Pod Insights The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 777: So You Want to Be a Hide Hunter About this episode Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/.
Topics discussed: A fascinating period in our history; all about hunting hides; and our new audio original, MeatEater's American History: The Hide Hunters (1865-1883) https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-hide-hunters-1865-1883?_gl=1*1p1v8p9*_gcl_au*MzQxMzA0NzEwLjE3NTgyOTY5MjY.*_ga*MTYzNzc5NjQ3Ni4xNzQ4MDM3ODI3*_ga_SBDMW7DR11*czE3NjAwNTExNDkkbzcwJGcxJHQxNzYwMDUxMTYzJGo0NiRsMCRoMA...
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Transcript 22,153 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:48 Speaker 03 This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.
1:55 Speaker 04 We're hunting. The Meat Eater Podcast.
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2:23 Steven Rinella? I got two things that made your interest. Well, three things if you count Phil. Phil printed off the script of Christmas. What do they call that?
2:32 Speaker 05 A Christmas carol?
2:33 Steven Rinella? Christmas carol. He printed the script off. He's been highlighting his lines. Who are you, who are you playing? Cratchit?
2:40 Speaker 05 Cratchit.
2:41 Steven Rinella? Yeah. God, seems like you'd play.
2:42 Speaker 05 Robert Cratchit. It was only a matter of time.
2:46 Steven Rinella? They didn't try to get you for Scrooge?
2:48 Speaker 05 Uh, surprisingly not, no. I think maybe a few more years. Wait till I get in the 40s.
2:53 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that was a joke. I don't think you'd be a Scrooge.
2:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:55 Steven Rinella? You know what I could picture you being though?
2:57 Speaker 05 What's that?
2:58 Steven Rinella? You know what he might be good at? You know, the guy that like, uh, the, that he's, he's like, uh, the nephew? And he's trying to get him, he's trying to get Scrooge fired up about Christmas.
3:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:08 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah, yeah. But then like Scrooge catches him goofing on him.
3:13 Speaker 05 Uh, they, they tried to get me to play Fred two years ago.
3:16 Steven Rinella? Well, you know, your first name basis with this guy.
3:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's right.
3:18 Steven Rinella? His name's Fred.
3:19 Speaker 05 His name's Fred.
3:19 Steven Rinella? Yeah. First name basis. You wanted, you wanted more of a role?
3:23 Speaker 05 No, I was, I was doing a different play. So it's just, yeah.
3:27 Steven Rinella? Phil's gonna be out there, "God blesses." What is, uh, what is one of Cratchit's big lines?
3:33 Speaker 05 Oh, I, he doesn't have a, a lot of big lines. He's, he's just kinda like the anchor for like, you know, kind of the.
3:39 Steven Rinella? The moral anchor?
3:40 Speaker 05 Moral anchor, yeah. That's the word.
3:41 Steven Rinella? "God blesses." Phil won't be able to do that.
3:45 Speaker 05 No.
3:45 Steven Rinella? Probably the worst part about your, what you got coming up, if I had to say.
3:50 Speaker 05 Let me hear it. I'm just, I, I would just like to say, I love how, uh, involved and interested you are in this whole process.
3:55 Steven Rinella? Oh, cause I'll, I will be there. My, 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. So I just wanna make sure when I get there, I know what's going on.
4:11 Speaker 05 Sure.
4:12 Steven Rinella? So I can whisper, be like, well, actually Phil doesn't even like this part. Or this guy kinda bugs Phil, you know, like he, Phil wasn't very happy with this actor.
4:19 Speaker 05 I'll spill all the details. Burn bridges along the way, yeah.
4:23 Steven Rinella? But what might be challenging to you is, because you have your own kids.
4:28 Speaker 05 I do. One of them's in the play with me, Steve.
4:30 Steven Rinella? Oh, Tiny, is he Tiny Tim?
4:31 Speaker 05 He's playing my son. No, he's, he's the middle child. He's, he's, there's, there's, uh, there's an older daughter of Cratchit's, a middle boy, and then Tiny Tim. He's playing the middle boy.
4:40 Steven Rinella? What I was gonna say, it could be a problem for you.
4:42 Speaker 05 Okay.
4:43 Steven Rinella? Is, because you gotta 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.
4:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:59 Steven Rinella? Then all of a sudden, you gotta get sort of like intimately familiar with this other kid while trying to take care of your kid.
5:05 Speaker 05 Well, that's, that's kind of Cratchit's big scene is that he's got, he's gotta kind of break down over the, the, the death of Tiny Tim in one of the scenes. That's the.
5:11 Speaker 06 Oh, I forgot that he died.
5:13 Steven Rinella? Well, you don't.
5:14 Speaker 06 I was gonna say, 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.
5:23 Speaker 05 Thank you. Yes. Randall's, Randall's.
5:25 Speaker 06 They're not nearly sickly enough to play Tiny Tim.
5:27 Steven Rinella? Yeah. My little boy, you know how Matthew's on crutches for six months?
5:30 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. Were you making a bunch of Tiny Tim?
5:32 Steven Rinella? Well, he's real jolly. He's a very agreeable young man. Very agreeable. Um, so we, while he was on crutches, that was his nickname. Because he's so, he's so agreeable.
5:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:44 Steven Rinella? Just a cheery little fella.
5:48 Steven Rinella? Oh, now, you know, he's not disgruntled.
5:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:52 Speaker 06 That's beautiful.
5:53 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Well, keep us posted.
5:54 Speaker 06 I will do.
5:54 Steven Rinella? Maybe, maybe Randall, maybe you and your wife would like to go with us.
5:57 Speaker 06 I'd love to. I, I don't go to the theater enough.
6:00 Steven Rinella? You don't take in much theater?
6:02 Speaker 06 Well.
6:02 Steven Rinella? I take in one play.
6:04 Speaker 06 I went to.
6:04 Steven Rinella? For Christmas Carol.
6:06 Speaker 06 I, I went to Phil's.
6:06 Speaker 05 It shows.
6:08 Speaker 06 I went to Phil's last production and it was lovely and I was, I was seated right behind J K Simmons. Famous Montana, J K Simmons, and he loved it.
6:17 Steven Rinella? He did?
6:17 Speaker 06 Every time Phil made a joke, I looked at J K Simmons and he was just, ah!
6:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah, but you know what? I don't think, I mean, I'm not knocking on Phil.
6:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, you are. That's okay.
6:26 Steven Rinella? I don't think that that was, I don't think it was genuine.
6:29 Speaker 06 No, no.
6:29 Steven Rinella? I think that he knew he's like a big, famous theater guy and he's in theater and so he's gotta act like he's into it.
6:35 Speaker 06 I think he just.
6:36 Speaker 05 That might be part of it.
6:36 Speaker 06 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?
6:47 Steven Rinella? 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. That'll feel normal, but then there'll be my children.
6:57 Speaker 06 That sounds like a normal outing for us.
6:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
6:59 Speaker 06 Because often we don't bring children to anything.
7:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah, because it wouldn't work for us. Like they're, she's gonna make them go.
7:04 Speaker 06 Yeah.
7:05 Steven Rinella? They won't, you know?
7:06 Speaker 06 Sure, sure.
7:07 Steven Rinella? Don't tell Phil. I mean, they're not gonna, they're not gonna want it.
7:09 Speaker 05 I was 11 year old once as well. It's okay.
7:11 Steven Rinella? They're not gonna want to go. But they'll be down there.
7:14 Speaker 06 I mean, I've been, I've been workshopping with Phil as to how we can graft sort of the structure of a Christmas carol onto the live tour.
7:22 Speaker 05 I think it's brilliant. Yeah.
7:24 Speaker 06 We can have ghosts of hunting season past, hunting season present, hunting season future.
7:29 Speaker 05 Well, you know now.
7:30 Speaker 06 Can appear.
7:31 Speaker 05 This is gonna air, Randall, and if this doesn't happen, there's going to be some disappointed fans in the audience. So.
7:35 Speaker 06 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. So.
7:48 Steven Rinella? Clay's planning on having Brent Reeves fry, uh, bluegills on stage every night.
7:54 Speaker 06 I know. I like that.
7:55 Steven Rinella? But, and I like it too, but you either gotta decide you're gonna bring it up with the venue and then they're gonna have like the fire department. They're gonna have like the fire department down there.
8:03 Speaker 05 And they're gonna say our, our, our very expensive and thick curtains are gonna smell like fish for the next three months.
8:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Or you don't bring it up and see what happens.
8:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:13 Steven Rinella? I don't know. Uh, you know what's gonna tickle Phil's fancy?
8:19 Steven Rinella? He's gonna get jealous.
8:21 Speaker 06 Yep.
8:22 Steven Rinella? We, I wanna do a thing, Phil.
8:24 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
8:24 Steven Rinella? And we're, we're already setting this into motion. Um, I'm gonna do a thing where it's called interviews with a black bear.
8:34 Speaker 05 And who's the black bear?
8:35 Steven Rinella? I haven't cast it yet.
8:37 Speaker 05 Is there gonna be a whole, there's gonna be callbacks, do some scene tests?
8:41 Steven Rinella? 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.
8:54 Steven Rinella? Like what? You know, like, like I could see the first sip, right? You're like, I could see why you might take a sip, but then, but you kept eating it.
9:04 Speaker 06 Is the, is, yeah, is the 20th trash can curiosity? Or is it just, you can't break the habit?
9:12 Speaker 05 You know, you, 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'd be a funny series.
9:20 Steven Rinella? Great interview.
9:20 Speaker 05 Interview with a turkey, interview with a, with a dove.
9:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah, like if you interviewed a black bear, if you could interview like a black bear that finds like, Clay Newcomb's bait barrel.
9:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:30 Steven Rinella? Okay. And then he slowly put like, it'd be like, okay, well, dude, when you first found the bait barrel, did you think it was a little, like, a little suspicious?
9:43 Speaker 06 Yeah.
9:44 Steven Rinella? That all of a sudden.
9:46 Speaker 06 And he's like.
9:46 Steven Rinella? Here's a barrel.
9:47 Speaker 06 He's like, you know, things hadn't really been going well for me lately and I thought maybe my luck had finally changed.
9:55 Steven Rinella? And like, yeah, and you know, so all of a sudden there's like a platform up in a tree like, but like, does this stuff, you know?
10:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
10:03 Steven Rinella? Register.
10:04 Speaker 06 Or like a black bear that finds his way into a convenience store and he's caught on the closed circuit television.
10:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah. Did you know you were at risk?
10:14 Speaker 05 So is this, is this a bear that is, is, is postmortem? Like, like it's a.
10:18 Steven Rinella? No, no, no, that's why it's gonna be a bear to like, it's, it's gonna be a bear to his, like, his buddy get there.
10:24 Speaker 05 Got it. Okay.
10:25 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
10:26 Speaker 05 You gotta.
10:26 Steven Rinella? I'm not gonna like bring a bear back from the dead.
10:29 Speaker 06 You could do, you could do a repetitive series and anytime a black bear's in the news, you just have the bear.
10:36 Speaker 05 God, I can't catch a break.
10:38 Speaker 06 Honestly, my family's so embarrassed.
10:41 Steven Rinella? Here's the other thing that'll, how did I, what did I say? There's three things of interest?
10:47 Speaker 05 Doesn't matter.
10:50 Steven Rinella? I just got off the phone.
10:51 Speaker 06 Great producing.
10:51 Steven Rinella? I'm trying to, here's, I'm gonna, do you guys ever preview radio live segments? We hold, we hold this up. Phil said you can hold this somewhere. So I want to preview, I'm trying to get an interview with a guy. I don't even want to say who. I just spoke to a wildlife enforcement agent.
11:10 Steven Rinella? I don't want to spoil anything. I gotta fill out like a form. I gotta fill out a thing to try to get him permission to speak to us.
11:19 Steven Rinella? He's gotta take it to the suits. So I don't want to blow it. I just got, I just did my pre-interview. Hold that up real nice. What Randall's holding is a wild mink pelt.
11:31 Steven Rinella? Did you know?
11:32 Speaker 06 How's that, Phil?
11:33 Speaker 05 It's looking shiny.
11:34 Speaker 06 Should I bring it?
11:35 Steven Rinella? It does look shiny?
11:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:36 Steven Rinella? Did you know, did you know? That if you go in and buy fake eyelashes?
11:44 Steven Rinella? There is a chance.
