Bear Grease - Ep. 166: Pure Americana - Plott Hound Royalty, Berry Tarlton (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

This week on Bear Grease, your host Clay Newcomb, brings you this second part in our series on Plott Hounds and how they’ve been interwoven into the lives of the Appalachian people. Developed in isolation deep in the Great Smoky Mountains, the Plott breed was tailor made for the rugged landscape, its people, its bears. The folks who’ve dedicated big blocks of their life to this bear hound are called Plott Men and Women. If you cut them they bleed brindle and in the very niche hound world, some rise to the top as Plott Royalty - and one such man is the late Berry Tarlton of Greenville, Tennessee. His life will give us a much bigger vista than just dogs, but a rare, authentic peak into Appalachia, its culture, its people, and ways. It will be told to us both first person through an archival interview of Berry and also through the collective voices of his grandson and great-grandson, Tracey and Ben Jones. Berry started the Houston Valley strain of Plotts, he’s in the Plott Hall of Fame, the Tennessee Bear Hunters Hall of fame. He was also a legendary lawman who took up a badge and gun in the name of family honor and spent decades chasing down and busting moonshiners in East Tennessee. The stories are as wild as these mountains themselves including car bombing, shoot outs, and being bushwhacked with a Tommy gun. You’re about to see that Plott Hounds are just part of the plot. We really doubt you’re going to want to miss this one… Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. When I was young, men bragged on how hard they work. Well, we've got the point now, people brag on how hard they don't work. You would never meet an old mountain person who bragged on being lazy. Perhaps there are a lot of ways in which to tell a dog story, the story of a breed.

We could talk about specific legendary hounds and their exploits, or tell stories about the traits of the breed or nerd out about breeding strategies, and dog lineages. But to me, the most interesting thing about the American plot hound is how it's been interwoven into the lives of the Appalachian people. This is part two in our series on these Brindle Bear Dogs. Developed in isolation deep in the Great Smoky Mountains, the plot breed was tailor-made for the rugged landscape, its people, and its bears.

I'm fascinated with the folks who've dedicated big blocks of their life to this bearhound. They're called plot men and women, and if you cut them, they bleed brindle. And in the very niche hound world, some rise to the top as leaders, and might even be considered plot royalty. One such man is the late Barry Tarleton of Greenville, Tennessee. His life will give us a much bigger vista than just dogs, but a rare, authentic peak into Appalachia, its culture, its people, and its ways. In a fortuitous twist, it will be told to us in part first person through an archival interview of Barry, but mainly through the collective voices of his grandson and great-grandson, Tracy and Ben Jones. Barry started the Houston Valley strain of plots.

He's in the Plot Hall of Fame, the Tennessee Bear Hunters Hall of Fame, and was a legendary lawman who took up a badge and gun in the name of family honor. He spent decades chasing down and busting moonshiners in East Tennessee. The stories are as wild as the mountains themselves. You're about to see that plot hounds are just part of the plot. A really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. He said, I had to take revenge. And he said, I could either do it legally or illegally.

His exact words. And he said, I decide to do it legally. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the bear. Greece podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I'm in Greenville, Tennessee at the home of Tracy Jones. He's sitting on the left side of a beige love seat with his iPhone and his hand.

Looking over my right shoulder out of a sliding glass door, across a pasture, I can see a grand view of weather-worn mountains. Like mute time capsules, they've witnessed the progression of mankind, but speak nary and intelligible word. Tracy lives 50 miles northwest as the crow flies from the plot Genesis Center in Haywood County, North Carolina. Tracy is a pastor, a farmer, he loves racking horses, but he's a generational plot man, and he came by it honest. Between here and the hills, about 150 yards behind the house, I can see a line of dog houses and a pack of dart brindle bearhounds.

Tracy is calling his mother and aunt to ask about the car bombing. I'm eavesdropping. Are you sad? Hey, Mom. Yeah. I was asking Aunt Sandy about the story about the car being blowed up at the house. She said she thought it was in 57. Yeah, Sandy was just a baby.

She's still little. Daddy was still, you know, warming her bottle, so she was little. How old were you? Well, I'd be five, I guess. Five years old. What time of night did it happen? Oh, it must have been early three or four o'clock because Daddy was warming Sandy's bottle, and then he was going to be.

get ready to go to work and the dogs was barking and he was going to go out there and mom said let them dogs bark and fix that young bottle and uh then we heard the explosion did it shake the house anything i had damage to my hearing for a while yeah that was afraid you would and they thought i would too because i was sleeping on the couch right beside of the right beside the car and grandpa come running across the road saying i knew that stove would blow up Now, I remember that. I told you this story was bigger than plot hounds, but somewhere deep in the marrow of it will find them.

Barry Tarleton was born in 1923 and passed away on June 5, 2012 at the age of 84. Those were Barry's two daughters, Jane and Sandy, telling the story about the car bombing. Among many other things, Barry. was elected constable, a law enforcement position in the mid-1950s and served for 24 years. He had a personal vendetta against the illegal moonshine trade in his community. Here's some context from his grandson, Tracy, on why his family was attacked. Not ever moonshine was a murderer. I mean, it was to make that straight. Some of them were just

old boys that wanted to make some money. But some of them were really mean. I mean, kill you. you mean, just like drug, and not ever drug dealer's a murderer, but some are. And they hated him. So one night they snuck into his house, he had a dog there that run loose in the yard. They killed it. Then they packed his car with dynamite and blew the car up beside the house, just to try to send him a message. I actually think they tried to blow the house up with the car, but they just didn't get the job done. You know, there's a funny twist of that story, too, because my great-grandparents lived across the road from them. And Papa had just got a new oil stove. You know, they went from wood to oil.

