Ep. 777: So You Want to Be a Hide Hunter

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
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(00:31):
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Speaker 2 (00:35):
That's f I R S T L I T E
dot com.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
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?

Speaker 3 (00:52):
A Christmas Carol?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Christmas? Carrol printed the script off. He's been highlighting his lines.
Who are you? Who are you playing? Cratch It?

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Cratch It? Yeah, God, seems like you play Robert cratch It.
He was only a matter of time.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
They didn't try to get you for Scrooge.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Uh, surprisingly not No, I think maybe a few more years,
wait till I get in the forties.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Yeah, that was a joke. I don't think he'd be
a Scrooge. Yeah, you know what I could picture you being?

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Know what's that?

Speaker 1 (01:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
M They they tried to get me to play Fred
two years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
You know your first name Basis.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
You wanted you wanted more of a role.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
No, I was. I was doing a different place.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
So it's just ya out there. God, just what is uh?

Speaker 1 (01:51):
What is want to crash its big lines?

Speaker 3 (01:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Phil won't be able to do that.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Probably the worst part about your what you got coming up?
If I had to say.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Here, I'm just I I would just like to say
I love how involved and interested you are in this
whole process.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
So I want to make sure when I get.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
I'll spill all the details.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Along the way.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
But what might be challenging to you is because you
have your own kids.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
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

(03:23):
other kid while trying to take care of your kids.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yes, yeah, my little boy. You know how Matthew's on
crutches for six months?

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Oh yeah, were you making a bunch of tiny Tim?

Speaker 1 (03:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Not you know, he's not disgruntled. Yeah, that's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Yeah, well keeps posted. Will Maybe maybe, Randall, maybe you
and your wife would like to go with us.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
I'd love to. I don't go to the theater enough.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
You don't take in much theater. Well, I take in
one play.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
He did.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Every time Phil made a joke. I looked at JK.
Simmons and he.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
I think he just might be part of it.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
I was eleven year old once as well.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
It's like I'm not gonna want to, but they'll be
down there.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
I think it's brilliant.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah, we can have ghosts of hunting season, past, hunting season, present,
hunting season future.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
So Clay's planning on having Brent Reeves Fry Bluegills on
stage every night.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
I know I like that, but.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
They're gonna say, our very expensive and thick curtains are
gonna smell like fish for the next three months.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Yeah, or you don't bring it up and see what happens.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Uh, you know what's gonna tickle Phil's fancy he's gonna
get gell us.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
Bear and who's the black bear?

Speaker 2 (06:56):
I haven't cast it yet.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
Is there gonna be a whole time gonna be called backs,
do some scene tests?

Speaker 1 (07:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
It is the twentieth trash can curiosity? Or is it
just you can't break the habit? You know?

Speaker 3 (07:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
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

(08:06):
and he's like, here's a bear.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
He's like, you know, things hadn't really been going well
for me lately, and I thought maybe my luck had
finally changed.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
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?

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, register or like a black bear that finds his
way into a convenience store and he's caught on the
close circuit television.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, yeah, did you know.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
You were at risk?

Speaker 3 (08:34):
So is this is this a bear that is is
post mortem? Like like it's a no, no no.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
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

(09:22):
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

(09:43):
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?

Speaker 2 (09:52):
How's that feel? It's like a shiny Should I bring it?

Speaker 1 (09:56):
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.

(10:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yep, we'll probably fake I feel like it. I feel
like it came into popularity.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
I feel like but it already went.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
But yeah, uh, mink are just striking.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Smell like hair.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
And what I won't be.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
Able to tell you even when we do the interview,
I won't be able to tell you the country of origin.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
It's not known.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
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?

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Let's do it.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
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

(12:45):
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

(13:08):
this picture we're holding up. These are like giant slabs
of fat removed from over the backstrap and hump of
a buffalo.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
And working on.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
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

(13:52):
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,

(14:16):
but is superior to any bread that was ever made.

Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yes, we made it. We made a whole video about
making it. We followed those instructions.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
Why do people say to the tea, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
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?

