Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you
Speaker 1: by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands,
Speaker 1: or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to
Speaker 1: support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at
Speaker 1: first light dot com. F I R S T L
Speaker 1: I t E dot com. Holy Cow, Big Time author
Speaker 1: Peter Stark is here, old friend too. New York Times
Speaker 1: bestselling author Longtime contributed Outside like at a time. Peter
Speaker 1: and I both contributed at Outside around the same time.
Speaker 1: Peter is a like an adventure and exploration writer. What else?
Speaker 1: Howles did you put it?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 4: I call myself an adventure historian because I write about
Speaker 4: other people doing the crazy stuff because I'm too well
Speaker 4: to do it myself. So I look for historical figures
Speaker 4: that have gone over the edge in the in the wilderness,
Speaker 4: went too far, yeah, yeah, rightther than myself or well.
Speaker 1: At a time you put you, you would push it
Speaker 1: a little bit too far yourself, right, And now you
Speaker 1: let other people do the pushing.
Speaker 4: Right and do you know what I'm talking about. You've
Speaker 4: done some pushing yourself.
Speaker 1: Sure, long time contributed to Outside magazine. His work has
Speaker 1: appeared all over the place. He's written for the Smithsonian,
Speaker 1: New York Times magazine, written for the New Yorker, written
Speaker 1: how many books?
Speaker 4: A lot of books, seven or eight now seven or
Speaker 4: eight books.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get into some of these books which are
Speaker 1: highly applicable. He uh, Peter Stark wrote a book years
Speaker 1: ago about just all the Worst Ways to Die in
Speaker 1: the wild. He's written a book about Astor and the historians,
Speaker 1: so kind of like a mountain man beaver trade but
Speaker 1: America's first homegrown millionaire.
Speaker 4: That is right, visionary, a visionary.
Speaker 1: He wrote a book about and this this touch is
Speaker 1: on So so in a way, you've touched your touched
Speaker 1: on some of me and Randall's territory.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh totally, yeah, this is this is your world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, we're like, yeah, we're looking at more of the
Speaker 1: working class end of things. M h and and not
Speaker 1: the bosses. But you've touched on the boss. So we're
Speaker 1: working on the thing about beaver trappers. Okay, and he
Speaker 1: was sort of the boss of the beaver trappers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you worked for him and he told
Speaker 4: you what you were going to get for that that
Speaker 4: that pelt yep and uh yeah, you were kind of
Speaker 4: a captive man under John Jacob Astor.
Speaker 1: And then he became big time rich.
Speaker 4: He became big time rich.
Speaker 1: And if you go into Astor Place, the subway station
Speaker 1: in New York today, you will find.
Speaker 4: A beaver on the wall in the tile work.
Speaker 1: And there's a beaver in the tile work at Astorplace.
Speaker 5: I got it.
Speaker 2: Okay, I've been in that subway station a million times,
Speaker 2: never noticed it.
Speaker 1: Also wrote a book about I mean, you have a
Speaker 1: new book. This is brushing up against our boy Clay,
Speaker 1: but also wrote a book about George Washington, but the
Speaker 1: early George Washington and the surprising amount of like wilderness
Speaker 1: experience George Washington had as an explorer and bushwhacker and.
Speaker 4: Kind of a general screw up in a lot of ways,
Speaker 4: which was really shaped his career because it was like
Speaker 4: he made all the mistakes he could make in his
Speaker 4: twenties in the wilderness and you know, like inadvertently setting
Speaker 4: off the French and Indian War, almost freezing to death,
Speaker 4: I mean within an inch of dying at age twenty
Speaker 4: one and one thing after the other out in the
Speaker 4: Ohio wilderness. And then he managed to learn some things
Speaker 4: from that experience, and you know, he became a great
Speaker 4: leader eventually, But in this at this point, he was
Speaker 4: just he was just kind of a jerk. Actually, he
Speaker 4: was very self centered. He was really thin skinned. He
Speaker 4: was incredibly ambitious, He was in love with his best
Speaker 4: friend's wife. He wanted to be British.
Speaker 1: Shopping down a line about chopping.
Speaker 4: And he wanted to be British. That's I mean, clearly.
Speaker 4: He tried for years to be a British Royal Army
Speaker 4: officer and they wouldn't let him in and he was
Speaker 4: really angry about that. He tried for years. There are
Speaker 4: lots of stories about that.
Speaker 1: Now we were we were having trouble with George Washington
Speaker 1: because we just did an audio bit about we're doing
Speaker 1: these projects on different phases of commercial hunters. So the
Speaker 1: first one we did was on the white the deer
Speaker 1: hide hunters mostly in the first far West, so you know,
Speaker 1: stuff that floated into the Ohio mostly from the South.
Speaker 1: It's like Daniel.
Speaker 4: Boone okay, okay.
Speaker 1: Deer hunters pre pre revolution. Yes, so our our book cover.
Speaker 1: Our audio project covers up to seventeen seventy six. Okay,
Speaker 1: stuff that world kind of dissolved. But in it there's
Speaker 1: some really alarming quotes from George Washington, who had like
Speaker 1: a very like condescending, just shitty attitude toward the backwoodsman,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, of the frontier and questioned their question their patriotism. Well,
Speaker 1: in that he's like a tip of the hat would
Speaker 1: push him to the French and he says they're not
Speaker 1: was he bitched that they weren't Brits or they weren't Americans, just.
Speaker 6: That they weren't quite invested in the in the revolutionary
Speaker 6: project and that the yeah, that they didn't have any
Speaker 6: fierce loyalty one way or the other. There's sort of
Speaker 6: people in between empires.
Speaker 4: Well, now here's George Washington out in the Ohio Valley
Speaker 4: wilderness and you're tying seventeen seventy six. In seventeen seventy,
Speaker 4: seventeen seventy he took a canoe trip down the Ohio
Speaker 4: River and essentially he reserved twenty thousand acres of the
Speaker 4: very best lands for himself literally. And the reason he
Speaker 4: could is because he had served as an officer Virginia
Speaker 4: colonial officer in the French and Indian War. And you
Speaker 4: know that's how he got paid. The officers and men
Speaker 4: got paid in bounty lands. You know, you know that expression,
Speaker 4: you know, free land for your service. And as an officer,
Speaker 4: he got three thousand acres as an officer in the
Speaker 4: French and Indian War. And then what he started doing
Speaker 4: is he went around secretly to his fellow officers. But
Speaker 4: he wouldn't go himself. He'd send like a surrogate and
Speaker 4: say to the fellow officer, hey, you know, interested in
Speaker 4: selling that three thousand acres And if the fellow officer
Speaker 4: might say, yeah, I'll sell it, and so then George
Speaker 4: would buy it. And in that way he accumulated like
Speaker 4: twenty thousand acres of land. And then he went over
Speaker 4: the mountains and canoed down the Ohio Villa Ohio River
Speaker 4: in two big canoes with Indian guides, and he had
Speaker 4: some frontier guys with him, and he he staked all
Speaker 4: the rich bottom lands and he keeps a journal of
Speaker 4: it all the way down. So that's seventeen seventy. Then
Speaker 4: in seventeen seventy four, you know, things start heating up
Speaker 4: with a revolution coming along. You know, tension, a lot
Speaker 4: of tension between the American colonists and the British. And
Speaker 4: there's a certain point where the British in London, you know,
Speaker 4: the British in charge in London, say, you know those
Speaker 4: bounty lands that we were going to give to these
Speaker 4: American colonists for their service in the French and Indian War, Well,
Speaker 4: actually those bounty lands are only going to go to
Speaker 4: British officers, not Virginian colonial officers. He went ap shit. Oh,
Speaker 4: he went apit.
Speaker 1: That's what There are these letters.
Speaker 4: I've got some I think reproduced in this in this book.
Speaker 4: But he was so angry, and that was seventeen seventy four.
Speaker 4: Didn't take much to push him over the edge to
Speaker 4: the to the.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's probably the point at which you've got his
Speaker 1: revolutionary fervor. Man Uh also a book which we're going
Speaker 1: to get into. But Uh the great leader to COUMSA exactly.
Speaker 1: And you pit him against.
Speaker 4: William Henry Harris and William Henry Harris Territorial governor.
Speaker 1: And when I say that that you pulled it on
Speaker 1: our boy Clay is Uh. In our network, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a podcast called Bear Grease and that and Clay
Speaker 1: did I think a three parter on Tecumsa which was
Speaker 1: interesting but not didn't delve into the the sort of
Speaker 1: this this.
Speaker 4: Uh it's kind of face off, but yeah, there's.
Speaker 1: Sort of face off between him and the President of
Speaker 1: the United States.
Speaker 4: And that the dynamics, it was really the dynamics between
Speaker 4: the white world and the white political world and the
Speaker 4: and the Native leadership. And yeah, really interesting. And Thomas Jefferson,
Speaker 4: my hero, does not come come off well on this equation. Really. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we get into that fathers man. You know, once you
Speaker 4: their earlier days, you know, they're not all change. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they they I mean they're great guys, There's no doubt
Speaker 4: about it. They're great leaders. You know a lot of them.
Speaker 4: They all forged by fire, but they forged by fire.
Speaker 4: But they they were, they were, there were there's a
Speaker 4: lot of shelf interest going on there at the same time. No,
Speaker 4: you've never seen that in politics.
Speaker 1: Uh oh you know what, So we're gonna get in
Speaker 1: all that real big time. You know. You know what
Speaker 1: I've been watching with my boy. It's like, well worth time.
Speaker 1: My littlest boy is Have you guys seen that thing
Speaker 1: it's like it's like Planet Earth, but it's dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: Philm Maybe you know.
Speaker 1: It's called prehistoric Planet.
Speaker 7: I mean my kids have we I don't know if
Speaker 7: it's the same one. I feel like there's a lot
Speaker 7: of those.
Speaker 1: So instead of them saying, instead of them, it's got
Speaker 1: that same guy, that guy that does all those things Edinburgh.
Speaker 1: Oh my good lord. I mean, God bless them, God
Speaker 1: bless them, but holy cow. They got a part of
Speaker 1: it where you actually see him talking and it's like
Speaker 1: he physically has to sort of like expel his words
Speaker 1: his Head's like the hunter wears me out, drives my
Speaker 1: kids crazy, like the whole time I'm sitting, I'm like,
Speaker 1: but what they do in this thing? So you know,
Speaker 1: they got a lot of these dinings. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you about dinosaurs. They got a lot of these dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: You find like part of a bone, right, the best
Speaker 1: you can do, Like, I'm all for it. We had
Speaker 1: the the Jack Horner, not in this studio but our
Speaker 1: old studio. I'm warm to dinosaurs. But you got like
Speaker 1: a dinosaur you find like a hunk of his toe,
Speaker 1: which is great. What this thing does is it totally
Speaker 1: tries to make up their lives, so rather than it
Speaker 1: being a show about here's what it's little, it's total
Speaker 1: looked like. And if you figure that his toe look
Speaker 1: like this, and you know it's foot might have looked
Speaker 1: like this. If it's foot look like that, one might
Speaker 1: assume that rite whatever they get into like, it's all
Speaker 1: cgi And there's one of them making a nest and
Speaker 1: then another one of them comes up to like rob
Speaker 1: the nest, but a snake gets it, and they oh,
Speaker 1: they got there. They got all their vocalizations and every
Speaker 1: in this thing, every dinosaur is constantly vocalizing. A dinosaur
Speaker 1: will be sneaking up, he's sneaking up on something. He's vocalizing.
Speaker 1: They don't stop vocalizing. Every dinosaur all the time, in
Speaker 1: every scene is vocalized. And they even got it. We're like,
Speaker 1: there's dinosaurs that use tools. So he'll get a stick
Speaker 1: lit like a cigarette and run over and light some
Speaker 1: stuff on fire to flush game out. There's a dinosaur
Speaker 1: that goes on the beach and he makes like this
Speaker 1: artwork on the beach to attract overhead mate, and he
Speaker 1: lays out like an offering.
Speaker 5: Of like they write books too, well, this is all
Speaker 5: bird behavior, right, so that's what they're Yeah, they take
Speaker 5: some you know, I mean, yeah, totally get I mean
Speaker 5: it's it's bullshit because we can't possibly know. But they're
Speaker 5: dixtrapolating from is bird behavior.
Speaker 1: Current and they got a thing the science behind the show,
Speaker 1: and they got thing. But when you're watching with a
Speaker 1: nine year old, I can't help myself. I have to
Speaker 1: pause it and be like, now you understand. You sound
Speaker 1: like everyone they somehow have filmed. In his mind, they've
Speaker 1: filmed dinosaurs.
Speaker 4: Man, you're like ruining the Santa Claus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like, it's great, and even do this stuff
Speaker 1: where it's like they even do parts of the night vision,
Speaker 1: so you'll be like dinosaurs in a hole in the
Speaker 1: ground and it's infra red. Then I'll pause and now
Speaker 1: you realize, Yeah, I think this.
Speaker 5: Is very important for you to do, because I think
Speaker 5: it's very dangerous, right, you know, because different faces that
Speaker 5: are like well you know, and you're like okay, and
Speaker 5: you gotta you gotta be able to explain certain things
Speaker 5: to certain people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we watch a little every night.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 1: It's it's fascinating in parts of it. I need. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Attinborough stuff kills me a little bit. God bless him,
Speaker 1: he's been the bit is a long time. Uh, the
Speaker 1: the the guesswork. But here's the biggest thing that blows
Speaker 1: my mind, and I don't think this is guesswork. Dinosaurs
Speaker 1: in the snow.
Speaker 7: And the hair they have on them.
Speaker 1: I had it in my head. I don't know. The
Speaker 1: whole damn place is a jungle, but there were there
Speaker 1: was a lot of dinosaur activity in the snow.
Speaker 4: In this in this show.
Speaker 1: But but they kind of lay the case out like
Speaker 1: the poles, you know, the lamb Ass movement. I mean,
Speaker 1: the poles are still.
Speaker 4: Cold, they still stay they were.
Speaker 1: And they had like yeah, they had sea. They was
Speaker 1: like long dark you know. Course at that time they
Speaker 1: had long periods of light and dark, just like we
Speaker 1: do now. Right, So in areas that you had northern
Speaker 1: areas that would that were inhabited by dinosaurs that had
Speaker 1: total darkness in the winter, total daylight in summer, had snowfall,
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot of this fake footage of
Speaker 1: dinosaurs duke in it out in the snow, which is
Speaker 1: just not something you think about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's the Smithsonian mag article, as you've written for
Speaker 2: the Smithsonian from twenty twenty how dinosaurs thrived in the snow.
Speaker 2: Discoveries made in the past decades helped snow help help, sorry,
Speaker 2: help show how many species cope with cold temperatures near
Speaker 2: both poles.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's okay, that's total news to me.
Speaker 1: But at Borough Man he lays in more than one.
Speaker 1: Liner's the hunter becomes.
Speaker 4: The daunt.
Speaker 5: You do got to tell the boys about uh, firehawks though,
Speaker 5: because right, and I'm sure that's what yeah, because that
Speaker 5: was that's what they're going off.
Speaker 1: That's what they're going off of. They're taking things that
Speaker 1: they know birds do and and just sort of randomly
Speaker 1: assigning them. Now there's one more to gripe. I got
Speaker 1: with the show.
Speaker 5: You got to point out the fact too. It's like
Speaker 5: you can't make something like this and not have fighting, right,
Speaker 5: It's like the dinosaur spent a lot of time fighting.
Speaker 6: And yeah, see now I find the fire hawk less.
Speaker 1: Impressive if that has been going on, Yeah.
Speaker 6: Sixty five million years and they have it advanced beyond
Speaker 6: the right, Well they fly, yeah, but the whole the trickery,
Speaker 6: the tools, the culture.
Speaker 5: Oh, come on, Randall, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Randall changes off. He's the he's the use a
Speaker 1: diaper's advanced just in his own life from diaper to doctor.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know he's PhD. You're sitting
Speaker 1: next to that right and in history, I told you
Speaker 1: Randalls has been looking at you with a condescending eye.