11:50 Steven Rinella? I don't want to put statistics on it, but there is a very, I'm not saying a probability, but a light, like a good chance that when you buy fake eyelashes, it is mink.
12:02 Steven Rinella? Not advertised as, but it is actually mink. And when you put that up and look at it.
12:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
12:08 Steven Rinella? My God, does that look like a nice eyelash? I don't like that look.
12:14 Speaker 06 Just.
12:15 Steven Rinella? The big fake eyelash look.
12:17 Speaker 06 Yeah.
12:18 Steven Rinella? Not my style.
12:21 Steven Rinella? But, you know, it's popular.
12:22 Speaker 06 Yep.
12:23 Steven Rinella? It'll probably fade.
12:23 Speaker 06 I feel like it, I feel like it came into popularity. I feel like.
12:27 Steven Rinella? But it already went.
12:28 Speaker 06 I don't know.
12:29 Steven Rinella? Oh, it's way popular. Like, in 20 years, if you're dressing up for Halloween and you're dressing up as a 2025 person for Halloween. You're gonna glue on big fake eyelash.
12:40 Speaker 06 Sure.
12:41 Steven Rinella? Um, and people will be like, oh, I remember that. But, yeah.
12:47 Steven Rinella? Uh, mink.
12:49 Speaker 06 It is striking.
12:50 Steven Rinella? And I was wondering, is that like enough to drive up the mink market? But then, man, think about how many eyelashes are hiding in that thing right there.
12:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
12:57 Steven Rinella? It's nothing but eyelashes.
12:58 Speaker 06 Tiny little strips.
12:59 Steven Rinella? You could do the whole town. You could give every woman in town new eyelashes with this mink.
13:05 Speaker 06 We should try to make, we should take a sliver, like a dental floss sized sliver off the side of that and try to make a set of fake eyelashes for someone in the office.
13:13 Steven Rinella? Be a great idea.
13:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
13:15 Steven Rinella? What they do when they're testing.
13:17 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
13:18 Steven Rinella? I don't want to blow the interview. I'm gonna give this last little tidbit away.
13:22 Steven Rinella? Against my better judgment.
13:23 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
13:24 Steven Rinella? When they're testing a shipment, guess, guess what the test is? Did I already tell you what the test is?
13:27 Speaker 06 He did, and I like it.
13:28 Steven Rinella? Take a cigarette lighter.
13:31 Speaker 06 Does it smell like hair?
13:32 Steven Rinella? If it smells like burning hair, it'll either smell like burning petroleum base or it'll be like, oh, that's burnt hair. That is a mink.
13:40 Speaker 06 That's great.
13:41 Steven Rinella? Fake eyelashes made from a mink. And what I won't be able to tell you, even when we do the interview, I won't be able to tell you the country of origins, not known.
13:48 Speaker 06 Hmm.
13:49 Steven Rinella? We're, we're, we're not knowing if these mink are American caught mink or European wild mink.
13:53 Speaker 06 Hmm.
13:55 Steven Rinella? Third thing of interest.
13:58 Steven Rinella? Can you pull up the photo, Phil?
13:59 Speaker 06 Let's do it.
13:59 Steven Rinella? This is of tremendous interest. You got your thing handy?
14:02 Speaker 06 I do.
14:02 Steven Rinella? Randall and I just did a, the, probably one of the best, um,
14:08 Steven Rinella? probably our best piece of, uh, video work ever.
14:13 Steven Rinella? In terms of what I think is interesting. Phil has a picture held up of me and Randall here, holding two.
14:23 Steven Rinella? It's the big hunks of fat that come off the back of a buffalo. It's called the depouille.
14:28 Speaker 06 Hmm.
14:28 Steven Rinella? The depouille, French. Uh, if you imagine like, like picture that you pull the hide off a deer. Cause more people have done that than pulled the hide off a buffalo. Pull the hide off a 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 back strap. But these are, in this picture we're holding up, these are like giant slabs of fat removed from over the back strap and hump of a buffalo.
14:56 Steven Rinella? And working on the latest installation of Meat Eaters American History, The Hyde Hunters, 1865 to 1883, we ran across this passage, which, which, which Dr. Randall will share with you.
15:09 Speaker 06 Another important article of food, the equal of which is not to be had except from the buffalo, is depoyer, or depui.
15:20 Steven Rinella? Depui.
15:21 Speaker 06 It is a fat substance that lies along the backbone next to the hide, running from the shoulder blade to the last rib, and is about as thick as one's hand or finger. It is from seven to 11 inches broad, tapering to a feather edge on the lower side. It will weigh from five to 11 pounds, according to the size and condition of the animal. This substance is taken off and dipped in hot grease for half a minute, then is hung up inside of a lodge to dry and smoke for 12 hours. It will keep indefinitely and is used as a substitute for bread, but is superior to any bread that was ever made.
15:59 Steven Rinella? Yes. We made it. We made a whole video about making it. We followed those instructions. Why do people say to the T?
16:10 Speaker 06 I don't know.
16:12 Steven Rinella? We follow them to the T. That's a great question. You want to know why the whole nine yards? You know what that means?
16:16 Speaker 06 No.
16:17 Steven Rinella? It's like the, in a P, is it, was that, what was that, like Spitfire P-38 airplane in World War II?
16:23 Speaker 06 Uh, is it a P-38? A P-38 is a Thunderbolt, I believe.
16:29 Steven Rinella? Oh, well, you know, Nate Mason?
16:33 Speaker 06 Yeah.
16:34 Steven Rinella? Big Army guy?
16:35 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
16:36 Steven Rinella? He was telling me that that, that belt, that machine belt?
16:38 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
16:39 Steven Rinella? The ammo belt, 27 feet long. So to give him the whole nine yards is to give him 27 feet of ammo out of that aircraft.
16:45 Speaker 06 Gotcha.
16:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah. I don't know why people follow stuff to the T. We followed it to the T. And I'm not gonna tell you what happened. You know how I teased the mink thing where I'm not telling the secrets? I'm not telling the secrets of what happened with our depooey.
16:59 Speaker 06 Yeah.
17:00 Steven Rinella? This project is sitting with Seth Morris right now, who's editing it.
17:04 Speaker 06 I had a crisis of of confidence in my answer. The P38 is the lightning. Just correcting myself, circling back there.
17:12 Steven Rinella? And I did fact check Nate Mason on that, but he takes a lot of pride in being able to offer up little things like that.
17:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, now that I I feel like I have heard that somewhere.
17:20 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm. Takes a lot of pride in that kind of stuff. If he waves you down, you know, on the staircase or something, it's gonna be to tell you like a little tidbit or to correct you about something you got wrong.
17:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
17:30 Steven Rinella? Uh, here's an interesting one. Now we're gonna get, we're gonna talk a whole bunch more about Buffalo, because we're gonna talk about the the Hyde Hunter era.
17:36 Speaker 05 Really quick, just before you get into this, can completely derail you, Steve. It says that there's no consensus about where to a T 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 additions you have to make when writing letters, like a like dotting an I or a J or crossing a T.
17:56 Steven Rinella? Hmm. Hmm. That sounds like something Bob Cratchit would say.
17:59 Speaker 06 Yeah.
18:00 Steven Rinella? To the till, to the till, Tiny Tim.
18:03 Speaker 06 But sir, it's Christmas.
18:06 Steven Rinella? Is that a Bob Cratchit line?
18:08 Speaker 05 Uh, yeah, it is actually. He does. He tries. He tries to leave right at the stroke of five or six and Scrooge gives him a dirty look and he says, but sir, it's Christmas.
18:17 Steven Rinella? God blesses the biggest goose in all of London.
18:25 Steven Rinella? Here's a really good one that a guy sent in. We haven't done one of these in a while.
18:31 Steven Rinella? First, this guy starts off by saying, uh, he's rarely heard our team, Pat, that points to me, passed up an opportunity to discuss, argue about semantics. So check this out. This, this cannot stand.
18:46 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
18:52 Steven Rinella? This guy recently moved to South Carolina. Gets to study in the state hunting regs, just to get a grip on what's going on. Okay. And he notices within South Carolina's hunting regs that they have an explicitly stated still hunt season. Still hunt season.
19:16 Steven Rinella? Now. Ask any American boy. What still hunting is and what are they gonna tell you?
19:24 Speaker 06 Creeping quietly through the woods.
19:26 Steven Rinella? Yep.
19:26 Speaker 06 Slowly, slowly, slowly. Shooting a deer before it sees you.
19:30 Steven Rinella? Take a couple of steps.
19:32 Speaker 06 Yep.
19:32 Steven Rinella? Stop and listen. Take a couple of steps, stop and listen. Still hunting. So he's like, why would they have a season where you can only?
19:44 Steven Rinella? Still hunt?
19:46 Steven Rinella? So he calls fishing game to say, what's up with how you could, like, why, why, why are you saying like you can only hunt this method?
19:54 Speaker 06 Can I?
19:54 Steven Rinella? 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.
20:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:07 Steven Rinella? Who in the world?
20:10 Speaker 06 I would have just called it quiet.
20:12 Steven Rinella? I'd call it no dog time.
20:13 Speaker 06 Right.
20:15 Steven Rinella? Be good song.
20:16 Speaker 06 No.
20:18 Steven Rinella? I'd call it no dog time.
20:21 Speaker 06 Like, is it a bluesy song or is it like an upbeat pop song?
20:24 Steven Rinella? No, it's like a country party song.
20:25 Speaker 06 Hmm, yeah.
20:27 Speaker 05 Parties.
20:29 Speaker 06 It's like a.
20:30 Steven Rinella? It's a honky tonk party song, dude, no dog time.
20:36 Steven Rinella? 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, like, I'd be curious. I don't need a dog on it because I'd be curious.
20:44 Speaker 06 Oh, that's good.
20:46 Steven Rinella? Oh, the other day I was with.
20:47 Speaker 05 Already halfway through the lyrics.
20:49 Steven Rinella? Okay. Here, oh, man, I hate to even get into this. Don't want to get into this. I was with Dan and Reed Isbell.
20:56 Speaker 06 Hmm.
20:57 Steven Rinella? Okay. From God's Country Podcast. And we're eating this, we're in this restaurant and they got like 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.
21:15 Speaker 06 Yeah.
21:15 Steven Rinella? Dan Isbell goes Marilyn Monroe.
21:19 Speaker 06 That's good.
21:20 Steven Rinella? But then there was like, I, everyone at the table detected a pause. Before he like, did like a gotcha.
21:28 Speaker 06 Yeah.
21:30 Steven Rinella? And the debate was, did he know?
21:35 Steven Rinella? Or did it only occur that he was going off the birthmark and said Marilyn, because Marilyn Monroe has a famous birthmark? Did he know? Before the delivery, the Roe connection? So we wanted to get the security camera footage from within the restaurant to see if like.
21:53 Speaker 06 When the twinkle in his eye?
21:54 Steven Rinella? I felt the twinkle was like delayed, like he goes like Marilyn Monroe and then, and then does a, ha ha.
22:00 Speaker 06 Yeah.
22:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah. But he's like, no, I knew all along. That's why I said it.
22:04 Speaker 06 I don't buy it.
22:05 Speaker 05 I don't buy it for a second.
22:06 Steven Rinella? No one bought it.
22:06 Speaker 06 No.
22:07 Steven Rinella? I was like, I, there was like, you said it and then there was like a beat and then it hit.
22:14 Speaker 06 Yeah. I'm, I'm dubious.
22:16 Speaker 05 I mean, I'm still impressed.
22:18 Steven Rinella? Oh, I'm, yeah, totally.
22:19 Speaker 06 Sure.
22:19 Steven Rinella? It's great. What was that time of her?
22:22 Speaker 06 Dogs.
22:23 Steven Rinella? Dogs.
22:24 Speaker 06 You don't mean to dog on?
22:28 Speaker 06 The.
22:29 Steven Rinella? Why would I talk about the rope?
22:31 Speaker 06 Well, you did one of those.
22:34 Steven Rinella? You said.
22:34 Speaker 06 I just did one.
22:35 Steven Rinella? You said, I don't mean to dog on.
22:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's what it was.
22:37 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's what it was.
22:37 Speaker 06 Yep.
22:38 Steven Rinella? So Marilyn Monroe, no. I would be curious if you went to dog hunting states. And I don't, I honestly don't know the answer to this. People can write in. Like if I went to a dog hunting state. So I go to Arkansas.
