Pod Insights The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 661: So You Want To Be A Mountain Man About this episode Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/.
Topics discussed: Order MeatEater's American History: The Mountain Men (1806-1840) https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US&srsltid=AfmBOooAidJ1t_0_zMZ0olv41F1HYPm1XMcSSPbEuQ_wiIbsWLI1tKIH; Colter and astounding feats; the importance of canoes; politics and power struggles;t aking a meticulous journal; between the British in the north and no more beavers in the south; how you become a mountain man; market hunters today as a bad deal for wildlife; the greasiest, most louse-ridden group; and more.
Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork
Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en
MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 25,071 words · 7 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.
0:04 Steven Rinella? You need credit to buy, well, pretty much any big thing. So how do you get started? Easy. The One Pay Builder Card. It's simple and smart. One Pay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans. And the One Pay Builder Card is an easy way to build credit. Just use it to make everyday purchases, build your credit history, and then you can work up to the big milestones. Buying a new car or a new house. Or hell, maybe something I'm always thinking about, which is another boat. Those moments start with small, consistent steps with the One Pay Builder Card. Download the One Pay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.
0:47 Speaker 02 One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through One Pay at onepay.com/podcast.
1:02 Steven Rinella? When you're outside cleaning fish, working in your garden, or just grinding through a long day of work, your hands take a beating. Dry, cracked hands can be brutal when you need to get work done. O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream. Get your hands back and work in order. This stuff is the greatest stuff in the world. Like most hand creams, you put them on and then you're all kind of greasy and slimy and you can't grab stuff. You put the stuff on, your hands are ready to get back to work. It absorbs fast, creates a barrier to lock in moisture, and doesn't leave your hands greasy at all. Do yourself a favor. Next time your hands feel like dried out fish scales, get O'Keefe's Working Hands. I'm telling you, this stuff is amazing. Go to okeefescompany.com to get yours today.
1:42 Steven Rinella? That's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works good. Discover the best off-road trails with OnX Offroad, the ultimate GPS navigation app for adventures. With OnX Offroad, you can find open trails near you even without cell service. Unlike other maps, OnX has real, humans mapping trails.
2:10 Steven Rinella? Providing detailed information on trail difficulty, descriptions, pictures, and more. Start your adventure with a seven day free trial and experience the difference. Download OnX Offroad today and elevate your off-roading experience.
2:37 Speaker 03 This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless.
2:44 Speaker 04 The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.
2:48 Steven Rinella? The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F I R S T L I T E dot com.
3:08 Steven Rinella? Randall, you know what problem I'm having in the restroom?
3:13 Speaker 04 Continue.
3:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah. It's not what you think.
3:18 Steven Rinella? It's not like a flow issue. Problem I'm having in the restroom.
3:22 Speaker 04 Is it a stopping issue?
3:23 Steven Rinella? No. You know how I have that, that immaculate Eric Von Schmidt? Painting? Here fell Custer.
3:33 Speaker 04 I was just looking at it with Chili.
3:35 Steven Rinella? Well. You know how there's two urinals? It's a long painting. There's two urinals. There's the short boy and the tall boy.
3:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:45 Steven Rinella? I always go to the tall boy. I always go right.
3:47 Speaker 04 So you're only getting?
3:49 Steven Rinella? So I like have studied every single possible detail.
3:55 Speaker 04 Of half that painting.
3:56 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And it's a very like, it's a famous painting for really being sort of the most accurate representation from looking from, from Custer Hill, Last Stand Hill, whatever the hell they call it, down. It's like very accurate. I've looked at the point where I see now that he's got blood kind of staining Custer's groin area of his trousers. Custer's kind of already been hit a couple of times. So it's like either a plumber comes and.
4:29 Steven Rinella? Switches the urinals.
4:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:31 Steven Rinella? Or like I get a mirror image of the, I don't know.
4:34 Speaker 04 I was gonna say we can't.
4:35 Steven Rinella? Think of how to, or you start like, I just break to the, to the tall boy, start going in the low boy.
4:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, what, try that and then it'll give you like a different perspective and experience while you relieve yourself.
4:46 Speaker 04 Well, that's, yeah.
4:47 Steven Rinella? But what if people come in?
4:48 Speaker 04 I went.
4:48 Steven Rinella? Someone comes in and they're like, why is he going in the low boy?
4:52 Speaker 05 Hmm.
4:53 Speaker 06 Can I say something?
4:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:55 Speaker 06 I don't think like, I also go to the, the, the tall one as well.
4:59 Steven Rinella? The tall boy.
4:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, but I mean, I don't have any, I don't have any like trouble at the low boy if that's my only option, you know?
5:06 Speaker 05 You know, gravity.
5:07 Speaker 04 I, uh.
5:08 Steven Rinella? But even today, I went in there knowing.
5:10 Speaker 04 The angles are all wrong though. The angles are all wrong.
5:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah, cuz like, I don't want you guys now to get a weird idea about anything.
5:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:19 Steven Rinella? I don't know. Even today I went in there being like, damn, I gotta go look at the right side of the painting again.
5:24 Speaker 04 Well, I, I went in there.
5:24 Steven Rinella? I'm gonna start going to the low boy.
5:26 Speaker 04 I went in there today and I saw, I had beaten Chili to the door, so I just invited him to join me.
5:31 Steven Rinella? And who went to what side?
5:32 Speaker 04 Well, I gave him the courtesy of using the adult sized urinal and I just, you know, squatted my knees a little bit.
5:40 Steven Rinella? And then you guys talked about the painting.
5:41 Speaker 04 I did get to take in the left side of that painting, which I admit was pretty new to me.
5:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
5:46 Speaker 05 I feel totally left out cuz I don't know what that painting looks like.
5:50 Speaker 04 Well, you can go in there. It's a unisex restroom now.
5:52 Speaker 05 Right. Oh, wait, were we talking about the downstairs one or the upstairs?
5:55 Steven Rinella? Right down the hall here.
5:56 Speaker 05 Oh, right. And there's a stall in that one too that I do those.
5:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah, but you could get one of those cups. There's a cup that women can use to go at urinals.
6:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:03 Steven Rinella? You could just leave it hooked at the low boy if you want.
6:06 Speaker 04 Or you could just stand there and not use the urinal.
6:10 Speaker 05 I would definitely lock the door behind me. That, that would be some interesting stuff.
6:14 Steven Rinella? If you're using that funnel.
6:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, if I'm using that funnel. Not sure I care to use the funnel. Um.
6:21 Steven Rinella? You just stand there and look. That might look weird too.
6:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, right.
6:24 Steven Rinella? Or you lock the door.
6:25 Speaker 04 Just lock the door behind you.
6:26 Steven Rinella? And then you come out and someone says, were you in there going to the bathroom? And you'd have to be like, no.
6:31 Speaker 05 No, I was looking at the painting.
6:33 Steven Rinella? Well, then they'd say, well, why is the door locked?
6:36 Speaker 05 Cause I want to have my own private viewing.
6:39 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:40 Steven Rinella? That's true. Yeah, it wouldn't seem weird.
6:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:43 Speaker 06 No, I don't think there's anything weird about this at all.
6:45 Speaker 05 I'll try that later today.
6:46 Steven Rinella? The other thing about it, I remember hitting the year, I remember hitting the year when I was the age that Custer died at.
6:53 Speaker 06 Hmm.
6:54 Steven Rinella? I can't remember what it was, not terribly old. I remember being in that year.
6:57 Speaker 06 Forty's.
6:58 Steven Rinella? And when Seth got married, did I ever tell you about my speech?
7:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, you officiated his wedding.
7:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I married Seth.
7:05 Speaker 06 I was there.
7:06 Steven Rinella? Oh, you were there?
7:07 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
7:08 Steven Rinella? Well, can I relive it for a minute?
7:09 Speaker 05 Relive it, I wasn't there.
7:10 Speaker 06 Really quick, Custer, Custer died at thirty-six.
7:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
7:14 Speaker 06 Oh, God.
7:14 Speaker 05 Oh, wow.
7:15 Steven Rinella? But I took note when I was Custer's age. Thirty-six.
7:19 Speaker 06 Thirty-six.
7:20 Speaker 05 That's.
7:21 Steven Rinella? I know a lot of people are still idiots at thirty-six. So when I, when Seth got married, I realized, but I didn't tell anybody, I kept it secret. I realized that he was getting married on the, the anniversary of Custer's death.
7:37 Speaker 05 Oh.
7:39 Steven Rinella? Twenty-fourth, June twenty-four, June twenty-three, I can't remember.
7:41 Speaker 06 Twenty-fifth.
7:43 Steven Rinella? You sure?
7:44 Speaker 06 Uh, according to this article.
7:46 Steven Rinella? Twenty-fifth and twenty-six was the battle. Okay, June twenty-fifth. Seth got married on June twenty-fifth. So when I get up to do the preaching, I get up and say, today will forever mark a day. When a man made a terrible mistake.
8:03 Speaker 05 Sure, Kelsey, love that.
8:06 Steven Rinella? A man driven by hubris and pride.
8:10 Speaker 06 That's really good.
8:11 Steven Rinella? Oh, and I buttered it up.
8:14 Steven Rinella? Forever, people, this day will be remembered.
8:16 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
8:18 Steven Rinella? And then I was like, I was like, of course I'm referring to the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, hundred and whatever years ago today.
8:28 Speaker 04 And the wedding party visibly relaxed.
8:30 Speaker 05 Yes.
8:30 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
8:31 Speaker 05 Sighed with relief.
8:32 Steven Rinella? And I heard, I don't want to name names, but um, there was a family member, there were family members. I don't even want to say what side they were on. There were family members that were already not happy. That I was doing it.
8:48 Speaker 05 Oh.
8:48 Steven Rinella? And then they came away, they came away uh, even unhappier.
8:53 Speaker 04 Hmm.
8:55 Speaker 05 Steve stirring the pot.
8:57 Steven Rinella? Yeah, even unhappier.
8:59 Speaker 04 I didn't pick up on that vibe.
9:00 Steven Rinella? No, that's what I heard.
9:01 Speaker 04 Hmm.
9:02 Steven Rinella? Later, it was, it was divulged to me.
9:09 Steven Rinella? Uh, if you're listening today and then all indications are that you are, um,
9:16 Steven Rinella? at the, we're, we're going to talk about mountain men. We're going to talk about long hunters and we're going to talk about mountain men. We're going to talk about some other stuff too. We're going to explain what those people are. And then we're gonna, you're gonna keep on listening. Me and Randall are going to wrap it up. I'm here with Randall. He's gonna, I'm going to ask him about Mexico in a minute. Uh, me and Randall are going to wrap it up and then in, in our conversation about market hunting, long hunters, mountain men, a little bit of history about what we mean when we say those things. And then you're going to hear a chapter called Hunger and Thirst. And this chapter is a sneak peek at our new audio release, which is part of our Meat Eaters American History.
9:58 Steven Rinella? Um, if you remember, we did Meat Eaters American History, Volume One, The Long Hunters. Seventeen sixty.
10:08 Speaker 04 Three.
10:09 Steven Rinella? Three.
10:11 Steven Rinella? To seventeen seventy-five. In a minute, we'll explain why that, why those dates. Our, our new volume is, so now we have Meat Eaters American History, Volume Two. And we jump to, and we'll explain why these dates, we're jumping to the years, sorry, it's Meat Eaters American History, Volume Two, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840. We're gonna explain what that means. So, when you hear the word frontiersmen, what does it mean? When you hear the word mountain men, what does a mountain man actually mean? We're gonna talk about what a mountain man actually means, that we're gonna talk a little bit about the history of these different market hunters. And then we're gonna go into
10:54 Steven Rinella? a chapter from this book, this audio original called Hunger and Thirst. And it's, is it available now?
11:05 Speaker 04 If this is released on Monday, it'll, it'll be available on Tuesday.
11:09 Steven Rinella? It's available on the 11th.
11:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, and this is coming, this is, today is the 10th.
11:15 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah. Effectively, it'll probably be fine now.
11:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:19 Steven Rinella? Yeah. It'll probably be available now. If not, you buy it and you'll have the next day.
11:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:22 Steven Rinella? It's like 11 bucks, 11, 12 bucks?
11:24 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
11:25 Steven Rinella? I think, isn't it 11.99?
11:26 Speaker 05 Awesome, awesome deal.
11:28 Steven Rinella? 12 chapters, oh, it's five, six hours long.
11:30 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
11:31 Steven Rinella? It's a five or six hour long history of, how many hours you think it came in at? 12 chapters, seven hours?
11:39 Speaker 04 I haven't seen, I haven't seen a total. I would guess it's closer to, yeah, seven hours.
11:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah. It's like, it's a seven hour history of the mountain men. Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, John Colter, all those guys are explained, like what actually they did, why they did it. We're gonna talk a bunch about the different eras of the market hunters. And then we're gonna a little bit talk about what's to come in the future, as we kind of go down the line of these American mount, these American market hunters. You know what we should talk about too for a minute?
12:07 Speaker 04 Sure.
12:08 Steven Rinella? Is, there's a weird wrinkle, like everyone's familiar with the North American model of wildlife conservation, and in it is this thing about not commodifying wildlife. But then people are like, well, why can you sell deer hides? You can still sell deer hides. Why can you sell beaver meat? Why can you sell muskrat skins?
12:29 Speaker 04 Right.
12:29 Steven Rinella? Why can you sell taxidermy?
12:31 Speaker 04 Right.
12:33 Steven Rinella? Um, because in the market hunting world, you know, like...
12:38 Steven Rinella? Everyone knows the work that Theodore Roosevelt did for wildlife conservation. And one of the big things he did is he kind of waged war on the market hunters.
12:46 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
12:46 Steven Rinella? But we still have market hunters.
12:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I think it's, I mean, even beyond just the more obvious examples of like selling meat and selling hides, I feel like the commodifying wildlife is one of those elements of the North America model that's always people sort of debate over what constitutes commodifying wildlife. Like if you're charging people for access to
13:15 Speaker 04 hunt or whatever, I mean, it's one of those things where people like to make more expansive arguments about what is a violation of the North American model. It's, I feel like it's one of the pillars of the North American model where people debate.
13:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
13:29 Speaker 04 The, the, the scope of it.
13:32 Steven Rinella? Another pillar of it is, is that you take things you want to do that don't seem like they fit with the North American model and you argue about how they actually kind of do.
13:41 Speaker 04 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
13:43 Steven Rinella? Rather than just saying, you're right, this doesn't fit with the North American model, but I like it.
13:51 Steven Rinella? But I like doing this and I'm not going to try to tell you that it fits.
13:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:55 Steven Rinella? The North American model of wildlife conservation. One thing, one thing to get into here, make a quick note, so a lot of times when we're doing the show, there's a shitload of people in the room. Right now, there's not. Crins here, Randall's here because we're doing something a little bit special today. But a reminder, so many of the people that come in and do the show, you know, we have a whole podcast network. So I sometimes fail to point out
14:20 Steven Rinella? how many of the people you know from coming on the show have their own shows that are on our network. So Cal is always in here, Ryan Callahan, old Cal. Cal in the wild.
14:31 Steven Rinella? That's a feed. That's a podcast feed. Hosts Cal's Week in Review and the Foundations Podcast with Tony Peterson. So those sit within our network under the Feed Cal in the Wild. We got a Bear Grease, a Bear Grease Feed, of course. And on the show, you've met and heard from many times Clay and Brent Reeves. So the Bear Grease Podcast Feed has the Bear Grease Podcast, it has Bear Grease Render episodes and This Country Life episodes with Brent Reeves. We have a Wired to Hunt Feed, the Wired to Hunt Podcast Feed, The Eponymous Show with Mark Canyon, Wired to Hunt, and then Foundations with Tony Peterson.