And it drove, my grandpa Shipley was ticked about it because he said, that fancy thing will blow up in Killian's All. So the night that the Moonshine car, the car was blown up with the moonshiders, Grandpa Shipley ran out in the highway with his long-handle underwear on screaming. I told you that old stove would blow up and kill y'all. He didn't like the new technology. Wow. They hated Barry because he was relentless in his pursuit. When he caught them, he was just, and he was extremely good at his job.

The men who bombed Barry's car were caught when somebody snitched on them. But the bomber was killed before he ever went to trial. That's all we know. This was a dangerous place. And it's a rare thing in the bear grease world when we're talking about someone who's no longer on this earth that we actually get to hear from them firsthand. But luckily for us, in early 2012, just months before Barry's passing, Bob Plot, yes, our friend, author, and plot descendant, Bob, came to interview the old bear hunter, though only a shell of what he once was. Tracy filmed the

interview with his grandfather. This is the voice of Barry Tarleton. Tracy had probably on why he got into law enforcement. It was deeply personal. Got started and it because of your brother's getting killed. Oh, yeah, I had two brothers get killed over them, John. Well, I'm not going to kill of the guy that's left up behind him because of his throat. Oh. And he hasn't got killed leaving the house.

You know, something keeps sitting in the chair and just, just got him right in the face of the child guy. So that's what got me started involved with him. Back to that time, we had a lot of killing in the Naked Mountains. It just said every year if you want to get somebody to get killed. I just got tired of it. Two of Barry's six brothers got killed in relation to alcohol. He said there was a lot of killing in the mountains, and quote, he just got tired of it.

No flash, no fluff, it was just that simple to the old mountain man. Here's Tracy expounding more on his grandfather's brothers being murdered. I know you're fascinated by the subject and have had it on your podcast, and I don't want to go into it very much, but the moonshine deal was a big part of that. You know, there's been a revival of like some kind of romantic-type notion of moonshine that wasn't true among the mountain people. Today it's, you know, a billboard in Gatlinburg and something you do when you come to Tennessee to visit.

But when you hear people like my grandfather and others talk about it, it just wrecked homes, wrecked lives, destroyed people. My grandfather had a couple brothers that were murdered in reference to alcohol, liquor. They were moonshining. No. The one brother went to the home of some people, and the family story is vague, but it involved alcohol to some extent. and the brother got his head blowed off of the shotgun. The other brother was found up here in the creek with his throat cut. They just cut his throat and left him laying in the creek.

Alcohol was involved with that. And then one of my grandfathers would have been his nephews. He was 15 years old, was given bad liquor, and slipped back to the house, went into his, went to bed, and he drowned that night in his own vomit. So our experience, the alcohol was like the rest of Appalachia, the liquor business was a very small fraction of people

who involved themselves with that, and the bulk of Appalachian people hated it. But that's not what you would believe today based on the billboards and the stories and all that that go with it. That's some interesting insight from Tracy. Let's keep going into this story. So Barry Tarleton, your grandfather,

both his brothers were killed, murdered. Murdered. Because of alcohol-related incidents here in the mountains. And then what did he do? Well, his words to me were this. He said, I had to take revenge. Revenge. He used the word revenge.

He used the word revenge. He said, I had to take revenge. And he said, I could either do it legally or illegally. His exact words. And he said, I decided to do it legally. So he ran for constable and spent decades hunting the moonshiners down and sent them to prison. And they hated him. See, it wasn't over untaxed liquor.

My grandpa or anybody else don't care no more for reverence and tax money than anybody else. A lot of people think, well, that's just a government thing. They just hated those poor mountain people because they had untaxed liquor. That's not Papa's motive. He could have cared less about the taxes paid on it. To him it was destroying his community. It was a dangerous place to live. But Papal cleaned the place up.

Now he was viewed as a hero in the community. Barry Tarleton was an undisputed hero in Green County, Tennessee, or at least with the people who weren't making moonshine. To this day, I'd say if you ask a long-time local in Greenville if they knew of Barry, they will. And they all say the same thing. And hey, don't forget, this story is about plot hounds. We'll get there.

Tracy and I were on a drive down a gravel road. We pulled over when we saw a lady that he knew. I'm nervous to put the mic in her face. Tracy tries to explain to her that I'm interested in Barry Tarleton. Tracy's never heard this story before. He was interested in the custom of work he did and chasing the moonshiders and stuff. He called my daddy a few times. Did he?

She just said he caught my daddy a few times. Can I record you telling this story? Oh, gosh. Just don't use a face. I won't, I won't. Yeah, tell me the story. Tell me again. So Barry caught your dad.

Is that what you said? Yeah. Dad had gone over to wards over here and got some moonshine, and they put in a sack of corn and put it in the back of Daddy's car. Well, Barry apparently seen him come out of there, and he pulled him over, and he dumped all that corn out and got that moonshine and took Daddy to jail. Well, Mama didn't know how to drive, but Barry didn't know that. So he figured since she was a woman she knew how to drive.

So he said, take the car and take the kids and go on home. That's what she did. And he took your dad to jail. We continue on our drive, but a few minutes later, we pull over to talk to Tracy's cousin, Scotty. We asked him about Barry. I stick the mic again out the window to a fellow who had no idea we were coming. Tracy had never heard this story either. Well, it's kind of awkward just driving up in some of my yard.

putting the mic in their face. But what would Barry's reputation have been in this community? Law man. Yeah, he was the law man when I was young. Me and my cousin used to ride bicycles on the road. We've been down there riding the bicycles and hear gunshots. Here come bury chasing somebody. They're shooting back and forth.

