saw a little differently, you know, don't know
Speaker 1: the same thing with York, the Lewis and Clark slave. Um,
Speaker 1: and maybe with him, I mean know by that in
Speaker 1: that circle, you were in a world where you know,
Speaker 1: they were celebrated. I haven't read into it. Maybe there
Speaker 1: are accounts from him, you know, Lewis and Clark would
Speaker 1: point out that, Um, the Native Americans definitely recognized him
Speaker 1: as different, you know, and uh many were quite attracted
Speaker 1: to him. Didn't like the white group but like that skin,
Speaker 1: you know, I would single him out. But yeah, and
Speaker 1: then they emancipated him afterwards. But no, to hear his
Speaker 1: take on I mean, is his take on it? Um,
Speaker 1: would it have been, Yeah, it was cool that you
Speaker 1: know they freed me. It would just take a ben
Speaker 1: on it, come on, man, like I didn't have the
Speaker 1: No one asked me to sign up, and and and
Speaker 1: there's the single biggest challenge of studying a topic like
Speaker 1: this its sources. You know, So what do people of
Speaker 1: color think about this topic? Okay? Well, I've got letters
Speaker 1: to forest and stream, you know, and sporting publications and
Speaker 1: agricultural journals, and people of color aren't contributing to those,
Speaker 1: so I'm getting the white perspective. Okay, Well, I'll read
Speaker 1: the interviews with former slaves that were done, you know,
Speaker 1: during the w p A interviews. Well, the most of
Speaker 1: the interviewers were white, so we don't know to what
Speaker 1: extent people were being as candid as they might. So
Speaker 1: you're always trying to tease out that other perspective. And
Speaker 1: that's really been, you know, one of the big weaknesses
Speaker 1: that historians always wanting to focus on the elite story
Speaker 1: that I mentioned at the beginning in that time period
Speaker 1: didn't even bother trying to figure out what what the
Speaker 1: poorer folks were thinking in that story. So it kind
Speaker 1: of fell the later generations of his storians and think, Okay,
Speaker 1: where can we tease out? How can we find what
Speaker 1: people were actually thinking? About this. Can we look at
Speaker 1: you know, court transcripts or interviews with former slaves, or
Speaker 1: how can we use a white source that talks about
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing in a way that you can sort
Speaker 1: of reveal, you know, some kind like that that story
Speaker 1: of the guy talking about his friend who was being
Speaker 1: you know, outshot by by the labor right. Um, the
Speaker 1: guy was never going to tell that story, but his buddy,
Speaker 1: to make fun of him, quotes that story and Forest
Speaker 1: and Stream. So I was able to get a little
Speaker 1: bit of that story. But it's hard to find that
Speaker 1: seems like quite the magazine. It was cool, it was
Speaker 1: very and I gotta tell you, Um, I get pretty
Speaker 1: easily distracted because I getting pretty enthusiastic about stuff and
Speaker 1: I pick up a nineteenth century copy of Forest and Stream.
Speaker 1: What I should be doing is flipping through it and
Speaker 1: seeing if I can find mention of ray and then
Speaker 1: I'm reading them all. So I've read so many issues
Speaker 1: of Force and Stream over here because it's just fun.
Speaker 1: I love looking at the ads. Williams could have a
Speaker 1: good conversation. Yeah, yeah, we had a We got a
Speaker 1: friend who he came on the show before. We'll have
Speaker 1: to find out what the hell episode? This was very
Speaker 1: early in the infancy of this this year show. Um,
Speaker 1: he looked at what did you look at a hundred years?