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Uh? Is it a P thirty eight? A P thirty
eight is a thunderbolt? I believe.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Oh, well, you know the Nate Mason, Yeah, big army guy.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Hm.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
He was telling me that that that belt, that machine belt,
the animal belt twenty.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
Seven feet long.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
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

(15:24):
editing it.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
I had a crisis of confidence in my answer the
p third eight is the lightning, Just correcting myself.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, now that I feel like I have heard that somewhere.
There's a lot of pride in that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
About something you got wrong. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Hmmmm, that's not like something Bob Crash did say.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
To the tidy tim But sir, it's Christmas. Is that
a Bob Cratchit line?

Speaker 3 (16:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Oh God bless it's the biggest goose.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
In all of London.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
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,

(17:16):
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

(17:39):
any American boy what still hunting is and what are
they going to tell you?

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Creeping quietly through the woods yep, slowly, slowly, slowly, shaving
a deer before it sees you.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
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?

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Why?

Speaker 1 (18:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Who in the world?

Speaker 2 (18:30):
I would have just called it quiet?

Speaker 1 (18:32):
I call it no dog time?

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Right, a good song?

Speaker 1 (18:39):
I call it no dog Time?

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Like is it a sandy song or is it like
an upbeat pop song?

Speaker 1 (18:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
That's good.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Oh there I was with already halfway through the lyrics.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Okay, here, man, I didn get into this.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Did he know.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
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

(20:24):
I said it.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
I don't buy it.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
I don't buy it for no one bought it. No.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
I was like, there was like you said it, and
then there was like a beat and then it.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Hit Yeah, I'm I'm dubious.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
I mean, I'm still impressed.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, it's great. Why was that talking about her dogs?

Speaker 1 (20:44):
Dogs?

Speaker 2 (20:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
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

(21:18):
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?

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Or would they be like he was actually still hunting?

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Yeah? You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, Like, if it's a universal convention in states that
have dog hunting, that's still hunting. Is hunting without dogs?

Speaker 1 (21:42):
Or do even dog guys look at the rags and
they're like.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
What Yeah, they could have pretty much picked any other
descriptor there and it would have caused less confusion.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
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

(22:21):
Koya Khan. So the Koya Khan people.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Are are like a like a tribe.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
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

(22:52):
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

(23:12):
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

(23:34):
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.

(23:57):
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

(24:20):
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

(24:41):
her tongue. Wouldn't it be that she had a seizure,
possibly bitter tongue in half?

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah, although you don't know what triggered that. No, Yeah,
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
I felt it was coincidence.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
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?

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Not lying pretty good with computers?

Speaker 1 (25:13):
Five it just double Do you know what's that film?

Speaker 3 (25:17):
Well?

Speaker 1 (25:17):
I thought you were started to call them out and jump.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
It without without bragging.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
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

(25:56):
I scanned through it poorly, because I'm not bragging. I
scanned through.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
I scan through it haphazardly and ply meg yourself now,
But I.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Was unable to find anything. Surely a more a talented
researcher could have found the answer but I was unable.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
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?

Speaker 2 (26:22):
You found no thing?

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Like, hey, be careful.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
So it doesn't really say it doesn't mean yeah, no, I.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Think someone else should probably back me up.

Speaker 3 (26:37):
Ye, I don't even know why we're trusting a single
thing you said.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
I missed it on the first time.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah. I always read that and like, again, I can't
recommend that book enough.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
You could have read that book a long time ago.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, there's just like it's hard to make a one
to one connection there.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
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

(27:32):
avocado and bread. I got deathly ill. It wasn't an avocado.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah yeah, but a.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yeah, oh sure.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, she says she wasn't feeling well. It probably could
have not mattered what she had for dinner.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
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.

(28:27):
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,

(28:50):
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?

Speaker 2 (29:08):
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

(29:29):
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

(29:52):
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

(30:17):
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

(30:40):
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

(31:03):
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

(31:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Buttons on the front might be buckskins, like a little
button fly flap.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah, it could be American buckskin.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
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

(32:14):
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

(32:36):
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

(33:00):
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

(33:23):
that's the long hunters. Yep.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
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,

(33:47):
you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Brother's father in law's brother in law. This guy married
this guy's sister.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Exactly, and he's like sort of like these familial, very
neighborly clan. Yeah, but it could be as many as
forty people, and.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
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,

(34:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
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

(35:28):
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.