15:13 Steven Rinella? And then, of course, we have God's Country with Dan and Reed Isbell. I got a big hunt trip planned with Tony Peterson.
15:21 Speaker 05 Oh, where are you going for that?
15:23 Steven Rinella? It's a whole secret.
15:24 Speaker 05 Oh, I think I know.
15:26 Steven Rinella? It's the Poverty Pat Hunt.
15:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:28 Steven Rinella? Oh.
15:29 Speaker 05 That is gonna be.
15:32 Speaker 04 Yep. Any extra spots on that one?
15:38 Speaker 05 You guys always get picked.
15:39 Steven Rinella? Did you have fun down in Mexico?
15:39 Speaker 04 I had a great time down in Mexico.
15:41 Steven Rinella? What happened? Did you enjoy it?
15:42 Speaker 04 I loved it. Oh, my God. I loved every minute of it.
15:45 Steven Rinella? What did you like about it? Randall went on his, was it your first couz deer hunt, Randall?
15:48 Speaker 04 First couz deer hunt, first trip to Mexico. Never been across the southern border.
15:53 Steven Rinella? Really?
15:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:55 Steven Rinella? Did you like it?
15:55 Speaker 04 I loved it. I loved it. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was sort of an interesting hunt because in some ways, it's like a very classic whitetail hunt where you got a bunch of guys staying in the same house and every morning.
16:09 Steven Rinella? Same cold ass smokey house.
16:11 Speaker 04 Yeah. And every morning, you're drinking coffee and saying like, well, what do you want to go? Do you want to go to that spot or that spot? Do you want to go to that spot or that spot? It's like, oh, we looked at that yesterday. Let's check out this other one. So strategically, it reminded me of like a very traditional whitetail hunt. But then you're, there's not a ton of hiking, but you're going up and down some steep stuff and falling and, you know,
16:35 Steven Rinella? Yep.
16:35 Speaker 04 busting your ass a little bit here and there on, because the footing's pretty tricky.
16:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it's, it's never ending 30 degree slopes covered in gravel.
16:43 Speaker 04 Yeah. And it's like,
16:45 Steven Rinella? There isn't a hook to any. Nothing's hooked to anything.
16:47 Speaker 04 No, you need your sea legs. We're like, there was one hike that Seth and I did.
16:54 Speaker 04 And we sort of got to the.
16:57 Speaker 04 We got to take a break and Yanis is like, man, I fell hard. I said, oh, I fell hard too. And we're comparing where we'd fallen. And then Seth said, I fell on that one as well. And all three of us had taken pretty serious spills. Unbeknownst to one another. So, and then you're glassing all day. Which is like, I can be.
17:21 Speaker 04 I mean, I'm just like always entertained by glassing. And, and so like there are a couple of days, I mean, we hiked up to a ridge. And we only moved a hundred yards in the course of the whole day, just behind the tripod, glassing and, and. Pointing stuff out and finding, I mean, not even just deer, but we were watching some coyotes chase some deer. We're finding ducks, we're finding turkeys.
17:46 Steven Rinella? Any mountain lions?
17:48 Speaker 04 No mountain lions. We saw some tracks. Uh, one day Seth and I went up this crazy. I call it a road, but really the roads down there are just sort of bulldozer cuts.
17:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
17:59 Speaker 04 And there were some fresh tracks. We saw, we saw some fresh coups tracks. And as soon as we stopped to look at those, we realized they're lion tracks. You know, right alongside of them.
18:09 Steven Rinella? In the snow?
18:10 Speaker 04 In this, uh, no, just in the, in the real loose dust. Cause yeah, everything is dust. I, I haven't really brought anything in the house from that hunt. Um, I'm waiting.
18:23 Speaker 04 Till I can fire up the air compressor and just blow everything out.
18:26 Steven Rinella? Got it.
18:26 Speaker 04 Cause it's just, my tripod is a different color. My bino harness is a different color. Like everything's covered in that. Real fine dust that just seeps its way into like zippers and everything you own.
18:38 Steven Rinella? For the rest of your life, when you open your tripod legs up and pull them out, they're gonna go.
18:42 Speaker 04 They're gonna make a difference. Oh yeah, for sure.
18:45 Steven Rinella? It's like a good, they'll make a gravelly noise.
18:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, I need to do a good, a good lens cleaning. All the eye cups and all my optics need a good cleaning. Yeah, super fun trip and.
18:59 Speaker 04 I've already, you know, as soon as I texted a couple buddies to say that I was going down there and they're all like, oh, that's a, that's like a bucket list trip for me. And so now I'm, ever since I got back, before I got back, I was kind of thinking about organizing another, the next trip down to Old Mexico.
19:19 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
19:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:21 Steven Rinella? Well, don't.
19:21 Speaker 04 I'm hooked.
19:22 Steven Rinella? Stay out of my little area there.
19:24 Speaker 04 Well, you know.
19:26 Steven Rinella? I'm joking.
19:27 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, what the thing that blew me away, actually, one of the things that I was not expecting is like, we stay at the Holiday Inn or whatever it is, a quarter mile from the border checkpoint on the Arizona side. And we got in a little late, like at 9:00 PM, you know, there's not a lot of activity. And then the morning we get up and Seth and I went down to breakfast.
19:51 Steven Rinella? At McDonald's?
19:52 Speaker 04 Uh, no, just in the lobby.
19:54 Steven Rinella? Okay.
19:54 Speaker 04 We did go to McDonald's on the way back.
19:56 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
19:57 Speaker 04 But you look out in the parking lot and it's all hunting rigs.
20:03 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
20:04 Speaker 04 There's like 12 jacked up pickups with Utah, Arizona plates. They're all towing side by sides. Every single person in the little breakfast nook is wearing camo.
20:15 Steven Rinella? Yep.
20:15 Speaker 04 And they're all like dudes between the age of 35 and 60. And then you get into the checkpoint line and the truck in front of you is a hunter and the truck behind you is a hunter.
20:26 Steven Rinella? January for sure.
20:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I was, and then you go to like some gas station across the border and the whole thing is basically a staging point for, for coos deer hunters. And so that was, that was one thing that was a very unexpected wrinkle in it was just like how visible it was, you know, it's like being out in eastern Montana.
20:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
20:47 Speaker 04 The week before Thanksgiving.
20:49 Steven Rinella? I think it's like that all January when they're rutting.
20:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was super cool.
20:53 Steven Rinella? But it's the good old days right now in Mexico, man.
20:56 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there was some talk about, um.
21:02 Speaker 04 You know, in a couple of occasions, it got brought up like, what's going to change, you know, in the next, in the next couple of years, especially like politically. Um, and yeah, the, you know, like the role of the cartels down there.
21:19 Speaker 04 It's a hunt where like, you can't really have your blinders on because it happens in this very specific political socioeconomic context that it all, I mean, yeah, it was, it, yeah, I'm still sort of just wrapping my head around it, but aside from that, it's just super fun hunting deer in January. I thought my deer hunting for the year was over and
21:42 Steven Rinella? That's the best.
21:43 Speaker 04 Yeah. So, great time.
21:45 Steven Rinella? Since I've been working on, um, this History Channel show, Hunting History, where we look into outdoor mysteries, man, people have been hitting me up with all kinds of stuff. Mysteries?
21:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:57 Steven Rinella? Someone sent me something really interesting the other day and it was a picture of the F, so there was a guy, like a, like a friend of a friend, his dad
22:06 Steven Rinella? was an FBI agent who worked on the D.B. Cooper case.
22:11 Steven Rinella? There's an FBI agent who interviewed, this is so crazy, there's an FBI agent who interviewed all of the people that dealt with Cooper before they went and did the drawings. The famous, you know, when you come in and they tell you what you look like?
22:27 Steven Rinella? He sends me a picture of the guy, the FBI agent who interviews everybody, leading into that meeting with the artist. The son of a bitch looks exactly like the picture of D.B. Cooper. It was like they described the last guy they saw.
22:42 Speaker 04 They're very impressionable.
22:43 Steven Rinella? And in all the reading, and all the reading and work I did on, all the reading and work we did on like the D.B. Cooper story, which is like the, the most, the biggest bottomless pit in the world. I just had to walk away from it eventually because you can't.
22:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:55 Steven Rinella? It's just, it's a bottomless pit. And all the reading I did about it, no one ever brought that up to me. It's like this dude looks like that. They're like, well, let me think. And they describe the guy, they just, they're describing the guy they just spoke to.
23:12 Speaker 04 That's the power of suggestion.
23:15 Steven Rinella? Lot of people wrote in saying how's their dad or whatever. Here's a weird one, just like an outdoor mystery, another one I can't, like, I can't believe I never heard of this.
23:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:25 Steven Rinella? Cause this is, this is my home state. Okay.
23:29 Steven Rinella? Uh, what is 1959?
23:32 Steven Rinella? All right, 1959.
23:38 Steven Rinella? William J. Wyman. So listen to this. This is a crazy story.
23:43 Steven Rinella? There's a military pilot, right?
23:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah. He's a military pilot. Guy named William J. Wyman, his plane disappears over Lake Huron. While he's flying from Saginaw. To Ken Ross Air Force Base in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. So, I mean, that base is still there. There's Ken Ross Base in the U.P. Guy's flying from Saginaw up Lake Huron to Ken Ross, Upper Peninsula. His plane goes missing on March 5. 1959.
24:19 Steven Rinella? They conduct a big search, no sign of the plane, never find the plane. He's presumed dead and they call it off.
24:28 Steven Rinella? On April 8, this is insane.
24:32 Steven Rinella? I never heard this. On April 8, these lighthouse keepers go out to Spectacle Reef. To reopen their lighthouse and find that someone had been living in the lighthouse.
24:47 Steven Rinella? He, there's, there's a note and the note's explaining. It's a note from Wyman in the lighthouse explaining his plane's engine had quit. When he's flying at 5,000 feet, his engine quit a mile from the lighthouse. Wyman's note, this is a quote from Wyman's note, "I tried to make it in, but could not stretch my glide this far. I landed in the water. I did not try to land on the ice and it did not appear to be thick enough. The plane went down within two minutes. But before it did, I, it floated close enough to an ice floe for me to jump." The ice was not over two inches thick. Another large body of water separated me from the lighthouse, so I waited.
25:29 Steven Rinella? Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast and the ice I was on started to move. At the very last moment, one corner of the ice grounded against the ice packed around the lighthouse.
25:43 Steven Rinella? So the letter goes on, but in short, Wyman then runs for the lighthouse and makes it there, but he gets a little wet. His clothes froze before he gets into the door of the tower.
25:56 Steven Rinella? But in there, he finds towels, overshoes, gets warmed up. He finds a radio transmitter in the lighthouse, but can't get it to work.
26:06 Steven Rinella? Set up all night blinking SOS with the tower's winter light, manipulating the tower's winter light.
26:15 Steven Rinella? He doubts if rescuers are ever going to find him.
26:19 Steven Rinella? Cause he hadn't filed a flight plan. So he freezes his ass off in this lighthouse for two nights. The ice thickens up. In his note, he explains he's going to try to make the 11 mile trek to the nearest land.
26:35 Steven Rinella? His note ends, I'm going to take some equipment with me. Binoculars, coat, hat, blankets, et cetera. I will turn them in to the US Coast Guard as soon as I get ashore.
26:47 Steven Rinella? They kick off a whole other search for Wyman and still today, no trace.
26:54 Speaker 04 Lost.
26:55 Steven Rinella? Twice.
26:56 Speaker 04 Twice. Yeah.
26:58 Steven Rinella? How the hell I never hear that?
27:01 Speaker 04 I don't know. I mean, I think like when you get into this realm, there's just a bottomless pit of stories and mysteries of, you know, planes going down.
27:12 Speaker 04 All kinds of weird stuff happening to people, but yeah, for it to be in your backyard.
27:16 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's a crazy story, man.
27:18 Speaker 05 Season two.
27:19 Steven Rinella? Yep. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of
28:04 Steven Rinella? a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live,
28:48 Steven Rinella? you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. You need credit to buy, well, pretty much any big thing. So how do you get started? Easy. The One Pay Builder Card. It's simple and smart. One Pay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans and the One Pay Builder Card is an easy way to build credit.
29:29 Steven Rinella? Just use it to make everyday purchases, build your credit history, and then you can work up to the big milestones, buying a new car or a new house, or hell, maybe something I'm always thinking about, which is another boat. Those moments start with small, consistent steps with the One Pay Builder Card. Download the One Pay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.
29:56 Speaker 02 One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through One Pay at onepay.com/podcast.
30:12 Steven Rinella? I, uh, when I was living in, in the, I lived for a very brief time in the Upper Peninsula, spent a great deal of time over there over a bunch of years. Um, I remember there's two things that kind of interested me when I lived there. Two guys got in a shootout over bear baits.
30:28 Steven Rinella? And the other thing was a guy is going to his deer hunting cabin. And he parks on a steep incline and gets out to open his own gate.
30:40 Steven Rinella? And as he's fiddling with his own gate, his truck slides forward and pins him against his own gate where he then freezes to death.
30:49 Speaker 05 Oh, no.
30:50 Speaker 04 I, uh, I was telling Yanni this story.
30:53 Steven Rinella? Stuck with me.
30:54 Speaker 04 Cause down in Mexico, there's, they love gates. And they're all, every single gate has a different mechanical device holding it shut. And I was telling Yanni that.
31:08 Speaker 04 At one point, we were antelope hunting and I went out to open the gate to be a, you know, I was driving and Sydney was in the passenger seat. I said, oh, I'll get the gate for myself. I hopped out, forgot to put it in park. And as I'm up against the fence, I turn around, the truck's rolling at me and I barely get back in time to put the brakes on. So whenever we open gates now, Sydney has like a multi-part checklist of making sure that I've put the truck in park. But he said he has a, I believe, a relative who died the same way.
31:39 Steven Rinella? Pinned on his gate?
31:40 Speaker 04 Pinned on, I believe, a mailbox.
31:44 Steven Rinella? Really?
31:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:46 Speaker 06 That's how the actor Anton Yelchin died. Do you remember that guy? He was kind of like a young and upcoming actor. And yeah, his truck pinned him against the...
31:53 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Man, I remember some people ran over our mailbox one time and my dad was so mad, he went and got a big chunk of phone pole and dug and set that thing down, dug a six-foot pit and sunk it in there and put a bunch of concrete in there. And he said, the next time someone hits this mailbox, he's gonna be here in the morning.
32:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:17 Steven Rinella? You know, in the newspaper article, whoever just found the news, the old newspaper article of the, they're abandoning the hunt for the airmen, April 13th, they abandoned the search for the airmen.
32:34 Steven Rinella? Did you look at the next article? Port Huron, Michigan, April 13th. Patrick Butler, 22, shot himself in the leg last night while practicing a fast draw. Butler told deputies his thumb slipped on the hammer, causing the pistol to discharge.
32:55 Speaker 04 End story.
32:58 Speaker 06 And the headline is wounds himself.
33:03 Steven Rinella? Uh, here's an interesting one. This is the last thing we're gonna talk about before we get into what we're gonna talk about. Uh, it's kind of a crazy one.