Me and him had to get off of the bicycles and get in the ditch line. I keep getting shot. Is that right? You remember a gun fight. Oh, yeah. They'd go by, shooting at one another. They didn't help, but they didn't stop right there. What was the, you know?

Did you ever learn what the story was? Well, they called them. Were they moonshiders? Moonshiners? Moonshiners. That's what he mostly done out of this area. He's chasing moonshounters. He was a good man.

He is a deacon in our church. Okay. That's how good a man he was. In the audio we have of Barry, he talks some about his law enforcement. But not much. The stories are short and to the point. It's doubtful that this is the one that Scotty witnessed, but here's Barry telling a story

about shooting the back glass out of a moonshiner's car. I was right after that. I was driving up the mountain over here on Sunday evening. Uh-huh. And I seen this load of whiskey coming through. And I was mad, you know, because of a little car up. He wouldn't stop. I just shot the back glass there.

We went on the up the road, turned around. Of course, you know I was just playing clothes. And went down and he said, oh, I don't know what the matter. He cursed that somebody shot his glass out. He didn't know what was me. So I tossed in there. I see the little liquor so I could rest it. When the guy pulled over, he didn't know that Barry was the one who'd shot his glass out.

The point of these stories is how common shootouts were. And Barry wasn't one to embellish a story. story. But here's another. It's short but shocking. He starts off by saying they tried to bushwhack me one time. They tried to bushwack me one time. I knew the state line that time Tommy Gun. There's on the side of the car. I fell out the other side of the shot. He got over it's a little bit. That's the Tennessee North Carolina State Line. He just said they bushwhacked him and shot his car with the Tommy gun on the Tennessee, North Carolina state line. Barry rolls out of the passenger's side and begins to fire back with his shotgun.

He closes the story with the chuckle, saying it was over in just a little bit. I'm telling you, Hollywood would have a hard time keeping up with the untold and true stories of Barry in East Tennessee. He once busted a thousand gallon whiskey steel, which was on the front page of the Greenville newspaper. The bust also led Barry to solving a murder case. case. One of the young moonshiners had killed a man by knocking him in the head with a pair of pliers for 78 cents and hid the man's body in the woods. Barry got the truth out of him and found the body. This stuff is wild. And don't forget that this is the story about plot hounds. So don't get too enamored with all these wild stories because we're just getting started. This is some

serious bear-gare-y stuff, man. But I want to love to live. learn how Barry, as constable, was able to go out and take down the moonshine trade in his community. Here's Tracy. So what did he do? How would he, a constable, go about breaking up some of these systems? Well, there's basically two things that just happened over and over again. One is he would find out where a steel was at. He would go in at night and sometimes catch him on the steel and sometimes not. If he caught them on the steel, he arrested them and took them in and destroyed the steel. You didn't always catch them on the steel. You know, that was just sometimes they were there, sometimes they were not. But a lot of times they would camp on the

steel and stay there with it under cover of darkness. You don't see smoke at night. But, you know, then the other method was Houston Valley was a thoroughfare for people out of a different county to go to Asheville. And Papal told me that they wouldn't go through hot springs, because there was a railroad track that crossed the highway. And if they happened to time it wrong and the train was coming through, the moonshiner would have to stop at the train and the law could catch him at the tracks. So they would come through Houston Valley to try to get the highway. Because they wouldn't have to stop.

Yes, because there was no railroad tracks. So I might run you down there later and show you. There's a little small bridge you don't even notice it. It's just like over a little tiny creek. Pavon would sit up right before that bridge and he would have another car up a little road down below him. And the Shiner's come run up on his stop point. And if they tried to get away, the other car was already behind them.

And then he would also just wait for him to come down the road. He'd just sit in Houston Valley and wait for him to come through, you know, with their car bent down on the high and in and run them down. Now, I do get a kick out of this story. Everybody likes to talk about how well moonshioners can drive because that's the beginning of NASCAR, the Shining drivers. Right. Right. That's the folklore around NASCAR that it started with guys trying to outrun the law.

Yeah. But I get a kick out of it because I say, well, if you think the moonshiners can drive, you ought to have met the revenues. Because they run them down all the time. My grandpa and my grandma would work together. And she would be prepared. And when he would run a car down and run it off the road, get it stopped if he had to, he would take the guy driving the car to jail. then my grandma would drive the moonshine car to the jail with the load of liquor. Grandma riding down the road with a load of liquor. Now that's interesting.

We're going to learn quite a bit more about Grandma in just a minute. Her name was Hazel, and they were a unique pair. But hold your East Tennessee raccoon horses, because this isn't even what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about his Houston Valley plots. This moonshine busting is just a side show to be. Barry's family, his work, and his plot hounds. His passion in his life, besides protecting and loving his family, was his hounds. No doubt, though, his law enforcement work and his motivations are a fascinating aspect of his life. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over.

They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a pool of blood. Oh my God. He doesn't. have a head. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and

silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends

in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the last episode, we explored the American Plot-Hound Genesis story. And I'm glad to report that I'm still alive and well. To my knowledge, no one has tried to assassinate me,

though the episode certainly lifted both dander and grins. But the conclusion we arrived at is, it doesn't really matter how the dogs got here. Whether those five dogs were on the ship with Johannes Plot or not, the plot dog arose from the frontier hollows of southern Appalachia in the early 1900s, like a four-legged saber-tailed brindle-champion prize bear fighter, fully developed, having been kept in regional isolation by a tight circle of bear hunters for 150 years. In the early 1900s, when this part of Appalachia began to open up, sports writers came and hunted

with these brindled dogs and the plot family who'd bred, hunted, and developed the breed for over a century. In the early 1900s, the New York Times printed an article, calling them plot hounds. The national attention on these dogs began to grow. grow. In 1946, the UKC officially recognized the American plot hound breed in their registry, and the demand for these hounds as bear, coon, mountain lion, and hog-dog skyrocketed. And I haven't expounded on this yet, but the hound received global recognition. Houndsmen from Spain, Denmark, Russia, and other places still come to the epicenter of the plot world in Appalachia today, paying large sums of money to get what is in their mind the finest hounds on planet earth.