(35:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
On some they're just plucking them.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
There's no way they're putting Let I think be cool
if you have you.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
Had the letter on there, you have all the yeah,
but the underfur.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
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

(37:00):
big Christmas Goose with all the trimmings, with all the
trimming is out now seven hours anywhere you get.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
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

(37:33):
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

(37:55):
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?

Speaker 1 (38:03):
And so like.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, and it has a pay scale and you commit,
it's financial security, like there's.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
Not like an HR office. But I mean it's like
a job though, right.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
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

(39:12):
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

(39:38):
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

(39:59):
world turning.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
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

(40:23):
silk hat. I think it was a silk hat, same cut,
like those crazy looking hats.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Noyea.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
You know, I would imagine that a guy with the
top hat would have a similar issue.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, it's like a guy trying to wear a cowboy
hat on an airplane.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Especially a tall guy like a Blincoln, you know, better
have high door door openings.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
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,

(41:21):
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,

(41:44):
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?

Speaker 2 (42:02):
What I lived in the woods?

Speaker 1 (42:03):
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

(42:27):
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

(42:49):
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

(43:11):
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

(43:33):
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

(43:54):
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

(44:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
Well, if I left the s off, it would have
put it in the dog song.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
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,

(44:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
And a lot of people probably don't even know there
was a crime. Yep.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
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

(45:44):
there's less than one thousand left in the United States.
It is very well understood that they committed the crime and.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
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

(46:30):
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

(46:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
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

(47:35):
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

(47:59):
they did these acts in and killed all these buffalo
was not the world that they lived in twenty years later.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
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

(48:35):
way in which this era turns into the modern era.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Hm.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
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,

(49:03):
who was like an adversary of the market hunters.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah, one of them eliminated.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
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

(49:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
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

(50:08):
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.

(50:34):
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

(50:54):
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

(51:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
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

(51:52):
waiting mothers.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
Yeah, I think, by god, I.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Did the right thing.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
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.

(52:19):
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

(52:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
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

(53:23):
Korean War. Yeah, he lives to see we mentioned he
lives to see like Playboy magazine being published.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Yeah, he lived to be one hundred and four years old.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
The first Burger king opened before he died, and the
first nuclear submarine launched before he died. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
But he you know, he.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
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

(54:20):
go back? And she goes, oh, there is a motorcycle race.
We're going to watch a motorcycle race.

Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah, the extreme like that.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
That.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
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,

(54:49):
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,

(55:12):
but who you wouldn't realize cut their teeth as hide hunters.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Uh Wider.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
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

(56:17):
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.

(56:39):
Those two guys were buffalo hide hunters, but no one
knows John Poe and Pat Garrett as buffalo heide.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Hunters their former buffalo hide hunters at the time.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
They shed that, They shed that identity and became new people.

Speaker 1 (57:04):
Yeah. Some became like dudes that were presidents of banks.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
A lot of them got killed in bars and card games.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
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

(57:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
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

(58:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
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.

(58:36):
But it's more it's it's better to say, yeah, they
stepped out of the American Civil War.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
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

(59:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
Wonder if you ever read Playboy while eating Burger King.
I think he's in a corvette.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
At one hundred and four. He I hope he was
doing all that stuff. It's doubtful though, is that. Baby.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
I'm gonna take my corvette down, pick up the April issue,
get a burger, get a.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
Whopper, just for the articles, of course. Yeah, yeah, well
that was.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
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,

(01:00:03):
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,

(01:00:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
Shot pieces, yeah, like a revenge attack.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
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

(01:01:37):
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

(01:01:58):
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

(01:02:20):
the time they surrendered, so you can imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
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

(01:02:44):
after the war are coming together in hunting outfits in Texas.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
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

(01:03:14):
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

(01:03:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:03:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Bracket it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
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

(01:04:33):
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

(01:04:55):
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

(01:05:18):
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,

(01:05:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
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

(01:06:21):
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

(01:06:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
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

(01:07:27):
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.