22:51 Speaker 06 Right.
22:52 Steven Rinella? South Carolina, there aren't many left. Um, which I've.
22:57 Steven Rinella? Makes me a little bit sad. Uh, and I said, hey, I'm going to still hunt. Like, or will they, people said, like, how'd you get that buck? And I said, oh, I was like, I'm still hunting. Would they be like, huh, he was hunting without dogs?
23:12 Speaker 06 Or would they be like, he was actually still hunting?
23:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying?
23:16 Speaker 06 Yeah, like if it's a universal convention in states that have dog hunting, that still hunting is hunting without dogs.
23:22 Steven Rinella? Or do even dog guys look at the regs and they're like, what?
23:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, they could have pretty much picked any other descriptor there and it would have caused lost confusion.
23:36 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
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25:58 Steven Rinella? Here's another quick one. This is good. A thing came 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, buddy. But it's good. There is a phenomenal book that I recommend to anyone out there called Shadows on the Koyukuck. It's about the, it's about a Koyukon, so the Koyukon people are like a,
26:28 Steven Rinella? like a tribe, it wouldn't be that, but like a tribe of native Alaskans and they, and these native Alaskans, the Koyukon people are centered around the Koyukuck River, which flows into the Yukon River. Sidney Huntington is a, is a Koyukon man. And Shadows on the Koyukuck is like his story of growing up on the river. It's, it's a phenomenal book. In the book, there's this passage and I, I am very, the person that wrote in, you're right. I'm very familiar with the passage. And in this passage, he says, basically in Shadows on the Koyukuck, a big part of the book is that,
27:09 Steven Rinella? this boy and his siblings, like their, their mom dies and they just, they're just like left out in this cabin. It's a true story. That's a big part of his life stories, is trying to like keep his little siblings alive without parental help. And he says supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. He's talking about the, the night his mom died. Supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. Whitefish have a hard grisly part in their gut that looks as if it has tentacles all over it, which is, which is a favorite delicacy of Koyukon Indians. Mom fried and ate this part.
27:51 Steven Rinella? He says that whitefish gut killed my mother.
27:55 Steven Rinella? 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.
28:13 Steven Rinella? The author, this is the guy that wrote the letter in, Matt, continuing, "The author doesn't elaborate any further on how the hard, grisly part in the whitefish's gut killed his mother."
28:24 Steven Rinella? "Google searches have failed to shed any light on the mechanism of death." And he's wondering, "You got any thoughts about that?" I, I don't think, I wasn't there, but I remember reading it. I don't think that that's what his mom died from. When she bit her tongue, wouldn't it be that she, she had a seizure?
28:44 Speaker 06 Possibly.
28:45 Steven Rinella? Bit her tongue in half?
28:46 Speaker 06 Yeah, although you don't know what triggered that.
28:49 Steven Rinella? No.
28:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, I, I, I did my own-
28:52 Steven Rinella? I always felt, I felt it was coincidence.
28:54 Speaker 06 I did my own five minutes of Googling and, and I found the part of the stomach that looks like that and I-
28:59 Steven Rinella? A lot of fish have it.
29:00 Speaker 06 And I found, uh, I actually found a cookbook of, of like traditional-
29:06 Steven Rinella? How many minutes it take you to do all this?
29:07 Speaker 06 Oh, five to 10.
29:09 Steven Rinella? Sure you're not lying?
29:09 Speaker 06 Pretty good with computers.
29:11 Steven Rinella? Five. It just doubled to 10. Do you know what's that film?
29:15 Speaker 06 Well, I thought you-
29:16 Steven Rinella? Like I started to call them out and it jumped to 10?
29:18 Speaker 06 I thought you were so impressed by the depth of my research that I thought five seemed 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 stage of my morning.
29:28 Steven Rinella? Go on. Just try to do it without, without bragging.
29:31 Speaker 06 But I actually found-
29:32 Steven Rinella? Can you do it without bragging so bad?
29:33 Speaker 06 Sure, sure. There exists,
29:38 Speaker 06 available online to any internet researcher, a book of traditional, uh, Koyukon recipes.
29:46 Steven Rinella? Is that right?
29:46 Speaker 06 And there's pages and pages about how to prep whitefish.
29:50 Steven Rinella? And you spent a couple of hours going through that, huh?
29:52 Speaker 06 Yeah, I scanned through it. Uh, I scanned through it poorly because I'm not bragging. I scanned through it. I scanned through it haphazardly.
30:00 Speaker 05 Specifically neg yourself now.
30:02 Speaker 06 But I, I was unable to find anything. Surely a more talented researcher could have found the answer, but I was unable.
30:10 Steven Rinella? But you found the recipe.
30:12 Speaker 06 I did, yeah.
30:13 Steven Rinella? And you found no reason, um, you found no reason like the, the, hey, it's like, you know, what's that, what's that fish liver that is toxic? You found no thing like, hey, be careful when eating.
30:22 Speaker 06 No, I couldn't find anything like that. But that I couldn't have found anything anyway, just because of how bored, how bad I am at that stuff.
30:31 Steven Rinella? So it doesn't really say, it doesn't mean.
30:32 Speaker 06 Yeah. No, I think someone else should probably back, back me up.
30:35 Speaker 05 Yeah. I don't even know why we're trusting a single thing you say.
30:37 Speaker 06 Surely I missed it on the first time.
30:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah. I, I always read that and it like, again, I can't recommend that book enough. You ever read that book?
30:46 Speaker 06 Mm hmm. A long time ago.
30:51 Steven Rinella? I read that and wondered about that. I, I just feel like it's like, I would hate, I'd never want to argue with the brother, but, but, um,
31:01 Steven Rinella? I think something else happened.
31:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, there's just like, it's hard to make a one-to-one connection there.
31:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Think about when you get real sick from eating.
31:12 Steven Rinella? Like your mind will kind of find culprits.
31:15 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
31:15 Steven Rinella? You know? I remember one time I got super sick in Mexico, like, like deathly ill. And I couldn't eat avocados for forever, but I had a ham and avocado. We bought like some, some room temp, air dried ham and avocado and bread.
31:34 Steven Rinella? I got deathly ill. It wasn't avocado.
31:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
31:39 Steven Rinella? A 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.
31:47 Speaker 06 Yeah. Oh, sure.
31:47 Steven Rinella? And you're looking at this crazy octopus tentacle.
31:50 Speaker 06 Especially when you're a kid.
31:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah. You're looking at that and you're like, good lord. And then like, you know, having a bit like your ma dies the next day. Like it's got to be that stomach.
31:59 Speaker 06 Yeah. She, she says she wasn't feeling well. It probably could have not mattered what she had for dinner.
32:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
32:06 Steven Rinella? Um, all right. So we're going to talk about, we're, we're going to dig in and explain a, we're going to dig in and explain a really fascinating period of American history and Randall and I have done these in the past. Uh, we did one on Daniel Boone and the long hunters. We did one of these episodes on Daniel Boone and the long hunters. We did one of these episodes on, uh, the mountain men. So Jim Bridger, John Coltrane, the mountain men. And we're going to do one right now on sort of the era that the, the, the era.
32:43 Steven Rinella? The backwoodsman era that came after the really big hit that came after the mountain man era, which was the hide hunters. So to start, Randall's going to lay out a little bit about like, he's going to,
32:58 Steven Rinella? why are we talking about those three things? Like, like, why are we bucketing those three things? Why are, what makes them similar? What makes them distinct?
33:06 Speaker 06 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, um, where large groups of individuals are going out. Well, I should say relatively large groups of individuals are seeking sort of a new life by harvesting wildlife resources for profit. And that's a phenomenon you see repeated over and over again in American history and often aligns with sort of bigger shifts in the larger national story, like the mountain men aligns with the Louisiana Purchase and the opening up of the Rocky Mountain West.
33:48 Speaker 06 Uh, the long hunter era, which is, uh, in the late 1760s, early 1770s, that aligns with through this window of opportunity between the French and Indian war and the American revolution broadly speaking. Um, but in each of these instances, uh, there's, there's, there are these individuals that go out into uh, what is then land largely unknown to them and occupied by native people. And they're harvesting wildlife resources on the scale. That's sort of unimaginable to us today. And in doing so, they also leave behind some of our, um, most.
34:31 Speaker 06 Told and retold stories of wilderness living and outdoor adventure that have sort of, you know,
34:38 Speaker 06 uh, been passed down to us as, as like the, the origin story of like, American hunters and anglers, right? Um, but in this series, we're asking, what were they doing really? Like, what were they after? How were they acquiring it? Who were they selling it to? What was it being used for? And what are the various, uh, like larger contextual factors that shaped? How they lived the lives the way they did? So, um, like I said, the first one was the long hunters and Daniel Boone is the most well-known of those. These are guys, uh, largely coming out of western North Carolina, uh, western Virginia. And they're going across the Appalachian Mountains to shoot whitetail deer,
35:22 Speaker 06 uh, for their skin, which is used in leather goods primarily manufactured in, in Britain.
35:29 Speaker 06 Um, 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.
35:37 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah. When you see, if you see like an old guy or like, or Napoleon or someone, he's got like some white pants, some tighties, some tight-fitting white pants.
35:45 Speaker 06 Buttons on the front.
35:46 Steven Rinella? Might be buckskin.
35:47 Speaker 06 Like a little button fly flap.
35:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah, could be American buckskin.
35:50 Speaker 06 Yep. And so, um, yeah, these are essentially poor farmers living on the frontier and, and it's uh, an economy where they don't have ready access for cash, but one thing and, and their, 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 whitetail deer skin. So, uh, 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 and the Cumberland River Valley. And, uh, shoot deer by the hundreds and thousands and pack them by mule train across the mountains. Um, and they stay out there for
36:33 Speaker 06 months, sometimes a year or longer. Um, and that's how they get the, the name long hunters.
36:40 Steven Rinella? Long ass hunt.
36:41 Speaker 06 Long ass hunt, uh, refers to the duration of their trips. And these are sort of smaller groups. Oftentimes it's like family members, neighbors, um, and they, they organize their expeditions along these lines of kinship and.
36:58 Speaker 06 Sort of clan, you know, and it's
37:03 Speaker 06 it's a really interesting sort of fleeting moment. Because in 1775, 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.
37:21 Speaker 06 So that's the Long Hunters.
37:22 Steven Rinella? Yep, that's a, that's a interesting thing that we compare through all these is these like, what are the, the groups?
37:30 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
37:31 Steven Rinella? The, the group dynamics? And you made, you made a point with the Long Hunters, when you're reading about Long Hunter expeditions, it's tons of, um, brother in laws.
37:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
37:43 Steven Rinella? Tons of cousins, tons, you know, I mean,
37:46 Speaker 06 Brothers, father in laws, brother in laws. This guy married this guy's sister.
37:50 Steven Rinella? Exactly. And he's like, sort of like these familial, very neighborly clans.
37:59 Speaker 06 Yeah.
37:59 Steven Rinella? But it could be as many as 40 people.
38:02 Speaker 06 And they're, and one of the big differences too, between the Long Hunters and some of the later volumes, uh, 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. Um, 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. Um, 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, uh, very thin. So we had to do a lot more sort of piecing together and hypothesizing, uh, in that story than we did in some of these other ones.
38:44 Steven Rinella? Yo, okay, recap mountain men, like when you hear the word mountain men, it's, it's an abused term.
38:51 Speaker 06 It is, it is.
38:52 Steven Rinella? It means like,
38:55 Steven Rinella? Yeah. It's not like an old hermit that lives up in the mountains.
38:59 Speaker 06 And there's
39:00 Steven Rinella? Like when you see mountain men from a historical standpoint, it's something very specific.
39:05 Speaker 06 Yeah. So as we use the term and 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 1806. It really is sort of, becomes a big thing in the late 1820s, mid 1820s, late 1820s, 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,
39:47 Speaker 06 trapping beaver, which is being used to produce wool felt. So really they're not after the skin, they're after the hair, which is, and hair not attached to the skin, which is sort of a, an interesting twist when you think about like the fur trade in general.
40:04 Steven Rinella? It's like when you're making mink eyelashes.
40:05 Speaker 06 Like mink eyelashes, exactly. I was curious when we were talking about that, if they're keeping,
40:09 Steven Rinella? No.