33:12 Steven Rinella? The Boone and Crockett Club
33:15 Steven Rinella? has opened up, I shouldn't say crazy, interesting. This is an interesting one. The Boone and Crockett Club has, they're, they're, they've unanimously approved a request by the Fort Peck tribes to accept bison entries hunted on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana. Most places, if you were gonna go shoot a buffalo, you wouldn't be able to submit them for Boone and Crockett Club because it wouldn't be regarded as a fair chase hunt. Like, even if you shoot, um, like if you shoot a high fence deer, Boone and Crockett won't accept a high fence deer.
33:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:51 Steven Rinella? There's all kinds of rules to Boone and Crockett Club. There's all kinds of rules that go above and beyond the, the what's legal, right? They have their own added requirements. Um, for instance, if you're radio hunting, using radio communications, Boone and Crockett won't accept your, your score, even if you're allowed to radio hunt where you're radio hunting.
34:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:14 Steven Rinella? So they've opened up there as a way to applaud the work that the Fort Peck tribes have done on creating a wild free range bison herd on their reservation. And using a sustainable management plan.
34:29 Steven Rinella? They've had the animals since 1999, since 1999. They got them from Yellowstone National Park. I actually met Robbie who runs that program. Um, but anyways, if you were to draw a Fort Peck bison tag and kill a big bull, you could have a bull submitted into Boone and Crockett. Boone and Crockett is gonna start accepting it as a fair chase hunt.
34:47 Speaker 05 That's great.
34:47 Speaker 04 It's very cool.
34:48 Steven Rinella? No, I like it, man.
34:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:50 Steven Rinella? Um, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's very involved in the conservation movement. And I was complaining to him.
34:59 Steven Rinella? I was complaining to him, he and I have a slight, I don't wanna say that. I, I was complaining to him about bison management in the state that I, I, I disagree with.
35:15 Steven Rinella? Like I sort of disagree with the direction the state of Montana is going on bison management. I'd like there to be more bison, more, I'd like to find ways to reduce conflict with landowners and create more areas for there to be more wild bison. And I do it like in my mind, I'm just like, it's like, I'm doing it like, I think that like as a hunter, I'm all for it. And my buddy's like, but hunters just don't see those animals that way.
35:40 Steven Rinella? Hunters are gonna, you know, hunters are gonna go, uh, they're gonna draw blood over elk, but they just don't feel that way about buffalo. And I'm like, but they should.
35:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:52 Steven Rinella? And someday they might.
35:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:54 Steven Rinella? But he's like, hunters don't get riled up about it.
35:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, we, we went on the buffalo hunt a couple of weeks ago when my wife drew the tag on American prairie. And I have to say like, that was one of the better, like wild ass days of hunting that I've had.
36:13 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
36:14 Speaker 04 Just like out on the prairie, no one around, making stocks on big groups of buffalo.
36:22 Speaker 04 It was like antelope hunting, you know, and it was just like, not really something I'd ever envisioned. Like I couldn't really imagine it playing out the way it did in my mind, but man, it was super cool. It's like, if I could do that every year, I would.
36:38 Speaker 04 But yeah, it's funny, there just aren't that many opportunities.
36:41 Steven Rinella? No.
36:42 Speaker 04 And the opportunities that do exist are so varied in, in sort of nature and how they play out and where you're doing it and what happens and who's there. But yeah, it's tough to, it's tough to sort of
36:56 Speaker 04 picture what a buffalo hunt's like and picture yourself hunting buffalo.
37:00 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
37:01 Speaker 04 But yeah, it's, it's interesting. I wish more people were fired up about it.
37:06 Steven Rinella? You know, hopefully they will become.
37:08 Speaker 04 There's nothing more Montana than a buffalo hunt.
37:10 Steven Rinella? I met a dude, I was at this thing not long ago and I met a guy who did the hunt that I did in Alaska. And he wound up getting in such a pickle, he had to call the state troopers to get him out.
37:21 Speaker 04 Wow.
37:22 Steven Rinella? You know, same, same unit I drew.
37:24 Speaker 04 River conditions or what?
37:25 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
37:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:26 Steven Rinella? Ran into all kinds of trouble, got rescued by the troopers. So I said, well, did you get one?
37:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
37:32 Steven Rinella? He's like, no.
37:37 Steven Rinella? Uh, yeah. All right. So let's dig in on. Randall, do me a favor. You're gonna start out. Um, explain, Randall, explain what a long hunter is.
37:50 Speaker 04 So the long hunters were a group of individuals in the late colonial period. Uh, based primarily in western Virginia. You know, and, and like the New River Valley and sort of the area tucked up against the Appalachian Mountains. And at the end of the Seven Years' War, the end of the Anglo-Cherokee War, when sort of violence on the frontier had quieted down, they went across the mountains into what is now Kentucky.
38:23 Steven Rinella? Give people a year.
38:25 Speaker 04 Um, so like in the, in the 1760s, so, um, 1763 is sort of how we periodized it. The end of the Anglo-Cherokee War was in 1761. But essentially, uh, these were like cash poor farmers. Um, who were basically producing enough crops to support themselves and didn't really produce a surplus. Um, and so one way that they could actually make cash to buy the things they needed was to supply whitetail deerskins. Um, to basically a leather market in Europe, primarily in Europe. Um, and so guys like Daniel Boone and these groups.
39:02 Steven Rinella? Casper Mansker.
39:02 Speaker 04 Casper Mansker and, and it's, and the, um, Henry Skaggs.
39:09 Steven Rinella? Yep.
39:10 Speaker 04 You know, there are these kind of like remote clan-based settlements, um, and they would get together groups of like 30 or 40 guys cross over the mountains on horseback and, uh, whitetail deer hunt for up to a year or more than a year. And, uh, Boone famously spent like two years across the mountains on a long hunt. But you know, they're going over into territory where they're not supposed to be. Um, and they're shooting deer, uh, by the hundreds. I mean, they're accumulating thousands of, of deer skin belts. Uh, thousands of deer skins in the course of a hunt.
39:52 Speaker 04 And hauling them all back on horseback and then selling them off. And that's sort of the cash economy of western Virginia and western North Carolina during that period was largely based on whitetail deer skin. So these are market hunters.
40:12 Speaker 04 They're rural people. They didn't leave behind a lot of records. A lot of times what you hear about them is sort of based on what was written, you know, a couple of decades later when people are writing down stories about the early settlers in this county or that county. And they'll say like, when he was a young man, he was a long hunter.
40:30 Speaker 04 But it's sort of this fleeting moment of our history of market hunting where, yeah, hunting deer across the Appalachian Mountains was the way you could make a fair bit of money as someone without a lot of means, who basically, and you also have to have a little bit of gur in you to go out and do that. You know, it's a dangerous proposition.
40:55 Steven Rinella? A lot of gumption.
40:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, a lot of gumption. But yeah, that's the long hunters, I think. And then the end of the long hunting era really is brought about with the onset of hostilities in the lead up to the American Revolution. Because the frontier becomes a very violent place.
41:18 Speaker 04 And it becomes exceedingly dangerous to grab a couple dozen guys and go out on your own for a year at a time in sort of no man's land, when there's a lot of hostilities going on between tribes that had aligned themselves with Great Britain. And, you know, you're a colonial, land hungry colonial Westerner, you're kind of the bad guy. So that's, that's sort of what brings an end to it. There's still some long hunters, but a lot of them are either called into military service or they stay home to protect their household or they're just too scared to go west. So.
41:54 Steven Rinella? There's a few geopolitical wrinkles within the long hunters that I found to be very interesting.
42:01 Steven Rinella? Randall's talking about these sort of, if you picture, he's talking about these years that are the lead up to the American Revolution. Evolution. And when you hear about like revolutionary fervor and the building of the like American patriotic movement. You're thinking of like, you know, Boston and the Boston Tea Party and the establishment of the the Minutemen and Paul Revere, right? And Thomas Paine writing Common Sense and all these people who are sort of yearning for liberty and imagining this country that would get free of England.
42:36 Steven Rinella? And you sort of want to extend that sentiment out to those frontier settlements, like to Boone's Clan and these other clans that live way on the frontier. That is not really how they're feeling. These are by and large like groups of people who, I mean, they've they've been born colonists that, you know, they're many of them are US born colonists. But they're they're much more aligned in their own little frontier world than they are tied to any sense of like the brewing sense of America.
43:10 Steven Rinella? But man, they cannot escape, like they do not escape the war.
43:14 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:15 Steven Rinella? Because like Randall mentioned that when they're going off into the first far, what we call the first far west, when they're going off over the Appalachians to hunt deer. Randall said they're not supposed to be there. They're not supposed to be there for two things. There's one that's kind of obvious. Now they're not supposed to be there because there's Native American tribes who claim the land and some like protected violently protected. But what Randall's referring to is under own the own colonial law. The British don't want their American subjects going over there and causing trouble with tribes. So there are like Britain is always trying to like deal with the tribes and try to like
43:59 Steven Rinella? find a sort of, I don't know, man, like a sort of some kind of static agreement.
44:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, wars are expensive. They're costly in lives and and sort of the attention of the colonial administrators and it just it's bad for business. And and you know, empire is largely a money making enterprise. And so, yeah, as if they can have peaceful borders with the tribes and maintain sort of stable relationships with the tribes, that's what's best for the crown.
44:30 Steven Rinella? Yeah, and tribes are basically saying like, what is with your?
44:37 Steven Rinella? These crazy redneck hillbilly American guys pouring over like they're not supposed to be here.
44:43 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
44:44 Steven Rinella? But they're often met with hostilities and then as all these tensions start to rise between America and England. Uh.
44:55 Steven Rinella? Well, that is a little more complicated because it's like such a mess on the frontier. For a long time, the French to the north and the British are at odds and they each have mercenary forces. Like if you've paid attention, if you've paid attention to what was going on in, if you're looked at like what was going on in portions of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, where we would have these proxy wars. Right? Like we, the US wasn't supposed to be operating in Cambodia and Laos. So we would align with indigenous groups in Cambodia and Laos to like fight the communists.
45:40 Steven Rinella? So we allied with the Mong, like I think there was like Montenay forces we allied with. And we would arm them and give them direction and they would like kind of do our bidding. So in the American frontier, it was always this really complex thing because the, there was tribes aligned with the French and they would attack English colonists. And then later you had, uh, later as the war did get going and stopped this, this stopped the sort of long hunting era. You had tribes aligned with the British who would come and attack American settlements.
46:15 Speaker 04 Yeah. And I think too, the,
46:18 Speaker 04 you know,
46:20 Speaker 04 there's also a larger recognition by the 1770s among native people that with the French out of the picture largely.
46:32 Speaker 04 That if, if British governance in North America goes away, these Americans are gonna be unrestrained, right? And I think like a lot of tribes along that line recognized that the Crown was trying to hold back all these settlers. And if, if, uh, if America gains its independence, there's gonna be no restraining force preventing them from gobbling up more land and more land. So I think like, in addition to, to working as proxies, there's also a, an understanding among native people that like, this war is for control of North America.
47:11 Speaker 04 And, and it's part of this longer, much longer struggle for indigenous autonomy.
47:19 Steven Rinella? When we got done, if you listen to our Long Hunters piece, we, we end it in a, in, in a interesting, I don't wanna call, I wanted to say it's interesting because we did it, but we end it in a very deliberate way.
47:33 Speaker 04 Go ahead.
47:34 Steven Rinella? Like, we end the Long Hunters in a very deliberate way because we end it at a time when the, the first far west, which we're calling the, what we call the first far west, sort of melds into what you might think of when you think of the West. Okay, so i- if you're sitting there right now at home and someone says you the West, you're typically thinking of the Rocky Mountain West. In, in terms of like, in American history terms, you're thinking of the Rocky Mountain West.
48:04 Steven Rinella? At the time, the West, the, at the time of the colonial period, the, the Wild West was Kentucky. It, the Wild West was basically south of the Ohio River, south of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was like, that was kind of the, the first, what we call the first far west.
48:25 Steven Rinella? And many of the same sort of attitudes play out about it, right? It was like the land of promise. It started out where hunters started kind of like poking holes into it and finding ways in it because they were hunting. And then they're coming back and saying, hey, that place is pretty sweet.
48:41 Steven Rinella? There's a lot of money to be made there. And so following the tracks of the hunters, you have settlers and people trying to establish towns. And then we, we repeat that same thing.
48:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:50 Steven Rinella? In the Rockies. When we end the Long Hunters. The, the way we kind of mainly explain the, the, what these long hunters were is we, we, we do much of it through the lens of one individual, Daniel Boone. The name Daniel, more than any other name in the book, you hear the name Daniel Boone. Cause he's come to in many ways exemplify the period, the period and exemplify the long hunters and was a, and was esteemed in his own time as a hunter. Boone, as Kentucky filled up, uh, Boone got very bitter about America and he got very bitter about Kentucky. Boone had made a lot of land claims and had like bought land from guys
49:35 Steven Rinella? that didn't actually own it and made claims and then other people made claims on top of his claims. And at a point, he would have been on paper extraordinarily wealthy with land holdings. But he gets into legal battle after legal battle after legal battle where it's like, well, sure you bought it from so and so, but so and so didn't really own it.
49:58 Speaker 04 Right.
49:58 Steven Rinella? Like so and so bought it under some dubious stuff. Congress undid the purchase. So yeah, you bought it, but you bought it from a guy that didn't have it. I don't know what to tell you about your money, but the land's not yours. And, or he marked areas and then it, well, he didn't file it.
50:13 Speaker 04 Which is a very common thing throughout America. Like when you talk about these rolling frontiers, there's layers and layers of land speculators and fraudulent claims and battles over who has rightful ownership of land. So Boone is just wrapped up in all of this and on the losing end.
50:30 Steven Rinella? Comes out of it like Boone comes out of it broke. He leaves the first far west and goes to kind of the new western frontier of Missouri.
50:43 Steven Rinella? But he goes to Missouri before the Louisiana purchase.
50:48 Steven Rinella? He says he's never going back to Kentucky. And one of the things we talked about in Long Hunters is you have this idea of there's this historian that even said, or commentator, maybe you remember who it was, who said, not only is Daniel Boone, he says he's a Kentucky emotion.
51:03 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
51:04 Steven Rinella? But he says that he's an honorary founding father. He's become in the American imagination, an honorary founding father. But Boone, one of his final acts as an American is to be like, I'm done with America.
51:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:19 Steven Rinella? Done with Kentucky, done with America, I'm going to live under the Spanish crown.
51:24 Speaker 04 And be a subject of the Spanish king.
51:27 Steven Rinella? And they, Spain said to Boone, hey, come live in Spain.
51:32 Speaker 04 We'll set you up.
51:32 Steven Rinella? Come live in Missouri, we'll give you land here. And he's like, adios, America.
51:36 Speaker 04 Yep.
51:39 Steven Rinella? So it's funny, like this, the way that he's, that Boone is this regarded now as this, you know, there's paintings of Boone going through the Cumberland Gap, and they kind of set it up like he's like Moses.
51:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:50 Steven Rinella? It's like, he's like a Moses figure, bringing in his people to the promised land. You know, like going through the Cumberland Gap is like the Red Sea being parted. Right? And Boone became very celebrated like this, like a leader of men, you know? And he was, but he was like, kind of in it for himself, in it for his family, not, did not identify as an American patriot. But I'm kind of getting to the main thing is Boone winds up in Missouri and then completely out of his own control, he winds up back in the U, he winds up back in the US simply because before he dies, the US buys, does the Louisiana Purchase and thereby takes possession of Boone's new place in Missouri.