Speaker 4: Should be.
Speaker 1: Well, one more thing about it. They have there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like so you know the flying reptiles back then,
Speaker 1: the pterodactyles and all that. There's one of those things
Speaker 1: as tall as a giraffe.
Speaker 2: Okay, does it have a long neck like a giraffe?
Speaker 1: And they got them all walking around on their elbows
Speaker 1: so they land and then they bring their wings in.
Speaker 1: Their wing tips are sticking up in the air and
Speaker 1: they walk on all fours.
Speaker 2: That sounds like the dragons.
Speaker 1: And they got these huge Yeah, they got these huge
Speaker 1: necks and heads. And I don't care, like I'll say
Speaker 1: this right in the face of paleontologists. I don't know
Speaker 1: what they look like. They didn't look like that, they
Speaker 1: didn't like you got it. You got it wrong because
Speaker 1: physics still existed, you know what I mean, like the
Speaker 1: physical properties like it, like unless you're gonna come and
Speaker 1: show me that sort of like ship that like uh,
Speaker 1: what's his name? Einstein was into Yeah, well somehow not
Speaker 1: applicable because I'm like, that didn't look like that. You
Speaker 1: got that one.
Speaker 6: We need to watch this. I think we need to
Speaker 6: watch this. Throw it up on the screen.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's some podcasts that do like sort
Speaker 3: of movie watch along commentary where you press play on
Speaker 3: the movie and press play on the podcast, and then
Speaker 3: you have people like, you know, it's like a commentary
Speaker 3: on a.
Speaker 5: DVD or whatever. Idea.
Speaker 3: It's just Steve just pointing out all of the inaccuracies
Speaker 3: with my kids, with your kids.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like she's riffing on the whole thing.
Speaker 1: My kids going dead Mystery Science Theater exactly. That would
Speaker 1: be so fun.
Speaker 3: I mean it would be obnoxious as hell, but I'd
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 1: I'll just do that a lot. News from sort of
Speaker 1: commentary from Catalina Island going back to going back to
Speaker 1: episode four eighty eight, we discussed the proposal by the
Speaker 1: Catalina Conservancy to eradicate non native black tail deer mule
Speaker 1: deer from Catalina Island. They come up with a plant.
Speaker 1: So Catalina Island is offshot. Well, it's an island off
Speaker 1: the coast California, and they have a they got they
Speaker 1: got a herd of buffalo that were brought out there
Speaker 1: for a Western Zane I think it was a Zaye
Speaker 1: Gray when they shot a Zaye Gray a new movie.
Speaker 1: And they got deer they brought out there. The buffalo
Speaker 1: are okay to hang out. The deer they want gone,
Speaker 1: and so they're hiring their break there. There's a proposal
Speaker 1: to use to bring in contractors to wipe the deer
Speaker 1: out from helicopters. We're discussing it on the show and
Speaker 1: we're saying, you know, as I often do, why would
Speaker 1: you pay someone to go get something that people would
Speaker 1: pay to go get. And we discussed this is why
Speaker 1: not use why not increase or use the hunting permit,
Speaker 1: the hunting permit process, it's already in place, and just
Speaker 1: expand the hunting permit process. They've they've been given out
Speaker 1: two hundred tags a year for deer. In twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, a guy who's been retired from California Department
Speaker 1: of Fish and Wildlife for three years wrote in with
Speaker 1: some commentary about this. I'm kind of going through his commentary.
Speaker 1: He says in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, we increase that
Speaker 1: amount to five hundred tags. In an attempt to promote hunting.
Speaker 1: To reduce the numbers on the island, California's Fishing Game
Speaker 1: Department went and encouraged the cataline To Conservancy to work
Speaker 1: with hunting conservation non governmental organizations to recruit hunters to
Speaker 1: go out on the island. It's a long letter, but
Speaker 1: basically he says that the conservancy is paying lip service.
Speaker 1: There's a term for this that I can't I want
Speaker 1: to use on Eric's try to limit the curse words
Speaker 1: to grin. It's my favorite thing. You'd say if you
Speaker 1: tell someone something and they kind of grin and go,
Speaker 1: but they have no intention of doing it. They're grin
Speaker 1: fing you, right, They're like You're like, They're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we'll look into it. That's what people have been doing
Speaker 1: to me all my life.
Speaker 4: But I didn't know there was a term for it.
Speaker 1: You know, you're like, hey, why don't you try? So
Speaker 1: basically that the Catalina him saying when we discussed this
Speaker 1: many episodes ago, we talked about there are a lot
Speaker 1: of obstacles to conducting effective deer hunts on the island,
Speaker 1: financial and otherwise. He goes on to say, we have
Speaker 1: tried extensively. He had tried extensively to work with the
Speaker 1: conservancy to overcome those hurdles, and they did not take
Speaker 1: them seriously.
Speaker 8: Well, they were the ones that made the hurdles, really
Speaker 8: is what it amounts to.
Speaker 1: And then now with the helicopter plan, they've got a plan,
Speaker 1: like many things, where no one is happy. The helicopter
Speaker 1: plan has the animal rights organizations up in arms, it
Speaker 1: has the hunters up in arms, and you've gotten a
Speaker 1: thing where and trying to please everybody, you've pissed off everybody.
Speaker 1: And he says that, and he is not. This individual
Speaker 1: is not on board with the idea that the hunting
Speaker 1: plan just didn't work. That do a fair job.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 7: It was never really given a chance.
Speaker 5: He's got a great point in here too, about like
Speaker 5: unsubstantiated claims about the difficulty of hunting in the wild
Speaker 5: land parts of the island. It's an island, it's completely
Speaker 5: accessible by water at all points. In fact, there's many
Speaker 5: different services out there, so you can circumnavigate the entire
Speaker 5: island and kayaks. Really yeah, oh super cool, super cool.
Speaker 5: And then you do that during lobster season. There's lobsters
Speaker 5: all over that island, all sorts of good stuff to eat. Man,
Speaker 5: And so I always think about that when I because
Speaker 5: I had multiple people tell me it, Oh, yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: there's no water, there's no Well, how the hell are
Speaker 5: these other people? It's a big island to go paddle around.
Speaker 4: How big is it?
Speaker 1: I've been out there. I can't remember. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: can't remember how.
Speaker 4: Many acres it is, like how many miles?
Speaker 1: Want is that the kind of island I feel like
Speaker 1: you could drive around? I don't want to say. It
Speaker 1: feels like a very limited roads. You can kind of
Speaker 1: take it all in.
Speaker 5: With a view, depending depending on how closely you follow
Speaker 5: the shoreline. It's fifty two to sixty six miles to
Speaker 5: circumnavigate Long Island eight miles across, So.
Speaker 4: That well, that's substantially I there's got to be water
Speaker 4: on that island.
Speaker 5: There is, it's just it's it's very limited. And then
Speaker 5: you know, like ice right is very limited and the
Speaker 5: roads you know, so like boats. But I yeah, I've
Speaker 5: I've been out there more than enough times to dream
Speaker 5: up exactly how I would hunt that thing very successfully.
Speaker 5: Like it doesn't seem to be real, not a problem
Speaker 5: that doesn't seem to really stomp a fella.
Speaker 1: Speaking to be able to take in how I said,
Speaker 1: you can take it in into view from a distance.
Speaker 1: So we we saw episodes ago. Had the director Werner
Speaker 1: Herzog on the podcast. Got one thing I didn't ask
Speaker 1: Herzog about that I wish I would have is he
Speaker 1: has a movie called The Enigma of Casper Mansker, and
Speaker 1: it's about a boy who was just raising a little
Speaker 1: rock hut. They never let them, they kept them captive
Speaker 1: his whole life in a rock hut, no interaction with
Speaker 1: the ND. Later he was freed and like educated a
Speaker 1: little bit, but it had developed this very peculiar worldview
Speaker 1: from having been kept having been like deprived and kept
Speaker 1: locked up in a rock hut his whole life. Someone
Speaker 1: mentioned him one time that you were in such a
Speaker 1: small space, but now you have the whole world, and
Speaker 1: he expressed that he viewed that space as being huge
Speaker 1: because everywhere he looked, no matter what direction he looked,
Speaker 1: there it was. But when you're outside and you look,
Speaker 1: a thing is only in one place. Do you follow me?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Now that's a really interesting perspective. Well, I mean
Speaker 4: it makes it makes logical sense. You can see how
Speaker 4: a human brain could configure it that way if if
Speaker 4: there was no other reference everywhere.
Speaker 1: Now, when when H. Stephenson was traveling with the Eskimal
Speaker 1: of the High Arctic and they would look through his telescope,
Speaker 1: they would refer to what they were seeing in the
Speaker 1: telescope and in a future tense, because that's when you
Speaker 1: would get there. That makes sense, right, what you would
Speaker 1: get to tomorrow. They would discuss as though it's existing
Speaker 1: in a future state, as when you.
Speaker 4: Derive that's so it's like a visual future tension.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, well, we're not there now, but there will be.
Speaker 1: But there will be a mountain, there will be a creep,
Speaker 1: there'll be a time when we get there. And he
Speaker 1: would get frustrated because when they would they would draw
Speaker 1: maps of islands for him, and they would the features
Speaker 1: that they utilized heavy would be huge. Le'saly's a huge
Speaker 1: island with a small bay where they hunt waterfall waterfowl.
Speaker 1: They would draw it for him, but it'd be like
Speaker 1: a little island mostly consumed by a bay. In their
Speaker 1: head like, well, who cares, Like go to the bay.
Speaker 1: Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 5: Way back when when I was doing lots of spot
Speaker 5: and stock mule deer hunting. Spend a lot of time
Speaker 5: just face down as flat as you can get right, like,
Speaker 5: especially in that like final one hundred yards, and sometimes
Speaker 5: it would be hours of just trying to creep that
Speaker 5: last little bit and when you would stand up, eventually
Speaker 5: there would be like a little instance of like nausea
Speaker 5: or vertigo and your brain like recalibrating to the scale
Speaker 5: of things as a standing human with a much further
Speaker 5: line of sight, whereas like you know that multi floor
Speaker 5: arose stuff out on the prairie, it's like eight inches tall.
Speaker 5: You'd be like it'd be like a giant boulder you're
Speaker 5: hiding behind, kind of like similar like to like diving
Speaker 5: down on reefs where you're like, oh, there's a little
Speaker 5: tiny rock down there, and then you get down there,
Speaker 5: it's like the size of VW type of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but that was always pretty wild to me.
Speaker 4: I can I can totally imagine that. You're like in
Speaker 4: an ant perspective.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you're hyper focused, and.
Speaker 4: You're hyper focused, and then you know, and there's all
Speaker 4: sorts of things. You know, we have two eyes that
Speaker 4: do the triangulating with your vision and they have been
Speaker 4: triangulating six inches away and now they're triangulating six miles away,
Speaker 4: and they say there's something's wrong here. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but that was always wild to me.
Speaker 1: One of the someone that got away, he died before
Speaker 1: we ever got him on. I was going to have
Speaker 1: Barry Lopez come on the show. In an Arctic Dreams,
Speaker 1: he's talking about a botanist who what was working on
Speaker 1: a tussock, So cataloging all the plant species on a
Speaker 1: tussock and trimming it, which is like this little head
Speaker 1: size clump of vegetation, and spending you know what, it
Speaker 1: was better part of a day working on this tussic,
Speaker 1: like snipping, weighing, snipping, weighing, and then having this feeling
Speaker 1: of then standing up and as far as the eye
Speaker 1: could see in any direction, it was it's sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, I mean the enormity, right, the enormity
Speaker 1: of the place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a doctor Seus's trick right where it's like
Speaker 5: the horton. Here's a who type of thing. Everything's on
Speaker 5: the head of the pit.
Speaker 1: Here's a letter that I like this we were talking about.
Speaker 1: I like this kind of LETTERCS it's a letter that
Speaker 1: someone wrote in mad about something, but it winds up
Speaker 1: they're wrong. The subject is a serious issue with Steve
Speaker 1: not giving attention to something he's always bitched about.
Speaker 5: Karin, you should have titled this Steve's wet Dream.
Speaker 1: He calls himself. So it's logan the Mountaineer Trapper. And
Speaker 1: he says, y'all are always bitching about national parks because
Speaker 1: you can't hunt on them. And he goes on to say, well,
Speaker 1: how come you haven't acknowledged the latest entry into the
Speaker 1: National park's system, which is the New River Gorge of
Speaker 1: West Virginia. And he goes on to say it's the
Speaker 1: only national park where you are allowed to fish, hunt
Speaker 1: and trap within park boundaries, seventy thousand acres of hunting, fishing,
Speaker 1: trapping ground now entrusted with National Park protections. And then
Speaker 1: some quote, I'm amazed that none of you have acknowledged
Speaker 1: the quote thing that you dislike the most in regards
Speaker 1: to the other designations. Brody went on to say, yeah.
Speaker 8: I mean, look, it's great that you can do that
Speaker 8: stuff in New River Gorge, fantastic, right, but fishing you
Speaker 8: can fish in national parks all over the damn place.
Speaker 8: You can fish in the Yellowstone and it ain't the
Speaker 8: first national park you can hunt it.
Speaker 1: But I pointed out that Broady. There's a difference because
Speaker 1: if you get like Rangu Saint Elias National Park and Preserve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so in certain gates of the Arctic, there's a thing
Speaker 1: called hard park and soft park.
Speaker 7: Preserves and parks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of it gets kick out of that
Speaker 1: hard park and soft park.
Speaker 7: A lot of what we're talking about is in Alaska.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where they'll be like an area of the park
Speaker 1: you can hunt, the area of the park you can't.
Speaker 1: And I've even heard of people. Remember one time, I
Speaker 1: can't remember, I met someone who knew someone. They were
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, but they had killed a
Speaker 1: sheep on the wrong side of a ridge and they
Speaker 1: were like, they killed a sheep in the hard park,
Speaker 1: not the soft park. And there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: brew how about that.
Speaker 7: But yeah, there's there's other stuff too.
Speaker 8: There's national seashores, which would be like soft park, I suppose,
Speaker 8: where you can hunt. But in Grand Teton National Park
Speaker 8: you can hunt cow elk and certain parts of the
Speaker 8: park at certain times of the year.
Speaker 7: So sorry, New River gorge.
Speaker 1: Sounds like Brody's turning into a National park apologist.
Speaker 7: No I'm not, but you know you got to point out.
Speaker 6: I mean, i'd consider myself a park man. You're I'm
Speaker 6: a park man. I like to go look at large
Speaker 6: creatures that walk right up to you.
Speaker 1: It's almost breaking up my marriage. My wife wants to
Speaker 1: go to glaciers.
Speaker 5: Damn bad, oh Randall's marriage. They're very much at my
Speaker 5: wife's glacier, happy to the line at which they would
Speaker 5: become pro capital punishment, if not pro vigilanti. And it's
Speaker 5: based off of their National parks experience.
Speaker 1: Oh, just enforcing rules.
Speaker 5: Yes, but you guys were talking about killing people who
Speaker 5: broke the rules in national parks.
Speaker 1: Randall thinks you have to. Rand thinks you should death
Speaker 1: penalty people who break should.
Speaker 6: This is probably an offhand comment fueled by some sort
Speaker 6: of substance that that leaves one prone to exaggerating their feelings.
Speaker 1: Well, that was the case, and my I have a
Speaker 1: dear friend that wouldn't be with us anymore because when
Speaker 1: he he he grew up here, and when he was
Speaker 1: a boy, you would ride your horse into the park
Speaker 1: with a hack saw because burrels like elk burrels was
Speaker 1: real popular for belt buckles, and they knew you weren't
Speaker 1: supposed to take the antlers off the park, but who
Speaker 1: really cared about the end. So that was a common
Speaker 1: thing in high school. Is the ride around hacksa on
Speaker 1: and off just the end, because like, come on? Was
Speaker 1: it was their attitude? Come on?
