Bear Grease - Ep. 334: Louisiana Trappers' War - The Camps

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

In this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, Clay Newcomb introduces the characters of the little known Trappers' War which took place in 1936 in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. You’ll meet filmmaker David Dubos, Isleños Trappers' War descents Paul Lagarde and “Wimpy” Seringe, and the unlikely star—the muskrat. Additional content from Louisiana native and political commentator, James Carville. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. There's a war they didn't teach us about in American history, and the spoils of the conflict were unlikely characters. This war wasn't fought over oil or political ideology, but rather muskrats.

It's called the Islanyos Trappers War, and it took place in 1926 in South Louisiana. And on this episode, we're setting up the context for the war, why it happened in meeting the men whose families fought in it. The flavors of South Louisiana will be flying high as we hear from a New Orleans filmmaker, a fur handler, and even the Raging Cajun himself, James Carvel. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one.

And don't forget, the bear grease feed continues to complexify and get better. We now have on this feed, Bear Greece, Brent's This Country Life podcast, and Lake Pickle's new Backwoods University. I've heard this called the Great Southern Takeover of Meat Eater. Yeah, something like that. I hope you enjoy this episode. So powerful people said, well, this is not right that little people should be making all this money when really it's rich people that really need money.

And that's always happened in the world. that rich people are going to take the labor and work of poor people and monetize it and make more money on it. That's not new, man. That didn't start in 1920. And it ain't ending in 2014. And it's not going to end in 2114. It is the sort of inherent right of power to acquire, power and money to acquire more power and money. And it played out right there in front of our very eyes.

My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Greenie. 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 hf gear american made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore can you all hear me yeah okay you can hear yourself good you can hear me yeah yeah okay I don't know where to start on this one. I guess we'll just start by introducing our first character, the muskrats. Okay, a muskrat.

It's nothing but a small rat. It's a rat. It's a vegetarian. It doesn't eat meat. The body on it's about 12 to 16 inches long. Usually a big rat's around 14 inches, but 14 to 14, 16. inches, I'd say. It's got a triangular tail. They don't have a round tail like a gutter rat. The tail's more of a triangle. It's small on the bottom and it goes up a little higher and it comes

to a point on the top. And the tail's usually about another 12, 14 inches long. And they live in a prairie, a wet prairie. I used to work in a far house. My dad, my dad, my dad. Dad, my grandfather bought for us also. That's the voice of Paul Lagarde of Plaquine Parish, Louisiana, character number two. So there's two sets of characters on this episode. The Muskrats and the Living People, they're one set like Paul, and then the folks now deceased who were actually involved in the Trappers War. Here is character number three of the first group.

How's this? It's good level. Okay, so I'm going to talk about the movie. Let me turn my phone off. Here we go. My name is David Dubose. I'm a screenwriter, producer, filmmaker from New Orleans, Louisiana, which is where I currently reside, mainly because of the movie tax credits that are here in Louisiana and that are a big draw. for Hollywood movies and even international films to come and film here.

And my main source of income is through screenwriting. I've got four projects in various stages of development, one of which is going to be filming this year and later 2025. I'm called Chainsaw Confidential, which is about the making of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre film in the early 70s. Now that's interesting. New Orleans filmmaker David Dubose also made a film about the Trappers War in 2015 called Delta Justice the Islanios Trappers War.

He's going to help us out a lot. Now here is our fourth living character. All right. There you go. There you go. Oh, okay. Pull it up. There you go.

Can you hear me good? Yeah. You comfortable? Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, my name is Lloyd Serenet. Better known is Wimpy. And the reason why I got that nickname when I was a kid,

and my siblings told me that all I wanted to do was eat hamburgers. So I told them, and Dave would read the comics to me, you know. Never had TV or nothing. But anyway, they would read the comics and that character, Wimpy. That's all he ate was hamburgers, you know. So I told him to call me Wimpy, and I would go out and play. And if my mother would call me, My real name, Lord, I wouldn't answer.

