00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware listeningst you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com.
00:00:43
Speaker 1: I got two things of major interest, well three things if you count Phil. Phil printed off the script of Christmas. What do they call that?
00:00:52
Speaker 3: A Christmas Carol?
00:00:53
Speaker 1: Christmas? Carrol printed the script off. He’s been highlighting his lines. Who are you? Who are you playing? Cratch It?
00:01:01
Speaker 3: Cratch It? Yeah, God, seems like you play Robert cratch It. He was only a matter of time.
00:01:07
Speaker 1: They didn’t try to get you for Scrooge.
00:01:09
Speaker 3: Uh, surprisingly not No, I think maybe a few more years, wait till I get in the forties.
00:01:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a joke. I don’t think he’d be a Scrooge. Yeah, you know what I could picture you being?
00:01:17
Speaker 3: Know what’s that?
00:01:18
Speaker 1: You know what he might be good at? You know the guy that like the that he’s he’s like the nephew and he’s trying to get him. He’s trying to get Scrooge fired up about Christmas, but then like Scrooge catches him, goofing on him.
00:01:31
Speaker 3: M They they tried to get me to play Fred two years ago.
00:01:36
Speaker 2: You know your first name Basis.
00:01:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right.
00:01:41
Speaker 2: You wanted you wanted more of a role.
00:01:44
Speaker 3: No, I was. I was doing a different place.
00:01:45
Speaker 2: So it’s just ya out there. God, just what is uh?
00:01:51
Speaker 1: What is want to crash its big lines?
00:01:54
Speaker 3: Oh, he doesn’t have a lot of big lines. He’s he’s just kind of like the anchor for like, you know, kind of the moral moral anchor. Yeah, that’s the word. Good.
00:02:04
Speaker 1: Phil won’t be able to do that.
00:02:05
Speaker 2: Now.
00:02:06
Speaker 1: Probably the worst part about your what you got coming up? If I had to say.
00:02:11
Speaker 3: Here, I’m just I I would just like to say I love how involved and interested you are in this whole process.
00:02:16
Speaker 1: Oh, because I will be there my wife like without even knowing you’re in it. My wife will be like alerting the family soon about what day this is happening, but what like we will be there.
00:02:29
Speaker 2: So I want to make sure when I get.
00:02:31
Speaker 1: There, I know what’s going on sure, so I can whisper and be like, well, actually Phil doesn’t even like this part, or this guy kind of bugs Phil, you know, like he Phil wasn’t very happy with this actor.
00:02:39
Speaker 3: I’ll spill all the details.
00:02:42
Speaker 2: Along the way.
00:02:43
Speaker 1: But what might be challenging to you is because you have your own kids.
00:02:48
Speaker 3: I do, one of them’s in the play with me, Steve. Oh, he’s playing my son. No, he’s he’s the middle child. He’s he’s there’s there’s a there’s an older daughter of Cratchet’s a middle boy, and then tiny Tim m he’s playing the middle boy.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: What I was gonna say it could be a problem for you is because you got to deal with your own kids all the time. You might not want to go down there and need to deal with this whatever kid it is playing Tiny Tim. You might be like, so sort of consumed with your own kids and what they got going on. Then all of a sudden you got to get sort of like intimately familiar with this other kid while trying to take care of your kids.
00:03:25
Speaker 3: Well, that’s that’s kind of crash. Its big scene is that he’s got he’s got to kind of break down over the death of Tiny Tim in one of the scenes. That’s the Oh I forgot that.
00:03:34
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it’s a good thing that your kids aren’t cast as tiny tim because they’re too healthy, they’re too robust, strapping young men.
00:03:43
Speaker 3: Thank you.
00:03:44
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, my little boy. You know how Matthew’s on crutches for six months?
00:03:51
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, were you making a bunch of tiny Tim?
00:03:53
Speaker 1: Well, he’s he’s a very agreeable young man, very agreeable. So well while he was on and crouches, that was his nickname because he he’s so agreeable. Yeah, just a cheery little fellah.
00:04:09
Speaker 2: Not you know, he’s not disgruntled. Yeah, that’s beautiful.
00:04:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, well keeps posted. Will Maybe maybe, Randall, maybe you and your wife would like to go with us.
00:04:18
Speaker 2: I’d love to. I don’t go to the theater enough.
00:04:21
Speaker 1: You don’t take in much theater. Well, I take in one play.
00:04:24
Speaker 2: I went to Christmas Carrol, I went to film shows. I went to Phil’s last production and it was lovely and I was I was seated right behind JK. Simmons, famous Montana JK. Simmons, and he loved it.
00:04:37
Speaker 1: He did.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Every time Phil made a joke. I looked at JK. Simmons and he.
00:04:41
Speaker 1: Was just a you know what, I don’t think. I mean, I’m not knocking on film. I don’t think that that was I don’t think it was genuine. No, I think that he knew. He’s like a big famous theater guy, and he’s in theater, and so he’s got to act like he’s into it.
00:04:56
Speaker 3: I think he just might be part of it.
00:04:57
Speaker 2: But I think he’s so into it that, you know, any good theater he gets, it’s just like a shot of life into his blood, you know.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: So like little date night, Well, it’s gonna be kind of like a weird date night for you because it’ll be me like me and my wife and you and your wife.
00:05:14
Speaker 2: That’ll feel normal. But then they’ll be my children. That sounds like a normal outing for us. Yeah, because often we don’t bring children to anything. Yeah, because it wouldn’t work for us.
00:05:23
Speaker 1: Like she’s gonna make them go, Yeah they won’t, you know, sure, sure, don’t don’t fill them. They’re not gonna.
00:05:30
Speaker 3: I was eleven year old once as well.
00:05:31
Speaker 1: It’s like I’m not gonna want to, but they’ll be down there.
00:05:35
Speaker 2: I mean I’ve been I’ve been workshopping with Phil’s as to how we can graft sort of the structure of a Christmas Carol onto the live tour.
00:05:43
Speaker 3: I think it’s brilliant.
00:05:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can have ghosts of hunting season, past, hunting season, present, hunting season future.
00:05:49
Speaker 3: Well you can appear this is gonna air random and that this doesn’t happen, there’s going to be some disappointed fans in the audience.
00:05:55
Speaker 2: So, well, whatever we come up with will have to be equally good or better. I don’t I don’t imagine. I mean, this is a great idea. I’m just gonna say that. But whatever whatever replaces it or supplants it will be better.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: So Clay’s planning on having Brent Reeves Fry Bluegills on stage every night.
00:06:14
Speaker 2: I know I like that, but.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: And I like it too. But you either got to decide you’re gonna bring it up with the venue and then they’re gonna have like the They’re gonna have like the fire department down there, and.
00:06:24
Speaker 3: They’re gonna say, our very expensive and thick curtains are gonna smell like fish for the next three months.
00:06:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, or you don’t bring it up and see what happens.
00:06:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know.
00:06:35
Speaker 1: Uh, you know what’s gonna tickle Phil’s fancy he’s gonna get gell us.
00:06:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:06:43
Speaker 1: I want to do a thing, Phil, and we’re already setting this into motion. I’m gonna do a thing where it’s called Interviews with a black.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: Bear and who’s the black bear?
00:06:56
Speaker 2: I haven’t cast it yet.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: Is there gonna be a whole time gonna be called backs, do some scene tests?
00:07:02
Speaker 1: Because if I could interview any animal in the world, I would interview a black bear about like what he’s up to, what he was thinking? You’re like, like when you ate the gear oil, like what you know? Like like I could see the first sip, right, You’re like, I can see why you might take a sip, but then but you kept eating.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: It is the twentieth trash can curiosity? Or is it just you can’t break the habit? You know?
00:07:32
Speaker 3: You throw out black bears as an example, Steve. But I think if this, you know, takes off, I think going through a bunch of different animals would be very It would be a funny series. Interview with a turkey, interview with a with a dove.
00:07:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, like if you interviewed a black bear. If you could interview like a black beard that finds like Clay Newcome’s bait barrel. Yeah, okay, and then he slowly put like it’d be like, okay, well, dude, when you first found the bait barrel, didn’t you think it was a little like a little suspicious. Yeah, all of a sudden and he’s like, here’s a bear.
00:08:08
Speaker 2: He’s like, you know, things hadn’t really been going well for me lately, and I thought maybe my luck had finally changed.
00:08:15
Speaker 1: And like yeah, and you knows, all of a sudden, there’s like a platform up in a tree like by like does this stuff you know?
00:08:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, register or like a black bear that finds his way into a convenience store and he’s caught on the close circuit television.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, did you know.
00:08:33
Speaker 2: You were at risk?
00:08:34
Speaker 3: So is this is this a bear that is is post mortem? Like like it’s a no, no no.
00:08:40
Speaker 1: That’s why I like it’s going to be a bear to his like his buddy gets their Yeah, I’m not gonna like bring a bear back from the dead.
00:08:49
Speaker 2: You could do you could do a repetitive series and anytime a black bear is in the news, you just have the God I can’t catch a break. Honestly, my fan only so embarrassed.
00:09:02
Speaker 1: Here here’s the everything that will How did I What did I say? There’s three things of interest? It doesn’t matter. I just got off the phone. I’m trying to Here’s what I’m gonna do. You guys ever preview radio live segments. We hold we hold this up. Phil said you can hold this somewhere. So I want to preview. I’m trying to get an interview with a guy I don’t even want to say who. I just spoke to a wildlife enforcement agent. I don’t want to spoil anything. I got to fill out like a form. I got to fill out a thing to try to get him permission to speak to us. He’s got to take it to the suits. So I don’t want to blow it. Yeah, I just got I just did ire my pre interview. Hold that up? Real nice. What Randall’s holding is a wild mink pelt. Did you know?
00:09:52
Speaker 2: How’s that feel? It’s like a shiny Should I bring it?
00:09:56
Speaker 1: Did you know? Did you know that if you if you go in and buy fake eyelashes, there is a chance. I don’t want to put statistics on it, but there is a very I’m not saying a probability, but a light like a good chance that when you buy fake eyelashes. It is mink, not advertised as but it is actually mink. And when you put that up and look at it, yeah, my god, does that look like a nice eyelash. I don’t like that. Look just a big fake eyelash. Look. Yeah, not my style. But you know it’s popular.
00:10:43
Speaker 2: Yep, we’ll probably fake I feel like it. I feel like it came into popularity.
00:10:47
Speaker 1: I feel like but it already went.
00:10:48
Speaker 2: I don’t know.
00:10:49
Speaker 1: Oh, it’s way popular, like in twenty years. If you’re dressing up for Halloween and you’re dressing up as a twenty twenty five person for Halloween, you’re gonna glue on big fake eyelash, sure, and people will be like, oh, I remember that.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: But yeah, uh, mink are just striking.
00:11:10
Speaker 1: And I was wondering is that like enough to drive up the mink market. But then, man, think about how many eyelashes are hide in that thing right there. Yeah, there’s nothing but it. You could do the whole town. You could give every woman in town new eyelashes with this mink.
00:11:25
Speaker 2: We should try to make We should take a sliver, like a dental flos sized sliver off the side of that and try to make a set of uh, fake eyelashes for someone.
00:11:33
Speaker 1: In what they do when they’re testing. I don’t want to blow the interview. I wanted to give this last little tidbit away against my better judgment. When they’re testing a shipment, guess guess what the test is that I already tell you what the test did, and I like it. Take a cigarette lighter.
00:11:51
Speaker 2: Smell like hair.
00:11:52
Speaker 1: If it smells like burnt hair, it’ll either smell like burning petroleum based or it’ll be like, oh, that’s burnt hair. That is a mink greake eyelashes made from a mink.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: And what I won’t be.
00:12:04
Speaker 1: Able to tell you even when we do the interview, I won’t be able to tell you the country of origin.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: It’s not known.