Speaker 4: There's still.
Speaker 6: I will say that there are Uh the flagrant disregard
Speaker 6: for the norms of society that you see at national
Speaker 6: parks frustrates me and raises my blood pressure. When there's
Speaker 6: like a big sign that says don't walk out onto
Speaker 6: the alpine and then someone just walks out onto the alpine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what would we do without Pierce bros Yeah, why
Speaker 1: did Pierce Brosn get in trouble in the park.
Speaker 6: Well, he walked out towards the the hot Mammoth, the
Speaker 6: geothermal features.
Speaker 1: Was he in pursuit of a criminal mastermind? Well he
Speaker 1: took no.
Speaker 6: He there was a photo taken of him and he
Speaker 6: posted it and someone said, what you're doing in that
Speaker 6: photos against the rules, and.
Speaker 4: Well he could have been his last walk too. I
Speaker 4: mean places in Yellowstone where you as you know, yeah,
Speaker 4: you walk out there and suddenly the crust breaks in
Speaker 4: your You're in like a lobster boil.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well he well, I don't want to.
Speaker 8: Wish ill news they got all the rules, all the
Speaker 8: idiots would be dead anyway, randall right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well we Yeah, I don't know. I I national
Speaker 6: parks I think are a source of great uh frustration
Speaker 6: for me. But I also see what they have to
Speaker 6: offer in terms of wildlife and landscapes.
Speaker 1: And I just only going anywhere where I don't feel
Speaker 1: like I'm scouting. I can just buy anything by feeling
Speaker 1: like maybe I'll see something that'll guide my future activities.
Speaker 1: When I'm in the parking, there's nothing I can see
Speaker 1: here that's going to influence anything.
Speaker 4: Have you ever gone in the in the deep in
Speaker 4: the Yellowstone back country? Right on the edge of it,
Speaker 4: but like like in the center of the park. I
Speaker 4: mean that's what I hear about. That's where you go on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's even worse.
Speaker 4: That's where I run my.
Speaker 5: Track going into those places.
Speaker 1: Yellowstone, Beaver Pelts worth a lot of money, Guinelt, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want Peter slogan is rare in hands teeth.
Speaker 8: I wanted thoroughfare once and I was just like man
Speaker 8: can't can't hunt any of this really sucks, you know.
Speaker 4: But but were you wait, did you get way back
Speaker 4: in there?
Speaker 8: And what a long time ago it's like in the
Speaker 8: mid nineties.
Speaker 1: To answer your question, I have not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have not, But I mean just not not
Speaker 4: in terms of hunting, but just in terms of you know, oh, scout.
Speaker 4: When you're saying scout, you mean scout for some living thing, like.
Speaker 1: I'm doing something that might impact something, Okay, right right,
Speaker 1: I go like, you know whatever, I don't know. A
Speaker 1: friend of mine just went on a pack rift trap,
Speaker 1: one of our buddies. He was packgrafting, and he mentioned
Speaker 1: casually mentioned seeing a couple of bears. Now I took note,
Speaker 1: and I was like, nowhere again. But if he was
Speaker 1: in the park, it would have been in one ear.
Speaker 1: And I know I understand that, I understand that. Here
Speaker 1: here's the thing I probably I shouldn't even be talking
Speaker 1: about because we haven't looked into it at all. But
Speaker 1: just just I'll point this out. Maybe cal maybe you've
Speaker 1: read up on this, someone wrote him. I have not
Speaker 1: vetted this. Maybe we shouldn't even talk about it.
Speaker 5: No, it's it's you vetted it. Yeah, I mean, there's
Speaker 5: a several other examples too, So.
Speaker 4: This is real.
Speaker 1: This is a real mental tongue twister here. I live
Speaker 1: in Minnesota. This is someone right now. I live in Minnesota.
Speaker 1: And earlier this year, the Upper Sioux Agency State Park,
Speaker 1: consisting of about two square miles, was transferred to the
Speaker 1: Upper Sioux community. This land has a troubled history where
Speaker 1: the federal government failed to provide promised food annuities and
Speaker 1: as a result, Dakota people starved. He goes on. This
Speaker 1: legislative session in the state Senate, a bill was introduced
Speaker 1: which would transfer state lands in White Earth State Forest,
Speaker 1: consisting of approximately one hundred and fifty five thousand acres
Speaker 1: or just under two hundred and fifty square miles, to
Speaker 1: the White Earth Tribe of northwestern Minnesota. The land currently
Speaker 1: is a state forest in the public true and is
Speaker 1: used for outdoor recreation by the public for small and
Speaker 1: large game hunting, horseback riding, fishing, etc. Leaders of the
Speaker 1: White Earth Tribe have stated that they would keep lands
Speaker 1: open to the public. However, the sort of guarantee that
Speaker 1: being a state forrest has to the public would be lost,
Speaker 1: and ultimately access for the public to the land would
Speaker 1: be up to the whims of tribal leaders. While I
Speaker 1: think the land transfer is a noble attempt towards righting
Speaker 1: wrongs of the past, I do not agree with removing
Speaker 1: lands from public use to further this goal. Currently, the
Speaker 1: land is open to use for everyone, but transferring it
Speaker 1: threatens that common use. For this session, the bill has
Speaker 1: been tabled, but Senator Konish I don't know how he
Speaker 1: pronounces his name, who carried the bill, has stated she
Speaker 1: expects it to reappear in future sessions. I would appreciate
Speaker 1: any considering on the topic and some of the Meat
Speaker 1: Eater team's thoughts on this topic. I'll hate you with mine.
Speaker 1: I'm going to keep it brief. I don't like to
Speaker 1: see any under any circumstances anywhere public lands falling out
Speaker 1: of the public trust.
Speaker 4: Ever.
Speaker 1: Ever, I don't care what it's for.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but this could potentially, I mean, I agree like
Speaker 5: staunch public lands advocate and want to keep them open
Speaker 5: to everybody. But just by like saying that, it kind
Speaker 5: of leans into this assumption that that access is going
Speaker 5: to change and it's going to come out of public
Speaker 5: access or not provide the same level of public access
Speaker 5: all this is saying, is that that management would change
Speaker 5: and that would be like the only known right now.
Speaker 5: But yes it does. With any management change, people like
Speaker 5: to rearrange stuff and let folks know who's in charge.
Speaker 5: So we don't know what we don't know.
Speaker 1: That's why I had to bring it up, I know.
Speaker 5: But yeah, the there I just saw over the Black Hills,
Speaker 5: a nonprofit Cheyenne Youth group, Uh, just purchased forty acres
Speaker 5: in the Black Hills as.
Speaker 1: Off the open market.
Speaker 5: Off the open market as an example of another like
Speaker 5: would be like another example of like a land back
Speaker 5: situation where this is going to be like tribal land
Speaker 5: in theory, held in perpetuity, but purchased purchased off the
Speaker 5: open market. Yeah, and then like Vermont and Maine have
Speaker 5: several examples of that too, So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Are you okay with that if it's on the open market?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's yeah. I mean there's plenty of
Speaker 5: people who aren't. And it's a really fun conversation to
Speaker 5: have because it's like, well, what is illegal about what
Speaker 5: is wrong about this?
Speaker 1: And then also what goes against you know, that's an
Speaker 1: issue with the very controversial American prairie reserve in the
Speaker 1: in this in the north central part of this state,
Speaker 1: which is buying ranches on the open market. Right ranch
Speaker 1: comes up for sale, you join the bidding process, and
Speaker 1: you buy it. And what they would like to do
Speaker 1: is just take the infrastructure out, take the fencing out,
Speaker 1: with the long term goal of turning it into you know,
Speaker 1: turning it into sort of like a pre contact prairie ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And people that would be very much private property rights
Speaker 1: right have a very like don't tread on me attitude
Speaker 1: in general politically, will find it very offensive because it
Speaker 1: is it sort of transcends the property rights issue and
Speaker 1: gets into a removal of history.
Speaker 4: Or a cultural It's a cultural threat, I think, a
Speaker 4: threat to that ranching culture is my understanding. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm not an expert in this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's very much.
Speaker 8: Like these coastal elites coming in here and buying up
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 1: But it's changed, but it's conflicted by like, well but yeah,
Speaker 1: I I I understand that. But at the same time
Speaker 1: I understand that. I feel like if you'd gone to
Speaker 1: ask someone like, do you feel that you should be
Speaker 1: able to do on your land what you want to
Speaker 1: do on your land. They would be like hell, yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: then you need to extend you stort of need to
Speaker 1: extend that outward unless you're saying that certain things trump,
Speaker 1: unless you're admitting that certain cultural things trump one's right
Speaker 1: to do what one wants with one's land, right.
Speaker 4: Well, by that argument, I mean, this is where I
Speaker 4: get impatient with with a certain mindset that we see
Speaker 4: a lot in Montana when people say, well, I'm a
Speaker 4: fourth generation Montana or a fourth generation ranch or a
Speaker 4: fourth generation this or fifth generation that. And then well
Speaker 4: and then you know, then you got the people who
Speaker 4: are three hundredth generation and five hundredth generation, and so
Speaker 4: you've got these guys who are fourth generation farmers or
Speaker 4: ranchers saying, well, this is our cultural history. And yet
Speaker 4: it ignores this incredibly ten to fifteen thousand years of
Speaker 4: other history. And so you know what's the difference there.
Speaker 4: And with the point about the is it the white
Speaker 4: National Forest in Minnesota, white earth whiter? That's another It
Speaker 4: strikes me that's another irony in that state forest, but
Speaker 4: state forest, state forest. And I've totally agreed that I'm
Speaker 4: never for closing public access to anything. I mean that
Speaker 4: I'm staunched as can be. But it's funny with a
Speaker 4: it's kind of a big irony that now it's the
Speaker 4: the we'll just call the white guys who are worried
Speaker 4: that the tribes are going to break the treaty.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1: And won't let them, won't let them on the land,
Speaker 1: like we're losing all our lands.
Speaker 5: We're pointing out to right that if you look in
Speaker 5: Minnesota on state forest land, like the there's plenty of
Speaker 5: threats to public access on state forest on on state
Speaker 5: forest and and it's in open pit, copper sulfide minds uh,
Speaker 5: a giant helium deposit uh, you know, all sorts of
Speaker 5: things that state land is typically there to generate some
Speaker 5: sort of income right there, and.
Speaker 4: That's part of its mission in a way that and
Speaker 4: so and that's a certain kind of public asset access
Speaker 4: which actually cuts out part of the public because it's
Speaker 4: being made into a for profit resource, right yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And then you know, so like United Property Owners
Speaker 5: in Montana would be one of the groups that has
Speaker 5: like tried to back legislation that would restrict a pr
Speaker 5: from purchasing land or following through with with their business model.
Speaker 5: The legislation is real wonky because it is willing buyer
Speaker 5: willing seller situations. Uh So I was thinking the other day,
Speaker 5: I'm like, would like Sherman Anti Trust Act be like
Speaker 5: the way to it? You have a corporate entity that's
Speaker 5: uh gobbling up the resource, right, would that be the
Speaker 5: the way?
Speaker 1: This is just just you're getting a you're gaining a
Speaker 1: regional land monopoly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh yeah, I've got another one along those lines.
Speaker 4: That's that's really been kind of eating away at me.
Speaker 1: And this is we're supposed to switch to use here
Speaker 1: on your on your time.
Speaker 4: Now, Okay, well this is how you'd like to use it, Well,
Speaker 4: I'll make it about me.
Speaker 5: You want to go to the bathroom.
Speaker 4: No, so this will feed into what I'm doing. I come,
Speaker 4: you know, grew up in Wisconsin. Came from a huge
Speaker 4: canoeing family, and so my grandparents were into my grandfather's
Speaker 4: way into rivers, my father on and on. My father
Speaker 4: was also really into frontier history and Indians, and so
Speaker 4: I grew up steeped in that frontier history. And one summer,
Speaker 4: my brother and I we grew up in a lake.
Speaker 4: My mom still lives there in ninety two in Wisconsin
Speaker 4: and yeah, doing well, I'm going to go back there
Speaker 4: next week. And we took a canoe from my parents'
Speaker 4: front lawn and we paddled from there to New Orleans
Speaker 4: really yeah, without without getting out of the water.
Speaker 1: I feel like I maybe forgot knew about this but
Speaker 1: then forgot it because it's somewhat Yeah, no, I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1: And and so I'll load right up in the yard.
Speaker 6: My buddy and I talked about that a lot, but
Speaker 6: we never pulled it off.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, well, believe me, you know, it's not like a
Speaker 4: summer vacation because it's like punching in at the factory
Speaker 4: and doing eight hours or ten of hard, hard paddling
Speaker 4: and then coming to a sandbar.
Speaker 1: So it was a basic like walk me through the
Speaker 1: basic like here to here, to hear, to hear.
Speaker 4: Okay, so this is this is where I'm getting into
Speaker 4: the public access thing.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 4: So this is a do you know about sub continental divides? Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so this is the sub continental divide between the
Speaker 4: Great Lakes system and the Mississippi Gulf of Mexico system.
Speaker 1: Which was which was punctured by the Chicago Sanitation Canal.
Speaker 4: You are so right, Well, we're going to talk about that.
Speaker 4: I went to Chicago Sanitation which was violated by the
Speaker 4: Chicago Sanitation Canal, which has the electric fish barrier. Well
Speaker 4: is that right?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 4: Well, that that you know, because I've been writing so
Speaker 4: much in in in these books, this most recent one
Speaker 4: Gallop Towards the Sun to Compson, William Henry Harrison, and
Speaker 4: a lot of it takes place in that whole Midwest region,
Speaker 4: in the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes, and and
Speaker 4: so I've always been really cognizant of rivers, I mean
Speaker 4: my whole life, and how they flow, and that one
Speaker 4: of the most important geographical features in North America is
Speaker 4: that subcont or mid continental divide between that where the
Speaker 4: waters flow out the Great Lakes to the you know, Gulf,
Speaker 4: to the Saint Lawrence and into the Atlantic, and where
Speaker 4: they flow from down the Mississippi or down the Ohio
Speaker 4: into the Gulf of Mexico. So if you're an Indian
Speaker 4: or family Indian but birch bark canoe, I mean, you
Speaker 4: could travel all over the place without really getting out
Speaker 4: of your canoe, which which they did. And people today
Speaker 4: don't really understand what an interconnected system of waterways there is,
Speaker 4: there was, and there is in this continent if you
Speaker 4: have the right craft and you know and you know
Speaker 4: where to go.
Speaker 5: So and the benefits, right, like the safety, the safety
Speaker 5: of being out on the open water with like a
Speaker 5: lot of distance between you and thick brush, potential death
Speaker 5: from animals.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it is, yeah, it is safe safety. And
Speaker 4: so so one of the things that makes me crazy
Speaker 4: about public access is stream access law. And I'm sure
Speaker 4: you guys have discussed this in Montana, and I'm I
Speaker 4: think now.
Speaker 1: In New Mexico is kind of the battleground.
Speaker 4: Is what's going on, and and you know, I'm sure
Speaker 4: you've talked about at least as far as I know,
Speaker 4: we still have it. I mean, Montana is a really
Speaker 4: good stream access phenomenal that the high water mark is.
Speaker 4: I mean you can venture up to the high water mark,
Speaker 4: which can be a lot of a lot of ground.
Speaker 4: And but then I was thinking, like, there's this really
Speaker 4: important hordage in Wisconsin that was you know, it was
Speaker 4: like the main interstate interchange of this whole part of
Speaker 4: North America. And it's between the Wisconsin River and the
Speaker 4: Fox River, so it's Green Bay.
Speaker 1: Also it's a portage to get from the Mississippi system
Speaker 1: to the Saint Lawrence system. Yes, this ship that goes
Speaker 1: into the Atlantic to the stuff that goes into the
Speaker 1: global Mexico.