She called me Wimpy, and I answered. So I just threw a Wimpy all my life. So everybody knows him is Wimpy. Of course, I was born down in Delacro Island. You know, and y'all wanted to talk about the Trappers' War. I'm only going to tell you what I was talking. The connection between Paul, David, Wimpy, and the Muskrats is that they all had family involved in the Trappers' War.

So now we're going to go to the second cast of characters from the actual 1926 war. On one side was a judge named Leander Perez. Some called him a dictator. He was in Plaquemine and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, just south of New Orleans. The other side of the war was the Isleanos people of Delacroy Island, who had trapped there for almost 150 years. their main man advocate was named Manuel Milero. But the ironic part is that Leander Perez, the parish bad boy, was in Isleños too.

So Leander Perez was a highly educated Isleanos and he saw a way to usurp the land from the Isleanos. He would have his cousins and, you know, buy up the land and then turn around and lease it back to the Isleños, but then start charging them more and more money. And eventually got to the point to where they couldn't afford it. And they said, yeah, Perez is coming in and finagling and, you know, shaking hands with the Islanios and then stabbing them in the back and with his other hand. And his idea was to monopolize the industry and make the money for him. and pay them pennies on the dollar kind of thing. So the islagnos, they were very poor but hardworking people.

And to them, a $1.52 a pelt for a muskrat was a lot of money. They could go out and trap and make and bring in anywhere from 50 to 200 muskrat a day. So they were making plenty money. Well, eventually when you start making a lot of money, it calls a 10,000, to itself. And so Leander Perez, who was then the district attorney in Blackmun's parish, but he was also in his Lennios, and he looked at the situation and he decided he wanted a piece of that. The antagonist Leander Perez wanted to take over the muskrat fur trade by controlling the trapping leases and jacking up the prices. History would remember Perez for his stances on segregation. Many

He said he was a high-octane bigot, but he was also loved by a lot of people. We're about to hear from James Carvel, the Louisiana political advisor who rose to national prominence in the Clinton era. Yep, James Carvel. This clip was used by permission from David's Delta Justice movie. Carvel is talking about Leander Perez. I've heard that be said that there's some good in everybody. and I'm sure there was some in him. To my knowledge, it never manifested itself in any way.

Not surprisingly, given my sort of political persuasion, I think he's one of the most odious people in the history of this state, and I sang a lot. Perez was a real stinker. Later, we'll get into some bizarre detail on the man. But for now, you just need to know the general architecture of this story. The trapper started making money, and people from the outside moved in

and wanted a big person. piece of the pie. Here's Carville with all you need to know. So powerful people said, well, this is not right that little people should be making all this money when really it's rich people that really need money. And that's always happened in the world. That rich people are going to take the labor and work of poor people and monetize it and make more money on it. That's not new, man. That didn't start in 1920 and it ain't ending in 2014. It's not going to end in 2114. It is. is the sort of inherent right of power to acquire, power and money, to acquire more power and money.

And it played out right there in front of our very eyes. You nor I expected to hear James Carvel on Bear Greece. But what we really need to remember is that Manuel Milero is our protagonist who represented the rights of the trappers in a head-to-head legal battle with Leander Perez over the land. Here is how the war started. but how the war started it was a one-day war Perez got a crooked judge

to give him overturned the appeal that Manuel had won and he tried to now of course you have to enforce that it's just a piece of paper so when he went back to the Islanos and said hey get off

my land they just said you know screw you and that's when Perez turned around and hired a bunch of mercenaries from Texas to come in, get a boat, get a gatlin gun on it, and go down to Bayou where the Islanius his intention was to murder them. But the Islanius got wind of it,

and so they were ready for them and kind of ambush them. And that's the one-day Trappers' War, which was referred to as, you know, they talk about street justice or courtroom justice. This was Delta justice. This was Bayou justice, old school, old-fashioned, you know, Hatfields McCoy is kind of, you know, between the Isleanos and Perez. Many of the Isleanos, I would say they are proud of the fact that they stood up for themselves