00:12:10
Speaker 1: We’re not knowing if these mink are American cop mink or European wild mink. Third thing of interest, can you put the photo film?
00:12:19
Speaker 2: Let’s do it.
00:12:20
Speaker 1: This is a tremendous interest. You got your thing handy, I do. Randall and I just did a probably one of the best, probably our best piece of video work ever in terms of what I think is interesting. Phil has a picture held up of me and Randall here holding two it’s the big hunks of fat that come off the back of a buffalo. It’s called the depoey, the depouey French. If you imagine like picture that you pull the hide off a deer, because more people have done that than pulled the hide off a buffalo. Hat off deer, and he’s got like the big caps of fat on a real healthy deer, the big caps of fat that lay over the backstrap. But these are in this picture we’re holding up. These are like giant slabs of fat removed from over the backstrap and hump of a buffalo.
00:13:16
Speaker 2: And working on.
00:13:17
Speaker 1: The latest installation of meat Eater’s American history, The Hide Hunters, eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three, we ran across this passage which doctor Randall’s share with you.
00:13:32
Speaker 2: Another important article of food, the equal of which is not to be had except from the buffalo, is dupoyer or depeuwey depewy. It is a fat substance that lies along the backbone next to the hide, running from the shoulder blade to the last rib, and is about as thick as one’s hand or finger. It is from seven to eleven inches broad, tapering to a feather edge on the lower side. It will weigh from five to eleven pounds according to the size and condition of the animal. This substance has taken off and dipped in hot grease for half a minute, then is hung up inside of a lodge to dry and smoke for twelve hours. It will keep indefinitely and is used as a substitute for bread, but is superior to any bread that was ever made.
00:14:21
Speaker 1: Yes, we made it. We made a whole video about making it. We followed those instructions.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: Why do people say to the tea, I don’t know.
00:14:33
Speaker 1: We followed them to the great question. You want to know why the whole nine yards? You know what that means? No, it’s like the in a peeth? Is it was that? What was that like spitfire P thirty eight airplane in World War Two?
00:14:46
Speaker 2: Uh? Is it a P thirty eight? A P thirty eight is a thunderbolt? I believe.
00:14:50
Speaker 1: Oh, well, you know the Nate Mason, Yeah, big army guy.
00:14:55
Speaker 3: Hm.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: He was telling me that that that belt, that machine belt, the animal belt twenty.
00:15:01
Speaker 2: Seven feet long.
00:15:02
Speaker 1: So to give him the whole nine yards is to give him twenty seven feet am or out of that aircraft, gotcha. Yeah, I don’t know why people follow stuff to the tea. We filed it to the t and I’m not gonna tell you what happened, you know how I tease the mak thing with I’m not telling the secrets. I’m not telling the secrets of what happened with our depui. Yeah, this project is sitting with Seth Morris right now, who’s editing it.
00:15:24
Speaker 2: I had a crisis of confidence in my answer the p third eight is the lightning, Just correcting myself.
00:15:31
Speaker 1: So going back there, and I did fact check Nate Mason on that he takes a lot of pride and being able to offer up little things like that.
00:15:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, now that I feel like I have heard that somewhere. There’s a lot of pride in that kind of stuff.
00:15:43
Speaker 1: If he waves you down, you know, on the staircase or something, it’s going to be to tell you like a little tidbit, or to correct you.
00:15:48
Speaker 2: About something you got wrong. Yeah.
00:15:51
Speaker 1: Uh, here’s an interesting one. Now we’re gonna get We’re gonna talk a whole bunch more about Buffalo because we’re talking about the hide Hunter era.
00:15:56
Speaker 3: Really quick, just before you get into this and can completely derail you. David says that there’s no consensus about where to a tea comes from, but the best accepted candidate candidate, is that it’s a shortened version of to a tittle. The word tittle refers to those tiny little editions you have to make when writing letters like a like dotting an I or a JA or crossing a T.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: Hmmmm, that’s not like something Bob Crash did say.
00:16:22
Speaker 2: To the tidy tim But sir, it’s Christmas. Is that a Bob Cratchit line?
00:16:29
Speaker 3: Yes, it is, Actually he does. He tries, He tries to leave right at the stroke of five or six, and Screwge gives gives him a dirty look and he says, but sir, it’s Christmas.
00:16:37
Speaker 1: Oh God bless it’s the biggest goose.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: In all of London.
00:16:46
Speaker 1: Here’s a really good one that a guy is sent in. We have done one of these in a while. First of this guy starts off by saying he’s rarely heard our team prep pet that points to me passed up an opportunity to discover argue about semantics. So check this out. This this cannot stand. This guy recently moved to South Carolina, gets to study in the state hunting rags just to get a grip on what’s going on, okay, and he notices within South Carolina’s hunting rags that they have an explicitly stated still hunt season, still hunt season. Now, ask any American boy what still hunting is and what are they going to tell you?
00:17:45
Speaker 2: Creeping quietly through the woods yep, slowly, slowly, slowly, shaving a deer before it sees you.
00:17:51
Speaker 1: Take a couple of steps, yep, stop and listen. Take a couple steps, stop and listen. Still hunting. So he’s like, why would they have a season where you can only still hunt? So he calls Fish and Game to say, what’s up with how you can? Like?
00:18:11
Speaker 2: Why?
00:18:11
Speaker 1: Why? Why are you saying like you can only hunt this method? You mean you can’t you can’t stand hunt during the still hunt season, to which they say, no, you dummy. Still hunting is hunting without a dog. It is the no dog season.
00:18:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:18:28
Speaker 1: Who in the world?
00:18:30
Speaker 2: I would have just called it quiet?
00:18:32
Speaker 1: I call it no dog time?
00:18:34
Speaker 2: Right, a good song?
00:18:39
Speaker 1: I call it no dog Time?
00:18:41
Speaker 2: Like is it a sandy song or is it like an upbeat pop song?
00:18:44
Speaker 1: No, it’s like a country party song. Parties it’s any parties song. Yeah, that’s a great one. That’s a great one. I have never but it might be the like, I don’t know if you would like, I’d be curious. I don’t beat a dog on it because I’d be curious.
00:19:05
Speaker 2: That’s good.
00:19:06
Speaker 3: Oh there I was with already halfway through the lyrics.
00:19:09
Speaker 2: Okay, here, man, I didn get into this.
00:19:13
Speaker 1: Now I get into this. I was with dan and read Isbel okay from God’s Country podcast, and we’re eating this. We’re in this restaurant and they got like a paddlefish eggs, paddlefish caviar and I’m eating mine and I get a little bit of that caviar on my upper lip, like and it’s like Marilyn Monroe’s birthmark. Dan Isbel goes, Marilyn Monroe.
00:19:40
Speaker 2: That’s good.
00:19:40
Speaker 1: But then there was like I everyone at the table detected a pause before he like did like a gotcha yeah. And the debate was did he know or did it only occur that he was going off the birthmark? And said Marylyn because MARYL. Monroe has.
00:20:01
Speaker 2: Did he know.
00:20:03
Speaker 1: Before the delivery? The row connection. So we wanted to get the security camera footage from within the restaurant to see if like when the twinkle in his I felt the twinkle was like delayed, like he goes like marily Monroe and then and then does a hah yeah yeah. But he’s like, no, I knew all along. That’s why I said it.
00:20:25
Speaker 3: I don’t buy it.
00:20:26
Speaker 2: I don’t buy it for no one bought it. No.
00:20:27
Speaker 1: I was like, there was like you said it, and then there was like a beat and then it.
00:20:32
Speaker 2: Hit Yeah, I’m I’m dubious.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: I mean, I’m still impressed.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s great. Why was that talking about her dogs?
00:20:44
Speaker 1: Dogs?
00:20:45
Speaker 2: You don’t mean to dog on the Why about I got talking about the row? Well the way he did one of those, he said, well I just did one. He said, I don’t mean a dog. That what it was.
00:20:57
Speaker 1: That’s what it was. So Marylyman, Now, I would be curious if you went to dog hunting states. And I don’t know, I honestly don’t know the answer that this people can write in like if I went to a dog hunting state, So I go to Arkansas, right South Carolina, there are many left, which I’ve makes me a little bit sad. Uh And I said, hey, I’m gonna still hunt like or well they people said that, how’d you get that buck? And I said, oh, I was like, stile still hunting. Would they be like, huh, he was hunting without dogs?
00:21:33
Speaker 2: Or would they be like he was actually still hunting?
00:21:35
Speaker 1: Yeah? You know what I’m saying.
00:21:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, if it’s a universal convention in states that have dog hunting, that’s still hunting. Is hunting without dogs?
00:21:42
Speaker 1: Or do even dog guys look at the rags and they’re like.
00:21:45
Speaker 2: What Yeah, they could have pretty much picked any other descriptor there and it would have caused less confusion.
00:22:00
Speaker 1: Here’s another quick one. This is good think him in an obscure question, Steve may be uniquely equipped to answer. And I gotta tell you right off the bat, I’m gonna let you down home, buddy. But it’s good. There’s a phenomenal book that I recommend anyone out there called Shadows on the Koyukuk. It’s about the It’s about a Koya Khan. So the Koya Khan people.
00:22:25
Speaker 2: Are are like a like a tribe.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: It wouldn’t beat that, but like a tribe of Native Alaskans, and they and and these Native Alaskans, the Koyu Khan people are centered around the Koyukuk River which flows into the Yukon River. Sydney Huntington is a is a koya Kan man and Shadows on the Koyakok is like his story of growing up on the river. It’s it’s a phenomenal book. In the book, there’s this passage and I I am very the person that wrote in your you’re right, I’m very familiar with the passage. And in this passage she says, basically in Shadows on the Koyakuk, a big part of the book is that this boy and his siblings like their their mom dies and they just they’re just like left out in this cabin. It’s a true story. That’s a big part of his life stories is trying to like keep his little siblings alive without parental help. And he says, supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. He saw about the night his mom died. Supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. Whitefish have a hard, gristly part in their gut that looks af it as if it has tentacles all over it, which is a favorite delicacy of Koya Khan Indians. Mom fried and ate this part. He says that whitefish got killed my mother. Mom called us into the cabin and told us she wasn’t feeling well. Go upstairs and go to bed, she said. We found our mother lying at the bottom of the stairs, half out the door, as she had been when we had gone to bed. Her eyes were closed, most of her tongue protruded from her mouth, and it was bitten almost in two. The author this is the guy that wrote the letter in matt continuing. The author doesn’t elaborate any further on how the hard gristly part in the Whitefish’s got killed his mother. Google searches have failed to shed any light on the mechanism of death. He’s wondered, you got any thoughts about that. I don’t think. I wasn’t there, but I remember reading it. I don’t think that that’s what his mom died from when she bit her tongue. Wouldn’t it be that she had a seizure, possibly bitter tongue in half?
00:24:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, although you don’t know what triggered that. No, Yeah, I didn’t.
00:24:54
Speaker 1: I felt it was coincidence.
00:24:55
Speaker 2: I did my own five minutes of googling, and I found the part of the stomach that looks like that, and I a lot of fish have it, and I found uh, I actually found a cookbook of of like traditional Tommy min, does it take you to do all this? Oh? Five to ten?
00:25:10
Speaker 1: Sure?
00:25:10
Speaker 2: Not lying pretty good with computers?
00:25:13
Speaker 1: Five it just double Do you know what’s that film?
00:25:17
Speaker 3: Well?
00:25:17
Speaker 1: I thought you were started to call them out and jump.
00:25:19
Speaker 2: I thought you were so impressed by the depth of my research that I thought five seem unrealistic. I really don’t know how much time I spent on this. It was in the hazy, it was in like the first cup of coffee stages my morning on.
00:25:31
Speaker 1: It without without bragging.