40:09 Speaker 06 If they're just gluing them in place on something else.
40:11 Steven Rinella? They're just plucking them. There's no way they're putting leather.
40:13 Speaker 06 I think it'd be cool if you had a little strip of leather.
40:15 Steven Rinella? All the, yeah, but the under fur. Yeah. Oh, you know what we failed to mention?
40:20 Speaker 06 What's that?
40:21 Steven Rinella? Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, so volume three?
40:25 Speaker 06 Yes.
40:26 Steven Rinella? Is out now.
40:27 Speaker 06 Out now. Out October 14th. This is being released October 13th. So unless you're the type of person that listens to it the day it drops,
40:36 Steven Rinella? It's out now.
40:36 Speaker 06 As you listen to it, it's out now.
40:38 Steven Rinella? So Meat Eaters 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.
40:47 Speaker 06 Little tease.
40:48 Steven Rinella? But then the actual thing is how many hours?
40:50 Speaker 06 Uh, close to seven. Yeah.
40:52 Steven Rinella? So you're getting a little, you're getting a little, little titillator right now?
40:56 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
40:56 Steven Rinella? But then the big helping, the big Christmas goose.
41:02 Speaker 06 With all the trimmings.
41:03 Steven Rinella? With all the trimmings.
41:05 Speaker 05 Shilling and a pence.
41:07 Steven Rinella? Is out now, seven hours.
41:09 Speaker 06 Anywhere you get your audiobooks.
41:11 Steven Rinella? Anywhere you get your audiobooks.
41:12 Speaker 06 Okay. 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, a frontiersman trapper. Um, but one of the interesting differences between mountain men and long hunters is that uh, these expeditions, because they're going across the continent and there's a ton of logistics involved, they're, they're actually organized by corporations. And they have a lot of capital and there's a lot of sort of behind the scenes jockeying for control of different corporations and so and so sells their interest, whatever. But out of that, you get, um, the fact that these, these trappers, a lot of them just see an ad in the newspaper.
41:56 Speaker 06 It's like, do you want to go west and trap beaver for two years, three years and sign on? And so like, while Daniel Boone and some of these long hunters were going and hunting with their, their family and their neighbors. Uh, guys like Jim Bridger were sort of, you know, he's, he's 18 years old and he's, doesn't have a lot of, uh, he's sort of rootless. His parents are dead and he sees an ad in the newspaper and shows up at an office in St. Louis and.
42:22 Steven Rinella? Signs and, yeah, signs and employment agreement.
42:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
42:25 Steven Rinella? That's the funniest thing you think about, or you think about these guys, like the mountain men that are out there living off the land for multiple years.
42:32 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
42:32 Steven Rinella? With very little resupply. Most of those guys start out, they're, it's like, it's a job.
42:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
42:38 Steven Rinella? And it has a pay scale and you commit.
42:42 Speaker 06 It's financial security.
42:43 Steven Rinella? Like, yeah, there's not like an HR office, you know, but I mean, it's like a job though, right?
42:48 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah. And like the, I mean, it's, it's interesting because whenever you read a story about, uh, like the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, they always mention this one really famous advertisement. Where they're seeking a hundred enterprising young men to go up the Missouri. And so, yeah, like, although it seems like this really distant sort of ancient world.
43:10 Speaker 06 They're finding job ads in the newspaper and following up on them to become a trapper. And then that story dies out really with the virtual extirpation of beaver from the Rockies. And at the same time, there's a collapse in the beaver felt market. There's a bunch of different reasons for that, but the silk top hat becomes the preferred fashion. And essentially the beaver trade sort of vanishes. And in 1838, 1839, when these guys are coming together for rendezvous to sell their furs, they sort of see the writing on the wall.
43:49 Speaker 06 And then 1840 is the last official rendezvous, which is like the big commercial exchange that sort of keeps this whole world turning.
44:00 Steven Rinella? When Randall's talking about fur hats, like if you imagine Honest Abe Lincoln.
44:05 Steven Rinella? So Honest Abe Lincoln is running around in that hat 1860.
44:11 Steven Rinella? If he was running around in that hat in 1830, his would have been wool felt, beaver wool felt. But I believe Honest Abe was wearing, by Civil War, was wearing a silk hat.
44:22 Speaker 06 I think it was a silk hat.
44:24 Steven Rinella? Same cut, like those crazy looking hats.
44:26 Speaker 06 Yeah.
44:28 Steven Rinella? You keep like a house cat up inside there. But.
44:31 Speaker 06 Seems like a very inefficient.
44:33 Steven Rinella? Oh, just an insane.
44:35 Speaker 06 When you're wearing a backpack and it catches on everything over your head and you just, oh shit, I'm wearing my backpack. You know, I would imagine that a guy with a top hat would have a similar issue.
44:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah. So a guy trying to wear a cowboy hat on an airplane.
44:46 Speaker 06 Especially a tall guy like Abe Lincoln. Better have high door openings.
44:56 Steven Rinella? Where are we at? Yeah, we talked about that.
44:58 Speaker 06 Yep.
44:59 Steven Rinella? Which moves us into the Hyde Hunter era.
45:01 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
45:01 Steven Rinella? Okay.
45:05 Steven Rinella? 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.
45:18 Steven Rinella? The long hunters, the mountain men, you have all these American heroes, these mythologized characters. And what's interesting about these American heroes, these mythologized characters, is there's more awareness, there's more awareness about the individuals and the lives they lived, than there is awareness about what they actually were doing for a living. Meaning, people know the name Daniel Boone. Okay, so if you went out and just took, just pulled random adult Americans off the street.
45:52 Speaker 06 Yeah.
45:52 Steven Rinella? 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, some kind of frontiersman?
46:01 Speaker 06 He lived in the woods.
46:02 Steven Rinella? Yep. But if I said, can you explain to 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 pioneer, this pioneering figure, but they're not clear on what he was doing. He's known for, people have an understanding that he was a sort of explorer settler, which he was, but not necessarily intentionally, being like, he wasn't like, like, he wasn't a promoter. He is very tightly affiliated with, people know him as a Kentucky figure. He left Kentucky, died elsewhere, right? There's not a lot of awareness of what he was. Same with, if I went to you and said, Davy Crockett, people are gonna be like, yes,
46:47 Steven Rinella? familiar with the name Davy Crockett. And I said, can you explain to me some of the things Davy Crockett did for a living? And they probably wouldn't have a very good sense. The mountain man era. People know Jim Bridger, explorer, whatever. But if I said, but why was he exploring? They might not know that his sole focus over much of his professional career, his sole focus was like trying to locate populations of beavers in order to trap them. But they stand as these American icons, they're 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.
47:30 Steven Rinella? When we talk about the hide hunters, we're talking about a very specific type of buffalo hunters. We're talking about a type of buffalo hunter who was hunting buffalo in order to get the skins, which were just sold as dried, what they call flint hides, not tanned. They were collecting skins, pegging them out to dry and selling them. And these were skins that were being tanned into leather products in the east. That is what we call a hide hunter, 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 hide hunter period, is that
48:13 Steven Rinella? 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.
48:23 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
48:24 Steven Rinella? That rhymes. Well, if I left the S off, it would have.
48:27 Speaker 06 Put it in the dog zone.
48:31 Steven Rinella? Um, there's no heroes. Like, there's no mythologized figure. And you can ask yourself, 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 extirpated deer from certain areas or greatly reduced deer herds, wiped out elk herds, wiped out buffalo herds, they're not known as the guys that did that.
49:02 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
49:03 Steven Rinella? That, that crime hasn't been pegged on them. The mountain men, Jim Bridger, they extirpated beavers across a bunch of their range. They wiped out regional populations of beavers, but the crime hasn't been pinned on them.
49:19 Speaker 06 And a lot of people probably don't even know there was a crime.
49:21 Steven Rinella? Yep. They probably don't know that those things happened.
49:24 Speaker 06 Yeah.
49:25 Steven Rinella? But when you get into the buffalo hide hunters, who, as we'll explain the years, who from the end of the Civil War to about 1883, they virtually eliminate, they kill about 15 million buffalo. Um, they kill them until there's less than 1,000 left in the United States.
49:47 Steven Rinella? It is very well understood that they committed the crime.
49:52 Speaker 06 And we're still living with that.
49:54 Steven Rinella? Consequence.
49:54 Speaker 06 That consequence today, like even though they didn't wipe out the buffalo, biologically speaking, the buffalo never recovered from that episode as a wild animal.
50:05 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the way, the best way I've heard that, that distinction explained is I, I, I remember years ago, someone explaining that they weren't driven to genetic extinction, but they were driven to ecological extinction, meaning they ceased to be, they ceased to have an ecological function.
50:25 Speaker 06 Part of the landscape, yeah.
50:27 Steven Rinella? And we understand that these buffalo hunters did that and it's, and that crime has been pinned on them. And when you watch a documentary that deals with this era, they're usually just treated as villains. They're the villains. Everyone agrees that they're the villains. We don't have buffalo hunter heroes. We don't make buffalo hunter movies. There aren't movies where the buffalo hunter winds up being heroic and saving everybody.
50:59 Steven Rinella? Right? And Jeremiah Johnson, he doesn't run into and get saved by a buffalo hunter because they're villains.
51:06 Speaker 06 Yeah.
51:07 Steven Rinella? He gets saved by an old mountain man because they're heroes.
51:11 Speaker 06 And they, and the other thing too, that we get into this in the, in the audiobook is that um, there's a shift in consciousness that occurs during their lifetime.
51:24 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
51:25 Speaker 06 Where all of a sudden you see the rise of the modern conservation movement, the, the founding of the Boone and Crockett Club, the curtailment of market hunting by the federal government and, and this all happens during their lifetimes.
51:39 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
51:39 Speaker 06 Sort of almost as soon as the, the smoke is cleared from their shooting, all of a sudden market hunting is a very bad thing.
51:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
51:48 Speaker 06 In, in sort of the cultural and political American consciousness. And so they sort of live in this weird space where the, the, the world that they did these acts in and killed all these buffalo was not the world that they lived in 20 years later.
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54:35 Steven Rinella? I'm just gonna touch on now. I think we're gonna touch on this today.
54:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
54:40 Steven Rinella? Here's the thing about, to keep in mind about this Hyde Hunter thing. And we're gonna talk about why the years. Well, you know, talk about, let's, let's do why the years now, because I, I wanna talk about the way in which this era.
54:53 Speaker 06 Yeah.
54:54 Steven Rinella? The way in which this era turns into the modern era.
55:00 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
55:01 Steven Rinella? 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 Sand County Almanac.
55:13 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
55:14 Steven Rinella? Right? They lived to see the presidency of an individual Theodore Roosevelt, who was like an adversary of the market hunters.
55:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, wanted them eliminated.
55:30 Steven Rinella? Yeah, so they were like, living a period of, of sort of watching their peers, watching their contemporaries come to condemn them.
55:39 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
55:40 Steven Rinella? You know, I mean, you, you were making that point, but I mean,
55:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
55:42 Steven Rinella? I just think that it's important to realize that like, there was no, there was almost like no period when they were celebrated. A lot of them got bitter about this, and we, we tell that story in the book. A lot of them get to be old men and they're bitter.
55:58 Speaker 06 Yeah.
55:58 Steven Rinella? They're bitter about how they've been disparaged in their own lifetimes for what they did.
56:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, and in some ways, I mean, there, there are other parallels I could, I could draw, but they're, in their later in life, once they're no longer living in this world where uh, the hide hunt was a good thing, or, or, you know, even a neutral thing, like, once it became a hot button topic and the buffalo are wiped out and, and conservation's on the rise, they often would look back and explain what they were doing in a different way.
56:31 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
56:31 Speaker 06 They tried to re, 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 um, to, to conquer native people. We did it to sort of, you know, break, break Indian resistance and open up the West for settlement. But what's fascinating is when you go back and you read the accounts that were written at the time as opposed to like what they wrote down in 1900 or 1910, they'll always say, I was young, I needed money. It was free for the taking. All you needed was a rifle. You go out
57:15 Speaker 06 there and you, you get as many as you can.
57:17 Steven Rinella? Make a lot of money.
57:18 Speaker 06 And there's none of these guys at the time are sort of think are, are, are explaining their actions in a, in a way that's like part of a broader national story of quote unquote, progress. But as old men.