against the, what they felt was the tyranny of the local government, who was just Perez and his ilk were mainly interested in the money to be made from the muskrat trapping, which were turned into fur coats up north and sold. And there was a lot of money. I mean, it was maybe a couple of dollars per pelt, which now is nothing. But back then was a lot of money. I think in the film, we convert the money

that they would have made on average per trapper. And it was close to like $100,000. Just a lot of money for fur trapping. The film's 10 years old now. 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 Phelpsgamecalls.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. I asked Wimpy Serenay how valuable furs were to these people. I'm gonna put it this week. I remember there were what they call dollar around.

In other words, dollar for each far. And my dad used to catch about 100 rounds a day. So for how many months of the year could he do that? From December till March. Well, I'm going to put it this week. When you first went, you know, you caught a lot of rats. But toward the end of the season, you finishing up. See, the way they trapped, let's see, you had a square piece of land.

So you would trap what they call around. You'd put your traps all around the land, all around the outside of your land, your boundary lines, okay? And as the season goes by, you keep closing that circle in. And you keep closing it in. So you're catching the rats, and at the end of the season, you got them in one little spot. So you would catch the right of us left, you know. So the uslanios were very, they're very proud.

powerful people. I mean, some of these people in St. Bernard Parish in the lower end of it, where Delacro Island is and where the original descendants lived, there's only five families left there. And it's so between Hurricane Betsy and 1965 and of course Katrina, years later, 40 years later, just kind of wiped out Delacro Island. But that was once a very fertile place for fishing. hunting, trapping, and that's what people did. They lived off the land. My grandfather on my mother's side, that's what he did. He lived off the land, and that's

how he fed his family. But I would say that the majority of the Sleynios had heard the story of the trappers were because it was passed down generation to generation, oral histories, basically. And they looked at it as an unfortunate thing

that happened, but they had to defend themselves against the Perez people and his group, especially when he hired mercenaries from Texas to come over and murder them. They just felt, okay, well, that's the last straw. But they were lucky that they had Manuel Malero, who was an educated in Islanos, who knew that they were being taken advantage of.

We're learning little bits of this story as we build the context of the value of trapping. But bad boy Perez would end up hiring mercenaries to kill the Islanyos trappers. But we'll get to that. But to understand any story, you've got to understand the historical context of the roaring 20s.

So if you can picture America in the 1920s, this was a high time for the coastal cities. Hollywood was just getting started and was thriving with silent films. And New York was like the talk of the nation Everything new and innovative was going on. It started in New York and slowly made its way around the country. And fur coats became a status symbol for a lot of rich, wealthy women who lived in New York and all over the East Coast.

So there was this great demand for furs. And of all the furs that were prized, the muskrat fur was considered the most. expensive and the most desired. And so you can imagine all the great department stores that sprung up out of New York that were trying to sell these coats. They had to get them from somewhere. Well, they eventually word got down to South Louisiana where the muskrats were thriving throughout the marshes and bayous.

So the Isleño's trappers and the hunters and the fishermen and shrimp who made a living off the land, they were contacted by these outside sources to say, hey, they need, you know, these muskrats. In 1925, prime muskrat furs were going for $1.30 each. The math adds up if you're catching over a hundred per day for the 75-day season, which yields a single trapper making $3,000 to $4,000 per season. It's estimated that plaque, Maca Mascar parish alone sold over a million dollars worth of muskrat hides in its peak in the late 20s. An author Glenn Jensen says that Louisiana produced more furs than any other states and more muskrats than all the other states combined during this period. The territory of Alaska, 13 times larger than Louisiana, sold only one third as much value in pelts in 1925.