This isn't hearsay. This happens a lot. As a matter of fact, I have personally been approached by bear hunters from Russia and Spain reaching out to me wanting to buy American plot hounds. Like I said from the beginning, the most interesting thing about the plot hound to me is the human part of their story. will begin right at the start. Who was Barry Tarleton?

Here's Tracy. Well, to me, he was my papal. That's the regional term for grandfather. And in the community, he wore a lot of different hats. He started work at a place called Pet Milk when he was 16, worked there until he retired, never had a different job. But he also was a constable. And then he was a farmer.

He bought the farm that we live on. He bought it in 1955. The deed says that he paid an unspecified amount of money, some kind of trade goods, and assumed a debt of $5,000-some dollars that the people owed on the place. He lived in the mountains with the farms out just at the foothills. And he always wanted to move from where he grew up to here to live,

which is about 10 miles away. But my grandma had a plot of ground. on her family farm, and she wouldn't move off of it. She just would not move away from her home. Hazel, Barry's wife, would never leave her home place. That's where she and Barry lived their whole lives. Barry was also deputized in Madison County, North Carolina, so he could chase moonshiner's across the state line without stopping.

However, he spent his entire career 48 years at Pet Milk in Greenville, Tennessee. Here's more from Tracy on some unique specifics of Barry's life. His daily routine was insane. His whole life, he had to be at work, I'd say 4.30. It was very early. And he worked until 2.30 or 3 at the milk plant. He would get off from there, go by the farm, feed, or whatever he had to do. Cattle, hogs, tobacco, hay.

Then he would go home and feed his dogs. He kept a lot of dogs. you know, sometimes as many as 20. There was no too many dogs for him. I tell this story a lot. His wife's name was Hazel. He had an old 78 Ford truck, and you could hear him coming about a half a mile away.

He had big, what was called, co-op grip spur tires. You could hear him rumbling down the road, dogs would go wild when they'd hear him. When Mamma would hear him coming, she would have supper making. He would go up in the dog lock to feed, which was on a hillside, and he was a very strong guy.

He could carry two, five-gallon buckets of water uphill up into his 70s. And while he fed and watered his dogs, she would get supper ready. And when I say ready, I don't mean just cooked. When he walked in the house, it would be on the table. He would sit down at the table, eat. While he ate, she would go draw his bath water. When he got done eating, he got up from the table. He would go take a bath.

While he was taking a bath, she went, got his pajamas. whatever he was going to wear her sleep in, got all that ready for him, brought it to him. He'd come out of the bathtub, sat down in his chair, and every night he watched the news. He was insane about it. He listened to an hour of news like it was a religion. When the news went off while he was watching that, she would go turn his bed down, just fold his covers down. But by 8 o'clock, he went to bed. When he went to bed, she went back into the kitchen, and she would take a bowl of cereal, pour his

cereal out, put the sugar on it, cover it with aluminum full, and set it there for him the next day, pack his lunch in his lunch box, put it in a refrigerator, and that was their relationship. She loved him. He loved her. Yep. And she never wanted much. She just didn't care for things. But she always wanted a good car.

And so he would always keep her a good vehicle. And she drove like a maniac. You know, everybody talks about your grandma driving real slow and put-putting around. But she had white-knuckle you on the roads down through the valley where they lived. When I tell that story, it makes her sound like some little passive housewife that got run over by some over-bearing guy. But nothing was further from the truth. I mean, she was a pistol. She was just old school.

And she believed that her joy in life come from taking care of him. And she went to town once a week on Thursdays. get her hair done and get groceries. Wouldn't go outside the house without her makeup on. See, today, to be country, everybody thinks, you know, being country is dressing down. But the old mountain people, they were not that way. The old mountain people were not nasty, crude people. The mountain people I grew up around, they had to wear clothes.

Then they usually had good clothes, and some of them would have what they call their Sunday best. Even if it was one pair overalls that were only wore to church. Old school, he called them. Barry and Hazel were married 63 years until his death in 2012. She adored him and he adored her. The covenant of till death do his part was real to them. We're getting a peek through the veil of time into Appalachia. It might be easy to point a finger and say the housewife of the 1950s America is a relic of the past.

In some ways it is. It's easy to recognize the perceived faults of the past generation and identify the way that our society has progressed above those faults. But it's harder to understand how we've digressed, how modernity, technology, social norms, these things new to humanity, have crept in like a thief. Our current faults and the fruit they'll produce in decades to come will one day be evident. Many are already evident. but it's just interesting to think about. Again, I'm so grateful for this recording that we have of Barry. How would you like to hear him tell the story of how he met Hazel?

I want to hear it straight from the man himself. Well, one Sunday evening, I was driving an old 35 Ford down through the valley, and she was walked up to the road there, the neighbor lives out of the building. I stopped and after what she's doing. She said, she's waiting on a boyfriend. I said, you get a boyfriend? I said, you get a boyfriend? She said, yeah.

I said, well, you get rid of him. I'd like to have a day with you. She said, are you serious? I said, no, I am serious. So next week I didn't come to show up and next week I come back by the other. And she got rid of her and so, and she come down to the store where I was,

at a little store that I had for something. She said to turn her in and she told the board, she's, not there, the man, I'm with her her. He let her go and I'm going. I've been with her 60 years. Since 62 years. Get rid of him because I'd like to go on a date with you, he said. Now that's bold.