00:25:33
Speaker 2: I actually found it without bragging. For sure, sure there exists available online to any Internet researcher a book of traditional coya con recipes. When there’s pages and pages about how to prep whitefish, and there’s been a couple of hours going through that. Yeah, I scanned through it. Uh I scanned through it poorly, because I’m not bragging. I scanned through.
00:26:00
Speaker 3: I scan through it haphazardly and ply meg yourself now, But I.
00:26:04
Speaker 2: Was unable to find anything. Surely a more a talented researcher could have found the answer but I was unable.
00:26:12
Speaker 1: But you found the recipe I did, Yeah, and you found no reason. You found no reason like that they hate. It’s like, you know, what’s that what’s that fish liver that is toxic?
00:26:22
Speaker 2: You found no thing?
00:26:22
Speaker 1: Like, hey, be careful.
00:26:24
Speaker 2: No, I couldn’t find anything like that, but that I couldn’t have found anything anyway, just because of how bad I am and that stuff.
00:26:32
Speaker 1: So it doesn’t really say it doesn’t mean yeah, no, I.
00:26:34
Speaker 2: Think someone else should probably back me up.
00:26:37
Speaker 3: Ye, I don’t even know why we’re trusting a single thing you said.
00:26:39
Speaker 2: I missed it on the first time.
00:26:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. I always read that and like, again, I can’t recommend that book enough.
00:26:47
Speaker 2: You could have read that book a long time ago.
00:26:52
Speaker 1: I read that and wondered about that. I just feel like it’s like I hate, I would never want to argue with the brother, but I think something else happened.
00:27:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s just like it’s hard to make a one to one connection there.
00:27:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, think about when you get real sick from eating, like your mind will kind of find culprits. Oh yeah, you know, I remember one time I got super sick in Mexico, like like deathly ill, and I couldn’t eat avocados forever. But I had a ham in avocado. We bought like some some room temp air dried ham and avocado and bread. I got deathly ill. It wasn’t an avocado.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, but a.
00:27:40
Speaker 1: Week later I could have had a big old ham sandwich, but avocado. I couldn’t go near an avocado for two years. So I feel like stuff stands out in your mind.
00:27:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh sure.
00:27:49
Speaker 1: And you’re looking at this crazy octopus tentacle when you’re a kid. Yeah, you’re looking at that, and you’re like, good Lord, and then like you know, haven’t for bid like your mad dies the next day, like it’s gotta be that stoch.
00:28:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, she says she wasn’t feeling well. It probably could have not mattered what she had for dinner.
00:28:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So we’re gonna talk about we’re gonna dig in and explain a We’re gonna dig in and explain a really fascinating period of American history. And Randall and I have done he’s in the past. Uh, we did one on Daniel Boone and The Long Hunters. We did one of these episodes on Daniel Boone The Long Hunters. We did one of these episodes on the Mountain Men, so Jim Bridger, John Colter and the Mountain Men, and we’re gonna do one right now on sort of the era that the era, the Backwoodsman era that came after the really big hit that came after the mountain Man era, which was the hide Hunters. So to start, Ranald’s gonna lay out a little bit about like he’s gonna why are we talking about those three things? Like why are we bucketing those three things? What makes them similar, what makes them distinct?
00:29:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, So these are the first three installments of this Meat Eaters American History series, and what we’ve focused on in that series are these eras of sort of frontier market hunting where large groups of individuals are going out well, I should say relatively large groups of individuals are seeking sort of a new life by harvesting wildlife resources for profit. And that’s a phenomenon you see repeated over and over again in American history and often aligns with sort of bigger shifts in the larger national story, like the Mountain Man aligns with the Louisiana Purchase and the opening up of the Rocky Mountain West. The long Hunter era, which is in the late seventeen sixties early seventeen seventies. That aligns with this window of opportunity between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution broadly speaking. But in each of these instances, there’s there are these individuals that go out into what is then land largely unknown to them and occupied by Native people, and they’re harvesting wildlife resources on the scale that’s sort of unimaginable to us today, and in doing so, they also leave behind some of our most told and retold stories of wilderness living and outdoor adventure that have sort of, you know, been passed down to us as as like the origin story of like American hunters and anglers, right, But in this series, we’re asking what were they doing really, like, what were they after? How are they acquiring it, who were they selling it to, what was it being used for? And what are the various like larger contextual factors that shaped how they lived the lives the way they did so. Like I said, the first one was the long Hunters, and Daniel Boone is the most well known of those. These are guys largely coming out of western North Carolina, western Virginia, and they’re going across the Appalachian Mountains to shoot white tailed deer for their skin, which is used in leather goods primarily manufactured in Britain breeches, but all sorts of other and breeches are like knee length pants, like the goofy things you see on paintings of old guys with big white wigs. Yeah, yeah, when you see it.
00:31:40
Speaker 1: If you see like an old guy or like or Napoleon or someone, he’s got like some white pants, some tidy, some type in white pants.
00:31:46
Speaker 2: Buttons on the front might be buckskins, like a little button fly flap.
00:31:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be American buckskin.
00:31:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so yeah, these are essentially poor farmers living on the frontier, and it’s an economy where they don’t have ready access for cash but one thing, and their farms don’t produce enough of a surplus to really sell on a market. But the one good that they can take to market and sell to buy the things that they need to buy is white tailed deer skin. So after the French and Indian War, when it’s a little bit safer to go across the Appalachian Mountains, they start going over to Kentucky, Tennessee. Basically the Ohio River Valley in the Cumberland River Valley and shoot deer by the hundreds and thousands and pack them by mule train across the mountains. And they stay out there for months, sometimes a year longer. And that’s how they get the name long hunters long ass hunt. Long ass hunt refers to the duration of their trips. And these are sort of smaller groups. Oftentimes it’s like family members, neighbors, and they organize their expeditions along these lines of kinship and sort of clan, you know. And and it’s it’s a really interesting sort of fleeting moment because in seventeen seventy five the first permanent white settlement is established in Kentucky. And then also you have the beginnings of some of the frontier violence that ultimately bleeds into the Revolutionary War. So that’s the long hunters. Yep.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: That’s a that’s a interesting thing that we compare through all these is these like what are the the groups, the group dynamics, And you you made a point with the long hunters. When you’re reading about long hunter expeditions, it’s tons of brother in laws, Yeah, tons of cousins, tons, you know what I mean.
00:33:47
Speaker 2: Brother’s father in law’s brother in law. This guy married this guy’s sister.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: Exactly, and he’s like sort of like these familial, very neighborly clan. Yeah, but it could be as many as forty people, and.
00:34:04
Speaker 2: They’re And one of the big differences too, between the Long Hunters and some of the later volumes. The individuals we look at in the later volumes is they don’t leave behind a lot of records. They’re they’re rural people, they’re largely illiterate. Most of their stories that we have of them are recorded after the fact by interviews with their survivors or maybe interviews with them later in life, you know, like talking to an old man about what he did in his twenties. And so the source material for that, with the exception of Daniel Boone, is very very thin. So we had to do a lot more sort of piecing together and hypothesizing in that story than we did in some of these other ones.
00:34:45
Speaker 1: Yep, okay, recap mountain men. Like when you hear the word mountain men, it’s an abused term, it is it means like, yeah, it’s not like an old her that lives up in the mountains, and there’s like when you see mountain men from a historical standpoint, it’s something very specific.
00:35:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, So as we use the term in most I guess people who are in this field use the term, it’s referring to Rocky mountain beaver trappers who went west after the return of Lewis and Clark. So it’s eighteen oh six, it really is sort of becomes a big thing in the late eighteen twenties, mid eighteen twenties, late eighteen twenties when they developed the rendezvous system, which is a way of supplying these trappers and also getting their furs to market. But they’re they’re out there in the Rockies sort of nomadically traveling from watershed to watershed in organized groups, trapping beaver, which is being used to produce wolfeldt. So really they’re not after the skin. They’re after the hare, which is and the hair not attached to the skin, which is sort of a an interesting twist when you think about like the fur trade in general, it’s like you’re making mink eyelashes, like mink eyelashes exactly. I was curious when we were talking about that if they’re keeping if they’re just gluing them in place.
00:36:12
Speaker 1: On some they’re just plucking them.
00:36:13
Speaker 2: There’s no way they’re putting Let I think be cool if you have you.
00:36:15
Speaker 1: Had the letter on there, you have all the yeah, but the underfur.
00:36:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:36:20
Speaker 1: Oh you know what we fail to mention? What’s that? Met Eater’s American History, The Hide Hunters. So volume three, yes, is out now.
00:36:29
Speaker 2: Out now out October fourteenth. This is being released October thirteenth. So unless you’re the type of person that listens to it the day it drops as you listen to it, it’s out now.
00:36:39
Speaker 1: So met Eater’s American History The Hide Hunters, which we’re giving you a we’re giving you a crash course in the subject right now. We’re giving you a free crash course in the subject right now for an hour, little tease, but then the actual thing is how many hours? Seven Yeah, so you’re getting a little you’re getting a little little tittle later right now. But then the big helping, the big Christmas Goose with all the trimmings, with all the trimming is out now seven hours anywhere you get.
00:37:12
Speaker 2: Your audio books, where you get your audiobooks. So, yeah, Mountain Men is is a story that I think a lot of people might be familiar with just when they think of a frontiersman trapper. But one of the interesting differences between mountain men and long hunters is that, uh, these expeditions because they’re going across the continent and there’s a ton of logistics involved, they’re they’re actually organized by corporations, and they have a lot of capital, and there’s a lot of sort of behind the scenes jockeying for control of different corporations and so and so sells their interest whatever. But out of that you get the fact that these these trappers, a lot of them just see an ad in a newspaper. It’s like, do you want to go west and trap beaver for two years? Three years? And sign on?
00:38:03
Speaker 1: And so like.
00:38:04
Speaker 2: While Daniel Boone and some of these long hunters were going and hunting with their family and their neighbors, guys like Jim Bridger were sort of you know, he’s he’s eighteen years old, and he’s doesn’t have a lot of he’s sort of rootless. His parents are dead, and he sees an ad in the newspaper and shows up at an office in Saint Louis and.
00:38:24
Speaker 1: Signs, yes, signs an employment agreement. Yeah, that’s the funniest thing you think about. When you think about these guys, like the mountain men that are out there living off the land for multiple years with very little resupply. Most of those guys start out it’s like it’s a job.
00:38:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it has a pay scale and you commit, it’s financial security, like there’s.
00:38:46
Speaker 1: Not like an HR office. But I mean it’s like a job though, right.
00:38:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and like the I mean, it’s it’s interesting because whenever you read a story about like the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, they always mentioned this one really famous at advertisement where they’re seeking one hundred enterprising young men to go up the Missouri and so yeah, although it seems like this really distant, sort of ancient world, they’re finding job ads in the newspaper and following up on them to become a trapper. And then that story dies out really with the virtual extirpation of beaver from the Rockies, and at the same time there’s a collapse in the beaver felt market. There’s a bunch of different reasons for that, but the silk top hat becomes the preferred fashion and essentially the beaver trade sort of vanishes, and in the eighteen thirty eight eighteen thirty nine, when these guys are coming together for rendezvous to sell their furs, they sort of see the writing on the wall. And then eighteen forty is the last official rendezvous where which is like the big commercial exchange that sort of keeps this whole world turning.
00:40:01
Speaker 1: When when Randall’s talking about for hats, like, if you imagine honest Abe Lincoln, so honest Ave Lincoln is running around in that hat eighteen sixty, if he was running around in that hat in eighteen thirty, his would have been wool felt, beaver wolf felt. But I believe honest Abe was wearing was by Civil War, was wearing a silk hat. I think it was a silk hat, same cut, like those crazy looking hats.
00:40:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, you keep like a house cat up inside there, but it seems like a very inefficient. Oh just an insane when you’re wearing a backpack and it catches on everything over your head and you just go, oh shit, I’m wearing my backpack.