57:29 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
57:29 Speaker 06 Living, living now, living in the 1920s, 1930s, uh, or even just back in, in like during the Roosevelt presidency, they're saying, oh, well, you know, we were part of, we were part of the American story. We weren't bad guys. The, the whole money thing was just a side issue. What we were really trying to do was open up the West for white settlement.
57:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they get terribly sentimental too. Um, 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.
58:06 Speaker 06 Yeah.
58:07 Steven Rinella? In the Texas panhandle, running into the arms of their waiting mothers.
58:13 Speaker 06 Yeah.
58:14 Steven Rinella? I think by God, I did the right thing.
58:18 Speaker 06 And, 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 night, in the early 1900s, they said, well, this was a good and necessary thing. We did it so that we could, we could defeat the tribes of the plains. Um, at the time they did that because they thought it was something worth celebrating. They, they said what they did in that way because 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 plains, they latched on to those explanations because it made the guys seem even worse. It made the hide hunters seem even more villainous.
59:03 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah.
59:03 Speaker 06 And so like, uh, you, you almost have to go back to, um, 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, in sort of the public opinion.
59:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah, we, we, uh,
59:24 Steven Rinella? Well, I'm just 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
59:35 Steven Rinella? uh, over 10,000 buffalo.
59:39 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
59:39 Steven Rinella? Okay. Who lives to, who lives through the Korean War.
59:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
59:48 Steven Rinella? He, he lives to see, we, we mentioned, he lives to see like Playboy magazine being published.
59:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, he lived to be 104 years old.
59:56 Steven Rinella? 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.
1:00:09 Speaker 06 The first Burger King opened before he died and the first nuclear submarine launched before he died.
1:00:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:00:16 Speaker 06 But he, you know, he, he 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, I hadn't been back to Dodge City since the buffalo hunt. And the interviewer's like, well, why did you go to Dodge City? Why did you go back? And she goes, oh, there was a motorcycle race. We're gonna watch a motorcycle race.
1:00:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the extr- like that, that, that's what we spent a lot of time on is just how abrupt at the end of this era, how like abrupt the country changed.
1:00:53 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
1:00:54 Steven Rinella? Out of it. And a, a thing we bring up as well,
1:01:01 Steven Rinella? we keep talking about these, this certain, these certain hide hunters who lived through the buffalo slaughter and became, they, they kind of stayed, they kind of wanted to continue to, to defend themselves. And we talk about that there's no hide hunter heroes. Now, that's not entirely accurate because there's a lot of mythologized Western figures who became mythologized later for their exploits as gunfighters, lawmen, gamblers, but who you wouldn't realize cut their teeth as hide hunters. Wyatt Earp, like historians a little bit question like how into hide hunting Wyatt Earp was. He was hide hunter adjacent, maybe did some hide hunting.
1:01:46 Steven Rinella? Wyatt Earp did some hide hunting. I'll tell you who absolutely was a hide hunter. Pat Garrett, the man who killed Billy the Kid. We recently had.
1:01:59 Speaker 06 Brian Burrows.
1:02:02 Steven Rinella? Brian, I could, yeah, Brian Burrows on. No, Burrow.
1:02:08 Speaker 06 It's Burrow.
1:02:08 Steven Rinella? Burrow.
1:02:09 Speaker 06 Sing of William Burrows.
1:02:10 Steven Rinella? Well, no, that's what, that's what's screwing me up.
1:02:12 Speaker 06 I always do that.
1:02:14 Steven Rinella? 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 the last person Billy the Kid addressed. He said, "Quienes?" To a man named John Poe. And then was shortly thereafter shot and killed. Well, said it again, said the same thing, goes, goes into a bedroom. He passes a guy outside and says, "Quienes?" 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.
1:02:59 Steven Rinella? Those two guys were Buffalo hide hunters, but no one knows John Poe and Pat Garrett as Buffalo hide hunters.
1:03:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, they're former Buffalo hide hunters at the time.
1:03:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah, 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 era.
1:03:20 Speaker 06 They shed that, they shed that identity and became new people.
1:03:24 Steven Rinella? Yeah, some became like dudes that were presidents of banks.
1:03:29 Speaker 06 A lot of them got killed in bars and in card games.
1:03:32 Steven Rinella? Yeah, many, like many divide, uh, died violently. And that's another thing about like the, the legacy of the hide hunters is you'll find people say, oh, the hide hunters were nothing but horse stealing scoundrels.
1:03:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:03:46 Steven Rinella? And then other historians, including Elliot West, who we had on the podcast years ago. Elliot West has this passage like, oh, they became candy salesmen and high school principals.
1:03:56 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:03:57 Steven Rinella? And you're like, both those things are true. They were some horse stealing scoundrels.
1:04:00 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:04:01 Steven Rinella? And some became candy salesmen. Like they became all things.
1:04:04 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah. Elliot, Elliot 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, they have these, they, they weren't born to be hide hunters.
1:04:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:04:21 Speaker 06 Right?
1:04:21 Steven Rinella? And not like Boone was born to be a hunter.
1:04:23 Speaker 06 And there was, there was an opportunity and they stepped into that world and they, they did what they did. And then that world vanished along with the buffalo and they moved on to the next thing.
1:04:35 Steven Rinella? Uh, it's more appropriate to say, this is a segue. It's more appropriate to say that these buffalo hide hunters, who we know and understand and have condemned for exterminating the American buffalo.
1:04:53 Steven Rinella? Yes, they stepped out of normal life, but it's more, it's, it's better to say.
1:04:58 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:04:59 Steven Rinella? They stepped out of the American Civil War.
1:05:04 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:05:06 Speaker 06 Yeah. And that's something that I,
1:05:09 Speaker 06 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.
1:05:20 Speaker 06 You really don't have a full appreciation for it until you start reading their individual stories by the dozens. And it's just, it's overwhelming. Frank Mayer, the guy who lived to see Burger King and Playboy magazine, he was a 13-year-old drummer boy.
1:05:39 Steven Rinella? What if you ever read Playboy while eating Burger King?
1:05:41 Speaker 06 I think he-
1:05:42 Steven Rinella? In a Corvette.
1:05:43 Speaker 06 At 104, he, I hope he was doing all that stuff. It's doubtful, though.
1:05:49 Steven Rinella? He said, "Baby, I'm gonna take my Corvette down, pick up the April issue, get a burger."
1:05:55 Speaker 06 Get a Whopper.
1:05:56 Speaker 05 Just, just for the articles, of course.
1:05:57 Speaker 06 Yeah. Well, that was back when, when you really could read some good stuff in there, you know?
1:06:02 Speaker 05 We used to be a country.
1:06:03 Speaker 06 Um, so he, he, yeah, Frank Mayer, the guy who lived to be 104, he was a 13-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 13-year-old, like, it's hard to imagine him going on to just live a quiet life somewhere, right? And, 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?
1:06:47 Speaker 06 And so they're sort of lost, they're 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.
1:06:58 Steven Rinella? No, we haven't mentioned Cook yet, but, 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 what was going on in that period, but-
1:07:13 Speaker 06 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.
1:07:24 Speaker 06 And his brother is shot 27 times. He is, his, his brother was serving.
1:07:32 Steven Rinella? He shot pieces.
1:07:33 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:07:33 Steven Rinella? An revenge, like a revenge attack.
1:07:35 Speaker 06 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, and he got shot 27 times. And the commanding officer of that unit gave John Cook his brother's hat. That's just soaked in blood and full of holes. And says, you know, this is what we have left of your brother. Bring it to your mom.
1:08:03 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:08:03 Speaker 06 And so even though Cook himself was like, again, a youngster, he, you know, he didn't like bear the brunt of the fighting like. The, the Civil War profoundly brought an end to his like childhood innocence. And then there's guys that served as prisoners of war and guys that, uh, there's one Hyde Hunter who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Um, and there's, you know, we have stories of like a guy who was a Confederate soldier who is, he was at a fort that was, went under siege. And like two thirds of the guys in there with them had died by the time they surrendered. So you can imagine.
1:08:42 Steven Rinella? 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.
1:08:51 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:08:52 Steven Rinella? And then heads out, that, 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, yeah, within a decade after the war are coming together. And hunting outfits in Texas.
1:09:10 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah. And, and you also, there's a couple of interesting stories of brothers.
1:09:16 Speaker 06 Uh, the Clarkson brothers, the eldest 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, um, he wrote to his other brothers and said, "Come on out, you got it." And these guys killed, I believe, 20,000 buffalo during their careers 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.
1:09:52 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:09:53 Speaker 06 Like army, army gear. So we, we, we begin this story in 1865 because the connection to the end of the civil war is sort of inarguable. Um, but the hunt itself really doesn't get underway until later, until six years later, essentially.
1:10:12 Steven Rinella? Yeah, there's a little device we use in these American history pieces where we like to, we like to bracket. We like to bracket like the, the years that we're talking about, which is, no, it's true.
1:10:26 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:10:26 Steven Rinella? But what we also do is we also hint at what we bracketed. Okay. So with the, with the long hunters, we say in the title, Meat Eaters, American History, The Long Hunters, 1763 to 1775. 1763 being the end of the French and Indian War or the Seven Years' War. So you get a period of relative peace on the frontier, which allows guys to somewhat more safely go into the colonial frontier to hunt. 1775, of course, is the year before the, the American Revolution, which brings in this very bloodied period on the American frontier when it becomes really hard to hunt.
1:11:07 Steven Rinella? But then, of course, we explain a lot about like what happens before 1763.
1:11:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:11:15 Steven Rinella? And then a little bit about what happens after 1775, but the, but the, but the, the era is that. With the mountain men, 1806. So that's the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition. However, we explain a little bit about Louisiana Purchase, which is before that. But the action is like the return of Lewis and Clark and the reports of great quantities of beavers in the American West with the collapse of the market in 1840.
1:11:44 Steven Rinella? The Hyde Hunter story, we're saying 65. And as we explain, it's because you can't understand the Hyde Hunters without understanding the Civil War. From a standpoint of firearms, from a standpoint of railroads.
1:11:58 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:11:59 Steven Rinella? From a little bit of politics, okay, and from the standpoint of creating a generation of displaced young men.
1:12:06 Steven Rinella? But the shooting doesn't start till about seven years later.
1:12:14 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:12:14 Steven Rinella? The shooting really starts in 1872.
1:12:18 Speaker 06 Yeah, and on the railroad, on the railroad note, like the transcontinental railroads are authorized during the Civil War, and that's tied to politics and questions about, you know, like keeping California in the Union and also the northern elected officials don't, no longer have to concede things to the South, so it's really a northern project. So they authorize the transcontinental railroads, they really don't get construction, they don't make a lot of progress in construction till after the war. But the railroads are important for two reasons. One, the sheer logistics of moving all these buffalo skins off the plains is unimaginable
1:13:02 Speaker 06 without the railroads and the quantities that they're moving them. Two, a lot of these Civil War veterans got, they sort of cut their teeth as buffalo hunters shooting meat to feed railroad workers. And so they're, they were already making this transition into market hunters before the Hyde Hunt as meat hunters.
1:13:26 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I'd like to explain one example that, just because it's a name people are going to be familiar with. If you're sitting there now listening to this, if one buffalo hunter, no, I'm not saying a Hyde Hunter, a buffalo hunter you probably know is Buffalo Bill Cody.
1:13:46 Steven Rinella? Buffalo Bill Cody never participated in the hide hunt. Buffalo Bill Cody shot 4,000 buffalo as a meat hunter for the railroad. But then got off on other ventures, got into the show, got into show business and some high profile guiding. He never made the transition, but other guys like that, like picture you got a guy, like a guy like Bill Cody, Buffalo Bill Cody kills 4,000
1:14:13 Steven Rinella? for the meat. This guy has perfected the, has perfected the skill.
1:14:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:14:18 Steven Rinella? So you had these dudes, when, when the hide market takes off, and we explain in great detail why the hide market exploded. When the hide market takes off, you got guys that are raring to go.
1:14:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, and they don't, they don't need to figure out how to kill buffalo.
1:14:32 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:14:33 Speaker 06 Like they've, they've had their sort of professional apprenticeship as meat hunters. And they're selling meat not only to railroad camps, like, like you think about all the labor is needed for these infrastructure projects. Like there's companies that get a contract from the railroad to board and house all of the workers. And then those companies are going out and hiring a guy like Bill Cody to kill buffalo. And it's like eight a day or something like that. They're also getting contracts to supply meat to forts, like there's military forts being established across the West to guard the railroad and also to wage war on the tribes. And so there's civilians who are going out and hunting buffalo to feed the soldiers.