Speaker 4: And and you know where Green Bay, Wisconsin and which
Speaker 4: was a very I mean it was a major Indian
Speaker 4: village forever and then it was then it was a
Speaker 4: really early purpost.
Speaker 1: Who is the dude that got into Green Bay and
Speaker 1: uh put on a silk what they call a mandarin robe. Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: I know, he's like China. It was French guy, one
Speaker 1: of those guys cross Lake Michigan. Get my silk robe.
Speaker 4: But then so, so there's this and my father would
Speaker 4: tell me about this. Okay, it's it's called Portage, Wisconsin.
Speaker 4: And oh and it connects those two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's so funny. I've seen that and
Speaker 1: said that a million times in their.
Speaker 4: Thoughts, and you never thought, yeah, because you grew up
Speaker 4: not so far away, and you know there's a big
Speaker 4: interstate that goes right by it. And so my brother
Speaker 4: and I was out there ski racing with my brother
Speaker 4: this winter at a ski area right near the Portage,
Speaker 4: and after we finished skiing, I said, hey, you know,
Speaker 4: I've always wondered really what this looks like. And so
Speaker 4: we started driving around and this portage it's really it's
Speaker 4: like a marsh and it's not very long to get
Speaker 4: from one system to the other. So this summer we're
Speaker 4: going to go and make that portage. Oh and what
Speaker 4: I'm wondering is like, okay, now in stream access law, Okay,
Speaker 4: here we are on one of the central routes across
Speaker 4: the continent in pre contact time. I mean, like you know,
Speaker 4: fifteen lane highway this portage would be. And now can
Speaker 4: you actually go across it? And it's a public land
Speaker 4: or is it private land? And it's private land? Are
Speaker 4: you allowed to go across? So what's your take on that?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: What you can't?
Speaker 1: Yes, you can't. No, Listen, I feel that, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like you should.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you.
Speaker 1: Know, follow the rules seems sticky, but should.
Speaker 5: If i'll you first, what is your intent?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: That's what we talk about.
Speaker 1: Exercise his historic portage.
Speaker 4: Right, I'm gonna I'm gonna work to establish those.
Speaker 5: You're not intending to loiter on private land. You're not
Speaker 5: in the harvest from private land.
Speaker 4: It's straight straight, just to pass through.
Speaker 1: And when some guy comes out in his yard and
Speaker 1: yells at you, and you say, I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: from the Atlantic Waterway to the goal just.
Speaker 5: And that guy goes back.
Speaker 1: You know a lot of guys have done this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you know parts of it are when I
Speaker 4: was really looking at it, it's like parts of it
Speaker 4: are still marsh. You know, it's like you might be waiting,
Speaker 4: you know, you might not even be in, Like what.
Speaker 1: Is the what is the from when you leave a
Speaker 1: substantial piece of water? How many miles you got to
Speaker 1: go to get in to another substantial piece?
Speaker 4: It might be a few hundred yards.
Speaker 1: Well that's it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh have you started mapping it out on on X.
Speaker 4: I'm about to though doing this in in July. Oh,
Speaker 4: it's great, I'll send you a video.
Speaker 1: You're right about it, obviously, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And you know I have I have another guy who
Speaker 4: might be interested in doing it with me. My brother
Speaker 4: wants to do it.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't want you don't want to whole
Speaker 1: herd of you're going through there. I'd keep it tight.
Speaker 1: We want to establish a president.
Speaker 4: Yeah, do it? Do it?
Speaker 5: Like the voyagers have about sixty of you.
Speaker 4: Everybody, everybody has one hundred and eighty pounds of beaver
Speaker 4: pelts on your back. They can't stop you. Then it's
Speaker 4: state commerce, right exactly.
Speaker 1: Exercise the commerce called that's a fascinating idea, man, Like
Speaker 1: what happened? I think you should call your article what
Speaker 1: happened to the old portage? Anyway?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, and if you could find the last record of
Speaker 6: someone using it in that great idea.
Speaker 4: Man, it was a canal. It eventually was made into
Speaker 4: a little canal, and then and then that was a bandit.
Speaker 4: But I think from what I can see, the canal
Speaker 4: is still there. I mean you might even just be
Speaker 4: able to go take the canal. It's sort of choked
Speaker 4: up with dead fall.
Speaker 5: There is new legislation in you'll way you guys along
Speaker 5: when we do it for stream access revamp and stream
Speaker 5: access I think in Indiana as well. So I mean
Speaker 5: it's the stuff is still very much being tinkered with.
Speaker 4: That you're saying it's up now and getting kicked around.
Speaker 5: Yep, yeah for sure. Yeah, because like there's plenty of
Speaker 5: his historic use.
Speaker 4: I mean Indiana, I mean this is where this Tacompsa
Speaker 4: book takes place. That place is like a rife with
Speaker 4: major passageways that people know nothing about. Today, and it
Speaker 4: was like this huge travel system through their Fort Wayne.
Speaker 4: The reason Fort Wayne is where it is is because
Speaker 4: it sits on it. You can't it's not like a mountain.
Speaker 4: It's this low knob sort of like a ridge line.
Speaker 4: This is like your country, a ridge line, very subtle,
Speaker 4: stretching south of Saint Erie, I mean saying a lake
Speaker 4: Erie and through that kind of northern northern Indian, northern Ohio,
Speaker 4: Indiana and to some degree Illinois. And the rivers that
Speaker 4: go north of that flow off that knob go into
Speaker 4: the Great Lakes, and those that go south of it
Speaker 4: go into the Ohio river system and then the Mississippi
Speaker 4: and the Gulf. And I means you know, you could
Speaker 4: probably jump from one stream to another in a lot
Speaker 4: of these places. And so those were when when Takompsa,
Speaker 4: you know and as forebearers the Shawnee and the Miami
Speaker 4: me we're establishing villages. That that ridge was one of
Speaker 4: the primary places where they established the villages. And when
Speaker 4: the US under George Washington first, you know, he was
Speaker 4: like in office about a year said that the Shawnee
Speaker 4: and the Cheroke here are are you know, hurting our
Speaker 4: settlers who are supposedly on legally taken land, which they
Speaker 4: were not. And George Washington says, Okay, we got to
Speaker 4: go get those the Shawnee and the and the and
Speaker 4: the and the and the Miami, who are who are
Speaker 4: killing settlers, and so he sent an expedition right to
Speaker 4: that spot. K Kyonga was called to destroy those villages.
Speaker 4: It was the epicenter.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 4: But but it's it's that it's so Indiana. It's really
Speaker 4: interesting that there's there's so many waterways in Indiana that
Speaker 4: were used very extensively by by native people.
Speaker 5: And I'm like a for a person, love love floating,
Speaker 5: love spending my time on rivers, and yeah, you never
Speaker 5: hear Indiana as like this travel. No, you know, it's
Speaker 5: not a canoe destination, of which there's many canoe destinations.
Speaker 5: But I am like, do a lot of traveling and
Speaker 5: just reacting with people about natural resources and stuff. And
Speaker 5: more often than not, when I point out a river
Speaker 5: and I'm like, holy shit, that looks cool. You ever
Speaker 5: go float that, you ever go fish that, people are.
Speaker 4: Nope, Yeah, yeah it is. I have that same experience.
Speaker 1: Hey, we're gonna let me, let me because we're do
Speaker 1: two things we're gonna we're gonna speed date. We're gonna
Speaker 1: speed date with Peter's books and his body work. But Cal,
Speaker 1: you want to, Cal had an update for us, then
Speaker 1: we're gonna then we're gonna go into our speed dating
Speaker 1: mode with Peter's books. Uh.
Speaker 5: Is this the plug for the Week in Review? Is
Speaker 5: that what you're talking about?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Phil, you chime in here. I think they're going
Speaker 5: pretty well. But we add a new drop every week
Speaker 5: to the Week in Review, and typically it's getting to
Speaker 5: know an issue or a conservation group a little bit better,
Speaker 5: a little more in depth, versus taking the whole you know,
Speaker 5: twenty two and a half minutes that we do every
Speaker 5: Sunday for the news. How do you think that's going, Phil?
Speaker 3: I think it's going great.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, if you guys haven't been paying attention to Cal's
Speaker 3: weekn Review, he's been doing two drops a week for
Speaker 3: the last I don't know, a month now or so,
Speaker 3: and it's it's going to keep going and just some
Speaker 3: really more in depth conversations with with these with these groups.
Speaker 3: And I think it's been it's been going really well.
Speaker 3: I don't know if what the feedback has been, but
Speaker 3: i'd assume it's been positive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all positive.
Speaker 1: No, if you dig the if you dig the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff that we talk about a lot of times
Speaker 1: up top of the show about certain you know, little issues,
Speaker 1: conservation issues that flare up around the country. This is
Speaker 1: where you go to get to get the greater level
Speaker 1: of information, a deeper dive on such issues and organizations
Speaker 1: that kind of drive those issues.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So the one most recent to when this show airs
Speaker 5: would uh spoke with a regional Pheasants Forever coordinator, Hunter
Speaker 5: Van Donsel, who's a wonderful human, very smart dude, smart
Speaker 5: enough to live on the high line in Montana even
Speaker 5: Uh so he's got freedoms that we don't enjoy here
Speaker 5: in the.
Speaker 4: Gallatin Valley ruin extra wind, yeah, and.
Speaker 5: Extra wind all the wind you can handle, but h
Speaker 5: and we talked about how Pheasants Forever operates, what they
Speaker 5: have going on.
Speaker 1: And then.
Speaker 5: Last year we spoke a lot about the grasslands, uh,
Speaker 5: which would be like, ah, like a KNACKA for grasslands
Speaker 5: which national what's whatever my acronym there, Randall.
Speaker 6: You're talking about the North American Grasslands.
Speaker 5: Act, Yes, which would be a NAGA. Yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 5: anyway would be a new updated version of a bill
Speaker 5: which would be in something that would affect us nationally
Speaker 5: that would operate on the same system as our National
Speaker 5: Wetlands Conservation Act, which would be providing lots of private
Speaker 5: and public funding and additional resources for the conservation of grasslands,
Speaker 5: which grasslands is a big catch all world word of
Speaker 5: sage brush steps and mixed grass prairie and short grass
Speaker 5: prairie and lots of stuff that big gnarly meal deer
Speaker 5: bucks and antelope bucks, and bees and migratory birds and
Speaker 5: a lot of fun things that we like to chase
Speaker 5: and check out. Grasslands are going away at an alarming rate.
Speaker 5: So that's why we're going to start working and talking
Speaker 5: a lot about the National Grasslands Act.
Speaker 3: Well its and it's all these organizations that we're throwing
Speaker 3: money at during trivia, but you could actually get to
Speaker 3: meet the humans behind these organizations, where their priorities lie,
Speaker 3: where the challenges li, where they're spending this money, and
Speaker 3: and hell they're helping you out. So it's been going great.
Speaker 3: I think it's really interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is like the one of the the pet
Speaker 5: peeves that I have of the ask cal email is
Speaker 5: when people write in they say, hey, tell me what
Speaker 5: to think about this. And so this is another pound
Speaker 5: my head against the wall example of trying to give
Speaker 5: you the information that you can make a decision on
Speaker 5: your own.
Speaker 1: I would never give up that.
Speaker 6: I was gonna say a lot of people that a
Speaker 6: lot of people want that power.
Speaker 1: They're envious of you, Peter.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: Okay, what was was speed dating or speed reading? Speed
Speaker 1: dating your books? Okay, so you're what's that French word your.
Speaker 4: I think that's an omelet?
Speaker 1: So was your first book sudden what hell was it?
Speaker 4: Last breath?
Speaker 1: Last breath? I was gonna say, sudden breath, sudden death,
Speaker 1: last Well, kind of yeah, that was your first book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell people about your first book. This is fascinating.
Speaker 4: It is, Yeah. I mean it's kind of like got
Speaker 4: me into this world. While I was in this world,
Speaker 4: both Steve and I were we're doing articles for Outside.
Speaker 4: I'd started somewhat earlier and Outside, would you know, love
Speaker 4: it if you'd put your life at risk and then
Speaker 4: survive and write a good article about it? But that
Speaker 4: was sort of their their and at least in part,
Speaker 4: and so at one point I came up with this
Speaker 4: crazy idea kind of like this portage idea. And I said, well,
Speaker 4: I wonder what happens if you get in a car
Speaker 4: and in Missoula and and at our little apartment above
Speaker 4: Goldsmith's Ice Cream When I was living with Amy, we
Speaker 4: were young marriage and drive north on a Highway ninety three,
Speaker 4: and you just keep driving north on a highway and
Speaker 4: you don't stop, and you cross the border and you
Speaker 4: still go, and then you still go, and then you
Speaker 4: still go, and like how far north could you go?
Speaker 4: And then I started thinking, I wonder if you just
Speaker 4: kept pushing, if there'd be some way you could ever
Speaker 4: get to Greenland just by going north out of Missoula
Speaker 4: on Highway ninety three. So my father in.
Speaker 1: Law, who you really end up where one takes off from.
Speaker 4: So and so, and my father in law, who was
Speaker 4: a foreign correspondent Great Adventure, had a VW van. He said, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: let's take my VW van. He was going to drive
Speaker 4: us up as far as we could get. And then
Speaker 4: Amy and I thought, okay, then we'll start trying to
Speaker 4: look for you know, planes or whatever we can find.
Speaker 4: And so we spent like six days driving from Missoula
Speaker 4: up through due North and we got up to the
Speaker 4: Northwest Territories and essentially Highway ninety three ends in a
Speaker 4: Yellowknife and you guys have probably, oh yeah, big lake,
Speaker 4: very big leg. And then my father said, okay, I'll
Speaker 4: take I'll take the van. And then we started hopping
Speaker 4: like small kind of commercial flights that that would take
Speaker 4: you know, the natives around two different far northern villages,
Speaker 4: and we started hopping those and we got all the
Speaker 4: way over to Baffin Island, which is way on the
Speaker 4: eastern shore and you know, it's a big punk of ice.
Speaker 4: And then we managed to in Baffin Island, we ran
Speaker 4: into this German couple and the guy was like a
Speaker 4: big international lawyer and had a lot of money, and
Speaker 4: his wife was a watercolor painter and so she wanted
Speaker 4: to paint the Arctic, and so they'd hired this little plane,
Speaker 4: this little bush Arctic plane to go up to Ellesmere Island.
Speaker 4: And you know, Elsmere Island like if you're going to
Speaker 4: the North Pole, that's your jumping off point. You know,
Speaker 4: there's nowhere, no land has farther. And so we hitch
Speaker 4: I took him a couple you know days to do
Speaker 4: all this, and we got up to Elsmere Island. And
Speaker 4: then we we we hired the plane from the German
Speaker 4: couple said you know, can we borrow it for like
Speaker 4: half a day and and uh and they said fine, fine,
Speaker 4: we'll just stay here. And it's called Greecefjord. It's like
Speaker 4: ten houses on Elsmere Island on the southern shore with
Speaker 4: the like a you know, tunderous strip. And so then
Speaker 4: we had this pilot, Jock, who is like young guy
Speaker 4: retired from the Montreal Stock Exchange to be a you know,
Speaker 4: Arctic bush pilot. And so so Jacques says, okay, and
Speaker 4: I say, well, we want to go over there to Greenland.
Speaker 4: And you know, by that time, all these islands are
Speaker 4: getting squished together because you're getting so far up in
Speaker 4: the north, you know, I.
Speaker 1: Mean by like plate tectonics, they're just squished together by
Speaker 1: by the North Pole, you know, everything they all converge
Speaker 1: us up there, you know.