00:40:41
Speaker 1: Noyea.
00:40:42
Speaker 2: You know, I would imagine that a guy with the top hat would have a similar issue.
00:40:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s like a guy trying to wear a cowboy hat on an airplane.
00:40:48
Speaker 2: Especially a tall guy like a Blincoln, you know, better have high door door openings.
00:40:57
Speaker 1: Where are we at? Yeah, we’ll talk about that. Yeah, which moves us into the hide Hunter era. Okay, here’s one of the funny things about working on these series of all these these American commercial hunter market hunter periods. For the first couple of volumes we did the Long Hunters, the Mountain Men. You have all these American heroes, these mythologized characters. And what’s interesting about these American heroes, these mythologized characters is there’s more awareness. There’s more awareness about the individuals and the lives they lived. Then there is awareness about what they actually were doing for a living, meaning people know the name Daniel Boone. Okay, So if you went out and just took it, just pulled random adult Americans off the street and said, have you ever heard of Daniel Boone? You’re gonna get a nod. Yes, what was up with him? Some kind of hunter or some kind of frontiersman?
00:42:02
Speaker 2: What I lived in the woods?
00:42:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, But if I said, can you explain me what he did for a living, You’re gonna have a very low success rate on getting a good answer. So people know the name, they know these pioneers, this pioneering figure, but they’re not clear on what he was doing. He’s known for people have an understanding that he was a sort of explorer settler, which he was, but not necessarily intentionally being like he wasn’t like like, he wasn’t a promoter. He is very tightly affiliated with people know him as a Kentucky figure. He left Kentucky, died elsewhere, right, there’s not a lot of awareness of what he was. Same with if I went to you and said Davy Crockett, people are gonna be like, yes, familiar with the name Davy Crockett, And I said, can you explain to me some of the things Davy Crockett did for a living, and they probably wouldn’t have a very good sense. The Mountain Man era, people know Jim Bridger explorer or whatever. But if I said, but why was he exploring? They might not know that his sole focus over much of his professional career, his sole focus was like trying to locate populations of beavers in order to trap them. But they stand as these American icons are American heroes. Now that we’re moving into the hide hunter era, and when we say the hide Hunters we’re talking about is buffalo hunters, but there’s a long history of being buffalo hunters. When we talk about the hide hunters, we’re talking about a very specific type of buffalo hunters. We’re talking about a type of buffalo hunter who was hunting buffalo in order to get the skins which were just sold as dried what they call flint hides, not tanned. They were collecting skins, pegging them out to dry and selling them, and these were skins that were being tanned into leather products in the East. That is what we call a hide hunter is someone who’s using like a systematic system of slaughter of buffalo in order to sell hides in a specific period of time. One of the things that struck me the most we started on this highe hunter period is that here you’re now entering into a type of a type of frontiersman, a type of market hunter from an era that produced zero heroes. Rhymes.
00:44:27
Speaker 3: Well, if I left the s off, it would have put it in the dog song.
00:44:33
Speaker 1: There’s no heroes, like, there’s no mythologized figure. And you can ask you why are there no famous heroic hide hunters? And I think that there’s probably one main reason why while the long hunters like Boone extra pated deer from certain areas or greatly reduced deer herds wiped out elk herds, wiped out buffalo, they’re not known as the guys that did that. That crime hasn’t been pegged on them. The mountain men Jim Bridger, they extra pated beavers across a bunch of their range. They wiped out regional populations of beavers, but the crime hasn’t been pinned on them.
00:45:20
Speaker 2: And a lot of people probably don’t even know there was a crime. Yep.
00:45:23
Speaker 1: They probably don’t know that those things happen. Yeah, but when you get into the buffalo hide hunters who as will explain the years who from the end of the Civil War to about eighteen eighty three, they virtually eliminate They kill about fifteen million buffalo. They kill them until there’s less than one thousand left in the United States. It is very well understood that they committed the crime and.
00:45:54
Speaker 2: Were still living with that consequence. That consequence today, Like even though they didn’t wipe out the buffo, biologically speaking, the buffalo never recovered from that episode as a wild animal.
00:46:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. The way the best way I’ve heard that that distinction explained as I remember years ago someone explaining that they weren’t driven to genetic extinction, but they were driven to ecological extinction, meaning they cease to be they cease to have an ecological artage landscape. Yeah, and we understand that these Buffalo Hunters did that, and it’s and that crime has been pinned on them. And when you watch a documentary that deals with this era, they’re usually just treated as villains. They’re the villains. Everyone agrees that they’re the villains. We don’t have buffalo Hunter heroes. We don’t make Buffalo Hunter movies. There aren’t movies where the buffalo Hunter winds up being heroic and saving everybody, right, And Jeremiah Johnson, he doesn’t run into and get saved by a buffalo Hunter because they’re villains. Yeah, he gets saved by an old mountain man because they’re heroes.
00:47:12
Speaker 2: They and the other thing too that we get into this in the audiobook is that there’s a shift in consciousness that occurs during their lifetime where all of a sudden you see the rise of the modern conservation movement, the founding of the Boone and Crocket Club, the curtailment of market hunting by the federal government. And this all happens during their lifetimes sort of almost as soon as the smoke is cleared from their shooting, all of a sudden, market hunting is a very bad thing in sort of the cultural and political American consciousness, and so they sort of live in this weird space where the world that they did these acts in and killed all these buffalo was not the world that they lived in twenty years later.
00:48:10
Speaker 1: Randall that we’re gonna touch on this today. I’m just gonna touch out now. I think we’re gonna touch on this today. Yeah, here’s the thing about to keep in mind about this hide hunter thing. And we’re gonna talk about why the years. Well, you don’t talk about le’s let’s do why the years now, because I want to talk about the way in which this era, Yeah, the way in which this era turns into the modern era.
00:48:40
Speaker 2: Hm.
00:48:41
Speaker 1: You know, we’ll get into this more, but we make the point in there that these some of these buffalo hide hunters lived to see the publication of San County Almanac, right, They live to see the presidency of an individual Theodore Roosevelt, who was like an adversary of the market hunters.
00:49:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of them eliminated.
00:49:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they were like living a period of sort of watching their peers, watching their contemporaries come to condemn them, you know, I mean you were making that point, but I mean, yeah, I just think that it’s important to realize that like there was no there was almost like no period when they were celebrated. A lot of them got bitter about this, and we tell that story in the book. A lot of them get to be old men and they’re bitter. Yeah, they’re bitter about how they’ve been disparaged in their own lifetimes for what they did.
00:49:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in some ways, I mean, there are other parallels I could I could draw, but they’re in there later in life, once they’re no longer living in this world where the hide hunt was a good thing, or or you know, even a new like once it became a hot button topic and the buffalo wiped out and conservations on the rise, they often would look back and explain what they were doing in a different way. They tried to They tried to reimagine what drove them to do what they did in order to align themselves with things that were still okay at that time, and so a lot of them said, well, we did it to tame the frontier, we did it to conquer Native people. We did it to sort of, you know, break break Indian resistance and open up the West for settlement. But what’s fascinating is when you go back and you read the accounts that were written at the time, as opposed to like what they wrote down in nineteen hundred or nineteen ten. They always say, I was young, I needed money. It was free for the taking. All you needed was a rifle. You go out there and you get as many as you can, make a lot of money. And there’s none of these guys at the time or sort of thing are explaining their actions in a way that’s like part of a broader national story of quote unquote progress. But as old men, oh yeah, living now, living in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, or even just back in like during the Roosevelt presidency, they’re saying, oh, well, you know, we were part of we were part of the American story. We weren’t bad guys. The whole money thing was just decide issue. What we were really trying to do is open up the West. For white settlement.
00:51:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, they get terribly sentimental too. This isn’t this isn’t a direct quote, but it would be that you’ll get this kind of sentiment from them as old men. Like when I look and see children coming out of Sunday School, Yeah, in the Texas Panhandle, running into the arms of their waiting mothers.
00:51:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, by god, I.
00:51:56
Speaker 1: Did the right thing.
00:51:58
Speaker 2: And one of the interesting things about these sort of after the fact explanations for their actions, especially as it comes to like the consequences for Native people, Like they in the early nineteen hundreds, they said, well, this was a good and necessary thing. We did it so that we could we could defeat the tribes of the Planes. At the time, they did that because they thought it was something worth celebrating. They said what they did in that way, they explained their actions because in a way that would be celebrated. But then decades later, once people started thinking differently about what happened to the tribes of the Planes, they latched on to those explanations because it made the guys seem even worse, made the heigh hunters seem even more villainous, and so like you almost have to go back to what they were saying while they did it, rather than what they were saying long after the fact, once their actions had sort of taken a big shift in sort of the public opinion.
00:53:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. We well, I’m gonna say it now. I keep trying to be like really disciplined about what we bring up when. But there’s a hide hunter who kills over ten thousand the buffalo okay, who who lives through the Korean War. Yeah, he lives to see we mentioned he lives to see like Playboy magazine being published.
00:53:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, he lived to be one hundred and four years old.
00:53:36
Speaker 1: Lives to see here’s a guy that’s on the Texas Plains fighting comanches, shooting buffalo for a living, and he lives to like read Playboy magazine, see the introduction of the corvette.
00:53:49
Speaker 2: The first Burger king opened before he died, and the first nuclear submarine launched before he died. Yeah.
00:53:56
Speaker 3: But he you know, he.
00:53:58
Speaker 2: Listened to the president on the radio. Uh he he uh, he drove cars, you know, like there’s stories about these buffalo hunters. The wife of one buffalo hunter later in life said, you know, I hadn’t been back to Dodge City since the Buffalo Hunt and the interviewers like, well, why did you go to Dodge City? Why did you go back? And she goes, oh, there is a motorcycle race. We’re going to watch a motorcycle race.
00:54:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, the extreme like that.
00:54:26
Speaker 3: That.
00:54:26
Speaker 1: That’s then we spent a lot of time on it is just how abrupt at the end of this era, how like abrupt the country changed out of it. And a thing we bring up as well, we keep talking about these the certain these certain hide hunters who lived through the buffalo slaughter and became they kind of stayed that, they kind of wanted to continue to defend themselves. And we talked about that there’s no hide hunter heroes. Now that’s not entirely accurate, because there’s a lot of mythologized Western figures who became mythologized later for their exploits as gunfighters, lawmen, gamblers, but who you wouldn’t realize cut their teeth as hide hunters.
00:55:16
Speaker 2: Uh Wider.
00:55:18
Speaker 1: There’s like historians a little bit questioned like how into hide hunting wider was he? He was hide hunter adjacent, maybe did some high hunting, Wider did some high hunting. I’ll tell you who absolutely was a highe hunter Pat Garrett, the man who killed Billy the Kid.
00:55:37
Speaker 2: We recently had Brian Burrows, Brian Yeah, Brian Burrows on, No Burrow Burrow singing of William Burrows. I know that’s what That’s what screwed me. I always do that.
00:55:54
Speaker 1: We recently had the writer Brian Burrow on and his very excellent book The Gunfighters, and in The Gunfighters he tells the story of the night Billy the Kid died in New Mexico, and he talks about that the last person Billy the Kid addressed he said ken as to a man named John Poe, and then was shortly thereafter shot and killed. Will set it again, said the same thing, goes into a bedroom, He passes a guy outside and says keen as, who is that? Goes into a bedroom, says it again to someone in the room, not knowing who he’s looking at, and that guy kills him dead. Those two guys were buffalo hide hunters, but no one knows John Poe and Pat Garrett as buffalo heide.
00:56:44
Speaker 2: Hunters their former buffalo hide hunters at the time.
00:56:47
Speaker 1: Bat Masterson gunfighter becomes a sportswriter buffalo hunter. So it’s not fair to say that the Buffalo Hunters didn’t produce heroes, but they didn’t produce heroes from that.