(01:07:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
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

(01:08:31):
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

(01:08:54):
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

(01:09:16):
intact robust trade in buffalo products before the hide hunt
gets rolling.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
Explodes that market Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
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

(01:10:13):
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

(01:10:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
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

(01:11:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
The mountain men.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
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

(01:11:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Come on out, you guys gotta get in on this.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
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

(01:12:29):
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

(01:12:49):
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

(01:13:10):
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

(01:13:32):
a job cooking for Fhill's outfit.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):
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,

(01:13:55):
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

(01:14:15):
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,

(01:14:37):
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

(01:14:59):
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

(01:15:20):
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.

(01:15:43):
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

(01:16:05):
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

(01:16:27):
like Kansas City.

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
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

(01:16:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
When our population was considerably lower.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
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

(01:17:33):
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

(01:17:55):
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

(01:18:16):
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

(01:18:40):
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.

(01:19:02):
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

(01:19:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
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

(01:20:12):
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

(01:20:35):
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

(01:20:57):
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

(01:21:18):
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

(01:21:39):
some like hunger for adventure in frontier life and all that,
but it's so overwhelmingly clear that these are people who
are desperate.

Speaker 1 (01:21:49):
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

(01:22:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:22:24):
Pulled out and they can't get a bus ticket home.

Speaker 1 (01:22:26):
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

(01:22:48):
cutting firewood, but that is putting them in position to
be queued up to participate in the hide hunt.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
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

(01:23:16):
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

(01:23:38):
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

(01:24:02):
plan that he had, right, It's just circumstances where he
found himself. And and ultimately I think he killed some
seven hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:25:11):
Pretty pretty good, a lot of meat.

Speaker 2 (01:25:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25:37):
I believe it was the.

Speaker 1 (01:25:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:26:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:27):
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

(01:26:52):
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

(01:27:15):
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

(01:27:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:27:56):
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

(01:28:21):
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

(01:28:44):
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

(01:29:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
There's no cultural exchange, there's no sort of shared interests,
there's no allies.

Speaker 3 (01:29:30):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:29:32):
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

(01:29:53):
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

(01:30:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:31:00):
A hide hunter.

Speaker 1 (01:31:03):
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

(01:31:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:31:36):
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

(01:32:02):
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

(01:32:23):
robe trade era.

Speaker 1 (01:32:24):
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

(01:32:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:33:08):
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

(01:33:30):
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

(01:33:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:34:04):
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

(01:34:25):
what we already know.

Speaker 2 (01:34:26):
We can kind of map out.

Speaker 1 (01:34:29):
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

(01:34:49):
in fact, oh you know what I was gonna mention
this story, like I wrote a book.

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
I think it came out and so it was two
thousand and eight.

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
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

(01:35:21):
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

(01:35:43):
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,

(01:36:04):
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

(01:36:24):
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

(01:36:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:36:59):
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

(01:37:20):
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

(01:37:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:37:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:38:12):
I don't know, like the fake wood. Okay, never mind
that particleboard. Plywood, Yeah, plywood, Sure, everybody knows plywood.

Speaker 1 (01:38:21):
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

(01:38:42):
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,

(01:39:04):
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

(01:39:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
It's gone back to white pie.

Speaker 1 (01:39:41):
I guess we'll let's just keep running that white pine.
That's great, is goodball lasting?

Speaker 3 (01:39:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:39:47):
I mean it was like that's a better way of
thinking about leather consumption because they were being like asiatic
water buffalo.

Speaker 2 (01:39:56):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (01:39:57):
Yeah, the paddle from South America. Sure, the United sure
buffalo hides, why not?

Speaker 2 (01:40:04):
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

(01:40:26):
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

(01:40:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:41:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:41:31):
Product you can?

Speaker 1 (01:41:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:41:39):
And I think we just before that, I mean we're talking.
I don't think we've mentioned yet belting.