Then Hazel proceeded to call him out to the storekeeper, pointing at Barry saying, that's the man I'm going to marry. We're kind of building this story backwards, but here's more from Tracy on Barry's early life. And this is all starting to make sense. And remember, this is a story about plot hounds. or plot dogs.

Here's Tracy on what I call possum poverty. Papal Barry was born in 1928, February of 1928. He was born in Houston Valley, you know, not in a hospital. I'd have to sit down and count them, but he had six or seven brothers and one sister. He was really close to that family. You know, they were very tight-knit. And one of the neat things was all of his life, even up into his 80s, He always referred to his daddy as poppy, and he always called his mom, mommy.

They were extremely poor. I'm talking about destitute-type poor family in the mountains there. And when we say poverty, I mean, if they caught a possum that was too small for a meal, they would put it in a cage and feed it until it was large enough for a meal to have meat. That's poverty. He was 13 years old before I ever went to town the first time, and they went on a wagon. he said he was shocked because he thought town was just one big building because all he'd ever been to was a country store he got the town saw all those buildings he couldn't believe it he just thought town

was a bigger store i could remember him telling me that him and one of his brothers were sent to the store with a dime to walk to store with a dime and his brother wanted to take it and keep it he had a brother was a little rough i think he tried to cut papal with a knife to take the dime they fought over it, a dime. But I never knew them to be an unhappy people. In fact, I would say, of all the people that I've known in life, he probably handled life better than anybody I've known. Just if he was at work, he was happy.

Because he grew up so poor, he was always thankful to have a job. Within the last two weeks, you know, there's a, there's a song dropped that some dude's mad about his job. It's real popular right now. Well, I think Papal started to work at the way. pet milk at a quarter an hour, and he said he was lucky to get the job because everybody wanted it coming out of the Depression. He wouldn't be singing no song about how much he hated his job. He'd laugh about people talking about the good old days. He told me one day, and he was

laughing about it. He said, I remember them good old days. He said, I don't want no more of them good old days. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fattening a possum out until it's big enough for a decent meal is an acute anecdote, but a genuine look into hard-scrabble poverty, giving us more insight than a government tax return ever could. And I think it's important to interject something made clear to me about Barry. It's that he was a modern man, all for social, economic, and technological progress. Of his three grandchildren, one became a pastor, one has a doctorate in nursing, and another a lawyer. And for all the house, people out there. He loved tracking callers when they came out. Here's more from Tracy.

I say this a lot. When I was young, men bragged on how hard they work. Well, we've got the point now, people brag on how hard they don't work. That was a foreign concept to the old people. You would never meet an old mountain person who bragged on being lazy. Oh, you can ask somebody now, like you stop by the store, you see a bunch of people sitting around the story, say, way up to. Ah, not much. Not much of anything. Ain't getting nothing done

the day. Just laugh about it. The old people, they wouldn't want to be associated with laziness whatsoever, not even in a joke. But he loved work,

but mostly he loved his dogs. So that's the kind of poverty we're talking about. Well, through work and multiple jobs, including the factory, the farming, the constable work, he never stopped.

work constantly. It would save, you know, every penny he could get saved. They were able to build a house, keep decent vehicles, got to where they could take family vacations. And what I'm saying is Papaw on 50 cents an hour could buy a farm. Now Papal's grandparents only farmed. So you went from only farming to having a job to still keep the farm to being nearly impossible to get a farm. The time my generation came along, you had to go out and get a white collar type job or inherit land to be able to have a farm where we live. The land value went so high that it was greater than the land's productive ability. So when we talk about poverty, you may have a kid with a nice car and a nice iPhone. He'll never own 50 acres of land.

Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, you describe that so well. What does that mean? Well, I think it means that we viewed people as really poor who had things more important than we have. And we view ourselves as really rich with things that are not very important. Tracy has brought up a philosophical question about poverty. Is it completely understood through finances? Who actually was poor?

That's something to think about that tickles to the point of cracking the very foundations of our modern society. Perhaps our generation has been hypnotized by overpriced trinkets, giving us a sense of financial superiority over past generations, while things of significant real value are being taken from us while in a glazed stupor. I've got a question for you. How do you evaluate your own life's meaning and value? Is it weighted heavily in economic, social status, and external achievement? I don't think Tracy is suggesting that meaning in life is calculated by owning land either.

We're going to let that cast iron skillet soak in some warm water before we try to scrub it out. Tracy keeps coming back to Barry loving his dogs, but he didn't just love any dogs. He loved plot dogs. We're going to get into the details of Barry's line of Houston Valley plots, but we need to understand the deep history of hounds, the Appalachian people. This is fascinating. And if you haven't picked it up yet,

Tracy Jones is an articulate and insightful fellow. Here's Tracy. To me to understand the Appalachian people, you have to understand that this area was settled by primarily Scots, Irish people, and some Germans, but they are all immigrants. Well, the reason they ended up in these mountains is because nobody else wanted them. it's hard to make a living here with a you know a mule and 40 acres so the people that moved in here a lot of them come off the border wars between Scotland and England and all that was going on there

and they fought over there like cats and dogs over borders and especially family honor you know if you i read a book one time on why the mountain people you know fought each other so much like the hatfields and mccoy's and the author really said it just come down to one thing it was family honor and you'd rather be dead as somebody to slight your family. But over in, you know, what the old timers always referred to as the old country, they didn't have their own land. It was owned by somebody else. You know, if they had a horse, it would have just been some kind of service horse.