00:57:00
Speaker 2: They shed that, They shed that identity and became new people.
00:57:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. Some became like dudes that were presidents of banks.
00:57:09
Speaker 2: A lot of them got killed in bars and card games.
00:57:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, many, like many divide, died violently. And that’s another thing about like the legacy of the hide Hunters is you’ll find people say, oh, the hide Hunters were nothing but horse stephens, scoundrels. Yeah. And the other historians, including Elliott West, who we had on the podcast years ago, Elliott West has this passage like, oh, they became candy salesmen and high school principles. Yeah, and you’re like, both those things are true. They were some horse stealing scoundrels. Yeah, some became candy salesman, like they became all things.
00:57:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Elliott Elliott West in that passage he makes a point that like the hide hunters stepped out of normal life to become hide hunters. You know, they were like farmers, they were guys that worked on the railroad, they were they have these they weren’t born to be right and like boone was born to be right, and there was there was an opportunity, and they stepped into that world and they they did what they did, and then that world vanished along with the buffalo, and they moved on to the next thing.
00:58:15
Speaker 1: Uh, it’s more appropriate to say this is a segue. It’s more appropriate to say that these Buffalo hide hunters, who we no one understand and have condemned for exterminating the American buffalo. Yes, they stepped out of normal life. But it’s more it’s it’s better to say, yeah, they stepped out of the American Civil War.
00:58:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that’s something that I it’s something that you hear about this era. Like a lot of these Buffalo Hunters were formal former Civil War soldiers or somehow affected. Their lives were affected by the Civil War. But you really don’t have a full appreciation for it until you start reading their individual stories, by the dozens, and it’s just it’s overwhelming. Frank Mayor, the guy who lived to see Burger King and Playboy magazine. He was a thirteen year old drummer boy.
00:59:19
Speaker 1: Wonder if you ever read Playboy while eating Burger King. I think he’s in a corvette.
00:59:23
Speaker 2: At one hundred and four. He I hope he was doing all that stuff. It’s doubtful though, is that. Baby.
00:59:30
Speaker 1: I’m gonna take my corvette down, pick up the April issue, get a burger, get a.
00:59:35
Speaker 3: Whopper, just for the articles, of course. Yeah, yeah, well that was.
00:59:39
Speaker 2: Back when when you really could read some good stuff in there, you know, to be a country. So he Yeah. Frank Mayor, the guy who lived to be one hundred and four, he was a thirteen year old drummer boy, serving they think, in his father’s artillery unit at the Battle of Gettysburg. If you can imagine what he witnessed during that period of time as a thirteen year old, like, it’s hard to imagine him going on to just live a quiet life somewhere right. And he even makes the point in his memoir that after the Civil War there were a ton of men who didn’t know what was next, but they knew they knew they had to move on, right, and so they were sort of lost. They were looking for purpose. A lot of them like they’d lost family members, They might have lost fathers. John Cook. I don’t know if we mentioned Cook yet.
01:00:38
Speaker 1: No, we haven’t mentioned Cook yet, but a very like Cook also comes out of one of the most ugly violent aspects of the Civil War, which and we explained it a little bit, which is not widely known about.
01:00:51
Speaker 2: What was going on in that period. But yeah, so he’s he’s his family moves out to Missouri, and so they get all wrapped up in the guerrilla fighting that’s going on on the Kansas Missouri border. And his brother is shot twenty seven times. His brother was serving he.
01:01:12
Speaker 1: Shot pieces, yeah, like a revenge attack.
01:01:15
Speaker 2: And his brother is serving in a Union military unit. And some Confederates earlier that day had killed some Union soldiers and put on their uniforms, and so they marched right up to Cook’s brother and he got shot twenty seven times. And the commanding officer of that unit gave John Cook his brother’s hat that’s just soaked in blood and full of holes, and says, you know, this is what we have left your brother, Bring it to your mom. And so even though Cook himself was like again a youngster, you know, he didn’t like bear the brunt of the fighting, like the Civil War profoundly brought an end to his like childhood innocence. And then there’s guys that served as prisoners of war and guys that there’s one hide hunter who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. And there’s a you know, we have stories of like a guy who is a Confederate soldier who is he was at a fort that was went under siege and like two thirds of the guys in there with them had died by the time they surrendered, so you can imagine.
01:02:22
Speaker 1: And then he that’s the guy he gets taken up to a military prison in the North at the end of the war, walks home to North Carolina, Yeah, and then heads out. That’s important thing to bring up is Confederate like not just Union, but Union and Confederate soldiers in the years immediately after the war, within a decade after the war are coming together in hunting outfits in Texas.
01:02:50
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And and you also there’s a couple of interesting stories of brothers, the Clarkson brothers, the l of the three. He served in the war, and then afterwards they said he grew his hair out long, and he went out west and started trapping wolves. And then once the buffalo hunt got underway, he wrote to his other brothers and said, come on out, you got it. And these guys killed I believe twenty thousand Buffalo during their career as Buffalo hunters. And there’s another guy. He writes to his brother, and that guy comes out and he brings a rifle and a canteen and a compass, and they’re all his Union issued like army army gears. So we begin this story in eighteen sixty five because the connection to the end of the Civil War is sort of inarguable, but the hunt itself really doesn’t get underway until later, until six years later. Essentially.
01:03:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s a little device we use in these American history pieces where we like to bracket. We like to bracket like the years that we’re talking about, which is no, it’s true. Yeah, But what we also do is we also hint at we.
01:04:11
Speaker 2: Bracket it.
01:04:12
Speaker 1: Okay. So with the Long Hunters, we say in the title met Eater’s American History, the Long Hunters seventeen sixty three to seventeen seventy five. Seventeen sixty three being the end of the French and Indian War or the Seven Years War, so you get a period of relative peace on the frontier which allows guys to somewhat more safely go into the colonial frontier to hunt. Seventeen seventy five, of course, is the year before the American Revolution, which brings in this very bloodied period on the American frontier when it becomes really hard to hunt. But then, of course we explain a lot about like what happens before seventeen sixty three, yeah, and in a little bit about what happens after seventeen seventy five, But the era is that with the Mountain Men eighteen oh six, so that’s the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition. However, we explain a little bit about the Louisiana purchase, which is before that, but the action is like the return of Lewis and Clark and the reports of great quantities of beavers in the American West with the collapse of the market in eighteen forty. The hide Hunter story, we’re saying sixty five, And as we explain, it’s because you can’t understand the hide Hunters without understanding the Civil War from a standpoint of firearms, from a standpoint of railroads, yeah, from a little bit of politics, okay, and from the standpoint of creating a generation of displaced young men. But the shooting doesn’t start till about seven years later. Yeah, the shooting really starts in eighteen seventy two.
01:05:59
Speaker 2: And on the railroad. On the railroad, note, like the trans Continental railroads are authorized during the Civil War, and that’s tied to politics and questions about you know, like keeping California in the Union. And also the northern elected officials don’t no longer have to concede things to the South, so it’s really a Northern project. So they authorize the trans Continental railroads. They really don’t get construction. They don’t make a lot of progress and construction untill after the war. But the railroads are important for two reasons. One, the sheer logistics of moving all these buffalo skins off the planes is unimaginable without the railroads in the quantities that they’re moving them. Two, a lot of these Civil War veterans got they sort of cut their teeth as buffalo hunters shooting meat to feed railroad workers, and so they were already making this transition into market hunters before the hide hunt as meat hunters.
01:07:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’d like to explain one example that just because it’s a name people are gonna be familiar with. If you’re sitting there now listening to this, if one buffalo hunter. No, I’m not saying a hide hunter. A buffalo hunter you probably know is Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill Cody never participated in the hide hunt. Buffalo. Bill Cody shot four thousand buffalo as a meat hunter for the railroad, but then got off on other ventures, got into the show, got into show business and some high profile guiding. He never made the transition, but other guys like that, like picture, you got a guy like a guy like Bill Cody, Buffalo. Bill Cody kills four thousand for the meat. This guy has perfected the has perfected the skill. Yeah, so you had these dudes when the hide market takes off, and we explain in great detail why the hyde market exploded. When the hide market takes off, you got guys that are rare and to go.
01:08:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they don’t need to figure out how to kill buffalo. Yeah, they’ve had their sort of professional apprenticeship as meat hunters and they’re selling meat. Not only two railroad camps. Like you think about all the laborers needed for these infrastructure projects. Like there’s companies that get a contract from the railroad to board and house all of the workers, and then those companies are going out and hiring a guy like Bill Cody to kill buffalo and it’s like eight to day or something like that. They’re also getting contracts to supply meat to forts, like there’s military forts being established across the west to guard the railroad and also to wage war on the tribes. And so there’s civilians who are going out and hunting buffalo to feed the soldiers. And then they’re also engaging in a more limited scale selling meat to butchers or meat stores in the east, restaurants, hotels, whatever. It’s sort of a curiosity. But all these there’s very much like an intact robust trade in buffalo products before the hide hunt gets rolling.
01:09:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, like if you imagine all of a sudden, squirrel brains are worth ten thousand dollars of brain, who’s best suited to capitalize on that.
01:09:34
Speaker 2: Explodes that market Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy.
01:09:40
Speaker 1: So people later one hundred years later saying, do you know that Kevin Murphy used to just hunt squirrels, like for the meat. People don’t realize this, and yeah, everybody knows him as the squirrel brain hunter.
01:09:52
Speaker 2: It’s so funny because they like the Clarkson’s the who I mentioned earlier the three. A lot of them will come out west not really knowing what they’re doing, and then they get a job cutting wood to supply firewood to a military base, or cutting wood to supply firewood to a railroad camp, and then they realize another one of the guys cutting wood has sort of a side gig shooting buffalo, and then they realize, oh, I could do that. And then they realize if I got a wagon of my own to haul this meet, I could just kill buffalo all the time. And so there’s like a series of years leading up to the hide hunt where there’s sort of this professional class developing, and there’s still like a huge rush of outsiders once the hide hunt gets out our way, but like there’s very much like a well developed expertise around killing buffalo, like especially in Kansas where it gets rippen.
01:10:47
Speaker 1: We should touch real quick on this idea that we talk about with the long hunters, that oftentimes a long hunting expedition would be people related, strong familial connection coming out of a specific settlement, oftentimes like in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, but coming out of these small agrarian settlements loosely connected individuals and they become like a like a they launch a long hunting expedition. It could be forty guys, it could be five guys.
01:11:19
Speaker 2: The mountain men.
01:11:20
Speaker 1: You have this thing with Uh, it’s just all these many uprooted, displaced young men sort of randomly thrown together. It’s not a family enterprise. With the hide hunters. You do get a little bit back into a there is some family stuff. Yeah, but we bring up this term. It’s a it’s a beautiful term and I’m surprised I had never heard it before. It’s so great. We get into this thing called siphon. I don’t the way you picked the Randall introduced this word to me. Siphon migration m H where a person will a person will move out west, start doing well in the Buffalo high trade. And then and then heunctions as a sort of siphon and starts pulling people out with them.
01:12:04
Speaker 2: Come on out, you guys gotta get in on this.
01:12:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. So like cousins, brothers, whatever, get on the train or ride and they’re coming out of Ohio, Illinois, Virginia, whatever it is, and they’re being drawn out by someone in their social network, someone in their family. They’re being drawn out to get in on the bonanza. You also have these organizations that they’ve called an outfit, who are coming together, oftentimes like under specific job titles. It’s a hierarchical structure. The mountain men would work for these giant by the time would have been like corporations. They had financiers. They’re like VC backed corporations hired the mountain men. There’s no corporate structure with the hide hunters. It’s like whoever has the money to buy the equipment is the top of the hierarchy, and they’ll be that. Usually that guy is the shooter, but then he has like specific roles with specific for specific skill sets. You have a shooter, you have a skinner, maybe you have two skinners, you have a camp cook, and these are like assigned roles and you can you can climb through the hierarchy. Yeah, but it’s like it’s like a it’s a job description, it’s a skill, and you can go apply that skill. I could be I’m gonna go cook for Randall’s outfit. I’m gonna get sick of that, and the next year I’m gonna go and sign a similar deal and get a job cooking for Fhill’s outfit.