1:15:18 Speaker 06 And then they're also engaging in a, in a more limited scale, selling meat
1:15:24 Speaker 06 to, to butchers or meat stores in the East, restaurants, hotels, whatever, as sort of a, a curiosity. But all these, there's, there's very much like a, an intact
1:15:38 Speaker 06 robust trade in buffalo products before the hide hunt gets rolling.
1:15:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah, like if you imagine all of a sudden squirrel brains are worth $10,000 a brain. Who's best suited to capitalize on that, expose that market?
1:15:56 Speaker 06 Kevin Murphy.
1:15:57 Steven Rinella? Kevin Murphy.
1:15:59 Steven Rinella? So people later, 100 years later, saying, you know that Kevin Murphy used to just hunt squirrels like for the meat?
1:16:07 Steven Rinella? People don't realize this.
1:16:08 Speaker 06 And, and yeah.
1:16:10 Steven Rinella? Everybody knows him as the squirrel brain hunter.
1:16:12 Speaker 06 It's, it's so funny because they like, like the Clarksons, the, who I mentioned earlier, the three brothers. I mean, he, a lot of them will come out west, not really knowing what they're doing. And then they get a job cutting wood to supply firewood to a military base or cutting wood to supply firewood to a railroad camp. And then they realize another one of the guys cutting wood has sort of a side gig, shooting buffalo. And then they realize, oh, I could do that. And then they realize if I got a wagon of my own to haul this meat, I could just kill buffalo all the time. And so there's like a, a series of years leading up to the hide hunt where there's sort of this professional class developing. And there's still like a huge rush of outsiders once the hide hunt gets underway.
1:16:55 Speaker 06 But like, there's very much like a, a well-developed expertise around killing buffalo. Like especially in Kansas where it, where it gets ripping.
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1:19:09 Steven Rinella? We should touch real quick on this, this idea that we talked about with the long hunters that oftentimes a long hunting expedition would be people related, strong familial connection, coming out of a specific settlement. Oftentimes like in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, but coming out of these small agrarian settlements, loosely connected individuals and they become like a, like they launch a long hunting expedition. Could be 40 guys, it could be five guys. The mountain men, 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.
1:19:55 Steven Rinella? 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 like surprised I'd never heard it before. It's so great. We get into this thing called siphon. I don't know where you picked it. Randall introduced this word to me. Siphon migration. Where a person will, a person will move out west. Start doing well in the buffalo hide trade. And then, and then he functions as a sort of siphon and starts pulling people out with him.
1:20:27 Speaker 06 Come on out, you guys got to get in on this.
1:20:29 Steven Rinella? 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. Um, you also have these organizations that they've called an outfit. Who are coming together oftentimes like under specific job titles. It's a hierarchical structure. The mountain men would work for these giant, well, at the time would have been like corporations. They had financiers, they're like VC backed corporations hired the mountain men. There's no corporate structure with the hide hunters.
1:21:14 Steven Rinella? It's like whoever has the money to buy the equipment is the top of the hierarchy. And they'll be that usually that guy is the shooter. But then he has like specific roles with specific for specific skill sets. You have a shooter. You have a skinner, maybe you have two skinners. You have a camp cook and these are like assigned roles and you can, you can climb through the hierarchy.
1:21:39 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:21:40 Steven Rinella? Um, but it's like, it's like a, a, it's a job description. It's a skill and you can go apply that skill. I could be, I'm going to go cook for Randall's outfit. I'm going to get sick of that. And the next year I'm going to go and sign a similar deal and get a job cooking for Phil's outfit.
1:21:56 Speaker 06 Yeah, and it's the, the.
1:22:00 Speaker 06 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.
1:22:11 Speaker 06 Blueprint for how a crew works. And if you, if you make it through a season with one crew, you can pretty seamlessly hop onto the other crew. And we think about this as like guys in relatively dangerous professions.
1:22:26 Speaker 06 You know, if you think about like logging, like wildfire crews or commercial fishermen.
1:22:32 Speaker 06 It's often people sort of in dangerous jobs. There's high turnover and there's like some hazing involved and, 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, 12, 15. I think they're in rare instances, there's some crews of 20, but they, 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.
1:23:15 Speaker 06 And what's sort of to circle back one bit, when you're talking about the, all the money in the, in the fur business being tied up in like the corporations that are hiring the trappers. The big money in the buffalo hunt story is with these companies that are sort of in the import export business. They're, they're trafficking in, in furs and leather and other goods, but they're just sort of, they're in Kansas City, sort of these big hubs on the eastern side of the plains. 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 plains, explaining to guys how to
1:23:57 Speaker 06 skin, how to, how to care for your skins, how to like, like what the process is, what they want. And then essentially all you need is a wagon, which is still a big investment in a rifle. And you go out and kill all the buffalo you can, and then a fur buyer or a, a hide buyer, I should say. Moves, either you go to town and sell your hides to them in the town and they're sort of a field agent for one of these big brokers. Or they are even traveling around in the field to different camps and hauling the hides away, buying them directly in camp. So the hunters themselves and their crews are sort of these autonomous units on the periphery.
1:24:41 Speaker 06 And then there's a real hierarchical network of buyers that sort of vacuum and funnel all this stuff up to places like Kansas City.
1:24:50 Steven Rinella? 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 War II, we lost about 250,000 Americans. In Vietnam, we lost 57,000 Americans. In the Civil War, we lost, this is combatants.
1:25:28 Speaker 06 And when our population was considerably lower.
1:25:30 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Between the two armies comprised of Americans, 700,000 dead combatants. In many communities, you took away an entire, in many communities, the war carried away entire generations of men. In communities, you went and you eliminated people, say, 17 to 28 or so. I mean, you like, you had it be where that town lost that bracket of individuals. That war killed off 8% of the white men aged between 13 and 43.
1:26:21 Steven Rinella? Remember that we lost 57,000 in US soldiers in Vietnam? 50,000, 50,000 civilians died in the Civil War.
1:26:31 Steven Rinella? 60,000 people lost arms and legs in the Civil War. So by beginning this story in the Civil War, it's like you have
1:26:44 Steven Rinella? literally destroyed huge swaths of the country.
1:26:49 Steven Rinella? 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 happen. But a big part of the, a big impetus in like explaining the situation is
1:27:08 Steven Rinella? I feel that coming and saying, oh, the Hyde Hunters
1:27:15 Steven Rinella? were these sadistic people hell-bent on destroying American wildlife. It's not accurate. I think that some of them, not think, some of them were aware of the destruction they were doing. Some of them in the moment articulated an acute awareness of the destruction they were doing. But there's more to the story than just to be that these were like sadistic, money-grubbing
1:27:45 Steven Rinella? executioners of wildlife. Like, these were often people that had, like, not just like little opportunity, no opportunity, and though we weren't using this term at the time about trauma, being shell-shocked, whatever, people coming out of horrific circumstances with absolutely no promise of employment.
1:28:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, and and I think too, 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.
1:28:28 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:28:28 Speaker 06 Like, that's the situation on the ground in 1865. And there's something like 200,000 people in the South lost their homes. So they're, you know, not only, or 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.
1:28:52 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:28:53 Speaker 06 And like we mentioned, you know, there's a, there's a clear opportunity in the buffalo market. And then the other, the other side of that is, like, the 1870s 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, you find these, in these accounts, like, somebody's explaining why they became a buffalo hunter. And they're like, well, the grasshoppers ate my crops.
1:29:24 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:29:24 Speaker 06 And, and I had to feed my family, so, so I became a buffalo hunter. Um, there's another story that a, a bunch of butchers from St. Louis
1:29:36 Speaker 06 had shown up on the plains looking to cut buffalo because they'd all lost their jobs in, in a financial crisis. Right? And so, like, even after the Civil War, the country's on very rocky footing. And, and it's very, it's overwhelmingly clear from the stories that these people left behind that there's, there's obviously some, like, hunger for adventure and frontier life and all that. But it's so overwhelmingly clear that these are people who are desperate.
1:30:11 Steven Rinella? Another thing that's kicking out. People on to the frontier is the, the, the, 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. Um, the Northern Pacific Railroad paused in Bismarck, North Dakota, like just shut down. So you'd bring out all these workers and create this job opportunity and now and then money would dry up.
1:30:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:30:37 Steven Rinella? Things that happen and all of a sudden it's just like, but we're done.
1:30:41 Speaker 06 Yep.
1:30:41 Steven Rinella? And so here you have people on the frontier who just had the, the, the rug pulled out.
1:30:47 Speaker 06 And they can't get a bus ticket home.
1:30:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And so that you'd like, you were sort of like dumping people just like displacing dumped people out on the plains, on the American frontier. And a lot of these guys, if you look at how they creep into it, like Randall said, I mean, they're doing like pretty lowly work, like cutting firewood and then trying to haul firewood and sell it to a military fort. No one's getting rich cutting firewood. But that, that is putting them in position to be queued up to participate in the hide hunt.
1:31:17 Speaker 06 Yeah. One, one story that is probably worth mentioning is there's a guy named Elijah Cox, who's actually a freed slave. And he, um, he served in the Buffalo Soldiers, the cavalry, the all-black cavalry unit. And he gets discharged and he's, he's discharged in Texas. He's, I believe he's born in Michigan. So he gets discharged in Texas during, 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.
1:32:00 Speaker 06 And, and after a couple of seasons of serving as a Skinner, one of the hunters in the outfit like breaks his leg or something. And so Elijah Cox gets to be a shooter. And so it's one of these sort of strange stories of like, he spent, he spent many years involved in the trade, worked his way up, had no, it was not a plan that he had, right? It's just circumstances where he found himself and, and ultimately, I think he killed some 700.
1:32:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah, he had an estimate of how many he 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.
1:32:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, he was, he was like medically discharged.
1:32:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah, so here he is, he's just on the frontier.
1:32:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, with no network, like, like nothing to fall back on.
1:32:55 Steven Rinella? 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, all I know is I had plenty to eat and I always had money.
1:33:14 Speaker 06 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 like 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 was pretty, pretty good.
1:33:34 Steven Rinella? Lot of meat.
1:33:35 Speaker 06 Yeah, I, I, what I said earlier, he was, he was born to escape slaves, he was born in Michigan, his parents were both escaped slaves from the South.
1:33:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the Buffalo Soldiers play into this story a little bit, and we get into much greater detail in the project, but the, that term, you hear that term often, like even the, what's his name, Bob, the Bob Marley reference, I believe it was the Comanche or Apache, I'm not, I can't remember who.
1:34:04 Speaker 06 Likened the hair.
1:34:07 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:34:08 Speaker 06 Oh, they they liken the hair of these black American cavalry members, they liken the hair to the wool of a buffalo. So they would say they were a buffalo soldier.
1:34:17 Steven Rinella? Man, it became like a 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, and they and they're having mix ups. Like that they're oftentimes during this little period that happened down in Texas. Buffalo hide hunters are joining groups of buffalo soldiers fighting against Comanche.
1:34:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, the situation, maybe we should get into this, like the the phases of the hunt.
1:34:56 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the three phases.
1:34:57 Speaker 06 Because it starts in Kansas, really.
1:35:00 Speaker 06 Along the tracks of of the railroads, the Topeka, Santa Fe, in particular, Dodge City is like a big hub. And then the slaughter sort of goes on until there aren't any buffalo in Kansas anymore. And they the hide hunters push into Texas. And Texas.
1:35:23 Speaker 06 It becomes a much like at first, they're so far away from any hub of settlement. They're still hauling the hauling the hides back up to Dodge City. But they're bumping into Comanches and and there's a real recognition on the part of the Comanches and other their their allies. That the hide hunters are killing off their economic lifeblood. And so it becomes sort of a very bloody theater for the for the hide hunt, where hide hunters sometimes are serving as sort of like proxy fighters for the US Army and the Army is serving as sort of proxy fighters for the the buffalo hunters.
1:36:05 Speaker 06 And then at some point, they kill all the buffalo in Texas. And they roll up to Montana. And in Montana, it's it's sort of a mop up job. And and in a couple of years, the the herds of the northern plains are basically blinked out.
1:36:18 Steven Rinella? That's a it's an interesting point about the indigenous Americans that.