And they wouldn't have had hounds at all because they wouldn't have been allowed to hunt. They had been saved for the nobility. So when they finally got in here, they were poor. but the one thing they could do is they could raise stock. And the hound put them on the same level as the people they used to be under the thumb of. For instance, George Washington was a houndsman, but he was wealthy. But a guy in these mountains could raise a fox dog that could be better than George Washington's, and there was nothing Washington could do to get it.

And then they felt the same way about their horses. They got to raising horses, and they would have local horse races, and the poorest dude in the country could end up with the fastest horse, and he may not have a nickel to his name, but if he beat you ever sat at the horse race, he was the man. I think that the horses and the hounds became so important to the mountain people because they had lived for centuries under the thumbs of other people, and now they could be on top at the things that were the most important to the people

that had them under thumb. The deep roots of why people love what they love and how the value of that thing is passed from generation to generation isn't always externally obvious. Here it touched the very foundation of the human class structure. Hounds were something that money and class couldn't manipulate, but rather it was earned through generational persistence, ingenuity, woodsmanship, and crafty breeding. The horse and hound delivered a sense of freedom. Independence. Most of these mountain people didn't have money, but they had hounds. Today, this artifact is still evident. But I think it's ingrained in our psyche now, that those are the things that not only put you on the same level as the rich guy,

but in some cases put you above him, and ain't a thing he can do about it. You may never have his thousand acres, you may never have his clothes, you may never have the future he could hand his kids because of his money, but he can't have your dog and he can't have your horse no matter how much money he's got. It feels like, too, that with these strains of dogs, like your family has, it's handing down a cultural heritage to them that is not in the form of finances. And that's really unique, especially as intact as it is, like what I see. And it would be with other breeds of dogs and other places, but specifically with the plot breed.

There are plot families that have handed down these tight strains of dogs for generations, like a financial inheritance. And that's really special. That is special. Money is handy. and we could all use a little more, but the delivery of a cultural inheritance is true power. Beyond the physical flesh and bone of something

that will eventually fade back into the earth, like a buried hound, the beast becomes a host or a carrier of family identity. Physical things can be temporary tools to deliver imperishable things. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper.

From cold case files to whispered, suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube. or wherever you get your podcasts. Financial distribution has never, nor ever will be just,

but neither are hounds. In the words of plot historian John Jackson, most people have not been bequeathed a royal strain of mountain bear dogs, but some have. I want you to meet Ben Jones, Barry's great-grandson. He's 29 years old.

We're in the dog lot, looking at a bunch of dark brindle hounds. So how would you describe to me the way these dogs look like these? What do they look like? Well, I like a dog that is long-legged with a small-framed body, not huge bones. And I don't like a super long ear on a dog. I don't want it past their nose for sure.

What's the premium plot bear hound? color. How would you describe it? Right there. I like them jet black with just enough brendle to register him. Ben is typically a man of few words, but lots of action. I find myself hesitating to brag on young men for fear that my words would entice them to succumb to the darkest villain of their age category,

their greatest potential weakness, pride. But I followed Ben in the mountains, And I can tell you, Ben is not just a plot man. He's a bear hunter who could stand with the best hunters who've ever laid a boot soul in these mountains. Ben Jones is the real deal. And he is and has been the Jedi master breeder of the Houston Valley plot line for the last 10 years.

Do you ever think about how, I mean, these dogs and some of the dogs and these other places are the, I mean, it wouldn't take but a generation to lose all this. I mean, in terms of kind of the legacy of your family and stuff, do you ever think about that? I mean, especially with losing, you know, it's dangerous hunting dogs and stuff. Yeah, it's actually almost happened two or three times in prior years. I mean, I've poured my life into trying to hold on to that strain without breaking it.

And to this point, it's still an unbroken chain since 1953. Why do you like a plot dog more than another dog? Well, truthfully, I don't like plots over other dogs. But I like my plots. In that statement, you see the practicality of these Appalachian plot men. And like I said, in some ways we're telling the story backwards. I want to ask Tracy how Barry got started. in plots. Here's what he said.

What Pat Ball said was he coon hunted a lot. His daddy was a cat hunter, Bobcat hunted. And so they learned to enjoy dogs from their daddy, I guess. Well, they got to getting tree dogs. And in doing that, they got to train a bear every now and then, like in the 50s. And somewhere along the line, he was having a discussion with some folks. And Vaughn Plott was involved. And he said, well, Barry, if you're going to be,

be serious about buyer hunting, you need to get plots. And Vaughn wouldn't let him have a dog, wouldn't sell him a pup or nothing. So he said, you got to get plots, but you're not getting them for me. Yeah, that's what he told me. So he found a female dog out of Kentucky. Like I said, they didn't sit around talk about history much. They talked about what they did last week. We don't know exactly when he got his first plot.

But we know he gave a pup to my cousin Charles in 1965 out of a litter. So we date it from six. that we know for a fact he raised litter of plots. But he had plots prior to that. Well, in the early 70s, he made friends with Gene White. And Papal got a young female from Gene, brought it up here, and she got hurt on a bear. And when she got hurt, she was crippled and couldn't hunt anymore.

Traded her back to Jean. And she became sort of Jean's really, I think, a real significant portion of what he ended up breeding over time as a brood jip. And then in trade, Papal got a female, and on the papers her name's Roberta. And from her, I think Ben told me yesterday, she read five times. Roberta became the foundation of the whole deal. And then that's still what's – Ben is talking about the unbroken line from Roberta to now. There's been outcrosses, but the breeding decisions was made in the family all the way back to her.