52:31 Speaker 04 Mm hmm. The frontier caught up with him.
52:35 Steven Rinella? We end the Long Hunters with this, with this place, like I said, where the first far west melds into the new, into the new far west, the second far west, the American west, is, uh, we get into the, the, the myth, perhaps reality, no one's quite sure, that Boone, as an old man,
52:57 Steven Rinella? he, he starts hunting with, he has a slave and he starts hunting with his, a slave, and goes on a bunch of trips with a slave toward the end of his life, but.
53:08 Steven Rinella? Before he gets too terribly old, he hooks up with some guys and does or doesn't go up the Missouri all the way to the Rockies. People are still like, it's really not known. He definitely would go up the Missouri to hunt. Some people think he made it all the way to the, up the Yellowstone River, perhaps. The historian Ted Franklin Blue has written about what is the evidence that he did? What is the evidence that he didn't? But like Boone, the long hunter could have been like a very early version of a mountain man. Or not.
53:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:46 Steven Rinella? When you looked into it, what did you, what did you wind up feeling about it?
53:50 Speaker 04 I mean, I think there's, he obviously went up river and
53:56 Speaker 04 my, my sense is that most people are skeptical of the idea that he made it up to like see the Rockies for himself.
54:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
54:07 Speaker 04 But I think regardless of whether or not he saw the Rockies, that parallel is really astounding that like he's going up the Missouri River in the early 1800s, right as this new sort of
54:28 Speaker 04 like ball of like frontier energy is getting unleashed westward up that river. And I might be jumping the gun here a little bit, but one of the interesting things that I've found in the research for the new book is that as Boone is an old man, uh, living in, I believe St. Charles, Missouri, sort of in the St. Louis area. One of his neighbors.
54:55 Steven Rinella? No, he stayed there at the Bodart and he, the that he, his family stayed at the mouth there.
55:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, but, but one of his neighbors there towards the end of his life was a man named John Colter, uh, who settled there after he lived out one of the most legendary careers as a mountain man.
55:19 Steven Rinella? Oh, is that where Colter wound up right nearby?
55:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, Colter, Colter and Boone were neighbors for a brief period because Colter died shortly after coming back from the mountains, but there's all these weird, it's a small world, like a small little fraternity when you, in, in the grand scheme of things. And so there's all these weird overlaps and parallels, but Boone's, Boone's life especially is like really interesting for just mapping all of this historical transformation that unfolds from east to west in the course of a, you know, a lifespan.
55:51 Steven Rinella? I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of
56:36 Steven Rinella? a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their Very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready,
57:20 Steven Rinella? the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to mkc.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert, the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to mkc.com today. That's mkc.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. Okay. So buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right? So how do you start building credit? It's easy. With OnePay's Builder Card, there's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees, just a card that helps you
58:00 Steven Rinella? build credit to reach goals like buying a car or home. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.
58:12 Speaker 02 OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast.
58:28 Steven Rinella? If I was to become a playwright, and I won't, but if I did, I would do a play. Maybe Phil would help me on it. We'd turn it into a musical.
58:38 Speaker 04 Well, we've already got the one, we've already got the one play idea in our.
58:43 Steven Rinella? Play idea?
58:44 Speaker 04 Yeah. Remember this? We're going to do a Glengarry Glen Ross Deer Camp.
58:49 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
58:53 Steven Rinella? Oh, my buddy's going to see, I'm so jealous. Bill Burr is doing Glengarry Glen Ross.
58:58 Speaker 06 He's just, it's a stacked lineup. It's Bill Burr, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean, Kieran Culkin. It's nuts. It's going to be awesome.
59:07 Steven Rinella? I met Bill Burr very briefly. He was, he seemed to be annoyed with me.
59:11 Speaker 05 Isn't he spearfish?
59:11 Speaker 06 I think he should be. I think that's a compliment.
59:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah, well, I was talking to, I was at, I was, I was back at, I was at, Joe Rogan was doing a comedy club bit. So I was there hanging out and I got to come back and you know, you hang out with all the comedians, you just stand there because you're not funny like they are. So you just try to be like, I don't say shit because I don't want them to think that I think I'm funny.
59:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
59:34 Steven Rinella? Do you know what I mean? You just stand in there, but he wanted to.
59:36 Speaker 06 I've got an idea for a bit.
59:37 Steven Rinella? He really wanted to talk to Joe and you could tell he was very annoyed. That I was like back, like, it's like, who's this idiot?
59:44 Speaker 06 Yeah.
59:44 Steven Rinella? He's not a comic.
59:45 Speaker 05 Well, does he know?
59:47 Steven Rinella? Well, he probably knows that. I ain't funny like Bill Burr. He figured that out in a hurry. Uh, oh, the play.
59:55 Speaker 06 Yeah.
59:55 Steven Rinella? It's Boone hunting with his slave. As old man.
59:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, that would be interesting.
1:00:00 Steven Rinella? And they have a lot of deep conversations. Another play, because I'm developing this theory that John Colter,
1:00:08 Steven Rinella? that John Colter had,
1:00:14 Steven Rinella? that, that John Colter had a horrible post-traumatic stress disorder.
1:00:19 Speaker 06 I don't think that's
1:00:22 Speaker 06 a stretch.
1:00:23 Steven Rinella? No.
1:00:24 Speaker 06 Based on what we know about his life.
1:00:25 Steven Rinella? Going through what he went through and then the timing of when he quit being a mountain man and how short his life was after he, after that happened to him. I think that, I think that it kind of blew his mind out. And I might do another play, follow-up play. But I don't know how to write plays, but you know, if I did.
1:00:43 Speaker 06 Phil?
1:00:43 Steven Rinella? Phil?
1:00:45 Speaker 06 No one knows how to write plays until you, until you start writing a play. Anyone can be a playwright. Anyone can write books, Steve.
1:00:52 Steven Rinella? No.
1:00:52 Speaker 04 No.
1:00:55 Speaker 04 How dare you, Phil?
1:00:58 Steven Rinella? We've been talking about market hunters. You know, let's jump ahead for a minute.
1:01:01 Speaker 06 Sure.
1:01:01 Steven Rinella? We just wrapped up what long hunters are.
1:01:02 Speaker 06 Yep.
1:01:03 Steven Rinella? So there's an interesting way that American history flows and we're trying to like, kind of follow this, this line of American history where.
1:01:11 Steven Rinella? You'll see we have these bracketed chunks of dates and they're imperfect. But we say 1867 1763 to 1775. Meaning there's a big frontier war. You know, a big war between colonists and tribes on the frontier. And it's just way too hostile for long hunters to go hunt to the West. The war dies down. It gets like you're like, it'd be like, hey, you can go over there and not die. And they hit it real hard.
1:01:40 Speaker 04 Probably.
1:01:41 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Well, a lot of them die. You have less of a chance you're going to die if you go hunt the first far west. And then all of a sudden the war blows up again. It's just, it's, it's like suicide to go hunt the first far west. And so the era ends. And the primary thing they're after is they're after deer skins. When I say it's imperfect, because they're also trapping a lot of beaver and they're trapping otter.
1:02:04 Steven Rinella? Cause they only want the deer skins in the off season. You want thin deer skins, not winter skins. So they would, they would hunt deer and then at some point beaver furs had come prime. And they would trap beaver and otter and some other fur bears. But they're mainly after deer skins.
1:02:20 Steven Rinella? When we pick up the, this next big like commodity push, this next big market hunting push is when you get into the strictly the beaver trade. And we talked about the mountain, which we're going to talk about. The mountain men, when you, you go through all the mountain man stories. They are fixated on beaver skins. They do some otter for sure, but they're, they are not also hunting deer. They are not hunting deer hides. They're eating all kinds of stuff, but they're very, very focused on beaver.
1:02:54 Speaker 04 Yeah. If you read like a journal and they arrive at a new river valley. They don't say like, oh, there's no beaver, but it's still kind of cool. There's some elk and buffalo and a couple otter here and there. They just say, no beaver, moving on.
1:03:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's what they're after.
1:03:14 Steven Rinella? As it's funny because we talk about, we'll explain these date ranges, but we talk about the main mountain man era running 1806 to 1840.
1:03:23 Steven Rinella? What you get when you get outside of, when you go on the far end of that, you get where you wind up having these like mountain man type figures, or what they would call trapper traders at the time. And you start to see that they're getting very interested in trading buffalo robes.
1:03:42 Steven Rinella? So all that like Lepantour, Charles Lepantour got his trader. It's like they're doing some traffic in beaver hides, but there's an, there's an emerging market for buffalo and they're engaging with tribes to get buffalo. They'll still talk about beaver, but they're into buffalo. And then if you drift a little while later and you drift up into the 1870s, it's just all buffalo. Like that's it. It's the buffalo trade.
1:04:07 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:04:07 Steven Rinella? Um, so we're going to do one where we explore the buffalo trade. And it's funny because when we do that, we're going to have this segue where these like beaver, where the like the American West and the beaver trade in the West kind of transitions into a buffalo industry.
1:04:23 Speaker 04 Yeah. And the trade in buffalo robes, because initially the most valuable commodity you can get is a, a skin with the hair on. They call a buffalo robe. That's an extension of this bigger umbrella of the fur trade.
1:04:42 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:04:43 Speaker 04 But by the 1870s, it's a totally different animal. It's an industri, a fully industrialized slaughter for just the skin.
1:04:54 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:04:54 Speaker 04 To be used in, in leather making.
1:04:57 Steven Rinella? Later, when we get into the buffalo hide hunters, the buffalo hunters, you'll see this, there's this thing that switches.
1:05:05 Steven Rinella? Early, there's like this thing called, there's an era called where they're interested in what they call the robe trade. And in the 1860s, the robe trade was a big deal. What they mean by the robe trade is you are American, the American economy wants what they would call Indian tanned robes. So tribal hunters, that's who drove this market is like tribal hunters, Great Plains tribes would go and kill buffalo in the wintertime. And they would, they would tan the hides and sell a completely tanned, ready to go hide. And that was the robe trade.
1:05:46 Steven Rinella? The robe trade eventually moves to the hide trade where you're just selling dried skins, tacked out dried. From any season, didn't matter.
1:05:56 Steven Rinella? We're going to explore that whole thing, but I'm just kind of setting up the way that, I guess the point I'm trying to make is when we're looking at like this history of market hunting in the West and all these different things they're after. We're trying to bracket it, but like I said, it's imperfect bracketing because these things bleed into each other. Daniel Boone was a beaver trapper in Kentucky.
1:06:19 Steven Rinella? And a deer skin hunter. A guy like Jim Bridger was a beaver trapper in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, whatever. Became a robe trader, right? It's not like one generation of these people dies and a new generation starts up. It like, it switches. But what we're doing is we're trying to look at the most with hunters and trappers. Kind of like, what are the most sought after commodities and when do these commodity markets peak? And so with that, Randall, talk about why, explain why we wound up, when we kicked it around, why we decided that 1806 to 1840.
1:07:01 Steven Rinella? Was the mountain man era. Cause someone might go like, well, they were trapped beaver before that. They trapped beaver after.
1:07:06 Speaker 04 Yeah. And they're, yeah, exactly. And I think for the purposes of our project.
1:07:14 Speaker 04 We chose 1806, I think maybe August 17th.
1:07:18 Steven Rinella? Yeah, we have an exact date.
1:07:19 Speaker 04 1806, because that's the date when John Colter turns around and heads back up to Missouri to trap beaver. And so, so really, the beginning of our story is the Louisiana Purchase and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, the Corps of Discovery, sent by Jefferson to explore a water route to the Pacific. And among the different sort of economic opportunities and commodities that they're taking note of in their journals, as they make this, you know, unimaginable journey to the Pacific and back, is there, they're noting that there's a lot of beaver. And at the time, beaver is a very valuable commodity, beaver fur used to make felt.
1:08:05 Speaker 04 And so, by the time they're on their way back to Missouri, the Lewis and Clark expedition, they have a hunter with them named John Colter, who was recruited specifically for this mission. And as they're on their way back to St. Louis, the expedition encounters two trappers and traders who are headed up the Missouri, and they want to check out some of the stuff that Lewis and Clark and the gang had just been through. And so, John Colter seeks to end his term of service with the expedition, because he wants to join these guys and head back upriver to the, you know, quote unquote untouched
1:08:46 Speaker 04 trapping country that they'd seen near the Three Forks of the Missouri, outside of present day Bozeman, Montana.
1:08:52 Steven Rinella? By Seth's house.
1:08:53 Speaker 04 By Seth's house, yeah, he basically just wants to go to Seth's house.
1:08:58 Speaker 04 And yeah, and that kicks off, I mean, for Colter, that kicks off a, several years of some of the most harrowing and sort of just jaw dropping wilderness.
1:09:13 Speaker 04 Adventures that you can imagine, you know, solo journeys across vast expanses, running for his life, um, from a group of Blackfeet who had captured him. I mean, Coulter is sort of like a-
1:09:26 Steven Rinella? Having his buddy's guts smeared all over him.
1:09:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, Coulter is sort of like a, I mean, he's almost like a comic book character of just like astounding feats.
1:09:34 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Um. And it's, it's funny that how little is known about him.
1:09:38 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:09:39 Steven Rinella? You know, there, there's very little known about him. You could kind of tell that, uh, he, he at least got drunk once.
1:09:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, he got in trouble.
1:09:47 Steven Rinella? Got in trouble for boozing.
1:09:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, as did, you know, several of the Lewis and Clark expedition members when they're sitting there waiting to head up river, uh, cause they come down to St. Louis prior, the, the winter prior to departing to the Pacific. And so, sitting around in their camp, there's a lot of disciplinary action required to keep these guys in line.
1:10:10 Steven Rinella? Um, but yeah. A good detail about the Coulter deal is when, when Lewis and Clark expedition is coming down the Missouri and they're getting close to getting back. You know, they're kind of in the smooth sailing portion of the trip. Coulter runs into these trappers and he wants to go back up with them. And he asked permission and I always like this little detail.
1:10:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:10:30 Steven Rinella? Lewis and Clark, the, the, the, the leaders say, if everyone else here will promise not to ask the same thing, you can go. And everyone agrees, I won't ask to leave. And thereby they let Coulter go.
1:10:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, if everybody-
1:10:50 Steven Rinella? But everyone had to promise they wouldn't ask to.
1:10:52 Speaker 04 If everybody wants to do this, we're going to have a real issue.
1:10:55 Steven Rinella? I'm gonna start doing that with my kids.
1:10:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:10:56 Steven Rinella? One of them asks to do something, I'll say, if you can get your brother and sister to promise not to ask me the same thing, that's fine.
1:11:01 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm. It's a good system.
1:11:04 Steven Rinella? Nothing would happen.
1:11:04 Speaker 04 It maintains, it maintains order.
1:11:07 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
1:11:08 Speaker 04 Um, but yeah, we, we kind of kicked that, that's Coulter turning up river is why, why we start with that year of 1806 and um, you know, when we're talking about mountain men, we're talking about a type of individual who is a nomadic beaver trapper. Um, and so Coulter sort of turning around and heading back up river without a real destination in mind, just wants to get out there and accumulate furs. We're sort of calling him the first mountain man and obviously like anybody could, you know, someone could make any number of arguments pointing to other figures.