01:13:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it’s the I’m forgetting the name of the historian, but he talks about this idea of crew culture where you develop, like an industry develops, this sort of well recognized a blueprint for how a crew works and if you if you make it through a season with one crew, you can pretty seamlessly hop onto the other crew. And you think about this as like guys in relative dangerous professions. You know, if you think about like logging, like wildfire crews or commercial fishermen, it’s often people sort of in dangerous jobs. There’s high turnover and there’s like some hazing involved and once you but once you know the lingo, and once you have your own sort of set of tools, like you can you can bounce around and so so these buffalo hunting outfits are really small scale outfits, maybe four or five guys, some you know, twelve fifteen. I think they’re in rare instances. There’s some crews of twenty, but they all have very well defined jobs and there’s a well defined sort of order of operations in terms of how you kill the buffalo, how you skin them, how you process them, and everybody’s doing it. The same. And what’s sort of just circle back one bit when you’re talking about all the money in the in the fur business being tied up in like the corporations that are hiring the trappers, the big money in the buffalo hunt story is with these companies that are sort of in the import export business. They’re they’re trafficking in furs and leather and other goods, but they’re just sort of they’re in Kansas City, sort of these big hubs on the eastern side of the planes, and they are moving these skins by the thousands to tanneries in the east. They’re sort of brokers like middlemen, and they actually are sending flyers out onto the planes explaining to guys how to skin, how to how to care for your skins, how to like like what the process is, what they want. And then essentially all you need is a wagon which is still a big investment in a rifle, and you go out and kill all the buffalo you can. And then a fur buyer or a hide buyer i should say, moves either. Either you go to town and sell your hides to them of the town and they’re sort of a field agent for one of these big brokers, or they are even traveling around in the field to different camps and hauling the hauling the hides away, buying them directly in camps. So the hunters themselves and their crews or of these autonomous units on the periphery, and then there’s there’s a real hierarchical network of buyers that sort of vacuum and funnel all this stuff up to places like Kansas City.
01:16:29
Speaker 3: Uh.
01:16:30
Speaker 1: We were when we worked on this, we were struggling to be like, how do you describe the chaos of the Civil War, to understand how it’s spinning people out, Like people know how horrible it is. So in world in World War Two, we lost about two hundred and fifty thousand Americans. In Vietnam we lost fifty seven thousand Americans. And the Civil War we lost this is combatants, and.
01:17:05
Speaker 2: When our population was considerably lower.
01:17:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, between the two armies comprised of you know, of Americans, seven hundred thousand dead combatants. In many communities, you took away an entire In many communities, you the war carried away entire generations of men. You in communities, you went and you you eliminated people, say seventeen to twenty eight or so. I mean you like you had it be where that town lost that bracket of individuals that that war killed off eight percent of the white men aged between thirteen and forty three. Remember said we lost fifty seven thousand and US soldiers in Vietnam, fifty thousand, fifty thousand civilians died in the Civil War. Sixty thousand people lost arms and legs in the Civil War. So by beginning this story in the Civil War, it’s like you have literally destroyed huge swaths of the country and people needed something to go do. And the reason I bring this up and that kind of the reason we focus on this, Well, the main reason we focus on this is because it’s like it’s the truth and it’s how things happened. But a big part of the a big impetus in like explaining the situation is I feel that coming and saying all the hide hunters were these sadistic people hell bent on destroying American wildlife, It’s not accurate. I think that some of them, not think some of them were aware of the destruction they were doing. Some of them in the moment articulated an acute awareness of the destruction they were doing. But there’s more to the story than just to be that these were like sadistic money grubbing executioners of wildlife, Like these were often people that had like not just like little opportunity, no opportunity. And though we weren’t using this term at the time, about trauma, being shell shocked whatever, people coming out of horrific circumstances with absolutely no promise of employment.
01:19:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think two like a lot of them were refugees. Like when we think about the Great Depression and we think about like the you know, the grapes of wrath, like people heading out looking for work, like hitting the road looking for work, Like that’s the situation on the ground in eighteen sixty five, and there’s something like two hundred thousand people in the South lost their homes. So they are you know, not only maybe their farms had been burned, like their crops had been burned, like they’re they’re unmoored from what their lives had been like prior to this. And like we mentioned, you know, there’s a there’s a clear opportunity in the Buffalo market. And then the other the other side of that is like the eighteen seventies were a time of serious economic upheaval, and there’s all sorts of financial panics and businesses failing, people getting laid off, unemployed, and so you find these in these accounts, like somebody’s explaining why they became a buffalo hunter, and they’re like, well, the ground oppers eight my crops, and I had to feed my family, so so I became a buffalo hunter. There’s another story that a bunch of butchers from Saint Louis had shown up on the planes looking to cut buffalo because they’d all lost their jobs in a financial crisis. Right, and so like, even after the Civil War, the country’s on very rocky footing and and it’s very it’s overwhelmingly clear from the stories that these people left behind that there’s there’s obviously some like hunger for adventure in frontier life and all that, but it’s so overwhelmingly clear that these are people who are desperate.
01:21:49
Speaker 1: Another thing that’s kicking out people onto the frontier is the progress of the railroads. Viewed in hindsight, the progress of the railroads was was was stunningly fast, but at times there’d be pauses. The Northern Pacific Railroad paused in Bismarck, North Dakota like just shut down. So you’d bring out all these workers and create this job opportunity and now and then money would dry up. Things that happened, and all of a sudden it just like but we’re done, yep. And so here you have people on the frontier who just had the rug.
01:22:24
Speaker 2: Pulled out and they can’t get a bus ticket home.
01:22:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so that you’d like you were sort of like dumping people, like displacing dumped people out on the planes on the American frontier. And a lot of these guys, if you look at how they creep into it, like Randall said, I mean, they’re doing like pretty lowly work like cutting firewood and then trying to haul firewood and sell it to a military fort. No one’s getting rich cutting firewood, but that is putting them in position to be queued up to participate in the hide hunt.
01:22:55
Speaker 2: Yeah. One story that is probably worth mentioning is there’s a guy named Elijah Cox who’s actually a freed slave and he he served in the Buffalo Soldiers, the cavalry all black cavalry unit, and he gets discharged and he’s he’s discharged in Texas’s I believe he’s born in Michigan. So he gets discharged in Texas at some point fighting the apaches, and he doesn’t have anything else to do, so he becomes a cook for a buffalo hunting outfit, and then after a couple of seasons of serving as a cook, he becomes a skinner. And and after a couple of seasons of serving as a skinner, one of the hunters in the outfit like breaks his leg or something, and so Elijah Cox gets to be a shooter. And so it’s one of these sort of strange stories of like he spent he spent many years involved in the trade, worked his way up. Had know. It was not a plan that he had, right, It’s just circumstances where he found himself. And and ultimately I think he killed some seven hundred.
01:24:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had an AskMen of how many got And I think that when he when he got cut loose from the military, if I remember right, and it’s in we explained it in here, I think he got cut loose from the military from an injury.
01:24:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was he was like medically discharged. Yeah, so here he is he’s just on the frontier, yeah, with no network, like like nothing to fall back on.
01:24:33
Speaker 1: Later when he was asked about it. You know, we’re talking about earlier, we were talking about the way people justify it and the way they kind of like maybe misremember their motivations. Later, when he was asked about it, his reply was basically like, oh, I know, as I had plenty to eat and I always had money.
01:24:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And that was during the that was So what’s interesting about that is like during the Great Depression, you know, there’s all these oral history projects, and so he was interviewed at the tail end of the Great Depression. He’s still alive and he’s lived through the Great Depression, and he’s thinking about the Buffalo days and he’s like, I don’t know, it’s.
01:25:11
Speaker 3: Pretty pretty good, a lot of meat.
01:25:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I what I said earlier contradat he was he was born to escaped slaves, So he was born in Michigan. His parents were both escape escaped slaves from the South.
01:25:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Buffalo soldiers play into this story a little bit, and we get into much greater detail in the project. But the the that term, you hear that term often, like even the what’s his name Bob? The Bob Marley reference.
01:25:37
Speaker 2: I believe it was the.
01:25:38
Speaker 1: Commanche or Apache, I’m not I can’t remember who likened the hair. They likened the hair of these black American cavalry members. They likened the hair to.
01:25:51
Speaker 2: The wool of a buffalo, so they would say they were a Buffalo soldier. Man. It became like a proud identity for a lot of these guys after the Civil War, Like they’re they’re out west, they’re serving in the army and and yeah, it’s like a really fascinating Eventually they come up to Yellowstone, they’re in Montana.
01:26:11
Speaker 1: And they and they’re having mix ups like they they’re oftentimes during this little period that have them done. In Texas, Buffalo hide hunters are joining groups of Buffalo soldiers fighting against Comanche. Yeah.
01:26:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, the situation that maybe we should get into this like the phases of the hunt, Yeah, the three phases, because it starts in Kansas really along the tracks of of the railroads, the Topeka, Santa Fe in particular, Dodge City is like a big hub. And then the slaughter sort of goes on until there aren’t any buffalo in Kansas anymore, and they the high hunters push into Texas, and Texas it becomes a much like at first they’re so far away from any hub of settlement that they’re still hauling the hauling the hides back up to Dodge City, but they’re bumping into comanches and and there’s a real recognition on the part of the comanches and other their their allies that the high hunters are killing off their economic lifeblood. And so it becomes sort of a very bloody, uh theater for the for the hide hunt, where high hunters sometimes are serving as sort of like proxy fighters for the US Army, and the army is serving as sort of proxy fighters for the buffalo hunters. And then at some point they kill all the buffalo in Texas and they roll up to Montana, and then Montana it’s it’s sort of a mop up job, and and in a couple of years the herds of the northern plains are basically blinked out.
01:27:56
Speaker 1: That that’s a It’s an interesting point about the Indigenous Americans that when we get into the deer skin trade, like in our long Hunter piece we focus on we focus really heavily on these Euro American, these white long hunters, but that the deer skin trade was really built by Native hunters before these guys like Boone and people started going into that area. There had been long a colonial trade in deer skins, and in the early days of that trade, those deer skins are being harvested by Native Americans and bought in and exported with the beaver skin trade. There were some tribes wanted nothing to do with the beaver skin trade. Other tribes jumped in pretty heavily, like the Flatheads were famous for having engaged in the beaver skin tribe trade. The Blackfeet. Some historians like to point out how the Blackfeet sat it out, but there’s other accounts of the Blackfeet engaging pretty heavily and trading to the north. But they did it. The mountain men would often overwinter with tribes. A lot of mountain men were very tightly as so, like jim Bridge was very tightly associated with the Shoshone. Right, So there’s this big Native American element of people in the trade, of people traveling with the practitioners. You get into the hide hunters and you don’t find like.
01:29:25
Speaker 2: There’s no cultural exchange, there’s no sort of shared interests, there’s no allies.
01:29:30
Speaker 3: No.
01:29:32
Speaker 1: As we get into it, we had a whole chapter. It kind of sets up this thing there was we’re talking about when we talk about hide hunters. There was a thing called what we call the robe hunt or the robe trade. There was a commercial Native American trade, which was small scale and very artisan, for tanned buffalo robes that were used as an as an insulation. Like if you were on a way. You could be in Boston riding in a wagon on a cold day and you have a lap blanket that is a winter killed buffalo from the northern Plains. You could be in the military and be issued a sleeping bag on a polar expedition that could be a winter killed Indian tanned buffalo robe from the northern plans. So Indians would shoot buffalo at the right time of year and the right location, the women would tan it into a finished good, and that finished good was sold.