Speaker 4: And and so the distance between this little landing strip
Speaker 4: in Greece Fjord, Canada, and the farthest north villages in
Speaker 4: the world they're Inuit villages Greenlandic Inuit villages around a
Speaker 4: place called Kannak. It's only two hundred miles apart. Over
Speaker 4: open water and so and so, you know, Jacques was saying, yeah,
Speaker 4: well I'll do that, or you know, Jack's blos said yeah,
Speaker 4: you can do that, and Jacques was like, okay, I'll
Speaker 4: do it. And one of the problems was Jacques was
Speaker 4: a medical rescue plane, so it was used to landing
Speaker 4: on prepared airstrips. You know, it had so it had
Speaker 4: pretty small, small tires, you know, landing wheels, and it
Speaker 4: was a fairly sleek plane. It wasn't one of those
Speaker 4: big like balloony bush planes, but it was still you know,
Speaker 4: it's pretty pretty all purpose. And so we get in,
Speaker 4: we get in. I'm spinning this story out. I could
Speaker 4: spin it for hours, but that uh, you know, early
Speaker 4: in the morning, beautiful sunny day like June, completely sunny,
Speaker 4: but everything, you know, seas completely frozen, their glaciers every
Speaker 4: which way. And we get on this in this plane
Speaker 4: and Jock's little plane, this little tundra airstrip and you know,
Speaker 4: he he, he taxis out to position and then and
Speaker 4: I'm sitting in the front seat with him, you know,
Speaker 4: and he on the earphones and then it's like we're
Speaker 4: waiting for the control tower and it's just go and
Speaker 4: then we launch and then we're you know, flying over
Speaker 4: the incredible northern scenery, you know, ice and islands and
Speaker 4: glaciers and you know, and this is pre GPS. This
Speaker 4: is in nineteen ninety ninety one, and so there were
Speaker 4: none of this, you know, high tech computer satellite tracking.
Speaker 4: And so Jacques has like an aeronautic map on his
Speaker 4: lap and you know, trying to find his way to
Speaker 4: Connacht over there, and by now you're so far north
Speaker 4: at the magnetic compass point.
Speaker 1: Southwest in the declaration is like about it.
Speaker 4: It's like almost exactly the opposite. And so we're flying
Speaker 4: north and I mean we're flying, you know, across this
Speaker 4: gap to a different continent, two hundred miles of water.
Speaker 4: And you know, after about a half an hour, we're
Speaker 4: driving along this beautiful weather and Amy's in the back
Speaker 4: and we have all our skis and stuff, crampons for Greenland,
Speaker 4: you know, and and and Jack has this map and
Speaker 4: folded in his lap, and he says, at a certain
Speaker 4: point he just goes, He just kind.
Speaker 1: Of crumbles it up in a ball and shoves it
Speaker 1: in my lab. He says, I can't figure out where
Speaker 1: we are safe.
Speaker 7: You Canada.
Speaker 5: And anyway, eventually that's tied exercise at that point here.
Speaker 4: On the clock. Yeah, and the plus green that was
Speaker 4: clouded in, you know, and and but he found a
Speaker 4: hole in the clouds. It was like really it was
Speaker 4: very dramatic. And and as we dropped through the hole
Speaker 4: in the clouds, you look down and there's this huge
Speaker 4: expanse of sea ice, massive fjord, and I could see
Speaker 4: these little they look like little wagon trains running along
Speaker 4: and I realized those are dog slits. Oh, and they're
Speaker 4: way out on the sea ice. And so we we
Speaker 4: circled around this little village and Jack was really nervous
Speaker 4: about landing, and you know, the airstrips like a cliff
Speaker 4: at one side, a cemetery on the other, and it's
Speaker 4: all kind of lumpy, and so he's finally on the
Speaker 4: third try, just puts it down all crack. You know.
Speaker 4: We go spinning down the runway like fish tailing down
Speaker 4: because the landing gear breaks off when we went. And
Speaker 4: so we're in Greenland. And so to make the long
Speaker 4: story short, we ended up hanging out with the Inuit
Speaker 4: hunters on the sea ice. And in this region of
Speaker 4: Greenland they still hunt I think still do the traditional
Speaker 4: way with with kayaks and harpoons. Snowmobiles are banned, literally banned.
Speaker 4: Oh kidd and yeah, I mean you'd be you'd be
Speaker 4: totally into this thing.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 4: They got out ahead of that, and then want they
Speaker 4: got way ahead of it. Yeah, and I hope, I hope.
Speaker 4: I'm really curious. I it was still like that. And
Speaker 4: so we went out twice on two expeditions on the
Speaker 4: sea ice with with hunters. One a dog sled and
Speaker 4: you know, and you have this sealskin kayaks strapped to
Speaker 4: the dogs, letter two of them. And you get out
Speaker 4: there and you're hunting for narwhale and they're out in
Speaker 4: these the leads, you know, the cracks and ice, but
Speaker 4: way I you know, like twenty miles out before you
Speaker 4: get to there, the ice starts cracking up. And then
Speaker 4: and we got stormed out of that one.
Speaker 1: You didn't have to get a toss you're looking to unload.
Speaker 1: You don't have to have a narwhale tuss you're looking
Speaker 1: to get. You didn't bring one home.
Speaker 4: No, I know almost, but I wasn't gonna get in
Speaker 4: the kayak with a hard food.
Speaker 1: Believe me.
Speaker 4: It's like you tip over in that kayak, and that's
Speaker 4: all she wrote. And it's but it's a wild scene.
Speaker 4: And then we got stormed out that time and had
Speaker 4: to kind of flee a storm to get back. Dog said,
Speaker 4: back to the to the village. And then another time
Speaker 4: a few weeks later, the ice had broken out and
Speaker 4: we went out and boats and did the same thing,
Speaker 4: and we our guys, you know, they came close. They
Speaker 4: almost got in our whale, but then but but not,
Speaker 4: and then and then we decided. Amy said, well, you know,
Speaker 4: I really have to get back home now. She had
Speaker 4: I can't remember. She had some hard deadline, and so
Speaker 4: like we're almost at the North Pole and we have
Speaker 4: to like turn this whole expedition to go home, which
Speaker 4: takes like a month to get home. And the reason
Speaker 4: this story started is because when we were up there
Speaker 4: and it's like fourth of July, we're on the sea ice.
Speaker 4: We're in this dog sled and it's like a sunny day.
Speaker 4: The other day it was blizzardy day. But we have
Speaker 4: our full Montana skik ear on and these guys, the
Speaker 4: Inuit hunters are wearing Mama Root and another guy, Thomas,
Speaker 4: and they're wearing you know, really good veteran hunters. There
Speaker 4: were ring like white wind light wind breakers white because
Speaker 4: that's you know, to just got for a camouflage, and
Speaker 4: like thin you know, like almost silk white gloves and
Speaker 4: that's all. And we're just like dying of cold, and
Speaker 4: they're like, you know, no problem. And so when I
Speaker 4: got home, I started thinking, what is it about the
Speaker 4: physiology of cold? And then I came up with this
Speaker 4: idea for Outside magazine to write about the physiology of cold.
Speaker 4: And I had this notion that I'd go out and
Speaker 4: camp out at Rogers Pass on the coldest night of
Speaker 4: the winter, at the coldest place in the lower forty
Speaker 4: eight states, and see how that was, you know, as
Speaker 4: a first person experience for Outside.
Speaker 1: See how I was to get real cold.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And then as it turned out that when that
Speaker 4: cold came along, that cold stand was fifty below with
Speaker 4: fifty mile an hour winds. And I said, you know,
Speaker 4: I have like a two year old daughter at home,
Speaker 4: and I'm thinking this might be a one way, one
Speaker 4: way camp. And so I called you you'll appreciate this.
Speaker 4: Mark Brian was our editor at Outside, and so I
Speaker 4: called Mark Brian and I said, I don't think I'm
Speaker 4: going to do this, you know, it's like it's way
Speaker 4: too cold, And I said, well, how about if I
Speaker 4: just camp in the backyard, it's gonna be like twenty below. No,
Speaker 4: we don't want you to camp in the backyard. Why
Speaker 4: do you invent a story of a guy who goes
Speaker 4: out in really cold weather and then goes through all
Speaker 4: the physiology of cold And so that's what I ended
Speaker 4: up doing, And I wrote it in the you the
Speaker 4: second person voice, and I essentially stole the plot line
Speaker 4: from to Build a Fire where Else? And so the
Speaker 4: story it's called now it's called it has a hundred
Speaker 4: different names. It's because it's been around twenty five years
Speaker 4: and it goes viral every winter.
Speaker 1: In a cold snap.
Speaker 4: It's called I think it's called Frozen Alive at this point.
Speaker 4: But it's this really kind of eerie story about a
Speaker 4: guy who's trying to visit his friends at a mountain
Speaker 4: cat on a winter night and it's twenty below or something,
Speaker 4: and he's driving his jeep up this winding road and
Speaker 4: he you know, spins off into a snow bank, and
Speaker 4: you know, he's stuck, but he still wants to go
Speaker 4: to the cabin. And he has his cross country skis
Speaker 4: and he says, well, I just ski to the cabin.
Speaker 4: You know, it's this beautiful moonlit night. You know, it's
Speaker 4: only five miles or so. You know, I run that
Speaker 4: far every every morning before breakfast. And then you can
Speaker 4: imagine how it goes from there. Not well, but you know,
Speaker 4: it's like it's it's I trace his physiology, you know
Speaker 4: that that he gets up a certain point and then
Speaker 4: the clip on his binding breaks and he has to
Speaker 4: dig in the snow to find it. And as you know,
Speaker 4: now his body temperatures is dropping from like ninety five
Speaker 4: down to ninety three. And at that point the brain
Speaker 4: function starts to slow down. And then at this point
Speaker 4: kidney function starts to slow down. You know. It goes
Speaker 4: through the whole thing, and he does surve but it
Speaker 4: ended up being this huge hit of a story. And
Speaker 4: then and then so I thought, well, maybe I'll write
Speaker 4: a whole book like that. So I wrote a whole
Speaker 4: book called Last Breath. It's like eleven Great Ways to
Speaker 4: Die in the Wilderness.
Speaker 1: And I remember you did the box Jelly, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: box Jelly, Yeah, Well talk about that ever there?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was trying to find the most you know, poisonous,
Speaker 4: most toxic, most venomous creature. And it turned out to
Speaker 4: be the box jellyfish. You got any of you guys
Speaker 4: familiar with that?
Speaker 1: The box jelly fish one, I know it exists, but
Speaker 1: I've never never seen one, never been swimming with a
Speaker 1: box jelly fish. No, we've got hanging up those little
Speaker 1: man not little Yeah, Yeah, that hurts. And then the
Speaker 1: lion's main ones hurt.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've heard. I've never been in those guys box
Speaker 4: jelly Well, in the in the box jelly fish, it's
Speaker 4: you know, they say it's the size of like a grapefruit,
Speaker 4: but it has this incredibly powerful neurotoxin and and you
Speaker 4: can be dead in like two minutes with a box
Speaker 4: jelly fish. And it's you know, and I traced all
Speaker 4: the chemistry of that. You know. The setup was a
Speaker 4: couple on their honeymoon in northeastern Australia, and you know,
Speaker 4: the guy takes a dive in the water, and you know,
Speaker 4: they're sort of fighting, and the guy takes a dive
Speaker 4: in and get to you know, sort of get away
Speaker 4: from her, and it's like.
Speaker 1: What other one doesn't.
Speaker 4: Survive dodged the bullet.
Speaker 1: Was there a falling one?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I had, Oh yeah, that was That was a
Speaker 4: fun one because I created a real turk, you know,
Speaker 4: and you know, like a real type, a hyper in
Speaker 4: your face jerk who is like, I'm the hottest rock
Speaker 4: climber there ever was. And and he goes he's going
Speaker 4: rock climbing, climbing one Saturday morning and his buddy stands
Speaker 4: him up. So he says, I'll do it alone and
Speaker 4: you know, free climbate and he he uh, he gets
Speaker 4: part way up and he peels off and he falls,
Speaker 4: I don't know, like thirty feet lands on a ledge,
Speaker 4: really hard slam, and I don't do you know. Doug Weber,
Speaker 4: he was an er doctor in Missoula. He was the
Speaker 4: one who gave me this scenario because I was just
Speaker 4: going to have some guy like go tumbling down a
Speaker 4: steep slope and you know, flipping around. He said, well,
Speaker 4: you can make that a lot more interesting because you know,
Speaker 4: when somebody takes a real fall, and it happens in
Speaker 4: car accidents too, it's I mean, it's like tragic stuff
Speaker 4: when it happens to somebody that that sudden deceleration can
Speaker 4: pull your heart forward and it causes a or to
Speaker 4: to have a like a weak spot in it, like
Speaker 4: a bubble. You know, I was basing not the name
Speaker 4: for it. And that you know, it's you can either
Speaker 4: can either break right then or sometimes it kind of
Speaker 4: lasts for a while.
Speaker 7: Are you feeling that right now, Steve? Yeah, you usually do.
Speaker 5: He didn't cut to his camera, but he made a
Speaker 5: face and.
Speaker 1: You know, things I don't like hearing about.
Speaker 4: And so yeah, this guy, well you didn't, don't fall
Speaker 4: thirty feet on your back into a ledge and you're okay.
Speaker 4: But so this guy falls and he and he really
Speaker 4: slams and he you know, and then he kind of
Speaker 4: dug The er doc said, yeah, and you typically throw
Speaker 4: up right then because this is your body, what it does,
Speaker 4: the physiology. And then and then the guy realized that,
Speaker 4: well he's still alive, you know, he's didn't even really
Speaker 4: get knocked out too severely, but he has a broken leg.
Speaker 4: And so you know, this guy's I'm just painting him
Speaker 4: as the biggest asshole I can. And so he's up
Speaker 4: on this ledge and he lasts the night, you know,
Speaker 4: and he dawn comes and he thinks I've got it,
Speaker 4: you know. And also there's a sing in the in
Speaker 4: the er world called called the Golden hour. You probably
Speaker 4: heard of that. It's like the first hour after one
Speaker 4: of these really traumatic uh body impacts accidents, that that
Speaker 4: your your body can kind of hold itself together for
Speaker 4: an hour, and they call it the golden hour. I mean,
Speaker 4: it doesn't know what's happened, but it can. So he
Speaker 4: gets past the Golden hour and he lasts all night
Speaker 4: and in the morning he's like, I'm alive, I'm alive.
Speaker 4: And when he does that, he bursts a arctic uh.
Speaker 4: And that's all she wrote.
Speaker 6: This doesn't sound like it was any fun to write.
Speaker 1: Give give a cup more than are in. I remember,
Speaker 1: I remember, I'm trying to remember, man, I remember that
Speaker 1: there was hype.
Speaker 4: Well, I said, I said, in some do.
Speaker 1: You do hYP do you do hyper thermia?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's what I said. I've sent it in
Speaker 4: some notes that I sent to Corene that out of
Speaker 4: that whole book. You know, sometimes people ask me, what
Speaker 4: what's the what's the what do you think is the
Speaker 4: worst way to die in you know, the outdoors? And
Speaker 4: I would say, oh god, you know, none of them
Speaker 4: are good. That's you know, it's nobody wants any of those,
Speaker 4: and nobody wants any of those from anybody they know.
Speaker 4: But that I think hyper thermia would be the hyper that.
Speaker 4: So hypothermia, of course is low low body temperature. High
Speaker 4: hyper thermia is high high high body temperature. And what
Speaker 4: that gets to a certain point where and you know,
Speaker 4: I've I realized how on the edge I'd been of
Speaker 4: that in certain moments. You know, I used to run
Speaker 4: up Mount Jumbo every day in the height of the
Speaker 4: summer heat, and you know, I could feel my body
Speaker 4: doing this weird ship. Yeah, And and that it's really
Speaker 4: amazing how quickly you can go over the edge into
Speaker 4: a heat, heat stroke or hyperthermia, and that that it's
Speaker 4: it gets to a point where your body can no
Speaker 4: longer cool itself down, Like the mechanisms that you use
Speaker 4: to cool yourself down, like sweating and various other mechanisms
Speaker 4: are are overwhelm helmed. And at that point your body
Speaker 4: actually starts heating up more and and it's like a
Speaker 4: like a nuclear furnace, you know, reactor that's out of control.