1:11:50 Speaker 04 This is like one of the choices you make when you're telling a story is where do you start, where do you end? But I think Coulter symbolically, especially as associated as he is with the Lewis and Clark expedition, the opening up of the, the upper Missouri river, the upper Missouri region and his exploration of the Northern Rockies. Like Coulter is as good as anybody for sort of the honor of the first mountain man.
1:12:13 Steven Rinella? Sure. Here the Kentucky writer, Chris Offit.
1:12:16 Speaker 04 The name's familiar.
1:12:17 Steven Rinella? He wrote a book and a bunch of people had a problem with some of the things he said in his book. And his response was you should write your own book.
1:12:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:26 Steven Rinella? Tell me about it.
1:12:27 Speaker 04 That's totally fair.
1:12:30 Steven Rinella? So that's how we decided that's, that's where, that's our, is our choice.
1:12:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:34 Steven Rinella? We debated it. We, we weighed the pros and cons.
1:12:37 Speaker 04 And we're not the first ones to make that argument. I mean, I think a lot of, a lot of historians over the years have argued that Coulter, you know, symbolically represents the beginning of a new era.
1:12:50 Steven Rinella? It also helps me know his name.
1:12:52 Speaker 04 Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, that's.
1:12:53 Steven Rinella? Cause there's other dudes, you know, there's dudes that could slip through the cracks.
1:12:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:12:59 Steven Rinella? But he, he just, he's a convenient because we know about him.
1:13:02 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:13:02 Steven Rinella? And then he did a lot of things to kind of set up the trade.
1:13:06 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:13:06 Steven Rinella? He did a lot of things that would sort of. Push how this would go down.
1:13:11 Speaker 04 Yes, and I think.
1:13:14 Speaker 04 Before we get into the. Where we end up in 1840.
1:13:21 Speaker 04 The sort of arc of this mountain man era is. Is important to understand sort of the general contours of how it goes because initially.
1:13:33 Speaker 04 People who want to capitalize on the furs of the upper Missouri.
1:13:38 Speaker 04 Attempted to mimic. A model that had been established by the Hudson's Bay Company. Which is the Canadian fur trading monopoly and it had largely operated with.
1:13:52 Speaker 04 Big forts. Controlled by traders.
1:13:56 Steven Rinella? Can you hold tight one minute?
1:13:57 Speaker 04 Yep, yep.
1:14:01 Steven Rinella? You folks listen, no doubt you've in some way heard Hudson Bay Company.
1:14:08 Steven Rinella? So. Just, just as America has their holdings.
1:14:13 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:14:15 Steven Rinella? To the north, kind of basically, you think of it like basically the line was pretty well established, our border with Canada.
1:14:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's some fuzzy areas, but. You could sketch it on a map without too much inaccuracy, just based on your understanding of contemporary borders.
1:14:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah, like roughly imagine the US Canada border that remained British.
1:14:36 Steven Rinella? And when you hear the word Hudson Bay Company. People kind of think of it like synonymous with. The crown. But what it was is they basically gave a charter.
1:14:49 Steven Rinella? It'd be like, like, let's say we were to seize Greenland. And we then said to a company.
1:14:58 Steven Rinella? Bechtel, I don't know. We say to a company, you have sole ability.
1:15:05 Steven Rinella? Greenland is effectively yours to conduct business on.
1:15:10 Steven Rinella? It's yours.
1:15:11 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:15:11 Steven Rinella? We're going to control competition to you, right? For, for a time and it's like, you have the license to conduct business. So Hudson Bay Company was a company. But it held the like charter.
1:15:25 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:15:25 Steven Rinella? From the crown to exploit the resource.
1:15:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, they had, they had a monopoly on all the waters flowing into Hudson's Bay.
1:15:31 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:15:32 Speaker 04 Which stretches a, a real long way into Western Canada.
1:15:36 Steven Rinella? So they weren't the government. Well, it gets tricky because, I mean, they kind of were the government.
1:15:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:15:42 Steven Rinella? I mean, they, they operated with the blessing of the government, with the force of the government, but they were a company.
1:15:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's not, the Hudson's Bay Company is much closer to sort of an empire in its own right than it is to like a trading post.
1:15:58 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:15:59 Speaker 04 Um, it's.
1:16:00 Steven Rinella? But there's no American parallel.
1:16:04 Speaker 04 Not.
1:16:04 Steven Rinella? At that time.
1:16:05 Speaker 04 Not an obvious one. Yeah. I mean, I mean, like you could compare it to maybe Exxon. Is in terms of like, it's, yeah, not, not at the time, but like a company that has the power to sort of move the needle in terms of international affairs and, and control over a huge swath of territory. And, um, but yeah, the Hudson's Bay Company was founded in the late 1600s. Um, and it set the standard for efficiency and profitability and running a fur trade at a scale that no one had ever really seen before.
1:16:48 Speaker 04 So they have this network of forts extending to the west, through the Great Lakes. Um, and what's happening at these is native people are the ones supplying the furs. And then their trade, the Hudson's Bay Company is trading with native people for, you know, manufactured goods and commodities from Europe. And so the, the Hudson's Bay Company is this huge logistical. Like octopus reaching into Western Canada and bringing huge quantities of furs to the east for shipment onto Britain.
1:17:22 Steven Rinella? And if our symbol of the American West becomes the horse.
1:17:26 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:17:27 Steven Rinella? The symbol of the Hudson Bay Company is the canoe.
1:17:30 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:17:31 Steven Rinella? They run a water. They run a water-based system and they they developed this whole culture of the voyagers, paddlers, sixty strokes a minute.
1:17:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:17:43 Steven Rinella? All this shit is moved in giant canoes with dudes that can carry at portages dudes that can carry 200 pounds.
1:17:51 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:17:52 Steven Rinella? You can portage 200 pounds at a time and they run this whole, I mean, not there's exceptions, but generally this whole thing is run in canoes.
1:18:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, and. And I think too, like the. In addition to canoes, the essential ingredient in their operation is having these trade relationships with tribes in the areas where they operated. And they're not always good, like there's obviously flare ups of violence and hostility, but there's there's sort of this.
1:18:26 Speaker 04 Underlying everything they do is they are able to get. Indigenous people to produce the furs they want.
1:18:37 Speaker 04 Wherever they go.
1:18:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah, unlike the Americans who tend to start every negotiation with a shootout.
1:18:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, and so that's what so that's sort of the start of our story is like all of a sudden the Louisiana Purchase happens, the United States claims ownership to all these lands west of the Mississippi River and.
1:18:57 Speaker 04 People who want to capitalize on the beaver furs there begin to imagine like their own domestic counterpart to the Hudson's Bay Company and they don't really. They sort of just try to reproduce this model and it doesn't work the same on the Great Plains and in the Rockies as it did up in Canada. One, the political situation is more fraught and they are running into.
1:19:21 Speaker 04 You know, violence and getting themselves on the wrong side of tribes like the Blackfeet, who are more resistant to white incursion. And then the other thing that's sort of interesting when you look at it is that a lot of tribes that they encounter aren't that interested in upending their life way to become beaver trappers. At this point in time, a lot of the people that they're encountering are equestrian buffalo hunting people, and they have a system that works for them. And it's just not compatible with breaking up into small little bands of beaver hunters and hitting every creek and river in the neighborhood and bringing them all back to these trading posts.
1:20:06 Steven Rinella? Some felt it was demeaning.
1:20:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:20:09 Steven Rinella? Some thought, why bother? I get everything I need from buffalo hunting.
1:20:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, and there's, there's one, there's one quote we have in there that's from a tribal member who I believe is talking to an emissary from the Hudson's Bay Company who's kind of gone down to the Dakotas. And he says something like, you know, I could get on board with beaver hunting if you could do it on horseback. Like, if this was like a real hunt, like, but I'm just not interested in crawling around, as he puts it, in the bowels of the earth, on my hands and knees to catch these beavers. So it's just like not, you know, the, the American interests are not as readily able to establish productive trade with the tribes they encounter as the Hudson's Bay Company has been.
1:20:58 Steven Rinella? So there's, there's another kind of cool wrinkle in it is they encounter, later beaver trappers encounter some bighorn sheep hunting specialists. A Shoshone band that people would call the sheep eaters later, maybe at the time they called them the sheep eaters, high mountain people. And when they, the mountain men, the trappers, explained to them that, you know, they were after this. Giant rodent and they were kind of like, oh shit, we ate all those.
1:21:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:21:27 Steven Rinella? And then he pointed out that they actually burned the hair off them when they get them.
1:21:30 Speaker 04 Yeah. Which is the valuable part. The only part that they're interested in.
1:21:34 Steven Rinella? Yeah. They're like, my bad. We ate them.
1:21:35 Speaker 04 And I think he says they burned the hair off them because they could get better drippings that way from the meat.
1:21:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Keep the fat in. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car.
1:22:19 Steven Rinella? They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today. I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know, you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench.
1:23:03 Steven Rinella? G10 scales with the 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know.
1:23:47 Steven Rinella? These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. What if you could save up for that new car or vacation just by buying the stuff you're already buying? With the One Pay Banking App, you earn 3% cash back on up to $150 in monthly spending in categories you choose, so it's easy to save. So what are you saving for? Maybe you got your eyes on a new truck or a new boat, or you're saving up for your first house. Download the One Pay App or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.
1:24:25 Speaker 02 One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Cash back is earned as points. Go to onepay.com/rewards/terms for redemption options and additional details.
1:24:42 Steven Rinella? We talked about Colter.
1:24:44 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
1:24:45 Steven Rinella? Like why he's a good guy to talk about, why Colter's helpful and talk about the mountain men. Colter kind of has these two, besides his time with Lewis and Clark, Colter, John Colter, has these two big adventures. It's sort of the most celebrated adventures of John Colter. One is Colter's Run, which has been reenacted and reenacted in every documentary show about the West, like ad nauseam, right? Colter's Run. The other thing is, is Colter's...
1:25:15 Steven Rinella? Colter maybe may or may not have been the first European to go through Yellowstone National Park. Which is called Colter's Hell. Of these two famous things, it's kind of like one happens like really as a mountain man. And one happens in a pre-mountain man era, because when Colter did his big mega hike. A mid-winter, oftentimes solo mega hike.
1:25:41 Steven Rinella? Through the Tetons, through the Absorcas, like all over the damn place through Yellowstone National Park. He's trying to establish this Hudson Bay thing. They go up and they build a fort. Where the Big Horn River flows into the Yellowstone, right around there. And they need to go find tribes who want to trap beaver and trade. So that big loop Colter does is trying to talk tribes into becoming beaver trappers.
1:26:06 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:26:07 Steven Rinella? And then you see just a couple of years later, at the Colter's run period, Colter is trapping beavers. And he probably always trapped some beavers, but you see the switch where they're like, it's not that thing Colter tried to go do. Like say, hey, boys, trap beavers, come sell them to us. Like it just doesn't take off.
1:26:25 Speaker 04 Yeah. And there's, one historian has described this period as a period of trial and error. Where fur interests are trying to figure out how they're going to get these beavers to market. And to make a long story short, by the 1820s, it's clear that.
1:26:47 Speaker 04 If, if the US is going to take advantage of this resource, they're going to send American trappers out to trap the beavers themselves.
1:26:56 Steven Rinella? Tribes be damned.
1:26:57 Speaker 04 And yeah, not, not work through the tribes.
1:27:03 Speaker 04 And the result of that is they need a way to, if they're not operating from fixed posts and fixed bases where the furs come to them. They need to find another way to get these huge quantities of furs back to St. Louis. And so that leads to the invention of the rendezvous. Which is a logistical invention whereby every summer, there's a fixed location and all these trappers spread across hundreds of miles, come together and trade the furs they've accumulated for what they need to survive the year ahead. So these trappers are basically, and these are the mountain men, they're living year round in the Rockies. They're not traveling back and
1:27:46 Speaker 04 forth to quote unquote civilization with their harvest. They're living in the Rockies year round, providing all their own meat and shelter and all that. And then once a year, they bring their accumulated harvest to this gathering that's like a huge encampment, trading them to the fur companies who come out in caravans with supplies and then the caravan brings the furs back to market. So this rendezvous is kind of the, like the beating heart of the mountain man era. And the first real rendezvous is like in 1825 and the last
1:28:27 Speaker 04 real rendezvous is in 1840. And so that's the, the end, the bookends of like the Rocky Mountain rendezvous system. So that's where you get to circle this all the way back around. That's how we get to the end date of 18040. So 1806 to 1840. And yeah, there's certainly beaver trappers after 1840. Some of these guys go out to Oregon and they start- Have little meetings. They had their own little spinoff rendezvous, right? But like, uh, this, this like fabled age of the mountain men that, you know, was getting headlines in newspapers in New York and, you know, international interest in these strange figures who are nomadic trappers.
1:29:12 Speaker 04 That golden age is really the rendezvous period.
1:29:18 Steven Rinella? One of the reasons that people that grow up hunting, um, you know, it's true of me, it's true of Rand. Like you grow up hunting and you grow up admiring the mountain men. However, like superficially, your understanding is of when you're a kid. I kind of got it, but there's parts of it I didn't understand, but I knew enough to know that they were the epitome of self sufficient hunters and trappers, right? They were like the gold standard of, of American backwoodsmen.
1:29:47 Steven Rinella? Part of that is that self sufficiency. Like when we talk about that Hudson Bay model where you have these big river systems and you have hired canoeers. And you have people that live in forts and they grow crops. They might hire hunters, they're supplied with food, right? So you come in in the summer, they get all, you bring in all the flour and sugar and coffee. And if you work at a fort for the Hudson Bay company, you might not really need to leave the fort.
1:30:14 Steven Rinella? And they're fed by Hudson Bay company, the employees are. What's so crazy about the mountain men thing is when they finally hit on this system that works for them. They just say, you boys are going to have to figure it out.
1:30:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:30:27 Steven Rinella? And you'll have trappers, you'll have mountain men that'll do three, four, five years. And it's, it is a diet of wild meat. No support, no structures, no cabins, no support with food whatsoever. They have one chance to resupply and they have a horse and a pack horse.
1:30:48 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:30:48 Steven Rinella? Or maybe a couple of pack animals, one chance to resupply, one chance to get any news from the outside world. And then they're just figuring it out.
1:30:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, three, 350 days a year. They are living off of what they have on their pack horse, which is basically a couple of traps, a rifle, a blanket,
1:31:10 Speaker 04 a knife, maybe an axe. It's a very limited kit. And they're simply going where the beaver are. And it's, it's really like a day to day existence. There often aren't long plans of like, we're going to hit here, here and here.
1:31:30 Speaker 04 It's like, we're going to go to this valley, see if anybody's trapped that recently. We get there, someone tells you, oh, and, and a lot of times too, they're encountering. Tribes who might point them in the direction of a place they might want to go or point out to them that they might not want to go to this other place where they're thinking of going because they're going to get killed if they go there.
1:31:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:31:52 Speaker 04 So it's a very, it's a very um like improvisational uh life like it there's it's the only dates on their calendar are the rendezvous.
1:32:05 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:32:06 Speaker 04 Other than that, it's like, how can we get as many beavers we as we can between now and then?