I think they're what, maybe 16 generations now? You may remember Vaughn Plott from the first episode. He was the great-great-grandson of George or Johannes Plot who started the breed. I think it's funny but fitting that Vaughn told Barry you need plots for Bear, but you're not going to get any for me. Like Ben said, Barry got started in plots in the early 1950s, but it wasn't until the mid-60s that they were able to start documenting the Houston Valley line of plots. And in the 1970s, they really began to take off with a legendary gyp named Roberta. I want now to ask Tracy about strains of plots and what that means. Well, that really answers the question that back to something Ben said a few minutes ago

when you asked Ben about plots and he said, well, what I really like is my own. That's not an arrogant statement. What Ben was saying was the overall breed of, plot itself is not a cohesive breed. It's splintered into strains. So if you say what are the characteristics of a plot, it's really a too general of a question because there's no such thing as a standard that plots have been bred to meet across the country. There's no governing board. So a guy across the mountain there, his plots may have a brinal hide like mine, but be nothing like mine at all. So you can't say that a breed is characterized by

certain traits because it's not that way. Strains. Strains simply mean a narrow breeding philosophy among certain families or groups. Well, I mean, you're friends with Roy Clark, and what you'll find is people that bear hunt

and especially from the mountains, if they're serious. I'm not talking about people who just, you know, hunt here and there and don't care. But serious people, if they breed plot bear dogs and they live in these mountains, they're going to be a lot of like, a lot. A lot of life.

Because they've got to do the same thing. If you followed Bear Grease for a long time, surely you've heard of Bear Grease Hall of Famer Roy Clark of Cock County, Tennessee. We did a series with the Clarks on episode 8 and 10 of Bear Grease. We also did a big video with Mr. Roy that's on the media YouTube channel. Tracy thinks the world of the clerks. And there are many great strains of plots and many worthy, worthy plot men, but there just isn't enough bear grease to go around to tell all their stories.

But we don't have to take it from Tracy on how to breed a good bear dog. How about we hear it directly from Barry? Here's a short, simple explanation from him. Of course, when I breed a dog, breed a dog, I always breed to the best female guy. She ain't going to count on breeding nothing to her. And he's got to be getting to me, you know, not because of the paper. on good feet, good in the woods, I ain't gonna bring to him. Yes, sir.

One of the good nose on him and got a lot of grit. And it's real friendly, almost like a house dog's pretty. And not eel, you know? And when it comes to a bird, I always get a difference. Every time I've been around a successful old-time dog breeder, I'm surprised at how simple they make it seem. He said he wants nose and grit, And by grit, he means a dog's ability and desire to not be afraid of a mean bear.

But it's interesting that he wanted them friendly to a human like a house dog. But he said, when it comes to bear, they're altogether different. I had a specific question for Ben about this Houston Valley line. We're back in the dog lot standing in front of most of the living animals of the Houston Valley plot line. Do you think a dog like that, best dog in your pack, would be as good a dog as the Houston Valley line has ever had? Like when you think about a line of dogs that is 70 years old, are the dogs getting better? Would Barry Tarleton think that was the best dog in the country? Well, I really don't want to say that because there are so many years of dogs that I never got to see to evaluate myself.

but I can tell you, as far as overall hunting, the dogs that are tied here now have seen more game and been more places than they ever would have prior. You get to see so much more out of them. I mean, we're going everywhere and also hog hunt them. And, you know, it's just a more well-rounded dog. They get to see more, and you get to see more out of them.

I mean, when you're hunting them that much, you're going to find the flaws that you wouldn't have never even seen before. you also find the, you know, the better qualities, but you find the bad ones too. There's got to be a strong ability to remove personal bias when truly breeding top-notch animals. You've got to be able to see the good and the bad. And in the case of these family lines, you've got to be able to remove the emotional ties to the dogs that could easily lead the breeder astray. Here's more from Tracy on Barry's Bear Honey. this to me is crazy you take people who have to work like dogs to make a living and all the

mountain people did the factory work they work like dogs they're farming they had to work like dogs and then you pick bear hunting for your hobby you're not getting a day off man yeah yeah yeah why do you pick bear hunting for a hobby there's no rest with that you're gonna probably work harder that day than the five days you do worked. So to me, that tells you a lot about the kind of people you're dealing with. They were not looking for a day off. It's hard to understand it if you haven't been on an Appalachian bear hound hunt, but it's hard work. Here's more from Tracy on hunting with Barry. So we'd be up on the mountain and he had this ongoing thing with my cousin Rocky about old

slewfoot. And that was this mythical bear that was the biggest one of the mountains. You know, never killed him. I don't know if we're... ever even run him, you know. But we'd turn loose, dogs would be running, pap ball would get wired up. I mean, he'd be, he said to some years old, be wired up like a 13-year-old boy. When he would drive, in normal, everyday driving,

he drove the slowest guy. He's the guy that you did not want to pull out in front of you. So up on the mountain, he'd drive faster up there in a bar suit. Maybe then he would go down the actual highway. He'd just lose his marbles. And his hands would get so, nervous, he'd pat the steering wheel. He'd just pat it, just as fast he could pat.

Just wild-eyed, crazy about it. He said, we're in hot pursuit. We're in hot pursuit. He just loved it. Oh, my goodness. He loved it with every fiber of his being. He couldn't wait to do it. I mean, he worked because he had to eat.

And he did the constable work because he didn't want his family living in a community that he considered to be unsafe and trashed. But he'd bar hunted because he loved it. I mean, I've known lots of bear hunters, and I'm not. not going to say that when I was growing up, Houston Valley plots were better than other people's dogs. I would not do that. I would not say that now. But I am saying that he loved them, and he loved the plot breed. He had some dogs that were not plots when he was younger. He had some great dogs, he coo-hunted, and he ordered a couple of blue ticks from Del Lee one time.