Speaker 1 (01:41:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:42:02):
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

(01:42:22):
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,

(01:42:43):
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,

(01:43:06):
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

(01:43:27):
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

(01:43:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
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

(01:44:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:44:37):
I'll talking like that.

Speaker 1 (01:44:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:45:00):
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

(01:45:22):
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

(01:45:48):
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

(01:46:09):
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

(01:46:32):
it from the belt again with that with that clutch, and.

Speaker 1 (01:46:34):
That power is always cranking, and they're even running primary
belts into other buildings.

Speaker 2 (01:46:38):
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

(01:47:01):
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

(01:47:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:47:49):
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

(01:48:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:48:27):
He's not a hunter.

Speaker 1 (01:48:29):
He goes to one of these railroad meat hunters and
says to a railroad meat hunter. Hey, can you get
me the five hundred?

Speaker 2 (01:48:38):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (01:48:38):
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,

(01:49:01):
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.

(01:49:21):
Both of these tanneries mess around with the hides and
both come back and say, we'd like a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:49:30):
Gimme Elia gott we'd like a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:49:33):
And that starts it. Yeah, that is it is a
very distinct like beginning. Yeah, that broadus's the beginning.

Speaker 2 (01:49:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:49:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:50:19):
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

(01:50:40):
there trying to cure hams and stuff on the planes
and and sort of his the world has moved past that.

Speaker 1 (01:50:48):
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

(01:51:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:51:34):
You could picture someone coming to this, depending on their motivations,
you could picture someone coming to this and saying.

Speaker 2 (01:51:41):
Like, it's all a lie.

Speaker 1 (01:51:43):
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,

(01:52:07):
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

(01:52:29):
vast quantities of smoked hams.

Speaker 2 (01:52:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):
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

(01:53:10):
pounds of meat and what perr?

Speaker 2 (01:53:12):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:53:13):
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

(01:53:35):
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

(01:53:56):
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

(01:54:16):
you look at his meat receipts, you're like, okay, he's
selling about six pounds per animal.

Speaker 2 (01:54:25):
But at the same time, at six pounds an animals,
he's selling ten twenty thousand pounds of meat in a year.

Speaker 1 (01:54:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:54:46):
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

(01:55:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:55:18):
And so.

Speaker 2 (01:55:20):
There's it's a there's a real complicated explanation of it all.

Speaker 1 (01:55:24):
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

(01:55:48):
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

(01:56:11):
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

(01:56:32):
river and washed out, and you go grab a handful
of hair on that thing.

Speaker 2 (01:56:35):
What happens when you grab a handful of that hair
and pull comes right out, comes right.

Speaker 1 (01:56:40):
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

(01:57:01):
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

(01:57:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:57:38):
When they're good and rotten, meaning.

Speaker 1 (01:57:41):
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.

(01:58:02):
It was just business man. It was business. It was business.

Speaker 2 (01:58:08):
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,

(01:58:31):
people eating weird stuff, people playing pranks on each other,
dying weird ways, dying in weird ways. We got a guy.

Speaker 1 (01:58:38):
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

(01:59:01):
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

(01:59:21):
the horse and the buffalo.

Speaker 2 (01:59:23):
Die and he walks walks away.

Speaker 1 (01:59:28):
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

(01:59:51):
next to it. Yeah, and Bob is in bad shape.

Speaker 2 (01:59:57):
It turns out that when you shoot buffalo by the dozens,
you make some bad shots and you end up encountering
some angry buffalo.

Speaker 1 (02:00:04):
Yep, and Bob is badly bruised.

Speaker 2 (02:00:06):
Yeah. Anyhow, me Inter's American.

Speaker 1 (02:00:14):
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?

(02:00:35):
I'm not gonna tell.

Speaker 2 (02:00:37):
Well, oh you can do this. Do the buffalo die
in the end?

Speaker 1 (02:00:42):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (02:00:42):
But what year not telling? Not telling?

Speaker 1 (02:00:49):
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.

(02:01:11):
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.

(02:01:32):
When it happens, we will tell you about it. Thank
you very much for listening.

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Steven Rinella

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