Here's Paul What does it What does it feel like Muscat fur? Well, you know what a mink feels like? You rubbed your mama Your grandma's mink coat Well, mink

The hair is smaller And shorter on a mink On a rat A good rat It was A good prime rat I'd say The fur is an inch and a half

Long sometime And the top of the rat was black. Some of the best rats they caught was out of Carnarvan. That's a little settlement right down the river here. That's where I all lands behind. It's not like a horse rat. It's bigger than a horse rat. It's about this big.

You know, and it looks like a rat. It's a rat. It's a musk rat. And they have two glands of musk. them. And, you know, when they would catch them, scan them, you know, and of course the caucas, they were throwing the bay, the buzzes and that would eat at them. They would take the musks, and like my mother, she would get the musk. And they'll put them in alcohol and preserve them and sell them the people who make perfume with the muskrat. I think that's what is, this perfume

go a musk probably came from that. I remember the jaws, you know, full of musk rat, musk in jaws, because they would put them in, yes, I don't know, alcohol or something, and persuasive. And the wives and that, that was their money, you know. The hair felt very smooth. The top of it was not black, but very, very dark.

The bottom was, like, the color of your shirt, gray on the bottom. You know, and when they skin them, it's skinned from the back legs. You cut right along the tail, and you turn them inside out, and just peel the skin off. And then you would put it on the rat stretcher, and you put the rat on there, and when you let it go, it stretched the far out. And then they would create the excess meat off of the bottom, and it far as inside out. And they would hang them on what they call right hangers, you know. big, big hangars with boards with nails in it,

and they'll just hang them up, you know. We have pictures of that in the museum down as him, but anyway, they have pictures of that guy hanging up muskrat to dry. You put it in some dry. And once they're dry, that's when the deal is what we call, you know, would buy them the fur. Even you sell pieces if one of the rats was ate up or something. just sell the piece or whatever they had was left.

Because it was, I guess, it was worth a lot of money. They could sell it all. Well, the way I understand, it was, it was, the fashion in the 20s was fur coats. Even the men used to wear long fur coats. My mother had a, she had, my dad had a muskrat coat, full-lant coat. Made out a beautiful.

It was so soft. At a time they tanned it and worked it out and made that cooled out of it, you know? I used to work in a far house. And they bought them from Simon Yoker, the Jewish man, and he owned Delta Rau Far. So in your lifetime, that fur business was alive and well in New Orleans. Yeah, yeah.

So how long did you work in the fur house? Well, I'd go there at the end of the trapping season, and they'd be shipping to New York. and they'd have all those firs in there. They had furrows stacked all around the walls from the floor to the seal. All muskrat or everything? You had muskrat, you had minks, you had otters, you had coons. How did the furs down here compare with northern furs?

They got a heavier thicker far up there because of the cold weather. But you had cold winters down here. When I was a kid, man, you know, I don't say every moment, but I'd say quite often you had obstacles hanging off the tin roof. Like I was telling you, I worked in the house, and they'd taken all those furrows would go in, and at the end of the season, they'd ship to New York. And so I'd go in there, and plenty of them had mildew on them and that.

So they'd take the otters. Otters got a lot of fat on them, and you'd scrape them. They had big boards, and they'd scrape that. side hard and get, especially the tail. And you put that, you'd put that fat in a rag for hours that's standing there at their tables and wipe them rats, wipe the mildew. With the otter fat.

With the otter fat. And made it beautiful. They came out beautiful. And then they'd take them and they'd put them in a press. They had a press. It was about as wide as this table. And then they'd press it down. Full of muskrats.

Full of muskrats. They weighed about four or five hundred pounds or you couldn't be. And they were shipping them green. Yeah, you shipped them green, right. Shipped them green. Wherever they processed them, they'd turn them, they'd tanned. Well, they didn't even process them yet. Most of them went to Europe.