01:30:31
Speaker 2: But that was small and there’s bottlenecks on there’s natural constraints on the scale of that trade because of the seasonality and especially because of that labor part. Yeah, like a woman could tan ten a year.
01:30:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, a woman in addition to serving her family, preparing hides to clothe their family, working on hides to make a tent, she might be able to put out ten robes, yeah a year.
01:31:00
Speaker 2: A hide hunter.
01:31:03
Speaker 1: That’s just hunting for skin, not tanned goods, but just hunting selling skin. A hide hunter, they would get into long periods where they are killing thirty and forty a day. There is examples of killing way more than that. We get into some of these extraordinary kills, but routinely, in good conditions, they’re waking up every day and killing thirty to forty and a woman, a woman in a Native American family on the Great Plans, might be able to produce ten robes and annually.
01:31:36
Speaker 2: And like we said, the hide hunters are only drying the skins out and then they’re being tanned on an industrial scale. In the East, there’s sort of a bottomless appetite for buffalo skins, and there’s really a bottomless appetite for leather at this time because the leather making industry, the tanning industry, has grown and consolidated and mechanized and made all these improvements and sort of process to the point that like it’s basically like a big gaping maw, and as many hides as you can shovel into it, it can handle it, and it can find markets for them. So the tanning industry is just absorbing this on a scale that like native communities could not have during the robe trade era.
01:32:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, they’re being tanned where you have a native woman tanning a buffalo hide with hand tools on the ground, using a buffalo’s brain, okay, or a concoction of liver and brain to soften it when the hide hunters get going. Their skins are being tanned in railroad fed tanneries in buildings that are three hundred yards long by companies that own There’s one company we talk about that owns twenty five thousand acres of timberland in Pennsylvania because they want tamarack and hemlock. They owned twenty five thousand acres of timberland to produce bark to make tannic acid.
01:33:08
Speaker 2: And this is a place like if you’ve heard the term of company town, where the company owns the store, the company owns the houses. You go there, you work for the factory, you go live in a house owned by the factory, and you buy your groceries from the factory. Like this is a company town in rural Pennsylvania that has nine story buildings where they’re drying buffalo hides and they’re tanning them these huge vats. They have rows of hundreds of vats, and yeah, like it’s almost it’s sort of startling when you see photos and these tanneries continue to operate even after the buffalo It was like when the buffalo hide trade was going on, they switched over to tanning, a majority of their business was buffalo skins, and then afterwards they simply switched back over to cattle skins.
01:34:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a really one of the more fascinating points, like a discovery that I hadn’t working on this. Oftentimes, when we go into these projects, like we’re going to it with some level of pre awareness about the details, and we’ll be able to like random and I can sit and we can kind of map out based on what we already know.
01:34:26
Speaker 2: We can kind of map out.
01:34:29
Speaker 1: How the story plays out, and we might come up with like we need to find out this or we need to learn why this is the way it is. But we come in with like some level of familiarity I and I kind of understand how I came to think this. Now I had thought from previous research and in fact, oh you know what I was gonna mention this story, like I wrote a book.
01:34:56
Speaker 2: I think it came out and so it was two thousand and eight.
01:35:00
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, I published a book, American Buffalo and Search of a Lost Icon. And it tells the story of the species from you know, the place, the scene. It tells the story of the species from the ice age up and into the future. It’s this whole overview of the animal. There’s a part of a chapter where I talk about the hide hunters. So have you ever seen like an exploded diagram where you’re looking at like a piece of machinery, and then there’s like a little arrow pointing to a part of the machinery, and on the next page is an exploded diagram of that little component. This is an exploded diagram of what is perhaps the most interesting part about that story, where this is taking that little that couple pages about the hide Hunters and American buffalo and blowing it out to something as long as the American buffalo. So there’s if you’ve read that, and I know many of you have read that, there’s like a little bits of overlapping stuff, But this is like a greatly this focus is on the most important stretch of a couple decades in that story and tells a very detailed accounting of something that I briefly gloss over in the book. But in that work, I had come to this thing, and you’ll see it repeated, like I know where I got it, this idea that there was a invention, okay, or a revolutionary new process that all of a sudden made it so buffalo leather was like the greatest leather of all time. Okay. You’ll see this, that they came up with news tanning methods and all of a sudden, lordy, lordie, you could make this great elastic belting out of buffalo hide, and buffalo hide was this super special leather. And that’s not entirely wrong, but it’s not quite right.
01:36:59
Speaker 2: You’ll see that in every single thing, almost every single thing you read on the subjects, even like people writing in the eighteen nineties like William Temple Hornaday, like they they’re saying, there’s this Eureka moment where all of a sudden, there’s value in buffalo leather and it goes It’s like a boom and a bust, and that’s just sort of accepted as fact. And I’d never read an explanation of what that was, and I really wanted to find that for this project. And we talked about this a lot, like we got to find that, We got to have that in there. Our audience is interested in tanning and working with skins and all this stuff. Like if there’s one thing we need to have, it’s that, and it just it doesn’t really exist.
01:37:54
Speaker 1: You know, what would be a maybe perhaps a better way of thinking about what actually happened. What’s that wood that everybody uses under decking? Now, it’s like that composite wood. It’s like chipped up. It’s like chipped up wood with with with resins and adhesives.
01:38:12
Speaker 2: I don’t know, like the fake wood. Okay, never mind that particleboard. Plywood, Yeah, plywood, Sure, everybody knows plywood.
01:38:21
Speaker 1: All right. Let’s say you got a mill and they produce plywood, and because of where they’re at, what trees they have available, they’re producing tons of plywood, let’s say, with white pine, and they develop this strategy and they can use white pine and they’re making this really nice plywood and they’re selling plywood like hotcakes. And all of a sudden, someone says, hey, man, you know how we’re paying five dollars per unit of wood on white pine? Do you know that we can get ponderosa pine for three bucks? And so they go to their engineers, Hey, what happens when you use Ponderosa pine? And the engineers go, oh, you know, it turns out if you if you add a little more resin, it’s the same thing. Man, like plywood’s plywood. We could definitely use that Ponderosa pine. Uh. In fact, if it’s three bucks and not five bucks, we’ll take as much of that Ponderosa pine as we can get our hands on. Yeah, And they keep making plywood, and people keep buying plywood, and a lot of these people that are buying it, they wouldn’t know white pine from ponderosa pine if they saw it. It’s the product they want, and they’re buying it. And then sometime down the road some guy goes, ah, you know what, the ponderosa pine they cut it all down.
01:39:39
Speaker 2: It’s gone back to white pie.
01:39:41
Speaker 1: I guess we’ll let’s just keep running that white pine. That’s great, is goodball lasting?
01:39:46
Speaker 3: Yeah?
01:39:47
Speaker 1: I mean it was like that’s a better way of thinking about leather consumption because they were being like asiatic water buffalo.
01:39:56
Speaker 2: Sure.
01:39:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, the paddle from South America. Sure, the United sure buffalo hides, why not?
01:40:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like there’s another there’s the United States is importing leather anywhere it can’t, or hides from anywhere it can, like sourcing hides, and all of a sudden, with the railroads they can access. However, many million hides are just sort of walking around out there on the planes and it can be sucked into this this pre existing you know network. And there’s some truth to the idea that there’s technological advances, like they’re the the industry as a whole is getting better and better at working with big, heavy hides. There’s some there’s there’s some changes in method where they’re they’re using hot water, like they’re they’re lining them and then doing a hot water bath. And there’s actually a guy who calls that the buffalo method. But it’s not. It wasn’t invented for buffalo. It’s just sort of like a gradual improvement and processes over time that happened to align with their ability to ship buffalo hides by the hundreds and thousands every year.
01:41:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. The challenge is if anybody that’s skinned it deer knows that the belly right the belly’s real thin. Yeah, the hides much thicker on either side of the backbone, you know, the inside of the legs is real thin, the hides real thick up on the neck. Whatever. The challenge is, how do you produce a uniform? How do you produce the biggest piece of uniform.
01:41:31
Speaker 2: Product you can?
01:41:32
Speaker 1: And so they’re doing all this stuff like they’re like they’re they’re like, imagine basically that you’re sanding it down.
01:41:39
Speaker 2: And I think we just before that, I mean we’re talking. I don’t think we’ve mentioned yet belting.
01:41:44
Speaker 1: No, we have a tub of where all this like why yeah, yeah, the country had always used leather. The number one thing we want a leather for shoes. Yeah, Like, let shoes were leather, tack, horse equipment, harness equipment, all that stuff was made out of leather. But and all of a sudden they.
01:42:02
Speaker 2: Need belting, which is like if you picture if you picture a timing belt on your snow machine or whatever in your car, Like a belt is simply something that, at the most basic level, takes movement from one place and transfers that movement to something else. Right, So one thing spins, the belt spins through it and the other side spins that. Yeah, does that make sense? And so if you imagine like a very early factory, it’s all it’s all gears and cogs either made out of wood or metal, and you’re taking power from a stream like a like a You’ve got a water wheel and a stream, and the wheel’s turning and that’s turning a big shaft that’s turning a gear that’s turning another shaft until it gets to wherever you’re doing the work with that power, whether it’s like a grinding mill or you know, you can power a saw with that. You could power any sorts of other like mechanical tools with that power. But it all has to be transmitted through One thing moves, another thing moves, and other thing moves another thing moves, because they can’t just zap it down a wire like in the age of electricity. And so the leather belt replaces this older system of shafts and cogs and wheels and things like that. And it’s revolutionary because you can spread power out across a factory floor in all types of different directions, and you can spread it out to different machines or whatever. And this is something that’s invented in America the leather belt drive, and then it’s sort of perfected during the Civil War as like there’s this increase in wartime manufacturing, and so that coincides again with the railroads reach the planes. The buffalo can be shipped east. The tanning factories are ready to absorb the buffalo, and there’s this, I mean, we’re talking about miles and miles and miles of belting in a factory.
01:44:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s a photo from after the buffalo hide era. And again they used that leather when it was available, but the wiping out the buffalo didn’t wipe out leather. So there’s a photo from the Ford plant. Yeah, the lathing operation for like the drive shafts at a Ford plant. Yeah, And the caption on the photo points out that what you’re looking at is fifty miles. It’s just a picture a bunch of people in a factory, all dressed in black and white. As a joke. A bunch of people at a factory.
01:44:37
Speaker 3: I’ll talking like that.
01:44:40
Speaker 1: Standing at equipment and over their heads is nothing butt belting. Yeah, Because somewhere is a big steam engine running and they’re transmitting power to all these lathes. And it says you’re looking at fifty miles of leather belting, but some of this leather belting is ten feet wide.
01:45:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And that’s so if you picture an old like if you’ve ever seen a drawing of an old factory, there’s all these people working at machines in neat little rows, and overhead there’s a bunch of stuff and there’s lines coming down to their machines, and it almost looks like like a puppet theater, right, And so essentially, the way that before the age of electricity, the way that this worked is you had a steam engine and that’s turning a huge belt, and that’s called the prime mover of the factory. Like the steam engine begins moving things, and then that belt moves these long shafts that are suspended in parallel rows above the factory floor. Those shafts then are linked together by belts so that when one turns, they all turn. So you have the prime mover, and that’s moving a big belt that turns one of these shafts, and then that shaft is turning all the other shafts, and then each individual machine is connected to those moving shafts on the ceiling by more belts and if you’re going to do something at a machine, you essentially have like a clutch like in your car, because the whole thing is moving continuously, like the things above your moving continuously. So if you’re all of a sudden, I need to use my saw or my hammer or my mill or whatever it is, you have like a foot pedal that sort of clutches that timing belt onto your machine. And now your machine’s running, and to stop it you disengage it from the belt again with that with that clutch, and.