Speaker 1: And then it gets.
Speaker 4: Really nasty that your organs start perforating in furious ways,
Speaker 4: and so you just start getting multiple organ failure and
Speaker 4: it's just I mean, it's really awful physiological Was that.
Speaker 1: Really promising young writer? I think Ian Fraser knew him
Speaker 1: as well. And he died of hyperthermia in Africa? Was
Speaker 1: his name Shepherd or something? I don't know.
Speaker 4: I'm not I'm not striking a bell, it's not striking.
Speaker 1: I feel like he was an outside writer too, Does
Speaker 1: that right? Died of hyperthermia?
Speaker 4: Well I can, I can believe it. And then I
Speaker 4: mean the one, the one thing.
Speaker 1: About like a writing fellowship in his name. Now, who
Speaker 1: the hell was that?
Speaker 4: He was a good writer?
Speaker 1: Man, try to find I'm Shepherd, hyperthermia writer, you know,
Speaker 1: something like that. But I mean the one.
Speaker 4: The one thing about it is that by the time
Speaker 4: all this nasty stuff happens to your oregons, you're you're unconscious. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you don't know anything, and so you see it. I
Speaker 4: mean that these unfortunate situations of people dying of pete
Speaker 4: stroke and athletic fields and whatnot. Yeah, they you know,
Speaker 4: they're out of it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, all right, what's your next book?
Speaker 4: My next book? Well?
Speaker 1: See, I no, not not what you're doing now? Oh
Speaker 1: tell me. After we're doing this speed, we're doing the
Speaker 1: speed data. Yeah, because then you did.
Speaker 4: I did a story. Well, I did one called Last
Speaker 4: Empty Places. Oh, I went down the African River. That
Speaker 4: was a crazy book where that's where I came the
Speaker 4: second close to dying from a black mamba, from a
Speaker 4: black mamba. After your trip, after the trip, I thought
Speaker 4: I was gonna die on the river. And once I
Speaker 4: got off the river, I was safe.
Speaker 1: But we were in and you guys got tangled up
Speaker 1: with a hippos. Oh yeah, it would be aggressive, yeah yeah, yeah. Oh.
Speaker 4: And the waterfall you need to just be buzzing around
Speaker 4: to ben you have no idea what's around it, and
Speaker 4: there're you know, vines hanging everywhere. It looks like an
Speaker 4: African movie in fast water, you know. And you're whipping
Speaker 4: around a bend and that all of a sudden, like
Speaker 4: a guide who was a've never been there, but he
Speaker 4: was a good, really good whitewater kayaker stopped like in
Speaker 4: this big boulder right in the middle of the river
Speaker 4: and he said, stop here, stop here, And you're whipping
Speaker 4: around the bend, you know, you know, stop right at
Speaker 4: as kayaking you look over, Oh there's this big waterfall
Speaker 4: where you die instantly.
Speaker 1: It's like in every cartoon. Yeah, it's every cartoon.
Speaker 6: There also quicksand and no no, yeah, well they're kind
Speaker 6: of vine.
Speaker 4: But like at night washing you guys, I don't know
Speaker 4: if any of you have been in Africa, but you'd
Speaker 4: like washing the dishes beside the river at night. You'd
Speaker 4: always have to have a second person with a headlamp scanning,
Speaker 4: so the crocks, you know, you'd see their red red
Speaker 4: eyes come in. And if you tipped over in the
Speaker 4: kayak in the rapids, which happened to I think all
Speaker 4: of us several times. Like when you're in the rapids,
Speaker 4: it's kind of like you're safe because the crocs don't
Speaker 4: like the rapids. They like the calm water below the rapids.
Speaker 4: So when you get washed out of the rapids, that's
Speaker 4: when you really have to get nervous. That's when I said,
Speaker 4: this is as far as I'm going in my adventuring life.
Speaker 4: This is as far as I'm the end. Yeah, then
Speaker 4: that's why I said, I'm going to write about historical
Speaker 4: guys doing the crazy stuff instead. But we talks something
Speaker 4: the black mon Okay, So so we've been through, you know,
Speaker 4: fifteen days of this incredible you know, crazy stuff, and
Speaker 4: I would have quit walked out if I could, but
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: Then i'd surely was there a lot of fish night river?
Speaker 1: Now you're not a lot there fishing? No, No, I
Speaker 1: mean we were just trying to We're like we're sort
Speaker 1: of surviving. Yeah, And there was no there was no
Speaker 1: through the whole middle section, there were no people. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were no African villages. It was very remote and
Speaker 1: rugged and that.
Speaker 4: So after fifteen days of this craziness where I've just
Speaker 4: thought I'd die every day, we finally get off the
Speaker 4: river and we end up at this big, very remote,
Speaker 4: still huge game reserve called Nassa Reserve in northern Mozambique,
Speaker 4: and we connect with a hunting camp there that has
Speaker 4: a you know, like a hunting block on the border
Speaker 4: of this big reserve and so and they're kind of
Speaker 4: taking us around. It's really nice hunting camp. And they
Speaker 4: have a like a land rover, and you know it's
Speaker 4: the kind of land rover that you know that there's
Speaker 4: no windshield, there are no doors, there's sort of a
Speaker 4: higher rack on the back where like the trackers will stand,
Speaker 4: and so the the you know, he's like the great
Speaker 4: white hunter Jamie is is going to take us out
Speaker 4: to show us where he's going to do a leopard steakout.
Speaker 4: And he's got to go set up the leopard steakout
Speaker 4: during the day. And so the photographer and I get
Speaker 4: into this land rover and a bunch of trackers on
Speaker 4: the back and we wind through this kind of open
Speaker 4: forest and we get to the leopard steakout and he
Speaker 4: does this thing, and then we're driving like an hour
Speaker 4: back to camp and I'm sitting in the left you know,
Speaker 4: it's British drive, so I'm in the messenger seat on
Speaker 4: the left side and there's no door, and Jamie has
Speaker 4: his you know, his fifty caliber What are they? You know,
Speaker 4: what's the fifty caliber elephant gun that that you know,
Speaker 4: that the huge big appa. Yeah, it's it's maybe it's
Speaker 4: the five, maybe it's a five hundred, it's a you know,
Speaker 4: it's just the cannon that they use in Africa. So
Speaker 4: he has that mounted on his dashboard. And we had
Speaker 4: no guns at all, not going down this river. So
Speaker 4: it's like, wow, we even have guns to protect this now,
Speaker 4: not to mention it cheap and cars and you know,
Speaker 4: I mean iron all this stuff, and we're driving back
Speaker 4: to camp, and we go into this open clearing with
Speaker 4: the sun coming down through the forest, and and I
Speaker 4: remembered going through this clearing earlier because it looked kind
Speaker 4: of pretty. And then I noticed, like, wow, there's a
Speaker 4: big there's a big stick poking up in the middle
Speaker 4: of that clearing. I wonder how that happened because there's
Speaker 4: no wind. It couldn't have fallen out of a tree.
Speaker 4: And so Jamie is driving completely oblivious. And and and
Speaker 4: I'm looking at this thing, and he's going right towards it,
Speaker 4: or there's like two little tracks right next to it,
Speaker 4: and I'm looking at it. And then I noticed that
Speaker 4: big head, that big stick is waving back and forth
Speaker 4: at like my head level high that high, that high, unbelievable.
Speaker 4: And and so and he doesn't, I mean, he is
Speaker 4: completely oblivious. This is all happens in just a few
Speaker 4: seconds at most, and I just say, oh shit. And
Speaker 4: I had nowhere to hide. I just I dove underneath
Speaker 4: the dashboard, I mean like really hard, slammed into all
Speaker 4: the metal down there. And then you hear this big
Speaker 4: kind of clump on the on the land rover, and
Speaker 4: all the trackers go struck the land rover. They all
Speaker 4: say mamma, So he stops the land rover. All the
Speaker 4: trackers jump out, and the first they kind of go
Speaker 4: trying to chase the black momba. I don't know what
Speaker 4: they were going to do with that, but then they
Speaker 4: go running around the land rover and right in front
Speaker 4: of my where my leg was, they're the two scratches
Speaker 4: down in front of my leg and you know down
Speaker 4: it's like you know that land and they these guys,
Speaker 4: you know, these real serious, these are serious African professional
Speaker 4: hunters are from ones from Zimbabwe or Rhodesian and with
Speaker 4: the other was from South Africa, so they you know,
Speaker 4: this is their life. And they said, yeah that the
Speaker 4: black Bambas are extremely aggressive. They'll protect their territory against anything,
Speaker 4: and so it's it's it's not unusual if they'd strike
Speaker 4: at at.
Speaker 1: Is that the one they say, like, if you get
Speaker 1: bit by it, just go leaning against the tree.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the one.
Speaker 1: And then do.
Speaker 4: The British uh, you know, they have that British sense
Speaker 4: of humor. You know, he's kind of that dry, understated
Speaker 4: sense of humor. So so Jamie says, you know, after
Speaker 4: all this commotion, we get back and you know, I'm like,
Speaker 4: can I stand.
Speaker 1: Up on the very top of the stream at least.
Speaker 4: And rather than sitting an open front door And he says, yeah, yes,
Speaker 4: you know in his British accent.
Speaker 1: Yes, it was a black mamba bite.
Speaker 4: You know, your time to live is twenty minutes. And
Speaker 4: we do have some black mamba, you know, antidote at
Speaker 4: our camp, but that's forty five minutes away. That's where.
Speaker 1: How'd you get interested in the historians?
Speaker 4: Oh, that's well. I wrote a book called The Last
Speaker 4: Empty Places, and I profiled like four really unpopulated areas
Speaker 4: of the country. And the way I did it is
Speaker 4: I asked, like a geospace geologist or a geographer, how
Speaker 4: do I find these real unpopulated areas? And he said, well,
Speaker 4: go get the like the NASA landsat seven photo light
Speaker 4: photo of the of the US at night, and you
Speaker 4: look where the lights are and then you go where
Speaker 4: they're not. And so that's what I did.
Speaker 1: I would never thought of that.
Speaker 4: Advice been hours and I was really fun to study that,
Speaker 4: and I ended.
Speaker 1: Up looking for the biggest holes I was looking for that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I called it my blank spots, but it's called
Speaker 4: The Last Empty Places. I wanted to call it the
Speaker 4: Blank Spots, but and I ended up choosing two in
Speaker 4: the east and two in the west, and one of
Speaker 4: the west ones was southwestern Oregon, where I'm sure some
Speaker 4: of you all here have been, which is really really empty,
Speaker 4: so unpopulated and so huge. And I was driving out there.
Speaker 4: I think I had our old, my falling apart land
Speaker 4: Cruiser at that point.
Speaker 1: And I remember that, do you remember that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were around on those days and
Speaker 4: it was still alive then, but you know, not getting
Speaker 4: a lot a lot of gas mileage. And I'm blasting
Speaker 4: through southeast Oregon and it's getting you know, I'm doing research,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm just checking it out. And it's like May,
Speaker 4: and it's getting dark, and I'm driving down this road
Speaker 4: and it's like really getting darker and darker, and it's
Speaker 4: like I haven't seen a town for hours, and it's
Speaker 4: like like where am I going to sleep? And I'm
Speaker 4: not even sure I might have had camping gear, but
Speaker 4: it's like I don't want to go sleep in the ditch.
Speaker 4: And then so then all of a sudden, I come
Speaker 4: to this town called john Day, John Day, Orgon, and
Speaker 4: so I find a motel spend the night at john Day,
Speaker 4: Orgon and then the next morning I say, John Day,
Speaker 4: that's a weird name for a town, and I look up.
Speaker 4: I start doing research on John Day, you know, first
Speaker 4: on the Internet, and then I think there was a
Speaker 4: little library there. And it turns out John Day is
Speaker 4: a member of this ast expedition. And he's this guy
Speaker 4: who's been going through everything you can imagine. You know,
Speaker 4: he's had malaria, he's been he's poisoned himself by uh,
Speaker 4: eating the death canvas rather than the cavas. He's been
Speaker 4: almost he's been left another guy when the story Overland
Speaker 4: expedition got caught in the middle of Hell's Canyon in
Speaker 4: winter and they had no food, no way out, and
Speaker 4: so he.
Speaker 1: Got a river named after himself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he did get a river name and a couple
Speaker 4: of dames.
Speaker 6: He sounds like he would have been a good character
Speaker 6: to profile in your book about Ten Ways to Die
Speaker 6: in the in the Wild.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he would have. He well, he was helping me
Speaker 4: that book, was helping me when I was writing about
Speaker 4: John Day, and oh he went through all this stuff
Speaker 4: and then he you know, they left him behind and
Speaker 4: the expedition left him for dead. And he and he
Speaker 4: and another guy managed to crawl out and find some
Speaker 4: Shoshone who you know, gave him like some fox to
Speaker 4: eat or some wolf I think actually, and then uh,
Speaker 4: they survive, and they poisoned themselves with the death camas
Speaker 4: and they.
Speaker 1: Crawled miss id purple cavas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then they they eventually managed to crawl like
Speaker 4: over the Blue Mountains to the Columbia. And so they
Speaker 4: get to the Columbia River, and they're thinking, oh, we're saved,
Speaker 4: you know, because all our guys are supposed to be
Speaker 4: building this fort at the mouth of the Columbia, you know,
Speaker 4: but they're like a couple hundred miles upstream at this point,
Speaker 4: and so they're you know, but they think they're saved,
Speaker 4: and they're sitting on the river bank on this nice
Speaker 4: sunny day, having survived all this stuff. And then suddenly
Speaker 4: they find themselves surrounded by Indians. And I can't can't
Speaker 4: remember which tribe. There's several tribes right in that area.
Speaker 4: And so the you know, and the Indians are really
Speaker 4: kind of friendly at first and want to talk to
Speaker 4: them and whatnot. And then they have, you know, they
Speaker 4: have muskets and the Indians don't. And then you know,
Speaker 4: like one of the Indians says, oh, I want to
Speaker 4: see how long that musket is, and you know, wants
Speaker 4: to measure it, and well, there goes that musket, and
Speaker 4: then another guy says, hey, I want to see that knife.
Speaker 4: Well there goes that knife, and then another guy goes, oh,
Speaker 4: I want to see that shirt. And so they ended
Speaker 4: up being completely stripped, utterly naked and told to go
Speaker 4: back the way they came and don't come back the.
Speaker 1: Way they came.
Speaker 4: Yeah they came.
Speaker 1: He's like, well I was for thinking, and then it'll
Speaker 1: be you on your portage strip this year.
Speaker 4: And then when they finally get to his storia, this
Speaker 4: John Day, there's an expedition that immediately turns around and
Speaker 4: goes back overland to bring mister Astor letters in this
Speaker 4: tin box about you know, we made it to there,
Speaker 4: blah blah blah, and and this John Day he's like, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm done with this. I want to go I want
Speaker 4: to go back. He's just like a really good Virginia
Speaker 4: hunter and his good guy he's like forty. It's a
Speaker 4: lanky guy, really good humored. And so they start going
Speaker 4: back up the Columbia in these you know, these big canoes,
Speaker 4: and then they're going to start trekking overland and they
Speaker 4: get to a place where they run into the first
Speaker 4: tribe on the Columbia Friendly Tribe. But John Days starts
Speaker 4: freaking out and he's he goes completely crazy. He clearly
Speaker 4: has PTSD and then he tries to kill himself two
Speaker 4: pistols to his head in the middle of the night,
Speaker 4: and he survives.
Speaker 5: But he wasn't good at everything, no, I guess.
Speaker 4: But anyway, that was John Day, and so he was
Speaker 4: the who got interested in me, interested into the historian history.
Speaker 5: He was.
Speaker 4: He might not have been trying so hard, who knows.
Speaker 6: That's another check mark on the list of things he survived.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he saw a.
Speaker 1: Picture in the movie and he's like in the movie,
Speaker 1: when I got two pistols, that's gonna do badass. So
Speaker 1: I got into the extra deranged.