1:36:25 Steven Rinella? When we get into the deer skin trade, like in our long hunter piece, we focus on, we focus really heavily on these Euro-American, these white long hunters. But that, the deer skin trade was really built by native hunters. Before these guys like Boone and people started going into that area, there had been long a colonial trade in deer skins. And in the early days of that trade, those deer skins were 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.
1:37:05 Steven Rinella? Like, the Flatheads were famous for having engaged in the beaver skin tribe trade. The Blackfeet, some historians like to point out how the Blackfeet sat it out, but there's other accounts of the Blackfeet engaging pretty heavily in trading to the north, but they, they did it. The mountain men would often overwinter with tribes. A lot of mountain men were very tightly associated, like Jim Bridger 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.
1:37:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, like, there's no cultural exchange, there's no sort of shared interests, there's no allies.
1:37:53 Steven Rinella? No. As we get into, we had a whole chapter that kind of sets up this thing. There was, we're talking about, when we talk about hide hunters, there was a thing called, what we call the robe hunt, or the robe trade. There was a commercial Native American trade, which was small scale and very artisan for tanned buffalo robes that were used as insulation. Like, if you were on a wagon, 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
1:38:36 Steven Rinella? could be a winter-killed Indian tanned buffalo robe from the northern plains. So Indians would shoot buffalo at the right time of year, in the right location.
1:38:48 Steven Rinella? The women would tan it into a finished good. And that finished good was sold, but that was, that was small.
1:38:56 Speaker 06 And there's, there's bottlenecks, there's natural constraints on the scale of that trade because of the seasonality. And especially because of that labor part.
1:39:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, like a woman.
1:39:05 Speaker 06 Could tan 10 a year.
1:39:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah, a woman.
1:39:09 Steven Rinella? 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.
1:39:19 Steven Rinella? 10 robes.
1:39:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:39:21 Steven Rinella? A year. A hide hunter.
1:39:25 Steven Rinella? That's just hunting for skin, not tanned goods, but just hunting and selling skin, a hide hunter. They would get into long periods. Where they are killing 30 and 40 a day. There is examples of killing way more than that. We get into some of these extraordinary kills. But routinely, like in, in good conditions. They're waking up every day and killing 30 to 40.
1:39:50 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
1:39:50 Steven Rinella? And a, and a woman. A, a woman in a Native American family on the Great Plains might be able to produce 10 robes.
1:39:57 Speaker 06 And annually. And like we said, they're, the hide hunters are only drying the skins out. And then they're being tanned on an industrial scale in the east. There's sort of a bottomless appetite for buffalo skins. And there's really a bottomless appetite for leather at this time because. The leather making industry, the tanning industry. Has grown and consolidated and mechanized and. Made all these improvements in, in 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.
1:40:40 Speaker 06 Is just absorbing this on a scale that like native communities could not have during the robe trade era.
1:40:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the, the, they're being tanned. Where you have a native woman tanning a buffalo hide with hand tools on the ground, using a buffalo's brain. Okay, or a concoction of liver and brain to soften it. When the hide hunters get going, their skins are being tanned in railroad fed tanneries. In buildings that are 300 yards long. By companies that own, there's one company we talk about that owns 25,000 acres of timberland.
1:41:18 Speaker 06 In Pennsylvania.
1:41:20 Steven Rinella? Because they want tamarack and hemlock, they own 25,000 acres of timberland to produce bark to make tannic acid.
1:41:30 Speaker 06 And this is a place, like if you've heard the term a 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, in rural Pennsylvania that has nine story buildings where they're drying buffalo hides. And they're tanning them in these huge vats. They have rows of hundreds of vats. And, uh, yeah, like it's almost, it's, it's sort of startling when you see photos.
1:42:09 Speaker 06 And these tanneries continue to operate even after the buffalo. It was like when the buffalo hide trade was going on. They switched all over to tanning, um, a majority of their business was buffalo skins. And then afterwards they simply switched back over to cattle skins.
1:42:26 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's a really, one of the more fascinating points, um, like a discovery that I had in working on this. Oftentimes when we go into these projects, like we're going to do it with some level of pre-awareness about the details. And we'll, we'll be able to, like Randall and I can sit and we can kind of map out based on what we already know. We can kind of map out 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.
1:43:02 Steven Rinella? I, um, and I kind of understand how I came to think this now.
1:43:08 Steven Rinella? I had thought from previous research, in fact, oh, you know what I was gonna mention? This story, like, I wrote a book, I think it came out, and so, I think it was 2008. In 2008, I published a book, American Buffalo in Search of a Lost Icon, and it tells the story of the species from, you know, the Pleistocene, it tells the story of the species from the Ice Age up into the future. It's this whole overview of the animal. There's a part of a chapter where I talk about the hide hunters. So have you ever seen like an exploded diagram where you're looking at like a piece of machinery,
1:43:52 Steven Rinella? and then there's like a little arrow pointing to a part of the machinery, and on the next page is an exploded diagram of that little component? This is an exploded diagram of what is perhaps the most interesting part about that story, where this is taking that little, that couple pages about the hide hunters and American buffalo, and blowing it out to something as long as the American buffalo. So there's, if you've read that, and I know many of you have, if you read that, there's like little bits of overlapping stuff, but this is like a greatly, this focuses on the most important stretch of a couple decades in that story, and tells a very detailed accounting
1:44:37 Steven Rinella? of something that I briefly gloss over in the book. But in that work, I had come to this thing, and you'll see it repeated, like, I know where I got it. This idea that there was a invention, okay, or a revolutionary new process, that all of a sudden made it so. Buffalo leather was like the greatest leather of all time. Okay, you'll see this, that they came up with new tanning methods, and all of a sudden, lordy, lordy, 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.
1:45:21 Speaker 06 You'll see that in every single thing.
1:45:24 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:45:25 Speaker 06 Almost every single thing you read on the subject. Even, even like people writing in the 1890s.
1:45:30 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:45:31 Speaker 06 Uh, like William Temple Hornaday, like they, they're saying there's this eureka moment where all of a sudden there's value in Buffalo weather. And it goes, it's like a boom and a bust.
1:45:43 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:45:44 Speaker 06 Um, 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, we talked about this a lot, like we gotta find that, we gotta have that in there. Our, our audience is interested in tanning and working with skins and all this stuff. Like if there's one thing we, we need to have, it's that. And it just, it doesn't really exist.
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1:48:19 Steven Rinella? You know what'd be maybe a perhaps a better way of thinking about what actually happened?
1:48:24 Steven Rinella? What's that wood that everybody uses under decking now? It's like that composite wood?
1:48:30 Steven Rinella? It's like chipped up. It's like chipped up wood with it with with resins and adhesives.
1:48:36 Steven Rinella? I don't know. Like the fake wood. Okay, nevermind that. Particle board. Plywood. Yeah, plywood. Sure. Everybody knows plywood. All right. Let's say you got a mill and they make 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 developed this strategy and they can use white pine and they're making this really nice plywood and they're selling plywood like hotcakes. And all of a sudden someone says, hey, man, you know how we're paying $5 per unit of wood on white pine? Do you know that we can get a ponderosa pine?
1:49:20 Steven Rinella? For three bucks? And so they go to their engineers, hey, what happens when you use ponderosa pine? And the engineers go, oh, you know, it turns out if you, if you add a little more resin, it's the same thing, man. Like plywood's plywood. We could definitely use that ponderosa pine. Uh, in fact, if it's three bucks and not five bucks, we'll take as much of that ponderosa pine as we can get our hands on.
1:49:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:49:46 Steven Rinella? And they keep making plywood and people keep buying plywood. And a lot of these people that are buying it, they wouldn't know white pine from ponderosa pine if they saw it. But 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. It's gone.
1:50:05 Speaker 06 Back to white pine.
1:50:06 Steven Rinella? Ah, I guess, let's just keep running that white pine.
1:50:08 Speaker 06 That's great.
1:50:08 Steven Rinella? It was good while it lasted.
1:50:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:50:12 Steven Rinella? And it was like, that's a better way of thinking about leather consumption. Because they were being like Asiatic water buffalo? Sure.
1:50:21 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:50:22 Steven Rinella? Cattle from South America? Sure.
1:50:25 Speaker 06 The United States is importing.
1:50:26 Steven Rinella? Hides in Texas? Sure. Buffalo hides? Why not?
1:50:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, like there's, there's, the United States is importing leather anywhere it can, or hides from anywhere it can, like sourcing hides. And all of a sudden, uh, with the railroads, they can access however many million hides are just sort of walking around out there on the plains and it can be sucked into this, this pre-existing, you know, uh, 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.
1:51:03 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:51:03 Speaker 06 Um, there's some, there's, there's some changes in method where they're, they're using hot water, like, uh, they're, they're liming 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 in processes over time that happened to align with the, their ability to ship buffalo hides by the hundreds and thousands every year.
1:51:34 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the challenge is. If anybody that's skinned a deer knows that the belly, right?
1:51:40 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
1:51:41 Steven Rinella? The belly's real thin.
1:51:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:51:43 Steven Rinella? The hide's much thicker on either side of the backbone. Um, you know, the inside of the legs is real thin. The hide's 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 product you can? And so they're doing all this stuff like they're like, they're, they're, they're like a bad, imagine basically that you're sanding it down.
1:52:03 Speaker 06 Well, and I think we should just before that, I mean, we're talking, we, I don't think we've mentioned yet belting.
1:52:08 Steven Rinella? No, we have to talk about where all this like, why?
1:52:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:52:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah. The country had always used leather. The number one thing we wanted leather for shoes.
1:52:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:52:18 Steven Rinella? Like let shoes were leather. Tac, horse equipment, harness equipment, all that stuff was made out of leather, but then all of a sudden they need.
1:52:28 Speaker 06 Belting, which is like, if you picture, if you picture a timing belt on your snow machine or, or whatever in your car, like a belt is simply something that at the most basic level takes movement from one place and transfers that movement to something else, right? So one thing spins, the belt spins through it and the other side spins. Does that?
1:52:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:52:53 Speaker 06 Does that make sense? Um, 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, a stream like a, like a, you've got a water wheel and a stream and the wheels 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, a grinding mill or, you know, you could power a saw with that, you could power any sorts of other like mechanical tools with that power, but it all has to be transmitted through one thing moves, another thing moves, another thing moves, another thing moves. Cause they can't just zap it down a wire.
1:53:36 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:53:37 Speaker 06 Like in the age of electricity. And so the leather belt replaces this older system of.
1:53:46 Speaker 06 Shafts and cogs and wheels and things like that. And it's revolutionary because you can spread power out across a factory floor
1:53:57 Speaker 06 in all types of different directions and you can spread it out to different machines or whatever. And this is something that's invented in America. The leather belt drive and then it's sort of perfected during the Civil War as like there's this increase in wartime manufacturing. And so that coincides again with the railroads reach the plains. 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.
1:54:29 Steven Rinella? 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
1:54:41 Speaker 06 A Ford plant.
1:54:42 Steven Rinella? Yeah, the lathing operation for like the drive shafts at a Ford plant.
1:54:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:54:48 Steven Rinella? And the caption on the photo points out that what you're looking at is 50 miles. It's just a picture, a bunch of people in a factory, all dressed in black and white. That's a joke. A bunch of people at a factory.
1:55:02 Speaker 06 I'll talk it like this, huh?
1:55:05 Steven Rinella? Standing at equipment and over their heads is nothing but belting.
1:55:10 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:55:10 Steven Rinella? Because somewhere is a big steam engine running and they're transmitting power to all these lades and it says you're looking at 50 miles of leather belting. But some of this leather belting is 10 feet wide.
1:55:24 Speaker 06 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 it almost looks like like a puppet theater, right? And so essentially, the way that before the age of electricity, the way that this worked is you had a steam engine and that's turning a huge belt. And that's called the prime mover of the factory, like the steam engine begins moving things and then that belt moves these long shafts that are suspended in parallel rows
1:56:09 Speaker 06 above the factory floor. Those shafts then are linked together by belts so that when one turns, they all turn. So you have the prime mover and that's moving a big belt that turns one of these shafts and then that shaft is turning all the other shafts. And then each individual machine is connected to those moving shafts on the ceiling by more belts. And if you're gonna 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 you are moving continuously. So if you're all of a sudden, I need to, you know, 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
1:56:52 Speaker 06 your machine and now your machine's running. And to stop it, you disengage it from the belt again with that with that clutch.