Speaker 1: It was It was not quite I want to say
Speaker 1: it was like post World War two, I think is
Speaker 1: where he picked it up, right, And I can't remember
Speaker 1: if Ray was one of them, but he reviewed attitude
Speaker 1: towards gun rights, attitude towards the environment, attitude, a handful
Speaker 1: of things just in a couple of publications over a
Speaker 1: hundred years. The evolution like basically the evolution of the
Speaker 1: American sportsman's mind, opinions, interests, perception, as captured in a
Speaker 1: hundred years of these and mostly through the editorials. Right,
Speaker 1: but you got to cover interesting things, man. That um
Speaker 1: that we talked about the show is when freezers became
Speaker 1: a thing that changed ship Like when you know whatever
Speaker 1: people are hunting in the forties or whatever. I can't
Speaker 1: remember what it happened, but you don't have freezer. You
Speaker 1: didn't know the whole idea of like shooting a deer
Speaker 1: and putting your freezer all year wasn't a thing. This
Speaker 1: wasn't a thing. Then all of a sudden it became
Speaker 1: like everybody had a freezer and just changed the whole
Speaker 1: conversation about game. Oh that's it. That that makes me
Speaker 1: want to dive back into something because right, how many
Speaker 1: times you heard that? But like, no, it's like, wasn't
Speaker 1: the case. You haven't there's nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: You got it and you had to find gave it away,
Speaker 1: and everybody ate it and that was it. You know.
Speaker 1: The big the big thing for for elite sportsman, especially
Speaker 1: on these you know, these big excursions, lots of visitors,
Speaker 1: lots of money. They're the really prominent ones where they
Speaker 1: would have toither the retinue. Right, so one of these
Speaker 1: big hunts. Uh, the kind of standard move for these
Speaker 1: elites was they would get every single thing that they captured,
Speaker 1: that they caught. They would divvy up some of it
Speaker 1: among their guides and laborers, and then the rest they
Speaker 1: would just have a big old party and give away
Speaker 1: to people in the area to show they're sort of aristocratic, uh,
Speaker 1: you know whatever they call it, their their their generosity.
Speaker 1: I wonder how that changed with the freezer, because I
Speaker 1: would imagine giving it away if you're not gonna eat it,
Speaker 1: because someone's gonna say, oh my god, did you see
Speaker 1: what Mr John he was eating what he caught. Is
Speaker 1: he having hard times? What's going on here? Because that
Speaker 1: was sort of thing. I don't have to eat what
Speaker 1: I catch, I give it away. I wonder if once
Speaker 1: freezers were around, I think, hey, throw that in the freezer.
Speaker 1: Let's not give that away. Yeah. I go read Randall's dissertation.
Speaker 1: That sounds really interesting. Yeah, I wish Yeah, you'll find
Speaker 1: it go way back. We know now there's like a
Speaker 1: lack of diversity right in the in the hunting general,
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing crowd in this country. And obviously it
Speaker 1: stems from what we've just been talking about. So can
Speaker 1: you kind of put that in perspective? Well, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I guess would. I would have to say I didn't
Speaker 1: get explicitly too much into this in the book because
Speaker 1: I sort of kind of shut it off around thet
Speaker 1: um but I think there's there's there's a lot there. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. I was actually talking to Jonathan Wilkins about
Speaker 1: this not too long ago. The sort of stereotype, uh,
Speaker 1: you know that you know, people of color, you know,
Speaker 1: don't like the outdoors or don't swim, or you know,
Speaker 1: don't hunt as often as white. It's predominantly a white thing. Um.
Speaker 1: And you touched on that, you know, in that blog
Speaker 1: that you posted a few weeks ago. The diversity can
Speaker 1: be an issue sometimes in the contemporary scene. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I always I always attributed it or imagined it being
Speaker 1: like a demographics issue that after the war, so many
Speaker 1: people came in the industrial to work in the industrialized North.
Speaker 1: That's one of these surprises of me how prevalent hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing were at the time. Yeah. Absolutely, And the
Speaker 1: way I would look at it is, um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's this very deep and rich sporting tradition in the
Speaker 1: black community, slaves, free blacks, you know, and we intensifies
Speaker 1: after emancipation because of sporting tourism. So it's it's a
Speaker 1: big part of black life, especially in the rural South.