Speaker 4: And then this, you know, it ends up being this
Speaker 4: as I just got into it because I ran into
Speaker 4: this little town of John Day, and then the character
Speaker 4: John Day, and then the expedition itself, and it was
Speaker 4: just I learned it. It's kind of like this mass
Speaker 4: of expedition that I'd never heard of. And it had
Speaker 4: come five years after Lewis and Clark to sent by
Speaker 4: this huge fur baron in New York for in real
Speaker 4: estate baron, John Jacob Astor, and he had this global
Speaker 4: trade scheme where he was sending one big party by
Speaker 4: ships around Cape Horn, established a trade center at the
Speaker 4: mouth of the Columbia. Another big party going overland to
Speaker 4: establish a series of posts going over the Rocky Mountains
Speaker 4: and meeting the seaguing party at the mouth of the Columbia,
Speaker 4: but all based around the Beaver market, right sea otter,
Speaker 4: So yeah, and at that point that the Northwest coast
Speaker 4: was there were a lot of sea otter And it
Speaker 4: was Captain Cook's guys who discovered you could get a
Speaker 4: sea otter on Vancouver Island a pelt for like a
Speaker 4: dollar worth of trinkets and sell it for one hundred
Speaker 4: bucks in China.
Speaker 1: Size was just sitting where you're sitting.
Speaker 4: Is that right? About the Captain cook book, Okay.
Speaker 1: Which I read, which is phenomenal, And he talks about
Speaker 1: when some of those dudes that so when some of
Speaker 1: those guys had who picked up a bunch of seatter
Speaker 1: pelts in Alaska, they wound up like over in Siberia
Speaker 1: at one point. Yeah, yeah, and they were able to
Speaker 1: sell some of those. And I can't remember what expedition
Speaker 1: he was talking about it, but what he mentioned there
Speaker 1: was guys that almost it was so lucrative, they hatched
Speaker 1: to plan, not cooks guys, but these guys on his
Speaker 1: other boat hatched a plan to mutiny because they wanted
Speaker 1: to go back and get a bunch more of those things.
Speaker 1: It was like that, It was.
Speaker 4: Like that was that incredibly, incredibly valuable. So that was
Speaker 4: Astro's scheme was I mean, it was like this brilliant
Speaker 4: global trade scheme. It was really visionary, and that the
Speaker 4: idea was to have a fleet of ships. So it's
Speaker 4: literally continuously circling the world. And you know, Shay that
Speaker 4: he was based in New York and Manhattan, and they
Speaker 4: New York and they'd have trade goods on them, you know,
Speaker 4: trade goods for the tribes like pots and knives and beads,
Speaker 4: trade beads, and they'd go around South America, around Cape Horn.
Speaker 4: They'd end up at the mouth of the Columbia at
Speaker 4: the emporium, the trade emporium that he was building, and
Speaker 4: there they would trade their trade goods to the tribes,
Speaker 4: and there are a lot of tribes in the Northwest
Speaker 4: coast for seaatter firs, and then the ships with the
Speaker 4: seattle firs would then go to Canton in China and
Speaker 4: they'd sell those seattle firs or trade them for huge markups,
Speaker 4: and they'd take on silk and tea and porcelain, which
Speaker 4: are really valuable trade goods in the Western world. And
Speaker 4: then they'd sail around the rest of the globe, you know,
Speaker 4: around Africa, and they'd end up in London, and they'd
Speaker 4: sell the silk and porcelain and tea in London and
Speaker 4: also in New York and make these huge profits at
Speaker 4: every stop and have this fleet of ships continuously circling
Speaker 4: the globe.
Speaker 9: Man.
Speaker 1: That reminds me of me recently leveraging a couple DSD
Speaker 1: Turkey decoys into two big ribbies.
Speaker 10: That sounds pretty global like, but it mostly didn't work right.
Speaker 10: Well it it would.
Speaker 4: Have worked, I mean, there were there were various factors,
Speaker 4: and and one is this is you know, I wrote
Speaker 4: in some of these notes that it would be really
Speaker 4: what we don't have time to do, uh at least now,
Speaker 4: is talk about the birch bark canoe and what incredible
Speaker 4: craft that was, uh huh. And that the the Brits
Speaker 4: in Canada had birch bark canoes and they had the
Speaker 4: whole voyager trade route that could go all the way
Speaker 4: out to the West coast by this time really fast,
Speaker 4: whereas the the Americans had, you know, it took them
Speaker 4: months and months and months. You know, they're dragging barges
Speaker 4: up the Missouri River and you know, walking and really slow.
Speaker 4: So the War of eighteen twelve broke up in June
Speaker 4: of eighteen twelve, and so that's announced that Congress US Congress,
Speaker 4: President Madison declares war on Britain because the Brits are
Speaker 4: screwing with American commercial ships in the Atlantic and dragooning
Speaker 4: sailors off to go join the British army and fight Napoleon.
Speaker 4: So there's all this hurrah about the US is really
Speaker 4: pissed at Britain. So President Madison declares war. It's like
Speaker 4: mid June of eighteen twelve, and the word of that,
Speaker 4: the news of that war, you know, like in an
Speaker 4: actual formal declaration of war, immediately is launched through Montreal,
Speaker 4: out the Great Lakes, through Grand Portage, through all the
Speaker 4: Lake of like you know that Manitoba, that whole area.
Speaker 5: Meanwhile, John Day is going, oh, ship, we can't go down.
Speaker 5: You have to turn around, walk all the way up
Speaker 5: this valley.
Speaker 1: Way right right.
Speaker 4: And so by this time that the Astorians had established
Speaker 4: a bunch of fur posts all in the Columbia basin,
Speaker 4: and so they had this enterprise up and running, and
Speaker 4: then all of a sudden one day these Scottish fur traders,
Speaker 4: that's that. Those are like the British Hanchos. Scottish fur
Speaker 4: traders show up at the northernmost aster post and walk
Speaker 4: in the front door of the cabin and say, hey, guys,
Speaker 4: we're at war with each other, and that means we're
Speaker 4: taking your fur posts, which is what happens.
Speaker 1: Wow, man, the other thing.
Speaker 5: Like that had to have been like all a lot
Speaker 5: of reasons for PTSD. Yeah, I bring up turn around
Speaker 5: on the snake, because that would be the thing in
Speaker 5: that whole deal that would give me PTSD wait being
Speaker 5: wrong and not having to turn around. But the Russians
Speaker 5: were so established, yes, like way established, way established with
Speaker 5: every like to the point of when you got out
Speaker 5: there after making that trip and be like, okay, we're
Speaker 5: going to establish this thing, this monumental scheme for transcontinental trade.
Speaker 5: Like you're like, oh, there's a literal world power that's
Speaker 5: been here for decades.
Speaker 1: Well they haven't been.
Speaker 4: That's that's that's it's close. It's close. I mean, that's
Speaker 4: that's There are several world powers like circling around this
Speaker 4: whole West coast in the Pacific because it's it's kind
Speaker 4: of unclaimed territory. And the Russians had come over. They
Speaker 4: didn't establish their fur trade in Alaska until the late
Speaker 4: seventeen hundreds, and so this is what we're talking here
Speaker 4: is eighteen eleven and the but the Russians did have
Speaker 4: a major post just just it's just what's the southernmost
Speaker 4: part of like catches a ketch a can is at
Speaker 4: the you know, the southeast that's the end of Yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: so that that's I'm pretty sure that's where they had.
Speaker 4: It was like a you know, stone castle, and he
Speaker 4: had you know, he was like living there like a
Speaker 4: baron this this guy a count Baronoff and so he's
Speaker 4: just really decadent, you know, Russian count and it has
Speaker 4: all these you know, all these Indians working for him
Speaker 4: and I don't know, slave women and he has military
Speaker 4: Russian military.
Speaker 1: Abc islands like Chilikov.
Speaker 4: Up that way. Yeah, so it's Count Baranov and and
Speaker 4: he's and he's like, it's an incredible drinker, you know.
Speaker 4: And and he has all these military guys with him too,
Speaker 4: and he has this big fur trade working with I
Speaker 4: think there are they Eliut.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're telling it there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think, well, I think he has several tribes
Speaker 4: working for him. Yeah, and but here's his big fur post.
Speaker 4: And so at one point, my guy, the guy who
Speaker 4: leads the story overland expedition, mister Hunt, who's this real
Speaker 4: mild mannered guy. He's from New Jersey. He'd never been
Speaker 4: in the wilderness before. He led the party across the
Speaker 4: country that got this the continent that got everybody in
Speaker 4: trouble because he didn't know what he was doing. But
Speaker 4: he ends up taking a ship and I think it
Speaker 4: has a bunch of seatter pelts on it, and then
Speaker 4: he's going up to visit Count Baranoff up and at
Speaker 4: Baranoff Island, and he's going to buy like twenty five
Speaker 4: thousand beaver pelt from Count Baranoff and then he's going
Speaker 4: to take those over to like Russia, Siberia or China.
Speaker 4: And he's got this thing all worked out, as already
Speaker 4: sent his son in law daughter to work out the
Speaker 4: diplomacy with a queen, you know, with the Czarina of Russia.
Speaker 4: So they've got all this stuff worked out. So mister
Speaker 4: Hunt sails his boat with his seattle pelts from the
Speaker 4: Astor's post up to Count Baranov's post, and he's going
Speaker 4: to buy these twenty five thousand beaver pelts and it's
Speaker 4: going to make a fortune for mister Astor. But so
Speaker 4: Count Baranov is like, huh oh, yeah, hey, why don't
Speaker 4: you stay a while, dude, We got some parties coming up,
Speaker 4: and I want to show you my military parade, and well,
Speaker 4: let's have another drinking contest. And so it goes on
Speaker 4: like that for three weeks that he can't get out,
Speaker 4: and he keeps saying, well, what about my beaver pelts.
Speaker 1: Oh, we'll get to that, We'll get to that.
Speaker 4: And so by the time by the time that the
Speaker 4: party's over, it's it's too late in the season to
Speaker 4: go across to get the beaver pelts and go across
Speaker 4: to China. And so it's like mister Hunt is screwed
Speaker 4: and Count Baronoff keeps his beaver pelts, and so it's
Speaker 4: a it's a it's a it's a Russian ploy basically
Speaker 4: to keep to keep Astor out of the audit.
Speaker 5: It's like that Blues Brother scene. You know, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you guys get fifty bucks for the concert, but you
Speaker 5: drank seventy five bucks worth of beer.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: When was when the Good Old Boys, the band called
Speaker 1: Boys was late for their show. That's great reference. That
Speaker 1: puts the perspective for people. Uh that when that was
Speaker 1: called the historians.
Speaker 4: It was called a story.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: And then the subtitle is John Jacob Astor and Thomas
Speaker 4: Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 4: So that was a fun, crazy book to read, I
Speaker 4: mean to write.
Speaker 1: So hit me with getting into George Washington.
Speaker 4: Well, so that came every book I've written in the
Speaker 4: last four or five books came from that last Empty
Speaker 4: Places book.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know what I gotta I gotta tell you
Speaker 1: something I want to tell you earlier. You're talking about
Speaker 1: winding up at the John Day Hotel or winding up
Speaker 1: in hotel. I took my wife one time on a
Speaker 1: on a research trip. We went in Bismarck, North Dakota,
Speaker 1: and there was a If I remember right, man, I
Speaker 1: think it was like there's a big all the Seventh
Speaker 1: Day Adventist churches. We're having some kind of conference. If
Speaker 1: I remember that, that's what it was. I think I remember.
Speaker 1: Either way. Ever, you couldn't find anything and no place,
Speaker 1: no place to stay, and I didn't make any plan.
Speaker 1: And we find a motel. I'm not joking. I wish
Speaker 1: my wife could come down and tell the stories. Literally
Speaker 1: letters in the motel neon are burned out. We pull in,
Speaker 1: it's a dirt driveway. We pull in and a guy
Speaker 1: comes out and uh, the guy comes out to greet us,
Speaker 1: Like before we even get out of the car. He
Speaker 1: comes out to greet us, and I have I rolled
Speaker 1: on the windows and like, oh, who's this must be
Speaker 1: the proprietor. I rolled out on the window and he
Speaker 1: pokes his head and he goes, how many of you
Speaker 1: are in there? We get this room and there and
Speaker 1: there is no joke, a prophylactic on the floor of
Speaker 1: the room and cigarette.
Speaker 4: These aren't the Seventh Day.
Speaker 1: The only room the only place left. And my wife's
Speaker 1: like in your future, wife and you would have me,
Speaker 1: so from then on. Yeah, when you're on research trips,
Speaker 1: call ahead advice for future writers.
Speaker 4: We have your spousal Yeah, yeah, make arrangements ahead of time.
Speaker 5: That would have been so good though, to keep referencing
Speaker 5: that in the you know my past wife. Do you
Speaker 5: know what my past wife?
Speaker 4: So that's why there's you know, there's Empty the Blank
Speaker 4: Spots book, The Last Empty Places. One of the places
Speaker 4: I profiled was western Pennsylvania, which is I mean, it's
Speaker 4: it's amazingly dark on the on the on the yeah,
Speaker 4: amazingly dark. I mean, you know, and it's it's like
Speaker 4: the big the biggest darkest area in the east near
Speaker 4: an urban area that I that I could find and
Speaker 4: where were we at? And if he went if he
Speaker 4: went to Pittsburgh and went somewhat northeast of there, do
Speaker 4: you know that territory?
Speaker 8: I grew up in Edinburgh, so not far from where
Speaker 8: you were from.
Speaker 4: Okay, So it's I mean, it's like it's all national
Speaker 4: forests and you know, it's and it's mountains and it's
Speaker 4: it's just it's not agricultural land. It was actually was
Speaker 4: given away as bounty lands after the Revolutionary War and
Speaker 4: the and the War of French and Indian War, and.
Speaker 1: There was no good nothing could out there.
Speaker 4: So the guys who soldiers who got this land set
Speaker 4: it's not worth anything, and so they kind of walked
Speaker 4: away from it. But so I was out on that
Speaker 4: blank spot doing research. I was like, uh, well that
Speaker 4: was two thousand and seven or something, and I ran
Speaker 4: into this like twenty two year old guy stumbling around
Speaker 4: on the woods out there, who is really screwing up,
Speaker 4: but he's this real Turk. And his name was the
Speaker 4: young George Washington, and that's where he'd kind of cut
Speaker 4: his teeth in the wilderness. And so I said, Wow,
Speaker 4: this guy's a really interesting character, and so then I
Speaker 4: decided to write a book about him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that stuff that that that like aspects of
Speaker 1: his life. I only found out about that because I
Speaker 1: was on this thing you've heard, the warriors Path. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like one of the basically it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those trails, part part.
Speaker 4: Of those great warrior Yes, I know it, I know it.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, yeah, I read some thing about Washington, but
Speaker 1: this is post this is post revolution. He had a
Speaker 1: bunch more land claims there from having served his duty that's.
Speaker 4: Where he got his bought his first land at age eighteen,
Speaker 4: right along there.
Speaker 1: Okay, he had went out to take a look at
Speaker 1: he's got so much land. He hadn't even taken a
Speaker 1: look at it yet, right went out to take a
Speaker 1: look and got lost.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: In his journey talk he describes getting lost. And I
Speaker 1: met this old timer down there in the Panhandle, a
Speaker 1: Maria who had he went showed me, you know how
Speaker 1: you can go to places in the Oregon Trail where
Speaker 1: it's not like there's no road overlaying it and you
Speaker 1: see the ruts. He took me out and there's there's
Speaker 1: a big ass oak tree, and you know, a bunch
Speaker 1: of farmland and stuff. And we go out and there's
Speaker 1: a big oak tree. And he kind of had he
Speaker 1: lived there and grew up there and read all the stuff.
Speaker 1: He's like, Yeah, that trail was here, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, And you could still kind of picture it even.