1:56:59 Steven Rinella? And that power's always cranking and they're even running primary belts into other buildings.
1:57:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, to other buildings and and if you think about it like today, if you have a big manufacturing operation, every place you need an outlet or an extension cord, before electricity, that all has to be connected physically by moving things. Like if you want to move whatever, a rock crusher, it has to be connected by moving parts to moving parts to moving parts to the steam engine or whatever is is generating your your power there. So like when we think about the expansion of of the industrial economy, like in the 1870s, 80s, 90s.
1:57:39 Speaker 06 It's all predicated on the ability of belts to connect machines to steam engines. And so that's like, it's, it's, it's almost this bottomless demand for leather. And buffalo leather does lend itself well to this because of its inherent properties. But as Steve pointed out, like, the Ford is still using leather belts in the 1920s, 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 chute at the right time.
1:58:14 Steven Rinella? 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 plains. And it's very well documented. And it's a really interesting narrative of how this played out is a tannery
1:58:34 Steven Rinella? has a desire to experiment with some buffalo skins. So they call like a broker, a guy that deals in buffalo meat and other things out in Kansas. And they're like, hey, we'd like to get 500 hides to mess with.
1:58:52 Steven Rinella? He's not a hunter. He goes to one of these railroad meat hunters and says to a railroad meat hunter, hey, uh, can you get me the 500 hides? So here's a guy, he takes the order, and he needs to find someone to fulfill the order. He contracts a guy, a meat hunter, to fulfill his order for 500. The meat hunter shoots, I think, 551.
1:59:15 Steven Rinella? Turns the 500 into the guy that bought them for him, but he's got this extra 50 to burn. Sends the extra 50 to a brother in Boston.
1:59:25 Speaker 06 New York.
1:59:26 Steven Rinella? Sorry, New York. But the buyer, who then sold.
1:59:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:59:30 Steven Rinella? Sends the other 50 to a brother, who then is 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 on about 500, there's a tannery sitting on about 50. Both of these tanneries mess around with the hides and both come back and say, uh, we'd like a lot.
1:59:55 Speaker 06 Give me all you got.
1:59:56 Steven Rinella? We'd like a lot. And that starts it.
2:00:00 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:00:01 Steven Rinella? That is, it is a very distinct like beginning.
2:00:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, that brother.
2:00:06 Steven Rinella? That's the beginning.
2:00:06 Speaker 06 That brother in New York, as soon as he sells them and the company says, we want 2,000 more and probably more after that. He just gets on a train to Kansas and he, he finds his brother in Dodge City and said, this is just the business now.
2:00:21 Steven Rinella? Yep. It's game on.
2:00:21 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:00:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:00:22 Speaker 06 It's game on.
2:00:24 Steven Rinella? 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.
2:00:35 Speaker 06 They heard.
2:00:36 Steven Rinella? They got the news.
2:00:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:00:39 Steven Rinella? Like the day they got the news where people like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's the hides dummy.
2:00:43 Speaker 06 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. Cause 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.
2:00:56 Steven Rinella? Screw the meat.
2:00:57 Speaker 06 Take the hides off and, and bring them to here and he'll buy everyone he can bring them. And he, he's like dumbfounded. He, cause he's still out there trying to cure hams and stuff on the plains and, and sort of his, the world has moved past that.
2:01:13 Steven Rinella? Uh, another one, this kind of, this is the last part of this that, um, we're getting to right now. Uh, there is.
2:01:26 Steven Rinella? If you, if you study this area, this, if you study this era on like a superficial level, um, you'll always find out about all the waste. And without wanting to.
2:01:42 Steven Rinella? Without wanting to do a sort of revisionist history, you know, I, I, I, let me, let me better explain what I'm saying.
2:01:51 Steven Rinella? The, the, the Hyde hunters wasted enormous quantities of meat.
2:01:56 Steven Rinella? But there's more to the story. Okay. You could picture someone coming to this, depending on their motivations. You could picture someone coming to this and saying like, it's all a lie. They didn't waste all that meat.
2:02:10 Speaker 06 They sold a lot of meat.
2:02:11 Steven Rinella? Like they sold a lot of meat. And as we got into this, we're like, let me tell you two things that are real true.
2:02:20 Steven Rinella? Man, they sold a lot of meat. But man, they wasted a lot, lot, lot more.
2:02:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:02:31 Steven Rinella? You could get into, like, we get into all the numbers on this. You can get into what seems like staggering quantities of sold meat. When you get into the tonnages, the, like, the counts on tongues, the barrels of tongues, the trainloads of meat. Right? The vast quantities of smoked hams.
2:02:57 Speaker 06 And they talk about it a lot.
2:02:58 Steven Rinella? And you'd look and be like, my God.
2:03:02 Speaker 06 These guys were resourceful.
2:03:04 Steven Rinella? Train cars full of meat.
2:03:06 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:03:06 Steven Rinella? Right? And you could spin this whole narrative about all this meat.
2:03:11 Steven Rinella? Or you could start going like, okay, let's start trying to do a little math. Let's do a little math.
2:03:19 Steven Rinella? Like, here's a guy, and these guys had meticulous records because they're, 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?
2:03:29 Speaker 06 Right.
2:03:30 Steven Rinella? For his cow hides, for his bull hides, for his kips or calf hides, for his meat. And like, how many pounds of meat and what per, you know, it's like, these are like, we are very much like, we talk with long hunters. The law, a lot of the information about the long hunters is because a historian later went and talked to their grandkid.
2:03:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:03:47 Steven Rinella? And he's like, no, I swear grandpa said that he got $2 for his deer hides or whatever, you know? And that becomes like the historic record. Some dude's recollection about what his dad told him or his grandpa told him. Here, it's like, There's too much material. There's tons of material.
2:04:02 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:04:03 Steven Rinella? 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.
2:04:11 Steven Rinella? 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 me. And you start looking at their numbers, it's like, man. Dude, they sold a lot of meat, but like, it seems like about 99%.
2:04:30 Speaker 06 Was wasted.
2:04:31 Steven Rinella? Like, be like, okay, so they're selling about six pounds?
2:04:35 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:04:36 Steven Rinella? They're selling maybe like, if you look at his whole hide haul. And then you look at his meat receipts. You're like, okay, he's selling about six pounds per animal.
2:04:50 Speaker 06 But it, but at the same time. At six pounds in animals, he's selling 10,000, 20,000 pounds of meat in a year.
2:04:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:05:00 Speaker 06 So it's just like.
2:05:01 Steven Rinella? It's a real roller coaster. Cause you go into 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.
2:05:11 Speaker 06 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, or tuck a little money like away for a, a slow season, like. If they could, if they could haul some meat to a, to a railroad pretty easily, they did it. You know, if they're hunting in super remote areas, they're not tra- trading in meat. But like, if you can get an extra couple bucks off an animal by, by curing its hams and, and hump and stuff like. They did that. And so. There's, it's a, it's a real complicated explanation of it all, but.
2:05:49 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Here's, here's a interesting. Piece of this is kind of show like the, the hard scrabble nature, but also the, um.
2:06:00 Steven Rinella? A kind of persnickety quality of these individuals when it comes to or like a penny pinching kind of miserly quality to like the economics. There was a product that came from the buffalo. Um, that was a stuffing of mattress stuffing material. And it was, if you picture the forehead on a buffalo was called the mop. Okay. That had value and um, it was used to stuff mattresses, um, stuff upholstery. It was hard to get out, hard to pull out. Like they didn't want the mop skin. They just wanted the hair in bags. So these hide hunters, like you couldn't pull it.
2:06:42 Steven Rinella? But if anyone has dealt with animals like, you know, that like we have a term when the hair starts to slip. Like picture 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. Drowned in the river and washed out. And you go grab a handful of the hair on that thing. What happens when you grab a handful of that hair and pull?
2:07:03 Speaker 06 Comes right out.
2:07:04 Steven Rinella? Comes right, it's called the hair is slipping.
2:07:06 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:07:07 Steven Rinella? So in the hide trade, even today, the worst thing, talk to your taxidermist. 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.
2:07:19 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:07:20 Steven Rinella? It's rotten. Like if you go to your taxidermist with a bear rug or a deer cape and he grabs the tuft of that hair and pulls and half the hair in his hand comes free. You just, you messed up.
2:07:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:07:30 Steven Rinella? 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, we explain how they skin it. When they skin the carcass, they'd stop behind the ears. So a buffalo hide that went to the market is missing, it's missing its face. It's cut off behind the ears. They would wait till the carcass is rotted enough that the hair would start to slip. And then they would go back out into the field and pull mops.
2:08:00 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:08:01 Steven Rinella? And stuff it into sacks.
2:08:03 Speaker 06 When they're good and rotten.
2:08:04 Steven Rinella? Meaning if what, where there's money to be made, they were there to make the money.
2:08:11 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:08:11 Steven Rinella? It's just at times, it's like.
2:08:16 Steven Rinella? It 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.
2:08:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:08:24 Steven Rinella? Like, this wasn't like a laziness thing. It was a, it was just businessman.
2:08:30 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:08:30 Steven Rinella? It was business. It was business.
2:08:32 Speaker 06 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 weirdest, you know, people getting charged by buffalo, people getting pounded in hailstorms, people getting killed, people finding bodies.
2:08:53 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
2:08:54 Speaker 06 Uh, people doing really weird stuff, people eating weird stuff, people playing pranks on each other.
2:08:59 Steven Rinella? Die in weird ways.
2:09:00 Speaker 06 Dying in weird ways.
2:09:02 Steven Rinella? We got a guy, we have a big section about all the people, um, killed by buffaloes that they wounded.
2:09:08 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:09:10 Steven Rinella? We're, we're working on an animation project. Anyways, there's a guy who shoots a buffalo, gets up to it, it's still alive, pulls out his pistol to finish it off. As he pulls out his pistol, the buffalo jumps up and starts coming for him. He really quickly tries to mount his horse to get away and in mounting us, cause he's got his pistol out now and it's cocked. In mounting his horse, he has a negligent discharge and shoots his own horse. So now the horse takes off wounded. The buffalo is wounded, chasing the horse and then both the horse and the buffalo die.
2:09:48 Speaker 06 And he walks away.
2:09:50 Steven Rinella? Walks away. Other guys, other hide hunters, they go missing. This is a kind of, we, we, we give a handful of these, these stories that play out very similarly.
2:10:00 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:10:01 Steven Rinella? Bob is off hunting. Um, Bob don't come home at night. In the morning, you go looking for Bob and lo and behold, there's a dead buffalo laying there and there's a dead Bob laying next to it.
2:10:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:10:19 Steven Rinella? And Bob is in bad shape.
2:10:21 Speaker 06 It turns out that when you shoot buffalo by the dozens, you make some bad shots and you end up encountering some angry buffalo.
2:10:28 Steven Rinella? Yep, and Bob is badly bruised.
2:10:31 Speaker 06 Yeah.
2:10:34 Steven Rinella? Anyhow, uh, meat eaters, American history, the Hyde hunters. 1865 to 1883. We never explained 1883. So you know, when you hear an interview with an author and they don't want to tell the end?
2:10:51 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:10:52 Steven Rinella? Where you're in the end, you're like, so did they catch him? Like, well, I'm not going to tell. Does he die in the end? Not going to tell. Well.
2:11:04 Speaker 06 Oh, you can do this. Did the buffalo die in the end?
2:11:07 Steven Rinella? Yes, but what year?
2:11:08 Speaker 06 Not telling.
2:11:11 Steven Rinella? Not telling. Um, I let out to my, uh, I'm a huge Fury Road and Furiosa fan.
2:11:18 Speaker 06 Mm hmm.
2:11:19 Steven Rinella? I let out to my daughter. Early on in Furiosa that her boyfriend doesn't make it through to the end. She was very upset with me for letting that leak.
2:11:28 Speaker 06 Hmm.
2:11:29 Steven Rinella? So I hope you're not watching that one.
2:11:32 Speaker 06 Keep leaving that out, Phil.
2:11:33 Steven Rinella? Thanks for joining. Meat eaters, American history, of course, go back, uh, the long hunters. Then check out the mountain men and then, uh, dig into the new one available now. The Hyde hunters, 1865 to 1883. 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, um, wait and see when it happens, we will tell you about it. Thank you very much for listening.
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