You see, they'd go to New York, and then they had a far sale up there, and they'd sell them to the people in Europe. My great-grandfather was a farm, and that's what he did. They didn't know nothing but for them. And when my grandfather got down there, the trapping was starting to pick up. And so he, in those days, there wasn't no, you own this piece of land, and now the guy owned that, it was all open prairie. It was just like Wild West. And when it's, you know, when it stood at the beginning of the season, you went out there, you picked out a spot and you put your trap line out.

And people honored each other's areas. you know. Any good American story starts with a land squabble, which is such a primitive qualm. And deep in our DNA is a hidden carnal playbook. And on page one of that book, it says, look out for your own interest and no one else.

Territory to the Homo sapien is equivalent to food, water, and air. And in this case, These god-forsaken swamps, encompassing tens of thousands of acres in the region, had historically been no man's land owned by the state, the parishes, and absentee landowners. The islanyos were easily able to get cheap trapping leases for generations until all of a sudden the land had value because of muskrats. Most of the people that had historically trapped these swamps were from Delacrois. island. Here's Wimpy.

I grew up at Delacro Island and that was a big story, you know, since I was a kid about the Trappist War. And what happened, the people from Delacro made a living off the marshland,

you know. So there were a lot of muskrat in them days, you know, so it was, they made their living in the winter with the muskrat. And so these people who were just, you know, they were descendants of the Canary Islands, and they settled down at Delacro Island after the Revolution War.

Of course, I was born down in Delacro Island. The Canary Islanders moved towards the Delacro Island and the Bayou Airs down there, you know. At Delacro Island, it was not French. My dad was French. He spoke French. But the whole Delacro Island spoke Spanish. You know, I can speak Spanish that Spanish today. And there's only about maybe six or seven hours that speak it right now from down, Donald Cron.

And then, you know, the middle of the trap and musgrave. The Islanyos people were Spanish speakers from the Canary Islands southwest of the coast of Spain. Here's Paul. Paint the picture for me of who these Islano people were. This was like a Spanish group of people. Yep, yep. You heard of Canary Islands? Mm-hmm.

They inhabited the Canary Islands. I don't know for how long. And when Spain owned Louisiana Purchase before France sold it, they were brought here back in the 1790s to guard that river, to keep the English and whoever else when they come home. with that river and colonized, take it away from them, you know. Spain had it. And that's what their purpose was.

And they were not only brought there, they were brought to Galveston and a couple other spots where they were. So now, was this your family? Is this part of the family? Part of my family. My grandmother's side or my daddy's side was Osloyal. The Islano settled on De La Croy Island, but is it really an island? Describe to me why it's what bodies of water surround it that make it an island.

Well, yeah, a lot of people, if you ride down there, you wouldn't think it's an island. And if you go down there, when you get the Delacro Island, and if you have Lake Leroy here and Bayou Lirry, and then you have Bay Uttarabuff, and then you have Bayou, gentility here and then the little lake, all these lakes. So it made it an island. So they called it an island. Mm. You know, so if you drive down there and you stay on this side on the road today,

you don't have to cross a bridge to get there. Is that what you just? And raise you, there's one little bridge, you know, but it's just a buyer. 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 bed. and there was a full 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. Now that that's settled, let's talk to David. He's the filmmaker, and some of his family were Islaños, but the story of the Trappers' War somehow remained hidden. I didn't even know about it. This is a classic case of being a tourist in your own hometown. I had no idea this even existed.

My late aunt, great-aunt, Dot Benj, Dorothy Benj, she's a direct descendant of Manuel Milero, who was a big player during the Trappers' War, and she was very fond of him. and she called me one day. She knew I was a filmmaker, and I was part of the large family on my mother's side. My mother was a Nunez. She was Nisleños, which means they came from the Canary Islands. I didn't know a thing about it. So she called me, Dot did, and she said, I want you to do a documentary on my grandfather, Manuel Malero. She felt he didn't get the credit that he deserved.

and I always am attracted to people who don't get their just due. So I put together the budget schedule. I hired, you know, people started putting the whole show together. I called my DP, Gabe Mayhan, who did a brilliant job on the film. He came down with his crew and, you know, we assembled extras from the local area. And we shot on the land where the Aslanios had lived. Parts of it we shot at the museum, some of the interviews we did there. And then we did a lot of the reenactments in the marsh and in the swamps where they were, would have been in the 1920s.