1:32:12 Steven Rinella? We do, we have a chapter in in the book called Strangers in a Strange Land and it's in it, we explore this very, very complex relationship that the mountain men develop with the tribes. Complex, I'll give you a handful of reasons why it's very complex. There are some tribes, Flatheads, Nez Perce, who um throw in really heavily with the mountain men. They kind of become mountain men, they ride with the mountain men, they group some camp with the mountain men, like they throw in and become like trappers. Some tribes just absolutely resist them, like the the most classic, not the most classic,
1:32:57 Steven Rinella? but so like if if there was a primary enemy to the mountain men is the Blackfeet. The Blackfeet never got comfortable with the mountain men trapping beaver on their land. Other, there were other tribes where it was a little more touch and go, like Things of the Crow was a little more touch and go, but that is is very like a very complex part of it. If you look at some of these expeditions, they seem like rolling gunfights.
1:33:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:33:26 Steven Rinella? They're getting shootouts all the time, but they're often in shootouts um where they're with members from one tribe and they're fighting with the tribe's ancestral enemies or just trappers are fighting with a tribe or just trappers are fighting with a faction of a tribe, but then there's other factions of the same tribe that they're not in conflict with. At the same time, they're adopting native mannerisms, adopting native dress, marrying native women, adopting native religion.
1:34:00 Steven Rinella? At the same time, they're using ways of describing Native Americans, which is like highly derogatory.
1:34:07 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:34:07 Steven Rinella? But then you look like they grow their hair long, they have feathers in their hair, they decorate their horses, they marry Native women, they learn Native languages.
1:34:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, and there's a, there's a, a quote from one of the accounts that we looked at where they basically say you can't pay a free trapper a higher compliment than to tell them you'd mistaken him for an Indian.
1:34:31 Steven Rinella? Yep. Even guys commenting, they, they start walking. The mountain men would start walking like an Indian.
1:34:39 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:34:40 Steven Rinella? So it's just this, it's like you can't. On one hand, you want to go like, oh, there were these, these great egalitarians, you know, and, and like, uh, totally adapted to this lifestyle, but then what contradicts that is they demonstrate at times a very hostile relationship to tribal members, stereotyping tribal members all the time, um, not giving people the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, you want to go, oh, they were like these rapacious marauders. But what complicates that vision is all the contradictory material about how well they interwove with some tribes.
1:35:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I think, I think to maybe
1:35:25 Speaker 04 just step back and look at the bigger picture, it's not like the mountain men were this big wave of white quote unquote civilization, you know, coming head to head with Native America. Like there's this pre-existing politics in the Northern Rockies and Upper Missouri. All these tribes had these pre-existing relationships and power struggles with one another. And, um, it's a very dynamic period of time in Native history because of the introduction of firearms and horse culture has only been there for, you know, 150 years, maybe. Um, and there's trade goods coming down, like firearms coming down from the north,
1:36:10 Speaker 04 from Hudson's Bay Company. And so if you're a tribe like the Blackfeet.
1:36:16 Speaker 04 And you see American traders and trappers developing good relationships, or at least trading material goods with your historic rivals. Like, all of a sudden, these interlopers are a threat to you. And so, the mountain men are pretty insignificant in their relative numbers. But like, what they represent in terms of upsetting the status quo in Native America
1:36:45 Speaker 04 is pretty significant. And so, I think like,
1:36:50 Speaker 04 part of what we do in that chapter is try to explain the underlying dynamics that shape day-to-day encounters between a mountain man who runs into a band of Shoshone hunters, or who runs into a band of Blackfeet hunters, or whatever else. Because it varies widely. And it also depends on the individuals involved. You know, there are some individuals within tribes who are much more hostile to white incursion. And there are some individuals in those same tribes who are perhaps more accommodating. And so, it's just like, you never really know what you're gonna get.
1:37:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah, a good way to think about it, like, Randall makes a good point that there was no starting point with Euro-American tribal relations. There is, but you'd have to go back hundreds of years. And even then, it's fuzzy. But like, earlier, we talked about Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark, they really hit it off with the Nez Perce. Right? They kind of made like a little pact. We would later violate that pact, but long after the mountain man era. We would violate that pact in the mid 1870s. But they made a pact, and the Nez Perce stayed true to it. They're like, "We're friendly with the Americans." And they held that for a long time.
1:38:04 Steven Rinella? The only Indians Lewis and Clark killed? Blackfeet.
1:38:08 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:38:09 Steven Rinella? And Blackfeet did not have a friendly pact with the Americans. So even then, like, this guy like Colter, who was part of Lewis and Clark expedition in our first mountain man, like, he has some exposure to how complex relationships were. Right? There's not like a pan-tribal. I guess the thing people try to picture is that there's like a sort of... Pan tribal attitude to Euro Americans or a pan tribal attitude to the mountain men. It was not. It was.
1:38:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:38:40 Steven Rinella? Allegiances and hostilities and those things that change all the time.
1:38:45 Speaker 04 Yeah. And there's another, there's another quote we use in the book from Elliot West, who's been on the podcast, who's a Western historian, and he says, there's a lot of times, sort of unconsciously, people think about Native Americans as sort of just waiting in the background for Europeans to show up on the scene.
1:39:09 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:39:10 Speaker 04 As if they're apart from history until Europeans arrive there. When really like Europeans are walking into a political and cultural and socioeconomic environment that is just as complicated as any, you know,
1:39:32 Speaker 04 relationship between royal families in France, or you know, you think about Europe, you think about all this palace intrigue and rivaling factions and, you know, these relationships that go back hundreds of years and how all this factors into the decisions that are made on the ground and like, that's the same environment that the mountain men are walking into, but they're ignorant to all of that. And so it's really hard to just simplify and say, mountain men did this, native people did this, or, um, there's no like real model of, of relations that can be simplified between the mountain men and the, and the people they encounter.
1:40:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah. In, in the book, we really spell this out by talk, by looking at a period of a few months where a mountain man who kept a meticulous journal named Osborne Russell, a period of a few months. Of examining his interactions.
1:40:29 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:40:31 Steven Rinella? With Native Americans wildly varied.
1:40:34 Speaker 04 Yeah. They shoot at him, he shoots at them. Some of them save his ass, some of them.
1:40:41 Steven Rinella? They party.
1:40:42 Speaker 04 They they feed him, they tell him where to go.
1:40:45 Steven Rinella? They save.
1:40:46 Speaker 04 They steal his stuff. You know, and they were using they in quotes because like he's encountering people from different cultures and different political groups.
1:40:55 Steven Rinella? Um, but he never knows what he's gonna get.
1:40:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, he never knows what he's gonna get, but the one thing you can say is that his life during those few months is profoundly shaped by his encounters with native people. And he also, one of the things we point out in there is he he has learned the Shoshone language and he takes great pride in the fact that he can speak Shoshone. And that he's able to repay his uh, a chief who hosts him for a few days, he says he can repay him uh, by telling jokes in his own language to him.
1:41:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:41:30 Speaker 04 And like, that's the mark of a good guest. So it's like, whatever you might assume about how mountain men and and native people interacted, it's probably a lot more. It's a lot messier than you think.
1:41:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that every um, every aspect of the story, no matter how well you think you know it, every aspect of the story, you're gonna you're gonna come away from this with being like, oh, like a lot more to it than I thought.
1:42:01 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:42:02 Steven Rinella? The the way we divided it up, we divided the whole project out, we're gonna, we're gonna share one of them right now. Um, we're gonna share chapter six out of 12 chapters. But the way it rolls is we talk about mountain man country. Meaning, uh, there's an introduction and then that introduces the mountain man era. And then we talk about mountain man country, meaning.
1:42:25 Steven Rinella? Um.
1:42:28 Steven Rinella? Since we narrowly define what a mountain man is, we define where a mountain man was. Right? What, why at a certain point north, you weren't a mountain man? Why at a certain point east, you weren't a mountain man? Why at a certain point west, you weren't a mountain man? And why at a certain point south, you weren't a mountain man? I'll give a clue to one. You go much further south and there ain't no beavers.
1:42:53 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:42:53 Steven Rinella? Not many. I'll give two clues. You go north and you got problems with the British. Um, we explain all that. We explained the start of the mountain man era in a chapter called up the Missouri.
1:43:08 Steven Rinella? We explain kind of who the mountain men were like, like what kind of dude became a mountain man? It's mixed, a lot of orphans.
1:43:18 Steven Rinella? And a surprising number of people who are escaping indentured servitude is kind of a theme.
1:43:25 Speaker 04 And we also talk about in that chapter, how they become a mountain man.
1:43:28 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:43:28 Speaker 04 How they, how they insert themselves into this whole sprawling logistical, financial, corporate operation.
1:43:38 Steven Rinella? We could have called it, so you want to be a mountain man?
1:43:41 Speaker 04 Maybe we'll save that for volume three.
1:43:43 Steven Rinella? Chapter five, running the line. It's about like, you know, with all this crazy intrigue and all this, uh, you know, tribal interactions and hunting and starving to death and dying in gunfights. Uh, we keep reminding people that they were there to catch beavers. Running the line is like, uh, how were they catching the beavers? How did they trap Beaver? And you'll, you'll be a little surprised about
1:44:15 Steven Rinella? how much guesswork goes into that. There's a thing we run into working on these projects where.
1:44:21 Steven Rinella? There's some things that are so mundane that no one, there's some things that are perceived to be so mundane that no one explains it. Like picture 100 years from now, someone trying to figure out how we flossed.
1:44:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, or.
1:44:34 Steven Rinella? And you'd be like, well, I see. It says he flossed. Well, did he start like with his molars? Well, shit, I don't know. Just says he flossed. Like, there's not a really, like, like, the right people weren't writing it down.
1:44:48 Speaker 04 Or, or somebody, somebody shows up today and they're like, they're on their phones all the time.
1:44:54 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:44:55 Speaker 04 And someone who's using a phone in their diary, they're not going to say, well, I got on my phone and I opened Instagram and then I got a few emails. And when you want to send an email, you have to go click this button and click that button. And so they're not writing that down. But someone who arrives there and goes, holy shit, these guys are on their phones all the time. That person probably has no idea what he's looking at when someone's on their phone. And so a lot of the more detailed accounts we get of like setting traps and trapping operations, they're written by outside observers who find this fascinating, but they don't know what they're looking at necessarily.
1:45:33 Steven Rinella? The analogy we use is, is picture that you have a plumber, a very skilled plumber,
1:45:42 Steven Rinella? and he comes in to do a repair in your house. And then you have a land, a homeowner who has no idea about any of it. And later you say to the homeowner, hey, how did he fix that?
1:45:54 Steven Rinella? Well, I mean, he had like a wrench. Hey, he turned something.
1:46:00 Speaker 04 The thing about toilets is.
1:46:03 Steven Rinella? I don't really know. Took him about an hour.
1:46:04 Speaker 04 There's two heights of urinal.
1:46:07 Steven Rinella? And, and often the accounts of like how they did what they did are from people later, outsiders who had no idea, trying to offer up their sort of synopsis of what it was that they saw happening. But we get, we get somewhere in it. The chapter we're going to share with you guys is hunger and thirst. It's about being in a land of feast and famine. We have a chapter about the rendezvous. So that collection of days. That couple of weeks every year. We have a chapter about the fur. What happens to the fur? How does the fur get to Europe? Um, what is it used for? How, how does it?
1:46:50 Steven Rinella? Basically, this is everything of like, how does it get from a trapper's hands? How does it get turned into a product? And how does that product flow through time and space? Tricks of the trade is just all the crazy shit they knew how to do and how they knew how to do it. Amputations, whatever. Like stuff they had to know and where they got it from.
1:47:11 Steven Rinella? Chapter 10 is about, well, what happens in the wintertime?
1:47:15 Steven Rinella? Uh, they would spend months just stuck in places. They would spend months stuck in valleys.
1:47:22 Steven Rinella? Every 10 days is about death. Uh, we, we pull that name from, there was a historian, what was his name?
1:47:30 Speaker 04 The it's, I believe it's from, uh, Stanley Vestal's biography, Bridger.
1:47:36 Steven Rinella? Uh, there's this one historian who, who takes a look at it and he's, he's, he, he comes, he has this idea that when he, when he takes a look at the time period and the people involved, he throws out that it seems like a mountain man died every 10 days.
1:47:52 Steven Rinella? Um, Randall spent a lot of time on that. Randall doesn't think that that's right. But what does seem right is one in 10 died a violent death.
1:48:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, and, and I would point out too, like,
1:48:06 Speaker 04 there's a whole, there's so many secondary sources. When you're researching this stuff, like there's a historian who's published an article in the uh, journal put out by the museum of the mountain man where he has catalogued every reference to every mountain man dying.
1:48:23 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:48:23 Speaker 04 And cause of death, date, what we know about them, what happened. And so he has like quantitative, quantitative findings about what killed mountain men and when and why. And so when you look at something like that, it's, it's tougher to believe sort of the anecdotal, like Stanley Vestal argument, but there's no question that a lot of them died.
1:48:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Well, we, we've we're, we're in this, we're able to put some numbers around some things. You might be surprised that there's numbers around.
1:48:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:48:55 Steven Rinella? One thing that surprised me is, is.
1:48:59 Steven Rinella? There's about. The way we define what a mountain man was, there was about, there was probably three or four thousand mountain men.
1:49:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:49:08 Steven Rinella? During the period we're talking about, it's probably three or four thou- three or four thousand mountain men. Three or four thousand people would have kind of met that definition.
1:49:15 Speaker 04 At some point in their life.
1:49:17 Steven Rinella? And, and hundreds of them died. Violently.
1:49:21 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:49:22 Steven Rinella? Uh, chapter 12, the last one is trapped out. And it's about the. It's about the sort of two things. There's the thing that killed the mountain man era, and then there's the other thing that would have killed it if that hadn't killed it.
1:49:41 Steven Rinella? In the end.
1:49:42 Speaker 04 Economics and ecology.
1:49:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah, economics and ecology. What we didn't do, if we were smart, we would have done this. I'm only just occurring to me now. We would have found a way to bleed into the buffalo trade.
1:49:58 Speaker 04 Well, maybe we can do that. Maybe we can do that bleeding. In chapter one of volume three.
1:50:03 Steven Rinella? Yeah, we'll bleed it. That's how it goes. That in short is, um. Yeah, when you hear the term of frontiersmen, which is kind of synonymous with the, uh, long hunter, when you hear the term of long hunter, when you hear the term of the mountain man, that's what we're talking about. Um, dig in more, uh, check out the chapter, check out the chapter that's coming at you right now, hunger and thirst. And then, um.
1:50:28 Steven Rinella? 12 bucks? 11, 12 bucks?
1:50:30 Speaker 04 I think so.
1:50:31 Steven Rinella? To get the, the complete thing, Meat Eaters, American History. The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840, dropping now.
1:50:40 Speaker 04 And if you're listening on the day this comes out, you can preorder and it'll download on your phone at midnight.
1:50:45 Steven Rinella? My guess is you could just buy it. I don't know.
1:50:48 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:50:49 Steven Rinella? Well, I think it'll just be there all of a sudden.
1:50:51 Speaker 04 Yeah. But for those of you who listen to this the day after it drops, you can go buy it and listen right away.
1:50:57 Steven Rinella? Yep. And trust that we are working away on the next one. We're going to jump up to. This closes at 1840, so the long hunters closed at 1775. This picks up at 1806, 1806. This closes at 1840. The next one is going to pick up 1865. With the end of the Civil War.
1:51:23 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:51:24 Steven Rinella? And it will conclude in the winter of 81, 82.
1:51:30 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:51:30 Steven Rinella? So it'll wrap probably in the end, we haven't figured it out yet, but it'll probably wrap of March 1882. And that era will close.
1:51:41 Speaker 04 Outside of Mile City.