But once he got plots, he just fell in love with him. There was nothing like a plot to him. He knew there was good dogs that ever breed. He wasn't stupid. But plots was, was his dogs. And man, he loved them. I mean, the guys over here in the mountains, man, they would rag him all the time. They would take a walker dog and sneak it and put in his dog box and take a picture of it just to say he had a walker in his box. Yeah.

If they killed a bear and when he got older, everybody was really good to him. You know, they'd still let him get a dog and get down by the bear and have his picture took with it, you know, like he had done everything that day himself. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They'd run in with a couple walkers on a lead and try to get in the picture before he could get up, you know. and he'd just carry on how he could get that dog out of here. And then he wouldn't do this.

He wouldn't do it if it was in danger of getting run over or something. If he was going up a mountain road and somebody spotted dog was, you know, walking up the road, he just drive on by it. I say, Pat Ball stop here, let me get that guy's dog. I don't want that dog in my dog box. I ain't putting that white dog in there. And everybody loved him for it, you know. Burry ain't going to pick it up.

He's putting in this box. The hound world has an ongoing favorite. breed rivalry. It's non-stop and seems to track deep into hound history. I want to go back to the dog lot with Ben and ask him a question about the level of commitment it takes to maintain a truly top-notch pack of hounds. What's it take for somebody to keep a bear pack all year? I mean, most people can't do this. Most people couldn't have all these dogs and train them and be dedicated to them like this. I mean, like, this is a major lifestyle commitment.

Well, honestly, you have to sacrifice almost everything else. And that's why I don't judge somebody who tries to hunt, you know, they work a full-time job overtime and they get to hunt two days a week during kill season. A lot of people want to hack on them. I feel privileged to do what I do. But I've sacrificed a lot almost. I mean, don't go to the lake. Never been to the beach, never been on a vacation other than hunting in my life.

And I wouldn't trade it, but most people aren't going to give up all that just to chase a bear. I think it's awesome to know that in the early 70s, there's dogs that I would have gone hunting with. I don't say hunted with because I was just a kid. I just tagged alone in the early 70s, you know. I mean, I was riding the truck and see what the big men did. but I know those dogs and I know what was said about those dogs by those men I still have those memories.

Four generations later I get to see my son doing the same thing with dogs that are great grandchildren of the dogs I saw when I was a kid. Then I also get a kick out of knowing that in these mountains that the bear are the same children

and grandchildren of the same bear we hunted when I was a kid. So it's like an ongoing drama series generation after generation, of us and the bear. You think they know when they hear a Houston Valley plot coming? No, I don't think that, but I think it's a great story. The same bear are being hunted by the same families,

and it just goes on, and I hope it goes on for generations to come. As we come to an end, here's Tracy with some powerful conclusions on Barry's life, going all the way back to his law enforcement days and his value system. Yeah, he was not interested in the law for the law's sake. So I wouldn't even say he agreed with all the laws. I wouldn't even say he was above sometimes doing his own thing regardless of the law. But he just hated liquor. And one of the interesting traits about him, too, is he hated certain uses of language

were offensive to him. There's an old mountain word called blackguardish. That's the word blackguardish. Okay. Yep. And if somebody were to say something like some particular slang type word for something, you know, that was crude to him, offensive to his mind. And it's a rough, that was a rough guy.

But he had a sense of holiness for God that made some things not sacred to him. And if you address something that should have been considered sacred in a crude way, to him he would call that black guardish. What do you think that meant? Crude, unacceptable, nasty. We were with a guy yesterday afternoon who was speaking about Barry and he said he'd hunted with him 30, 40 years ago. And he noted that Barry did not tolerate people around him using foul crass language. Yeah.

You know, I love it when I hear people that just have a standard and they're comfortable with that standard. And they're not trying to inflict it on people outside of their, jurisdiction, but they have a standard. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make him sound like a saint. And he wouldn't want to be made sound like a saint. He had his flaws, but what he believed in, he believed in pretty thoroughly. And I like that in a person, even if their beliefs differ from mine, because I can trust that person.

Pappaw was as friendly a man as you will have ever met. Jovial, loved life, laughed all the time. I'm not saying Pabot was the best bear hunter ever lived, because that just wouldn't be true. But I'm saying nobody enjoyed it more. He loved it. I absolutely loved it. Could not wait to get up in the morning to go. But he had this aside to him that if you got to that point, he was dangerous.

He was just a dangerous human being. But everybody loved him. Well, when he died, when he died, it was unbelievable that the people who come through the line. And most of people, his generation, he died when he's 84. So most of his friends were gone already. But it was amazing how many people who came through the line who said, he said, Barry Tarleton was my best friend over and over and over. People loved him.

Love him. Barry Tarleton's story has opened up a unique window into Appalachia. I knew this was going to be good. But more than that, it opened the window into the life of a unique man, loved and respected by so many. And don't forget, the only reason that you and I know this story is because of the American Plot Hound. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. I don't do this kind of stuff often, but if you would like to hunt with Ben Jones and his strain of Houston Valley plots, You probably can.

That is, if you're tough enough. Ben runs a bear hunting outfit called Pale Horse Guide Service, based out of Greenville, Tennessee. You can see his ad in Bear Hunting magazine or just look him up online. Again, thank you so much for listening to Bear Grease. Share this episode with your friends. Leave us a review on iTunes. And don't forget about Steve Rinella and I's new audiobook. Now available for pre-ordering.

It's called The Long Hunters, 1761 to 1775. It's an incredible book about the foundations really of American deer hunting, and it's really good, man. You guys are going to love it. I'm already looking forward to the render next week. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms, called prime cuts.

Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record.

If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut, because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.