Speaker 1: But then we can look at at restrictions on sporting
Speaker 1: practices in the South. They're used the same way that
Speaker 1: other gym crow laws are used, you know, they're really
Speaker 1: trying to regulate black behavior. So by the time we
Speaker 1: get to you know, nine nineteen ten, the black population
Speaker 1: in the South was like, look, you know, lynch ings,
Speaker 1: Jim Crow laws, voting restrictions, hunting and fishing, restrictions. It
Speaker 1: is all part of a big story that's you know,
Speaker 1: really making the South less hospitable place. So the Great
Speaker 1: Migration begins and then um the northern cities. And I think,
Speaker 1: I think probably the thing that helps people remember just
Speaker 1: how connected African American population was to hunting and fishing
Speaker 1: in the South, which we think of you hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing is a rural thing, right for most people. Well,
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety, African Americans were demographically the most southern
Speaker 1: and rural population in the United States. But then the
Speaker 1: migration period starts between a nineteen hundred and nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: and today African Americans are demographically the most northern and
Speaker 1: urban population. But if you back up far enough, it's
Speaker 1: a rural population in the South historically relying on these
Speaker 1: forms of land and wildlife use to get by. It
Speaker 1: gets harder for them to do that. And I gotta
Speaker 1: believe it's on the list of factors that influenced the
Speaker 1: Great Migration. So I feel like there was a there
Speaker 1: was a sort of a separate, a forced separation, you know.
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't know if you back up a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty years, I don't think you could hold
Speaker 1: the the idea that people of color don't use the
Speaker 1: natural environment as much as whites, that that was just
Speaker 1: that was kind of separated they were they were that
Speaker 1: was taken from them, and not only did they use it,
Speaker 1: but they were sounds like renowned as possibly being the
Speaker 1: best ones at using it. Yeah, I mean there's there's
Speaker 1: a real tradition there. And uh, I think if we
Speaker 1: remember that, Uh you made the point in the blog, right,
Speaker 1: the idea that you know, the question of what's the
Speaker 1: way forward, uh, bringing new people into this sporting community,
Speaker 1: or or preserving the traditions of those who already do it.
Speaker 1: Well for the people who are saying, you know, let's
Speaker 1: preserve the traditions of those who already do it. Um,
Speaker 1: the list of people that have a tradition in those
Speaker 1: areas is bigger than our current list of people that
Speaker 1: think of themselves as traditional sportsman and sports man. There's
Speaker 1: this other group of people that used to be a
Speaker 1: huge part of American hunting and fishing and not quite
Speaker 1: so much now. So it's not like we can just say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, clearly historically people of color haven't really wanted
Speaker 1: to be involved in Yeah, we don't need to think
Speaker 1: about it. So there there is a question of you know,
Speaker 1: participation in outdoor activities hunting and fishing among diverse populations
Speaker 1: needs to be encouraged. It does bring up interesting just
Speaker 1: the idea about tradition, you know, depends how far back
Speaker 1: you want to delve back. Yeah, absolutely, And you know,
Speaker 1: and and I've I've talked to a lot of people
Speaker 1: over the years that I've met, you know, just not
Speaker 1: in the context of my work, but I've just met them.
Speaker 1: And and oh, you do hunting and fishing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: my family used to be really big into that and
Speaker 1: you know, not so much. Now, where'd your family come from?
Speaker 1: So we migrated from Mississippi. You know. I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's con that's consistent with the story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I regard myself as um having like a deep family
Speaker 1: tradition and hunting. But my ancestors came from Sicily, Western Europe.
Speaker 1: Like probably not deep. I mean by deep, I mean
Speaker 1: my grandfather. Do you know if those ancestors that were
Speaker 1: in Europe hunted? No, we have no one has any
Speaker 1: idea who they were. Right, Well, no, that's not true.
Speaker 1: On the Sicilians. We do the Ronella's we do. I
Speaker 1: don't know that they didn't hunt the damner didn't when
Speaker 1: they got here. So I'm saying, like deep tradition for
Speaker 1: me is that my maternal and paternal grandfather, you know,
Speaker 1: one of whom I met and hung out with. So
Speaker 1: that's how deep that is. Well, you know, in a sense,
Speaker 1: I would argue is that there's a different kind of
Speaker 1: depth there. There there's an historical depth to those kind
Speaker 1: of connections because what I've what I've learned over the
Speaker 1: years from reading different books about hunting coming out of
Speaker 1: the European tradition is a lot of people like even
Speaker 1: like these maligned you know, European immigrants that go to
Speaker 1: New York State and are accused of being game hogs. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, you're an immigrant that comes from most of Europe.
Speaker 1: They've got a long history of really restrictive game laws,
Speaker 1: a game system that is flat out gives all the
Speaker 1: privileges and rights to the landed aristocrats. You can explore
Speaker 1: that through like elements of that through the robin Hood narrative. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's a tremendous source of conflict. And when people migrate
Speaker 1: to the US and they're like, whoa, we can just
Speaker 1: do this, This is amazing. So there's this sort of
Speaker 1: instant tradition like look, I am allowed to do this, now,
Speaker 1: this is fan What a land of opportunity when I
Speaker 1: can actually freely hunt and fish without having to worry
Speaker 1: about the rich guy always gets first crack. So I
Speaker 1: think that a lot of sort of the more recent
Speaker 1: sporting even you know, even if you are you're the
Speaker 1: first generation to pick it up, you're kind of continuing
Speaker 1: that tradition of something that demonstrates independence that's common across
Speaker 1: you know, white, black, rich, poor when people do these
Speaker 1: things historically, they think this is about sufficiency. Independence, individual
Speaker 1: competence for many people feels like an American birthright exactly.
Speaker 1: And that was gonna be my closing thought, and you're
Speaker 1: just you know, saying it way better than I could.
Speaker 1: But it was just like reading the book has given
Speaker 1: me a completely new and better, stronger appreciation for hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing is like a means to freedom because if
Speaker 1: they if like these slaves didn't have that, like you know,
Speaker 1: just imagine, you know, I mean, we don't know what
Speaker 1: the outcome would have been, right, But like with hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing, it like immediately gave them a means to
Speaker 1: be like, oh, even though we're free, even though you
Speaker 1: still hold you know, some power overs because when you
Speaker 1: have to survive and we need to work and we feed.
Speaker 1: But because they had hunting and fishing, they were allowed
Speaker 1: to be freer. Yeah, before you came in, you and
Speaker 1: I were just having a quick chat and he kind
Speaker 1: of pointed out use these words, but he pointed out
Speaker 1: the ways in which it's a it's like a celebration
Speaker 1: in some ways of celebration hunting and fishing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, because you know, I guess the person.
Speaker 1: I let's circle back to Charles Ball, right, the guy
Speaker 1: who had to quote about feeling like an independent man.
Speaker 1: You know, he's a slave and this kind of powerful
Speaker 1: idea of competence, which we sort of lost. We don't
Speaker 1: really dig that these days. But the nineteenth century model
Speaker 1: of competence was I'm independent, I own my own land,
Speaker 1: I can feed myself in my family, and I'm beholden
Speaker 1: to no one. I'm debt free. Like so that was
Speaker 1: like the goal. You're a competent you know, American. I'm
Speaker 1: still big into competency, but I don't describe it though,
Speaker 1: h yeah, it's not a tern where you use much anymore.
Speaker 1: It's a great it's a great idea to fix stuff.
Speaker 1: And so there's this notion of being a competent citizen,
Speaker 1: and it was really understood back then is that was
Speaker 1: really a white thing, or at least that was the
Speaker 1: white view, like competence. A slave is not going to
Speaker 1: have that right their own. They're literally there. They can't
Speaker 1: have honor because they're owned by somebody else, and they're
Speaker 1: not going to independent. They don't feed their family. I do.
Speaker 1: So that just wasn't a thing that I that I,
Speaker 1: as as an owner, thought that was for them. But
Speaker 1: then you're Charles Ball and you're like, you know what,
Speaker 1: you own me, You own my family, You control what
Speaker 1: I do, you control my days. But you know what,
Speaker 1: I am the best sportsman you have. I go off
Speaker 1: on my own time and earned game and income from
Speaker 1: my family that you don't want me to have, and
Speaker 1: I do it anyway, and I demonstrate skill that you
Speaker 1: say shouldn't be demonstrated by people of color. And in
Speaker 1: the sort of limited world of options of a slave,
Speaker 1: that's a that's those are a couple of extended middle
Speaker 1: fingers to the master, and in and of itself, that's
Speaker 1: worth something. I think. All right, Scott Guiltner with we're
Speaker 1: gonna hit it again, Culver Stockton College. That's it. It's
Speaker 1: not Missouri, it is Canton, Missouri. What were you saying.