This took place in 1926. But my aunt was the one that got me involved. And once I started researching it, I just felt this is such a great story that no one knows about. Part of me would like to make a bear grease just about David making this film. He's an eccentric, brainy guy and knows more about sense. cinema than Dale Brisbane knows about going 90 on a buck and bull. But I asked David how true his movie stayed to the real story. My favorite, if I may digress for just a moment, my favorite anecdote on that is in 1962 when Lawrence of Arabia hit theaters, a gentleman, a British journalist

took one of T.E. Lawrence's colleagues to see the movie. And when it was over, he said, well, sir, what did you think of the film? Oh, most entertaining. Most entertaining. He said, well, how accurate would you say it was? I'd say, well, I'll tell you, they got the sand and the camels right. And that kind of leads to... That's Hollywood.

This kind of leads into the whole Trappers' War idea because, you know, Wimpy Serenay, who's one of our interview subjects, He told me, he said, the one thing that gets lost in war is the truth. Any war. And he said, you're always going to have people pointing at each other. You know, they still don't know who fired the first shot in this war. And so there's always this ambiguity of who was right, who was wrong. Can you write a wrong by being wrong?

The truth gets lost in war. Ain't that the truth? I want to learn about Paul's family, they're trapping, and their camp. And you see, we trapped, too, and we had a camp, and I spent my winter, well, I spent all my holidays with them. And get off of Christmas holidays and all, and they would be out at the camp trap, and I'd go back there with them. And sit around that table at night, and they tell stories. Sometimes I don't like to talk about it. But, yeah, they tell stories.

And, you know, he surrounded me as a kid listening. And that's where I picked up as much as I know about it. Was there somebody in your family that was there trapping that was part of it? My grandfather was there when it all went down. My grandfather was Paula Gord, Sr. My dad, who was junior. I'm the third. And my son is the fourth.

and his son's the fifth. And the boy said he's going to name his boy too. If you ever has one, yeah. But I tell you what really started it off. He was working at the slaughterhouse. They called it the abattoir. They had a big stainless steel troughs that ran through there. And they take their intestines, and they turn those intestines inside out, and they wash them to make sausage.

That's what they put the sausage in. in them days. They didn't have all that synthetic stuff they got today. And all the guys that were working, you'd be leaning up against that trough all that, they were all getting intestinal flu and dying. So my grandfather

got it. And my great-grandfather told him, he said, Paul, you're going to die. He said, you're going to die. He said, why don't you this quit? He said, and come for him with me. He said, we ain't going to make much money. He said, but you might get well and live. He was

He was very sick. So he did. And so he went down there and started farming with the old man. And the trapping started getting better and better. And people were starting to ship us overseas. Well, they always did ship them overseas. But like I said, it got better. There was money in it.

Like I said, they started trapping. And plenty of them down there told them. They laughed at my grandpa. And they told them, you think you're going to make a trap. Grandpa, Grandpa told him, I'm gonna do my best. And they wouldn't show him nothing. And he said, I used to go out there and sit at night in the evening time and watch them animals move

because they'd come out in the evening, some of them, you know, watch them move, how they move, where they ate at, where they messed at. And he, I'll tell you what, when he died, they didn't know him can keep up with him. He was, he was, he trapped way until he's, after he was 75 years old, and he didn't walk the prairie, ran it. And fast, fast.

And he'd run from one trap to the next. And he taught me out of trap. And I trapped, too. When I came back from Vietnam, I trapped. Muskrats meant a lot to these people. Wimpy is 84 years old. He was born in 1941, 15 years after the war, but he grew up going to the family's trapping camp, which they still own today.