1:51:43 Steven Rinella? Perhaps more dramatically than any other era, that era has like a, a end.
1:51:49 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:51:49 Steven Rinella? Like, like an end.
1:51:51 Speaker 04 And.
1:51:52 Steven Rinella? Like an end end.
1:51:53 Speaker 04 And a very visible legacy.
1:51:55 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:51:56 Speaker 04 Ecological legacy.
1:51:58 Steven Rinella? And, um. In that one, we're talking about the buffalo hide hunters, um.
1:52:06 Steven Rinella? And you just kind of start running out of heroes.
1:52:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:52:10 Steven Rinella? You got long hunter heroes, Boone, American hero. You got mountain man heroes, Jim Bridger, American hero. There is no hide hunter hero.
1:52:21 Speaker 04 No.
1:52:21 Steven Rinella? They're all villains.
1:52:23 Speaker 04 No, and it's, I mean, I think that's one, one interesting tension in this whole larger project is just like. When we think of market hunters today.
1:52:34 Speaker 04 It's, we think of it as a bad deal for wildlife and it is. Um, but throughout American history. These people who are engaging in this trade and its various forms also leave behind some of the craziest stories of wilderness adventure. That we have. And so. You're kind of always wrestling with that tension of like.
1:52:59 Speaker 04 You don't want to completely romanticize these figures, you know, you want to understand them, why they're actually doing what they're doing and, and. And what the consequences of that were. But also it's not interesting if you write a book about how bad the buffalo hunters are. So, so, you know, especially in that volume, it's kind of a tricky. Uh. Line to toe of like. You're not going to write a book condemning the buffalo hunters for the bad things that they obviously did, but. You're also not going to write a book celebrating how many buffalo they killed. So it's kind of a. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a trickier subject, I think, in, in our, in our contemporary perspective.
1:53:43 Steven Rinella? The other day I was writing a thing where I had to try to talk about,
1:53:48 Steven Rinella? try to sum up these different groups. And the best thing I could come up with when I got to the hide hunters is I was like, they're the kind of the greasiest, most louse ridden.
1:54:01 Speaker 04 Group. Yeah, which is, uh, which is a standard of evaluation that I often use.
1:54:07 Steven Rinella? On greasy, louse ridden us, they're high.
1:54:11 Speaker 04 And just like, it's like from a different planet, some of those stories.
1:54:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah. You're, you're getting into, um,
1:54:20 Steven Rinella? you're, you're getting into like some Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian type shit.
1:54:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. Like very sort of post-apocalyptic scenes of destruction.
1:54:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah. All right. Uh, okay. Here it is. Chapter six, hunger and thirst. Dig in. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor,
1:55:10 Steven Rinella? get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know. You are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers
1:55:55 Steven Rinella? and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture. Titanium hardware. A custom deep carry clip with flathead screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife.
1:56:36 Steven Rinella? It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. Okay, so buying a new car or a new home starts by building credit, right? So how do you start building credit? It's easy. With OnePay's Builder Card. There's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees, just a card that helps you build credit to reach goals like buying a car or home. Download the OnePay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.
1:57:15 Speaker 02 OnePay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder Card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through OnePay at onepay.com/podcast.
1:57:31 Steven Rinella? Chapter 6. Hunger and Thirst. Despite the rugged, unforgiving landscape on which they made their living, the existence of a mountain man wasn't all scarcity and suffering. Gluttony and excess were a staple of life for these isolated wilderness travelers. In Chapter 3, I mention the most famous mountain man movie of all time, Jeremiah Johnson. You'll have to pardon me as I return to it again, this time to the final conversation of the film, which is the saddest and loneliest 120 seconds in the history of American cinema.
1:58:14 Steven Rinella? In it, we find Johnson in the high country, pondering with a surprised visitor what month of the year it might be. He's cooking a rabbit on a spit. While nitpicky viewers might note that no wild rabbit on earth would tear as tenderly as that one when cooked in such a fashion, you have to give credit to the filmmakers for capturing the breadth of the diet of the mountain men. By this point in the movie, Jeremiah Johnson has dined on grizzly bear meat, attempted to dine on cutthroat trout, eaten elk, eaten buffalo, and eaten beaver, which he refers to as "proper food."
1:58:58 Steven Rinella? One thing that Jeremiah Johnson never eats in the film is the mountain man delicacy known as "Budan," which was described in real life by the British explorer and writer George Ruxton, who witnessed a memorable scene during his western travels in the mid 1800s. Ruxton had been all over the world by this point in his life. Between the ages of 17 and 27, he'd served in combat in Europe, hunted with indigenous people in northern Canada, and journeyed into the heart of the African continent. But of all those places, none captured his imagination like the Rocky Mountain West, and no figure fascinated him more than the American mountain man.
1:59:43 Steven Rinella? At one point in his travels, Ruxton watched as two trappers sat on a dirty saddle blanket with a long coil of boudin between them. Now, if you've traveled much in Louisiana, you might have encountered boudin, a type of sausage built on a base of hog liver and rice. But mountain man boudin was different. They would take the intestine of a buffalo and invert it. Ruxton notes that it would often be "partially cleaned," but that this step is "not thought indispensable." They'd then fill it with diced buffalo meat, liver, kidneys, whatever, and brown it over the ember of the fire like a crude sausage.
2:00:25 Steven Rinella? So these two trappers are sitting across from each other on a filthy saddle blanket. Between them, "like the coil of a huge snake," Ruxton writes, "sits one of these boudins, and they are eating it from opposite ends." So that "the serpent on the saddle cloth was dwindling from an anaconda to a moderate-sized rattlesnake." The two guys start hurrying to try to eat more of the boudin than the other before they run out of intestine. Such were the culinary exploits of the mountain men. For them, food was more than just sustenance. It was a source of pleasure, a badge of honor, and a currency of camaraderie in a world
2:01:07 Steven Rinella? where survival often hinged on the strength of one's stomach. But as one historian observed, the mountain man would often spend one month "luxuriating in the wealth of buffalo meat" and the next "reduced to the very brink of starvation." They got wild fruits when and where they could. Wild plums and service berries were favorites of western travelers. But they lived a mostly carnivorous existence. They had a saying, "meat's meat," which demonstrates a certain gastronomic open-mindedness. The fact that it's meat matters more than what kind of meat it is. But that doesn't mean they didn't appreciate the idiosyncratic qualities of each.
2:01:50 Steven Rinella? Rufus Sage, an American journalist who traveled west to document the culture of the mountain men, shared a sentiment of the era on the qualities of prairie dogs. "The flesh of these animals is tender and quite palatable, and their oil is superior in fineness and absence from all grosser ingredients."
2:02:12 Steven Rinella? As we know, the mountain men were living year-round in the wilderness. They're staying mobile, enabling them to move from stream to stream in search of fresh beaver sign. And they're limited in what they can carry with them in terms of supplies. So the difference between life and death was what sort of food they could pull from the land around them. Hunting, of course, offered the most practical solution to this challenge, and the mountain men were legendary for their ability to put away vast quantities of the meat they killed. William H. Ashley, who you'll remember, was one of the partners behind the expedition that led to the creation of the rendezvous system in the first place, claimed that,
2:02:56 Steven Rinella? "Nothing is actually necessary for the support of men in the wilderness than a plentiful supply of good, fresh meat. It is all that our mountaineers ever require or even seem to wish." Ashley drove the point home with additional clarity. "The circumstance of the uninterrupted health of these people who generally eat unreasonable quantities of meat at their meals proves it to be the most wholesome and best-adapted food to the constitution of man. In the different concerns which I have had in the Indian country, where not less than 100 men have been annually employed for the last four years and subsist altogether upon
2:03:41 Steven Rinella? meat, I have not known at any time a single instance of bilious fever among them." That means a fever with nausea and vomiting like the flu. "Or any other disease prevalent in the settled parts of our country, except a few instances, and but very few, of slight fevers produced by colds or rheumatic affections contracted while in the discharge of guard duty on cold and inclement nights."
2:04:11 Steven Rinella? Of course, Ashley's observation about a lack of infectious disease is likely attributed as much to a lack of outside contact as it was to diet. The mountain men lived in quarantine bubbles, to borrow a phrase from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it wasn't just these white trappers who believed in the supremacy of living off wild game. The Plains tribes had long recognized the power of eating meat and even looked down upon tribes who practiced agriculture or relied on white man's food. Again and again in the historic record, you find accounts from white Easterners coming
2:04:51 Steven Rinella? to the West and experiencing a new vitality when adopting the strict diet of wild meat that supported Native American nomadic hunters. A few decades after the close of the mountain men era, when sickly, malnourished veterans of the Civil War were coming west to try to expel Indians from their buffalo hunting grounds, they encountered in their enemies a level of strength and physical endurance that they could overcome only through advanced firepower and superior numbers. One-on-one, a white soldier fed on beans and salt pork and hardened bread riddled with larvae was little match for a native combatant raised on buffalo meat.
2:05:35 Steven Rinella? In Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which is, in my opinion, the best thing that ever has been or likely ever will be written about General Custer's humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the author describes an Unc. Papa Sioux warrior named Gaul who played a central role in that fight. Gaul happened to have his portrait taken in the infancy of photography. Connell writes, quote, "Gaul was a man of such explosive strength that he fairly cracks the photographer's glass." Every plate reveals a leader of prodigious psychic and physical energy.
2:06:19 Steven Rinella? Full-length photos make him look squat with short bent legs and a torso the size of a beer keg. Twelve years after the Great Fight, he stepped on a scale. He weighed 260 pounds. At the little bighorn with white stripes painted on his arms and a hatchet in one thick hand and the fullness of manhood, he must have galloped through Custer's desperate troopers like a wolf through a flock of sheep. How's that for a buffalo meat testimonial? And when it came to the preferences of the mountain men, buffalo was top choice. With their woolly hides, massive hump, and sharply curved horns, these creatures roamed
2:07:03 Steven Rinella? the Great Plains and intermountain valleys of the Rockies and herds numbering in the thousands. At the beginning of the mountain man era, the total population was perhaps as high as 30 million. The animals were seemingly everywhere in mountain man country, so much so that their absence rather than presence would be noted in journals, unless of course, they were too present. Then you'll encounter mentions of an annoying abundance. One traveler wrote, “During our progress, we were obliged to keep men in advance to frighten the buffaloes in our path.”
2:07:43 Steven Rinella? That day, the author mentioned, “His party killed 110 buffalo, saving only the tongues and hump ribs.” I could fill this whole chapter with nothing but accounts of people trying to describe the immensity of the herds, and I wouldn't be able to fit them all in. Here's just one, about a herd of unfathomable size trying to cross a river. There was “such a dense and continuous column that it formed a temporary dam, causing the current to rise and rush over their backs.” The roaring and rushing sound of one of these vast herds crossing a river may sometimes, in a still night, be heard for miles.
2:08:28 Steven Rinella? In my own book about the animals, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, I describe the immensities through witness accounts of mass buffalo drownings that occurred as a result of these chaotic river crossings. In May 1795, a man counted 7,630 that drowned en masse in Saskatchewan. In 1829, another man in Saskatchewan counted 10,000 dead in the river. In the early 1830s, a traveler along the Missouri River found multiple slews holding 1,800 or more drowned carcasses.
2:09:08 Steven Rinella? Another traveler watched thousands of carcasses drift by in a river in a continuous line, where the stench was so bad, he couldn't eat dinner. The Indians he traveled with told him, "Every spring was about the same." Given the sheer abundance of these animals at the time, there aren't a lot of mountain man stories about wild and daring buffalo hunts. For the most part, they rode up on them, or did a short downwind sneak on them, and shot them through the lungs with a rifle slug. There just wasn't much to it. Hunting buffalo was often more of a grocery run than anything else. The mountain men butchered buffalo in what was known as "the Indian manner",
2:09:51 Steven Rinella? which wasn't terribly dissimilar to what's known as the "gutless method" among big game hunters today. Positioning the animal on its belly, with the knees folded and legs propped out on either side to hold the body upright, they'd cock the neck around sideways, so it looked like the animal was watching its back trail. This stabilized the animal from rolling in that direction. You could wedge a rock or an old buffalo skull opposite the head to prop it up on the other side. It's hard to generalize about what the mountain men would and wouldn't use from a buffalo carcass once they got started, because it depended a little bit on personal taste, and depended a lot on how hard up for food they were.
2:10:36 Steven Rinella? They got picky when resources were abundant. One observer described how men were "rendered dainty by profusion" and would cook only the choicest pieces. So, in relatively normal times, when a buffalo was meant to provide a night's meal for a small band of trappers who weren't worried about what they'd eat tomorrow, here's what might happen. They'd open up the animal's hide with a cut along the spine. Then they'd peel the hide back on either side, exposing the back straps, and also a sometimes two-inch-thick layer of fat along each side of the hump that they would call the depui.
2:11:17 Steven Rinella? This layer of fat was a favorite cut of the mountain men and native people alike. Beneath the fat were the hump ribs, the protrusions of muscle on either side of a buffalo's spine just behind its head. Removing the hump ribs required the use of a hatchet or tomahawk. The Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg described using a buffalo's legs as a mallet to bust off the hump ribs. And he pointed out that the hump ribs were the only bones he'd typically remove from the kill site. Same with the mountain men, who'd often satisfy themselves with just this cut alone,
2:11:58 Steven Rinella? plus maybe the tongue, removed through the triangle of soft hide underneath the animal's lower jaw. If more meat was needed, or if buffalo were scarce, they would de-bone the front and rear quarters as well, and bundle it all up, maybe 20 large pieces or so, inside folded sacks made from the buffalo's hide.
2:12:22 Steven Rinella? Depending on mood and taste and need, they might also remove the fleece, a word for additional layers of fat found beneath the hide. They'd take the femurs and shin bones to be roasted in coals before smacking them open with a rock or hatchet to get out the marrow. They'd crack the skull open with a hatchet and eat the brains raw. They'd drink the blood. They might mimic the Plains tribes and drink the mother's milk from ripened mammarys. They'd squeeze the contents of the gall bladder over the liver and eat it raw as well. Sometimes, they just drank the gall straight, as one account suggests, "A man could get quite a glow
2:13:07 Steven Rinella? if he took it straight on an empty stomach."
2:13:21 Steven Rinella? The mountain men did not travel with an assortment of cast iron pots and pans and wire grates, which would have been too heavy and cumbersome. Instead, they had a minimalist kit. They demonstrated a fondness for spit-roasting meat, often skewering great hunks of buffalo on a green stick and slow-cooking it over the glowing embers of a campfire. Out on the prairie, where firewood was hard to find, buffalo dung served as a substitute. A common technique would be to alternate chunks of fat with chunks of lean meat on a sharpened stick, which would then either be held over the fire or pushed into the ground next to it. In other instances,
2:14:05 Steven Rinella? a big hunk of meat would simply be placed in the coals of a fire directly. The mountain man Osborne Russell described a campkeeper rolling out a "ponderous mass of bull beef", meaning meat from a male buffalo from a smoldering fire pit, and then smacking it with a club to knock the ashes off of it. Each whack with the club made the chunk of meat fly in the air "like a huge ball of gum elastic." Once the man dropped his club, the others knew it was time to pull out their knives and dig in. Most accounts suggest that buffalo was typically consumed rare,
2:14:48 Steven Rinella? probably in part because they were too impatient to wait very long for their meals, but also because game meat dries out quickly when overcooked. John Ball wrote of feasting on buffalo meat quote, "uncooked or slightly roasted on the coals, taking a bite of the fat part with the lean, eating it like bread and cheese." In another instance, George Ruxton observed several men quote, "retreating from the campfire to enjoy solo their half-cooked morsels." Trappers also made jerky and pemmican to preserve their harvest against spoilage.