Speaker 1: I thought you were saying, what about Illinois? You I
Speaker 1: live right across the river in Quincy, Illinois. Canton is
Speaker 1: on one side of the river, and Quincy still down
Speaker 1: the street on the home of the guy that was
Speaker 1: flying the and Nola gay when it dropped the Yeah,
Speaker 1: Paul Tibots, Yeah, he was born in His mother, Nola
Speaker 1: Gayo was was born and raised in Quincy. His mom
Speaker 1: was a Nola gay Yeah. That's why the plane's name
Speaker 1: that you have to do his own plane, Yeah, named
Speaker 1: it after his mom. And it dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Speaker 1: I think Hiroshima. What happened to that guy? I have
Speaker 1: no idea. I do know that about oh, geez, thirty
Speaker 1: years ago or so. One of the one of the
Speaker 1: historians in town told me that, uh, there was a
Speaker 1: push to name an elementary school after him, and then
Speaker 1: some people were like, I don't know, atomic bomb elementary school,
Speaker 1: and they eventually shelved the plan, but getting name of
Speaker 1: school after him and they were afraid. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, m hm, a doubt, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean the guy had was doing a job. He's yeah,
Speaker 1: did his job? Did it? Well, we'll talk about that
Speaker 1: once some more time. That's a tough one. No, it's
Speaker 1: not tough. I mean for some people to tell one
Speaker 1: for some people's tough one. All right, y'all, thank you, thanks, yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you all so much. Great book. Everybody should read
Speaker 1: this book. I appreciate and uh, yeah it is Uh,
Speaker 1: I'll just mentioned this a shameless plug if you don't mind. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can grab this on Amazon. Um. It is currently
Speaker 1: out of stock, but I check this morning and it's
Speaker 1: listed as restocked on June, so that's not too bad.
Speaker 1: So yeah, as usually when you win, there's a book
Speaker 1: and low supply and then all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: see it selling for big amounts of money. Have you
Speaker 1: seen it go for a lot of money? And sometimes uh,
Speaker 1: because it's like there's like not many for sale, and
Speaker 1: some guys like I'll tell you what I'll do. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and uh, two things to any of you
Speaker 1: out there that may listen to this. If any of
Speaker 1: you paid that amount of money for my book, I
Speaker 1: have two thoughts, one thank you and two out of
Speaker 1: your mind? What were you thinking? Let me hit you
Speaker 1: with a quick book story. So, uh, there's a book
Speaker 1: I'm a great admirer of by a guy named Duncan
Speaker 1: Gil Chris. It's called Hunt High not like Baked but
Speaker 1: Hunt the High Country, and um, I love the book
Speaker 1: and he was a very accomplished alpine hunter. And I
Speaker 1: always talked about this book, but the book was out
Speaker 1: of print, and eventually I realized that someone run off
Speaker 1: with my copy. So I go online and then there's
Speaker 1: some guys selling it for a hunter bucks or seventy
Speaker 1: five bucks. I'm like, that's ridiculous, you know if I
Speaker 1: wanted it back, So I buy the book. The book
Speaker 1: shows up in my house with a sticky note on
Speaker 1: the cover and it says, dude, you're the reason I
Speaker 1: bought this book. Yeah, then you had to give me
Speaker 1: that copy of that book, which I now proudly owned.
Speaker 1: I'm glad to know that it's a hundred dollar copy
Speaker 1: of that book because I had loaned out to you
Speaker 1: a like a like a first edition. Jack O'Connor that
Speaker 1: you had given away. So now I'm the owner of
Speaker 1: your hunter A card h High. Oh yeah, you're not
Speaker 1: getting it back. Forgot about that. That's the way it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be, right, they say. They say that books
Speaker 1: shouldn't have owners, just readers just pass them around. I
Speaker 1: don't abide by that. I like other stuff you said, Scott. Thanks, thanks,