01:46:34
Speaker 1: That power is always cranking, and they’re even running primary belts into other buildings.
01:46:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, to other buildings. And if you think about it, like today, if you have a big manufacturing operation, every place you need an outlet or an extension cord before electricity, that all has to be connected physically by moving things. Like if you want to move whatever, a rock crusher, it has to be connected by moving parts to moving parts to moving parts to the steam engine or whatever is generating your power there. So like when we think about the expansion of the industrial economy, like in the eighteen seventies, eighties, nineties, it’s all predicated on the ability of belts to connect machines to steam engines, and so that’s like it’s almost this bottomless demand for leather, and buffalo leather does lend itself well to this because of its inherent properties. But as Steve pointed out, like the Ford is still using leather belts in the nineteen twenties and they’re not taking them from buffalo like you could have. You know, it’s not like if we hadn’t had buffalo leather, we couldn’t have built these factories. Buffalo leather just happened to sort of fall into the shoot at the right time.
01:47:49
Speaker 1: What kind of feeds this idea of some specific thing triggering it? Is this? There’s this There is a story that comes out of the Kansas Planes and it’s very well documented and it’s a really interesting narrative of how this played out. Is a tannery has a desire to experiment with some buffalo skins. So they call like a broker, a guy that deals in buffalo meet and other things out in Kansas, and they’re like, hey, we’d like to get five hundred hides to mess with.
01:48:27
Speaker 2: He’s not a hunter.
01:48:29
Speaker 1: He goes to one of these railroad meat hunters and says to a railroad meat hunter. Hey, can you get me the five hundred?
01:48:38
Speaker 2: Hi.
01:48:38
Speaker 1: So here’s a guy. He takes the order, he needs to find someone to fulfill the order. He contracts a guy, a meat hunter, to fulfill his order for five hundred. The meat hunter shoots I think five hundred and fifty one, turns the five hundred into the guy that bought him for him, but he’s got this extra fifty to burn sends the extra fifty to a brother and austin New York, sorry New York. But the buyer who then sold, yeah, sends the other fifty to a brother who then’s like, well, I’ll go try to find someone that wants them. He sells them to a tannery. So now you have two tanneries that are sitting on some There’s a tannery sitting at about five hundred. There’s a tannery sitting at about fifty. Both of these tanneries mess around with the hides and both come back and say, we’d like a lot.
01:49:30
Speaker 2: Gimme Elia gott we’d like a lot.
01:49:33
Speaker 1: And that starts it. Yeah, that is it is a very distinct like beginning. Yeah, that broadus’s the beginning.
01:49:42
Speaker 2: That brother in New York as soon as he sells them and the company says, we want two thousand more and probably more. After that, he just gets on a train to Kansas and he finds his brother in Dodge City. He said, this is just the business now. Yep, it’s game on. Yeah, yeah, it’s game on.
01:49:59
Speaker 1: And it caught. It happened so fast that it caught meat hunters by surprise. There’s hide hunters that talk about that. There’s hide hunters that like, remember the day they they got the news. Yeah, like the day they got the news where people are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s the hides dummy.
01:50:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. There’s a guy. There’s a guy who’s out shooting meat and he’s complaining to some other hunters that it’s too hot out because all of his meat’s spoiling before he could sell it. And they look at him and they’re like, why are you still hunting for meat? You could just screak me, take the hides off, and bring him to here and it’ll buy everyone he can bring him. And he he’s like dumbfounded. He because he’s still out there trying to cure hams and stuff on the planes and and sort of his the world has moved past that.
01:50:48
Speaker 1: Uh, another one this kind of this is the last part of this that we’ll get into right now. Uh, there is if you study this area this, if you study this era on like a superficial level, you’ll always find out about all the waste and without wanting to without wanting to do a sort of revisionist history. You know, let me better explain what I’m saying. The hide hunters waste the enormous quantities of meat. But there’s more to the story.
01:51:33
Speaker 2: Okay.
01:51:34
Speaker 1: You could picture someone coming to this, depending on their motivations, you could picture someone coming to this and saying.
01:51:41
Speaker 2: Like, it’s all a lie.
01:51:43
Speaker 1: They didn’t waste all that meat. They sold a lot of meat. Like, they sold a lot of meat. And as we gotten into this for like, let me tell you two things that are real true. Man, they sold a lot of meat, but man, they wasted a lot, a lot, a lot more. Yeah, you could get into, like we get into all the numbers on this, you can get into what seems like staggering quantities of sold meat. When you get into the tonnages, like the counts on tongues, the barrels of tongues, the trainloads of meat, right, the vast quantities of smoked hams.
01:52:32
Speaker 2: And they talk about it a lot, and you’d look and be like, my god, strain resourceful train cars full of meat, right, And you could spend this whole narrative about all this meat, or you can start going like, okay, let’s start trying.
01:52:50
Speaker 1: To do a little math. Let’s do a little math. Like here’s a guy. And these guys had meticulous records because they’re getting receipts when they sell this stuff. Like the receipts are out there be like, you know, a receipt to Bob, but it’s like what Bob got for his cow hides for his bull hides for his kIPS or calf hides for his meat, and like how many pounds of meat and what perr?
01:53:12
Speaker 2: You know.
01:53:13
Speaker 1: It’s like these are like we are very much like we talked with long hunters. A lot of the information about the long hunters is because a historian later went and talked to their grandkid and he’s like, no, I swear grandpa said that he got two dollars for his deer hides or whatever, you know, and that becomes like the historic record some dude’s recollection about what his dad told him or his grandpa told him. Here, it’s like there’s too much material. There’s tons of material. So you can get into these staggering quantities of meat that really does. But then you get into like, let’s look at it as percentages, you know, and when you start looking at certain outfits and this is just the outfits that did sell me. Plenty of outfits didn’t sell me. When you get into the outfits that did sell meat and you start looking at their numbers, it’s like, man, they sold a lot of meat, but like it seems like about ninety nine percent it’s wasted. Like be like, okay, so they’re selling about six pounds. Yeah, they’re selling maybe like if you look at his whole hide hole and then you look at his meat receipts, you’re like, okay, he’s selling about six pounds per animal.
01:54:25
Speaker 2: But at the same time, at six pounds an animals, he’s selling ten twenty thousand pounds of meat in a year.
01:54:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it’s just like it’s a real roller coaster because you’re going to like, ah, they wasted all the meat. Then you get into this like holy cow, they sold a lot of meat, and you’re like, wait a minute, they wasted a lot of meat.
01:54:46
Speaker 2: But again it’s like the reason they did this is to make money. And so wherever they could squeeze a little extra profit or a little extra revenue to get the stuff that they needed or tuck little money like away for a slow season, like if they could, if they could halt some meat to a to a railroad pretty easily, they did it. You know, if they’re hunting in super remote areas, they’re not trading and meat, but like if you can get an extra couple bucks off an animal by by curing its hands and hump and stuff, like they did that.
01:55:18
Speaker 1: And so.
01:55:20
Speaker 2: There’s it’s a there’s a real complicated explanation of it all.
01:55:24
Speaker 1: But yeah, here’s here’s an interesting piece of this, this kind of show, like the the hard scrabble nature, but also the uh a kind of persnickety quality of these individuals when it comes to or like a penny pinching kind of miserly quality to like the economics. There was a product that came from the buffalo that was a stuffing of mattress stuffing material and it was if you picture the forehead on a buffalo is called the mop okay that had value, and it was used to stuff mattresses, stuff of polstery. It was hard to get out, hard to pull out, Like they didn’t want the mop’s skin, they just wanted the hair and bags. So these hide hunters like you couldn’t pull it. But if anyone is dealt with animals a lot, you know that we have a term when the hair starts to slip. Like fire your picture, you’re walking along the bank of a river and you see a deer and he’s like, you know, dead on the side of the river, drown on the river and washed out, and you go grab a handful of hair on that thing.
01:56:35
Speaker 2: What happens when you grab a handful of that hair and pull comes right out, comes right.
01:56:40
Speaker 1: It’s called the hair is slipping. So in the high trade even today, the worst thing. Talk to your tax nermost if you’re bringing in a deer cape, if you’re trying to sell a skunk hide, it doesn’t matter. Hair slippage means too late, it’s rotten. Like if you go to your tax nermous with a bear rug or a deer cape and he grabs a tough to that hair and pulls, and half the hair in his hand comes free, just you messed up. Yeah, it’s slipping. It’s no good. They would at times when there’s nothing else to do, they would wait till all these like when they skin the carcass, as we explained how they skin them. When they skin the carcass, they’d stop behind the ears. So a buffalo hide went to the market is missing, it’s missing its face, it’s cut off behind the ears. They would wait till the carcasses rotten enough that the hair would start to slip, and then they would go back out into the field and pull mops and stuff it into sacks.
01:57:38
Speaker 2: When they’re good and rotten, meaning.
01:57:41
Speaker 1: Where there’s money to be made. They were there to make the money. It’s just at times it’s like it’s just it wasn’t efficient, but you could. It’s it’s really hard to look at their lives and point out places where you’re lazy. Yeah, Like this wasn’t like a laziness thing. It was just business man. It was business. It was business.
01:58:08
Speaker 2: Yeah. And on top of that, not to not to get into more details, but there’s all kinds of wild stories in this, just like the weird you know, people getting charged by buffalo, people getting pounded in hailstorms, people getting killed, people finding bodies, people doing really weird stuff, people eating weird stuff, people playing pranks on each other, dying weird ways, dying in weird ways. We got a guy.
01:58:38
Speaker 1: We have a big section about all the people killed by buffaloes that they wounded. We’re working on an animation project. Anyways, there’s a guy who shoots a buffalo, gets up through it’s still alive, pulls out his pistol to finish it off. As he pulls out his pistol, the buffalo jumps up and starts coming for him. He really quickly tries to mount his horse to get away, and in mounting us because he’s got his pistol out now and it’s cocked. In mounting his horse, he has a negligent discharge and shoots his own horse. So now the horse takes off wounded. The buffalo is wounded, chasing the horse, and then both the horse and the buffalo.
01:59:23
Speaker 2: Die and he walks walks away.
01:59:28
Speaker 1: Other guys, other hide hunters, they go miss him. This is the kind of we give a handful of these stories that play out very similarly. Bob is off hunting, Bob don’t come home at night. In the morning, you go looking for Bob and lo and behold, there’s a dead buffalo laying there, and there’s a dead Bob laying next to it. Yeah, and Bob is in bad shape.
01:59:57
Speaker 2: It turns out that when you shoot buffalo by the dozens, you make some bad shots and you end up encountering some angry buffalo.
02:00:04
Speaker 1: Yep, and Bob is badly bruised.
02:00:06
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyhow, me Inter’s American.
02:00:14
Speaker 1: History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three. We never explained eighteen eighty three. So you know, when you hear an interview with an author and they don’t want to tell the end, Well, you’re in the end. You’re like, so did they catch them? They’re like, well, I’m not gonna tell. Does he die in the end? I’m not gonna tell.
02:00:37
Speaker 2: Well, oh you can do this. Do the buffalo die in the end?
02:00:42
Speaker 1: Yes?
02:00:42
Speaker 2: But what year not telling? Not telling?
02:00:49
Speaker 1: I let out to my I’m a huge fury Road and Furiosa fan. I let out to my daughter early on in furios that her boyfrid friend doesn’t make it through to the end. She was very upset with me for letting that leak. So I hope you’re not watching that one can leave that out till thanks for joining me. There’s American history, of course, go back the Long Hunters, then check out The Mountain Men, and then dig into the new one available now, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three. We were going to talk about what’s next, or we’re going to talk about how we’re trying to decide what’s next, but wait and see. When it happens, we will tell you about it. Thank you very much for listening.
Read the full article here