Paul's family still owns all that land today too. We're building the context to understand why people were willing to murder over muskrats. Wimpy also grew up in the Aslanos trapping camps. Do you remember going on the trap line with your dad? No, I was too small. You know, I was a kid, but I remember what they done because my brother's in all. used to trap. And us kids would take the few traps and put them behind the camp or something, catch a couple of musk grass.

I was very young. I was nothing with a kid, you know. Were those fond memories? Or was it just work? No, no. To me, it was great. Great. Was your mother there, your whole family to go to the traffic camp?

Right. Was it like something celebrated or was it something that people, just had to do so it was just like work. Right. It was like work for them. You know, the older one. It was like my brother trapped

and my two oldest brothers. They trapped with my dad. But did they, I guess what I'm trying to understand is did they, like today, if I had a camp and I went out there trapping, it would be like this extra thing.

It's recreational. Them days, it wasn't. This was not a recreation. No, that was your home. in the winter. I mean they would have been doing something else if they could have made money doing something else. Probably so. That was the way they made a living. The winter was trapped. Spring was fishing crabs. And then you had the trawl season and they made their living by catching shrimp fish, you know, with big sames and all that. That when it was,

it was legal then, you know. And there was some families that would fish for them to catch fish, saying some of them troll. My dad was a trawler. He was shrimp. As a matter of fact, he was one of the best ones. Not because he was my dad, but he didn't catch shrimp. I grew up on a plainer shrimp and, you know, on a shrimp boat, my dad in a summer. Well, no, I used to enjoy it because there was so much wildlife, you know, ducks. And man, you'd go right off the camp and kill the duck and you eat it, you know, things like that. You just lived off that land. And what I used to enjoy, Well, when I was a little kid, the blackbird, the red-wing blackbirds. And, of course, we all spoke Spanish.

It wasn't English, you know, when I was a little kid. And they had this fella called Adam Miller, and he used to come when I was pulling up and I was out there. And he used to come out with the boat and buy the muskrat, you know, because they would hang it up on the hangers and dry it and all that kind of stuff. Well, he worked for Delicro Corporation, and they would buy all the fur. It was far from, and he would come and grade the fur and all that. I remember all that kind of stuff, and he would buy the far, and I used to like them little red-wing black words, and they were always singing, you know.

And I told Mr. Adam, he called me that, I have a sense. Anyway, he said, and I told him, say, you know, Mr. Adam, put them little birds of saying, and he said, what is that, went here. I said, it's saying pan frillo. Panfrio, we call French toast. We call that pan frieu in Spanish. And I said, they want pan frio. They're saying pan frio.

Yeah, it would go like cholidel. Choliddle. I said, they want pan frieu, you know, it was that I wanted, I guess. I said, they're saying they want pan frieu. You know, boy, he laughed. He got a kick out of that, and the rest of my life, whenever I say him, he called me that, you know, pan friars. It was just a joy to be out.

I think we're starting to get a glimpse into the culture of the trapping camps. It seems like an idyllic place, but the work was long, hard, and the conditions primitive. But all this would come under literal gunfire in 1926. In this episode, we built the context that shows the value of these muskrats to these Islamios people. In the next episode, we'll get into the actual details of the war, including machine guns and murder. And we're going to explore more into Leander Perez's life. We'll close with the final thought about this story from James Carville, taken right out of the movie, Delta Justice, which will lead us into our next episode.

This is the oldest, most predictable movie in the world that has the same beginning, the same middle, and the same end every time. It don't change. and you could look at the history of the modern world through the Atlanta people of St. Bernard Parish and it would be right there. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share a podcast with a friend this week.

Look out for Lake Pickles Backwoods University, Brent's This Country Life podcast, and truly, thank you for listening to these stories. Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bearers. live. You know they're trying to sell a bunch of our public lands. We all need to take action because that's where the bears live. 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 Phelpsgamecalls.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.