Speaker 4: Was that the Great Warriors Road or was that the
Speaker 4: Braddock Road? Do you know what the Braddock Road?
Speaker 1: Well, I think it was part of what wasn't all
Speaker 1: the same complex roads.
Speaker 4: That Braddock Road went went from like the head of
Speaker 4: the not the head of the Potomac, but from like Arlington, Virginia,
Speaker 4: you know, right near Washington d c. Over the Alleghany
Speaker 4: Mountains to Pittsburgh. And that was built by General Braddock,
Speaker 4: who is in the French.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I got but yeah, no, man, because it
Speaker 1: was like but it could have been, but because you
Speaker 1: know why it was uh yeah that that could because Morgantown,
Speaker 1: I know where you're talking.
Speaker 4: That's a cool place that the road it is, But
Speaker 4: I think it was what you're talking about. The I
Speaker 4: think is the Great Warriors Road, which was used by
Speaker 4: the tribes like I think it was like a taba
Speaker 4: in the Great up in the you know, the near
Speaker 4: the Great Lakes, and they had mortal enemies down in
Speaker 4: the southeast, and so these tribes would go up and
Speaker 4: down that road to that path when they would fight
Speaker 4: each other, and so it became known as a Great
Speaker 4: Warrior Road, and then when settlers first came there, they
Speaker 4: became known as a Great wagon road. So it was
Speaker 4: down the middle of the Allegheny of the Allegheny Valley
Speaker 4: or that's that.
Speaker 2: Ay.
Speaker 1: He took me and said, you can pretty much you
Speaker 1: see the ruts. Yeah, He's like, it's reasonable to assume
Speaker 1: the Washington. Yeah, to the right of that oak tree. Totally.
Speaker 4: I mean that would be totally right, That would be
Speaker 4: totally and got lost here about that's awesome. So that
Speaker 4: folk's called young Washington. How let's see how wilderness and
Speaker 4: war forged the founding father.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we get into in our long Hunters piece that
Speaker 1: the audio original is telling about. We get into Washington
Speaker 1: being there for Braddock's defeat as of some sort of
Speaker 1: informal advisor, right in the way that the way that
Speaker 1: battle wound up sort of changing wilderness warfare.
Speaker 4: And and also that it changed it was one of
Speaker 4: the pivotal moments of his life because every other officer
Speaker 4: virtually died, which killed, and he survived, and he had
Speaker 4: bullets through his coat and his horse was shot out
Speaker 4: from under him, and that after that it was almost
Speaker 4: kind of the one of the key pivotal moments that
Speaker 4: turned him from being the self centered guy who's really
Speaker 4: ambitious and trying to be a British royal officer and
Speaker 4: whatnot into someone who was kind of thinking about a
Speaker 4: larger picture. Because after that battle and he survived and
Speaker 4: so many other people officers were killed, he said, well,
Speaker 4: providence he wrote this in a letter to his brother
Speaker 4: Providence must be saving me for some larger purpose. Now
Speaker 4: there's a footnote to them and not laying grabbing. Well
Speaker 4: that could you have to you have to have a
Speaker 4: backup plan, right. But but you know what's really occurred
Speaker 4: to me that you guys would find this way interesting
Speaker 4: because I've now, I've studied a lot of these battles,
Speaker 4: especially you know in the in the east, these early
Speaker 4: early Indian warfare, the Northwest Indian Wars and French and
Speaker 4: Indian War. But in that in that battle Braddock's defeat Braddock,
Speaker 4: I mean, why Shington, You know, he wanted to be
Speaker 4: a British Royal Army officer and they wouldn't let him in.
Speaker 4: I mean, he didn't have much of an education, he
Speaker 4: was kind of crude. He'd already really screwed up in
Speaker 4: a calusing his own massacre early in the going, and
Speaker 4: so they wouldn't let him in as a you know,
Speaker 4: a guy. They wouldn't let him wear a red coat
Speaker 4: and gold braids, and so he was wearing like civilian
Speaker 4: clothes or you know, hunter's clothes during Braddock's defeat. And
Speaker 4: so who do you think that Indians shoot first man,
Speaker 4: they take out the they take out the officers, and
Speaker 4: so all the officers got mowed down almost instantly. But
Speaker 4: they you know, Washington didn't really show up on their
Speaker 4: radar screen, and so he uh. In my theory, that's
Speaker 4: one of the main reasons he survived. He was incredibly brave,
Speaker 4: I mean, no doubt about it, and his whole life
Speaker 4: incredible bravery.
Speaker 1: You know, in The Long Hunters we mentioned this connection
Speaker 1: that Boone was there that day.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was a teamster, so he mentioned it like Boone,
Speaker 1: even though even though Washington was later critical of frontiersmen
Speaker 1: like Boone, Boone would have been aware, You'd have been
Speaker 1: aware of Washington almost certainly, he'd been aware of him,
Speaker 1: of his presidence, would have seen him, yes, and conversely
Speaker 1: Boone would Washington would have zero idea.
Speaker 4: Who Boone was exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when you look at the hierarchy of
Speaker 1: the people, and Washington was was literally attached to General
Speaker 1: Braddock's camp, so he would have you know, their meals
Speaker 1: would be served in the General's you know, meal tent,
Speaker 1: and they have.
Speaker 4: Like sterling silver platters going on here, and it's you know,
Speaker 4: it's a whole.
Speaker 1: It's not what Daniel Boone was eating off of. You know,
Speaker 1: he had a bowie knife.
Speaker 4: Would be his version of his sterling silver. And so
Speaker 4: and I think if I remember, I think Boone was
Speaker 4: like seventeen or eighteen or maybe nineteen at most young,
Speaker 4: and and Washington would have been in his early twenties,
Speaker 4: twenty three maybe, And so I don't think Boone was
Speaker 4: anywhere near that that corps of officers other than you know,
Speaker 4: knowing where they are. And yeah, Washington would, well, there's
Speaker 4: like a mule tier back there, sure, yeah, one of many.
Speaker 4: And but but Boone, to his credit, could see the
Speaker 4: writing on the wall right away.
Speaker 1: Bo yeah, bo real quick. So I can see how
Speaker 1: this leads in. But really quickly hit us with uh,
Speaker 1: hit us with your book about to come so that
Speaker 1: come shut. That winds up like that's very tied to
Speaker 1: this because one of the things you see, you look
Speaker 1: at the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War
Speaker 1: of eighteen twelve, you wouldn't have perceived it if you
Speaker 1: were alive, then you wouldn't have perceived these as distinct No, no,
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean? It was? It was
Speaker 1: the Great European powers. Right, it was like the great
Speaker 1: European powers jockeying for infacting and then using tribes as
Speaker 1: proxy forces.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And it would have just seemed like like like someone
Speaker 1: involved in the Cold War would have would have been Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: like all this stuff would have sort of bled into
Speaker 1: this this broader thing against Soviet influence, right, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, And you'd be like, oh, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's this and this and this, but it's part of
Speaker 1: this broader story of the West, like like for sure,
Speaker 1: yea capitalism and communism.
Speaker 4: Yeah you know, oh yeah, that West I mean pos
Speaker 4: the American West and the West mean West, you know
Speaker 4: as the global West, that global.
Speaker 1: But all these a lot of what we're talking about
Speaker 1: here is sort of these like all conflicts, I mean,
Speaker 1: they all like bleed into one another and players overlap exactly,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like a play like Washington
Speaker 1: was a player in French and Dinian War and very
Speaker 1: involved in the revolution. And then people that were very
Speaker 1: involved in the revolution were War of eighteen twelve, right, right,
Speaker 1: and then they enter the political sphere.
Speaker 4: No, that's exactly right, and that's I mean that's sort
Speaker 4: of what I've been fascinated with my you know, for
Speaker 4: some years now and writing about just that period that
Speaker 4: you're talking about, and actually a story is part of it,
Speaker 4: because it's you know, it's the West coast projection of Empire.
Speaker 4: And you know, you have in Astoria, you have the Russians,
Speaker 4: you have the French, you have the British, you have
Speaker 4: the Americans, and you have the Spanish, all vying for
Speaker 4: the West coast at this at the same time, right
Speaker 4: around the year eighteen hundred, in the east of the continent.
Speaker 4: You know, at the when you start out in like
Speaker 4: seventeen ninety, the White settlement, it barely goes to the
Speaker 4: Appalachian Mountains. I mean, it's trickled over a little bit,
Speaker 4: but barely. And so there's all that land out there
Speaker 4: that's that's a no man's land in terms of of
Speaker 4: European empires. Of course, it's tribal land, and there's a
Speaker 4: whole dynamic that's gone on for centuries among the tribes.
Speaker 1: But that.
Speaker 4: Land, I mean not only in the seventeen nineties, but
Speaker 4: in the decades before that was in a way I
Speaker 4: think I described that Ohio Valley land. It became a
Speaker 4: storm center of the world where these empires ended up
Speaker 4: conflicting with each other and essentially fighting it out, and
Speaker 4: as you say, using the tribes as proxies. And one
Speaker 4: of the things I really emphasized when I talk about
Speaker 4: this is that in these years, in seventeen nineties, eighteen hundred,
Speaker 4: eighteen twelve, I mean right up to then, nobody knew
Speaker 4: what the US was going to be. I mean, nobody
Speaker 4: knew if it was going to survive. No one knew
Speaker 4: if this was like an experiment. Because now I've gone
Speaker 4: into this stuff so deeply and really read records of
Speaker 4: Congress when they're arguing about all this stuff. It's some
Speaker 4: of these these frontier issues and some of these like
Speaker 4: other issues. But it's like I think of it as, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, have you ever built with framed something? He
Speaker 4: used to be a framing guy.
Speaker 1: No, I've been. I've been, I've done some I was not.
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't like claim to that I was
Speaker 1: a tree man. I know you did closet work at
Speaker 1: one point. I did that, but that's not framing.
Speaker 4: But okay, well, if you think.
Speaker 1: Like cabinet stuff and yeah, yeah, but not okay, But
Speaker 1: think of like, I don't want to. I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I don't want to have that that crown on my
Speaker 1: head as a frame. Well, surprised if cal is a
Speaker 1: framing man.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I can list of places that are still
Speaker 5: standing proudly.
Speaker 4: Okay. Now imagine you built that place out of out
Speaker 4: of green uncured wood and rough song, you know, completely green,
Speaker 4: and you hammered together this frame, you know, and you
Speaker 4: kind of tack it in with the nails like halfway
Speaker 4: in and make this sort of structure. Well, that's the
Speaker 4: way the United States was in seventeen ninety.
Speaker 6: That at a lot of my projects resemble that.
Speaker 4: I mean literally, that's the total image that comes to mind.
Speaker 4: And and so so much hadn't been worked out and
Speaker 4: one of the I could go all day and night
Speaker 4: about it, but that one of the things that really
Speaker 4: wasn't clear is like how far west the US was
Speaker 4: going to go. So it was not a done deal
Speaker 4: that the US was going to go even past the
Speaker 4: Appellations or even to the Mississippi or no way to
Speaker 4: the west coast. And so that in the British were
Speaker 4: really you know, their literal plan was to create what
Speaker 4: was called an Indian Barrier State, which would have been
Speaker 4: a no man's land, neutral territory where where imperial powers
Speaker 4: in the US had had no control. All. That would
Speaker 4: be a strip of land, essentially the Ohio and Mississippi
Speaker 4: Valley that hole all the way from the Great Lakes
Speaker 4: down to the Gulf of Mexico tribal tribal land, and
Speaker 4: it would be controlled by the tribes and the Brits
Speaker 4: and Americans were free to trade there, you know, in
Speaker 4: this sort of controlled way. But that's the bridge. They
Speaker 4: they made it several different points, a push for what
Speaker 4: they call the Indian Barrier State. In a way, it
Speaker 4: would be like trying to not in a way it
Speaker 4: was literally trying to bottle up the little fledgling baby
Speaker 4: United States, to bottle it up on the East coast
Speaker 4: so it didn't come over the Appalachian Mountains and didn't
Speaker 4: screw around with you know, British holdings in the interior
Speaker 4: of the continent, didn't screw around with a really valuable
Speaker 4: fur trade that was out farther west. And so in
Speaker 4: this era, we're talking about a country that didn't it
Speaker 4: didn't really know how it was going to fully function
Speaker 4: it and it didn't know what's what size it was,
Speaker 4: know how far it would go. So these the battles
Speaker 4: that we're talking about, this whole era, it's as you're saying,
Speaker 4: it's all part of that art. It's all part of
Speaker 4: that peace, and it's like working it out.
Speaker 1: Tell the Tell the title of the comes the book.
Speaker 4: It's called Gallop toward the Sun to Kamsa and William
Speaker 4: Henry Harrison's struggle for the destiny of a nation, and
Speaker 4: that was I guess you.
Speaker 1: Could put his so to. Kamsa was a war leader
Speaker 1: who had a prophet brother, yes, and they put an
Speaker 1: idea of instead of tribes inner fighting, instead of like
Speaker 1: internacine conflict, they would unite all the tribes and push
Speaker 1: America back into the ocean.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, or at least stop it from pushing them
Speaker 4: into the ocean. And it wasn't so much about stopping
Speaker 4: internice conflict. It was about agreeing to hold the land
Speaker 4: as one, as one entity. So what was happening is
Speaker 4: that that, you know, the federal agents would approach one
Speaker 4: tribe or one sub chief of one tribe and try
Speaker 4: to pry you know, land or some kind of agreement
Speaker 4: out of that chief who might actually be selling some
Speaker 4: other tribes land hundreds of miles away. So it was
Speaker 4: like all was splitting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a common thing that a guy be like, sure,
Speaker 1: i'll sell that to you. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean the Iroquois sold sold all of the
Speaker 4: all of Kentucky to the the Brits, the Iroquois. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and the you know, the Iroquois were seven hundred miles
Speaker 4: and miles away when they signed a contract.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you could have all that land down there.
Speaker 4: The Cherokees think it's theirs, but now we know it's not.
Speaker 4: There's That's exactly what happened. Uh, we got to wrap yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh,
Speaker 4: there's so many fun things to do things about. But
Speaker 4: give the name of the to comes to the book
Speaker 4: against people. People like to say it is called Gallop
Speaker 4: toward the Sun to Kumsa and William Henry Harrison's Struggle
Speaker 4: for the Destiny of a Nation.
Speaker 1: I'll say this, you read all Peter's books, You're going
Speaker 1: to dominate media to trivia.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 6: A few questions or a few answers have have We've
Speaker 6: alluded to them today?
Speaker 1: If past A lot of times he says stuff and
Speaker 1: I've been like that was a trivia question, all right,
Speaker 1: Peter starked, the answer coming on.
Speaker 4: Man, Yeah, really fun to talk to you. We have
Speaker 4: to have you back on again anytime. Let me know
Speaker 4: the well.
Speaker 1: The well is deep until it tries up.
Speaker 4: Thanks man, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 9: We no vine a mata then Steve Vandila. I can
Speaker 9: go on and on forever, Jes talking about squirrels and
Speaker 9: ask him about nigga see and there's no vine. I'd
Speaker 9: an I asked, tell us an eagle, Lie Cooper killingly.
Speaker 9: Vin Mennisburg talking about his mama is set flashed before
Speaker 9: your eyes, and there's no bide. I've added from good
Speaker 9: power just I can turn a dollar tow with diamond
Speaker 9: and now we're bout just making a few minor investments.
Speaker 1: And there's no bide. I've had an a man.
Speaker 9: Then Spencer got got to.
Speaker 11: Treat tattooed on in forever.
Speaker 9: But Leaves don't know hold it against him. It's just
Speaker 9: something about that meat in and crew.
Speaker 1: It keeps me.
Speaker 9: Sud in it f it out or.
Speaker 11: Two HEMI it's just a really good damn shoot meebe
Speaker 11: is how much the boys don't little to act like
Speaker 11: they know.
Speaker 1: But either way, I want to give them a mischiel.
Speaker 1: Getting head a little