2:15:28 Steven Rinella? To make jerky, or jerk, thin strips of meat cut along the grain would be hung on racks of cottonwood branches or willow stems. Sun, wind, and a slow fire underneath the racks would dry out these lean strips into a product that kept well in the arid climate of the west. Pemmican would be produced by removing connective tissue from the jerky, which was then pounded into a sawdust-like powder using a wooden mortar. The dried powdered meat would then be mixed with melted fat and/or bone marrow inside a sewn-up bag made from buffalo hide with the stitching sealed with buffalo fat like seam sealer on your tent.
2:16:11 Steven Rinella? Other times, the meat dust and fat or melted marrow would be packed into separate sacks, or, as was often the case, buffalo bladders, and then mixed together at mealtime. One account mentioned that pemmican was quote, "used throughout the country as familiarly as we use bread in the civilized world." Of course, buffalo was rarely the only thing on the mountain man's menu. Elk was probably the second most commonly eaten meat after buffalo. Either that, or, depending on the area, bighorn sheep. They ate mule deer too and bears, both black and grizzly, and pronghorn or antelope.
2:16:54 Steven Rinella? Mountain lion meat, or painter meat, was especially prized.
2:16:59 Steven Rinella? There were far, far more bighorn sheep on the landscape back then, before huge numbers of the animals were killed off by a strain of pneumonia introduced to the west by domesticated sheep from Europe. Places that now hold decent herds of elk used to hold tremendous herds of bighorns. Osborne Russell recalled sitting atop a mountain where, quote, "An eye could scarcely be cast in any direction around or above or below, without seeing fat sheep gazing at us with anxious curiosity or lazily feeding among the
2:17:38 Steven Rinella? rocks and scrubby pines." Numerous accounts compare the meat of bighorn, or mountain sheep as they were known, to mutton. Frequently, stories about killing sheep remark on the difficulty of getting a shot at and recovering these animals. William H. Ashley observed that, quote, "They were so wild and the country so rugged, we found it impossible to approach them." Likewise, the artist George Catlin observed that bighorn sheep had a tendency to make themselves, quote, "secure from their enemies, to whom the sides and slopes of these bluffs around which they fearlessly bound are nearly inaccessible." Pursuing these creatures was,
2:18:23 Steven Rinella? quote, "attended with great danger," Osborne Russell wrote, "especially in the winter season, when the rocks and precipices are covered with snow and ice." These efforts were worth the rewards, however. Washington Irving noted that the, quote, "Gourmands of the camp pronounced bighorns to have the flavor of excellent mutton." While another count states that sheep were known as, quote, "the game par excellence of the Rocky Mountains, which takes precedence in a comestible point of view." George Roxton declared it to be "a choice supply of meat, certainly the best I had eaten in the mountains."
2:19:09 Steven Rinella? One winter, Osborne Russell and some fifteen of his fellow mountain men attempted to stay as long as they could at a place they called Mutton Hill, forty miles southeast of Fort Hall in southeast Idaho. There, they lived on bighorn sheep until heavy snows drove the trappers out of the area in February. Another time, in 1839, Russell and some other mountain men attempted to overwinter at Fort Hall, where they figured they could live off buffalo meat. When they got tired of dried buffalo, instead of going lower to seek milder weather, they actually pushed higher into the mountains to the head of the south fork of the Snake River
2:19:52 Steven Rinella? and "spent the remainder of the winter killing and eating mountain sheep." While Roxton preferred bighorn, he was cool with pronghorn as well. The animal, he wrote, "affords the hunter a sweet and nutritious meat, when that of nearly every other description of game, from the poorness and scarcity of the grass during the winter, is barely eatable." Among those barely eatable critters, according to Roxton, were elk killed midwinter. "The meat of the elk is strong-flavored, and more like poor bull than venison. It is only eatable when the animal is fat and in good condition.
2:20:36 Steven Rinella? At other times, it is strong-tasted and stringy." The three Elk Jedediah Smith killed in mid-June of 1828 were probably in great shape. As he recorded that, "Men could be seen in every part of the camp with meat raw and half-roasted in their hands, devouring it with the greatest alacrity."
2:21:00 Steven Rinella? Bear meat, both black and grizzly, was well regarded. According to Rufus Sage, bear meat, quote, "to be tender and good, should be boiled at least ten hours." Sage recounted an episode when a bear was drawn into camp by the smell of fresh buffalo meat. After several of the men shot and wounded it, the bear charged and spooked off their horses while the trappers climbed trees for safety, until one managed to kill the bear with a pistol shot to the head. They then butchered their, quote, "greasy victim," and enjoyed a ample feast of bear's liver, heart, and kidneys, basted with fat.
2:21:41 Steven Rinella? Then, they filled a large kettle with its fleece and ribs, which they boiled overnight and enjoyed the following day. Osborne Russell described the preparation of a stew made from two fat grizzly bears. Kettles filled with bear meat and fat were hung over a fire, and the group appointed one of the old trappers to determine when it was done. Having not had much to eat for the past few days, Russell noted that, quote, "I thought with my comrades that it took longer to cook than any meal I ever saw prepared." Beaver carcasses, being as central to a mountain man's existence as grease to a short-order
2:22:22 Steven Rinella? cook, trappers had their preferred ways of dealing with them. The mountain man's passion for beaver tail is well documented. When you pierce a beaver tail on a skewer and let it roast next to a fire, the blackish, scaly skin bubbles and peels away to reveal a tailbone encased in gristle and fat that's not unlike what someone might leave behind on their plate after enjoying a steak. During lean times of eating poor or thin game meat, that fat would have been heavenly. As one account described it, "The beaver tail was, quote, 'considered even a greater dainty than the tongue or the marrow bone of a buffalo.'"
2:23:06 Steven Rinella? We get another picture of what hungry mountain men were forced to eat from the trapper James O. Patty, who was born in Kentucky and worked the beaver streams of the southwest in the late 1820s. He was the fellow I mentioned earlier who cleaned up while trapping on the Lower Colorado River, catching 36 beavers in 40 sets. At one point, while traveling through some tough country, Patty and his party got caught for four and a half days without anything to eat except for a small jackrabbit caught by his dog. It didn't go far when split among seven men. Patty noted that, "We were all reluctant to begin to partake of the horse flesh," but
2:23:51 Steven Rinella? they apparently got over whatever uneasiness they felt. Unfortunately, they found that, quote, "The actual thing without bread or salt was as bad as the anticipation of it." Later, Patty's men would kill and eat a raven, which he described as "a nauseous bird with unsavory flesh, a buzzard which was disagreeable, and finally, after a bit of heartbreak, a dog." The men drew lots, like drawing straws to decide who would be responsible for killing their canine companion, but Patty noted that the meat was "sweet, nutritive, and strengthening."
2:24:32 Steven Rinella? Rufus Sage couldn't in good conscience hide his affinity for dog meat. Quote, "Justice impels me to say the flesh of a fat Indian dog suitably cooked is not inferior to fresh pork, and by placing side by side select parts of the two, it would be no easy task even for a good judge to tell the difference." Whether they liked it or not, the mountain men would have had a hard time avoiding dog because some of the tribes they interacted with would honor visitors by preparing a meal of dog. Right after the Mountain Man era in 1846, the writer and historian Francis Parkman
2:25:15 Steven Rinella? partook of the meal with the Sioux. He described the ceremony rather unceremoniously. "A woman with a stone-headed mallet approached a 'litter of well-grown black puppies, comfortably nested among some buffalo robes. Seizing one of them by the hind paw, she dragged him out and, carrying him to the entrance of the lodge, hammered him on the head till she killed him. Holding the puppy by the legs, she was swinging him to and fro through the blaze of a fire until the hair was singed off. This done, she unsheathed her knife and cut him into small pieces, which she dropped into a kettle to boil.
2:25:58 Steven Rinella? In a few moments, a large wooden dish was set before us, filled with this delicate preparation. A dog feast is the greatest compliment a Dakota can offer to his guest. And knowing that to refuse eating would be an affront, we attacked the little dog and devoured him before the eyes of his unconscious parent." But let's return to the subject of starvation. Patty's account of eating ravens and buzzards opens a window into how bad things could get, even though we know they could get way worse. Anyone wanting to explore the incremental steps of desperation taken by starving folks
2:26:40 Steven Rinella? might look to the infamous story of the Donner Party, which is fair game in an account of the Mountain Men because Jim Bridger himself provided them with some poor advice on their route selection. In doing so, he helped them along toward their agonizing ordeal when stranded and snowbound high in the Sierra Nevadas of California. There, the party is forced to eat the starved oxen that were supposed to pull their wagons. They use the oxides to cover their makeshift shelters, but soon they're boiling and eating dried strips of the oxhide roofs. Then they're eating one another. First, they're scavenging the carcasses of the already deceased, but before long, they're
2:27:24 Steven Rinella? hurrying one another along to death with the help of a bullet. If dead mountain men could talk, no doubt they'd have better, which is to say worse, stories to tell. But the mountain man Jedidiah Smith, who is no stranger to horrible experiences, observed that starving men prefer to keep quiet. According to Smith, quote, "Men suffering from hunger never talk much, but rather bear their sorrows in moody silence, which is more preferable to fruitless complaints." One time, a group of mountain men traveling along a tributary of the San Juan River in present-day Colorado was caught without food and tried roasting some cactus in a fire.
2:28:09 Steven Rinella? They must have chosen one of the several poisonous varieties on the landscape. A few hours later, the men felt weak and then began to shiver and vomit. An overwhelming sensation of pain took hold in their bowels, and three or four of the men, according to this account, began rolling around on the ground writhing in pain. At this point, the other men in the party decided to kill one of their mules in an attempt to restore their comrades and reduce the suffering of the rest of the group, which by that point had gone without food for nearly seven days. The mule meat, quote, "proved both sweet and tender and scarcely inferior to beef."
2:28:53 Steven Rinella? Now, this is something that you'll see again and again in accounts from this period: a hungry party killing and eating their horses and mules. But not everyone gave such rave reviews to the flesh of their domesticated animals. Charles Larpintour described eating the liver and ribs of an old mare shot by one of his comrades as, quote, "needing a great deal of seasoning to make it palatable." The liver had been thrown into the coals and, quote, "turned so very black that at first I thought it was impossible to eat any." But Larpintour was a generous food critic. He was starving another time and went three days without food.
2:29:37 Steven Rinella? That's when he quote, "thought of a dried buffalo sinew, which I had in my bullet pouch to men moccasins. I pulled it out and cut it in two, offering my hunter, meaning his companion, a part of it, which he refused. So without asking a second time, I demolished the sinew, which I found excellent, except that it was too small." In desperate moments like these, the mountain men were liable to devour anything they came across that resembled food, whether they had any right to it or not. Joseph Walker, a Tennessee-born trapper who worked out of Taos, New Mexico, and later made his way to the Green River country, recalled stumbling upon a small native village
2:30:22 Steven Rinella? in the Great Basin region, today's Nevada, whose occupants fled at the sight of a party of white men. The mountain men were in rough shape, having been out of food for several days. And they were delighted to discover among the abandoned lodges, several bags made of animal skins, filled with quote, "what appeared to be fish, dried and pounded." They stole the bags and ate heartily that night around the campfire. In the morning, they were startled to find that the bags had in fact been filled with insect larvae. In another instance, several trappers, among them Richard Lacy Wooton, known as Uncle Dick, were traveling along the Colorado River in 1838
2:31:07 Steven Rinella? when they approached a Yuma village in hopes of securing something to eat. A few of the men brought back to the rest of the party what they assumed to be bread, but noted that it had a very unfamiliar taste. Upon closer examination, the biscuits were in fact cakes made of crushed red ants, mashed together and dried in the sun.
2:31:31 Steven Rinella? Starvation was not the only danger that lurked in the wilderness. There was also the ever-present threat of thirst, which is far worse than hunger. When traveling across the prairie on the way back to Missouri, Rufus Sage and his men ran out of water, still 15 miles away from the nearest river. Under the high July sun, he found it to be maddening. Quote, "I can endure hunger for many days in succession, without experiencing any very painful sensations. I can lie down and forget it in the sweet unconsciousness of sleep, or feast my imagination upon the rich, spread tables of dreams.
2:32:15 Steven Rinella? But not so with thirst. It cannot be forgotten, sleeping or waking. It will make itself known and felt. It will parch your tongue and burn your throat, despite your utmost endeavors to thrust it from memory." The mountain men did have tricks to get through it. They'd drink the blood of freshly killed game, or even their own piss, or they'd chew the roots of Oregon grape, which were said to have medicinal properties that could stave off the worst effects of dehydration. When offered the heart of a dead bison, one man wrote that, quote, "Immediately as it touched my lips, my burning thirst got the better of my abhorrence.
2:33:00 Steven Rinella? I plunged my head into the reeking ventricles and drank until forced to stop for breath." But you still just had to press on. That's what Nathaniel Wyeth's rendezvous-bound expedition did in 1834, when they went for several days without water in Wyoming. It was miserable. Their tongues were swollen, and their lips were cracked and bleeding from the relentless sun. According to our source, a man by the name of Richardson was, quote, "masticating a leaden bullet to excite the salivary glands." Finally, they took a mangled buffalo and tipped it on its side.
2:33:43 Steven Rinella? One of the men stuck his knife into the animal's distended belly and was rewarded with a gush of, quote, "green and gelatinous juices, mingled with the half-digested contents of its stomach."
2:33:58 Steven Rinella? Gagging, the thirst crazed men half-heartedly strained the liquid into a tin pan, hoping to remove the worst of the impurities. And then, with trembling hands, they raised the dripping pan to their lips and drank deep, quote, "with the satisfaction of a man taking his wine after dinner. A desperate act of survival in a land that knew little mercy."
2:34:34 Steven Rinella? I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set.
2:35:19 Steven Rinella? Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.
2:35:25 Speaker 06 A BetterHelp ad. I would like to formally request more storage space in my brain. Because somehow I can forget why I opened my laptop where I put my keys, or the name of someone I met 30 seconds ago. But I can remember an awkward conversation from six years ago in extraordinary detail. So if your brain came with a delete button, what would you use it on? Maybe it's that tough breakup you've analyzed from every possible angle, and irrational worry you know doesn't deserve this much attention. The conversation with your boss you keep rehearsing in the shower, or that one comment someone made that you're still thinking about weeks later. We don't always get to choose what sticks around in our heads. BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space to talk about what's
2:36:09 Speaker 06 taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible
2:36:19 Steven Rinella? Visit betterhelp.com. Cost and coverage may vary. What if you could save up for that new car or vacation just by buying the stuff you're already buying? With the One Pay banking app, you earn 3% cash back on up to $150 in monthly spending in categories you choose. So it's easy to save. So what are you saving for? Maybe you got your eyes on a new truck or a new boat, or you're saving up for your first house. Download the One Pay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.
2:36:56 Speaker 02 One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Cash back is earned as points. Go to onepay.com/rewards/terms for redemption options and additional details.
2:37:11 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Previous Ep. 660: MeatEater Radio Live! Coues Deer, "Cowz" Deer, and Two Truths and a Lie Next Ep. 662: Game On, Suckers! MeatEater Trivia CLI Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated