Bear Grease - Ep. 4: Death of a Bear Hunter

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

On this episode of The Bear Grease Podcast, we’re exploring the gruesome death of Erskine, an Ozark Mountain bear hunter killed by his quarry in the 1840s. You’ll hear the firsthand account of the incident from his comrade, Frederick Gerstacker. We'll also interview the leading historian of Ozarks (Dr. Brooks Blevins), hear from the man who found the only clue leading to Erskine’s grave, and go in search of the grave ourselves. This is one of my favorite stories of all time and its contents have affected my family and me for the last decade. I want to explore how stories impact us and why.Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. What you're dealing with, especially with Gershticker, is a young man who is really, really influenced by romanticism, the sort of dark unknown out there. This week on the Bear Grease podcast,

we're going to explore the tragic death of a bear hunter and hear the account firsthand from the guy that was standing there when it happened. Then we're going to search for his 180-year-old grave. In the process, we'll look into the adventurous life of the comrade of the deceased, Frederick Gerstocker. We're going to talk with the national expert on the Ozark region, and we'll hear from the man who held one of the keys in trying to find the old grave. And then we'll go on a search for the grave ourselves. You're not going to want to miss this one. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast,

where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. I want to tell you a story, or really, I want the story to tell itself. If we think about the now of time as the front edge of the, front edge of the world, of a wave that we're riding like a surfer. We can't get back anything that's behind us. The wave no longer exist.

All we have is the remembrance of the imagery, sight, sounds, in the context of the moment on the wave stored in our giant human brain. But humans don't just have brains. I'm quite certain that we have spirits, which also collect data that informs us of a deeper and more meaningful connection to the events of our lives

and the lives of others. But it's more than just stored data like temperature or the color of the sky or what was said. The spirit can see the thing behind the thing. Spirons are made of flesh and bone. You can't find it like an organ in the body. But the spirit is the conduit

that connects our lives to something much bigger. It's what makes our lives more than just a biological record of a human eating and drinking and producing offspring. The spirit is what makes us human. There are some stories that just impact us in more significant ways than others. The story you're about to hear, for me, is one of those stories that has shaped my life in a significant way. And it's hard for me to even explain why.

The question I'm trying to answer is this. What is the mechanism that can make someone else's story so meaningful in the way? our lives. When I was in college, I had a professor that knew I was interested in Arkansas Black Bears. In passing one day, he suggested I read a book called Wild Sports by Frederick Gerstocker. His sales pitch was weak. It's about an old German guy that has some Arkansas bear hunting stories in it, he said. The pitch was so weak that it would be five years before I'd ever read the book.

I mean, I guess I can't blame him for poor marketing, but I think that I think that he was so weak that thought what's a German guy got to do with Arkansas bear hunting? When I finally read the pages of the book, I was mesmerized by the words of the adventurous young German. I was mesmerized by his life. He was witty. He was an incredible writer. He was tough as alligator leather and fearless. And maybe most of all, much of his adventure took place within 20 miles of where I live. But even more, he was insightful into human life. He valued people, and he even recognized the wasteful and unsustainable ways of the market hunting culture of his time, of which he even participated in. Frederick Gerrstocker, some people say Gersticker, was a well-educated middle-class German that came to the United States in search of white-tailed deer and black bear.

Doesn't sound like that bad of a guy. He came over on a ship called the Constitution and arrived in New York in July of 1837. He embarked on a six-year-long adventure that would take him through seven states and one Canadian province. He kept detailed journals of his writing, and at times he would send him back to his mom in Germany. Six years later in 1843, when he arrived back in Germany, he found himself an acclaimed writer and national hero. His mother had been submitting his articles to a local German publication in the word of his adventures spread like wildfire. There are too many of Gerstocker's incredible stories to tell on this podcast,

but I want to tell you one that cut me to the quick when I first read it. It involved a man being killed by a bear in a creek drainage less than 20 miles from where I live. I was shocked and slightly offended that nobody ever told me this. story. I want you to hear the firsthand account from Gerstocker of the death of his friend Erskine. This is an excerpt from the book Wild Sports, published in 1854. This story is taken out of context, so there are some characters you'll need to know. Conwell is Gerstocker's older American hunting partner and friend with hair as white as snow, he said. Conwell lived in Arkansas. Wachiga is a Cherokee that became a trusted friend and hunting partner of Gershawker,

and you'll be introduced to young Erskine, who Gershiker had met some years before in the backcountry. So we were off again before noon and gained the source of the hurricane, rode across the devil's stepping path, a narrow rock with a precipice on each side, left the pilot rock on our left, and came towards evening into the pine forest, we were sure of finding kindlers. Descending the steep side of a mountain, we observed a thin column of blue smoke by the side of the stream, showing that some hunters were in camp there. We went straight towards it and found it to be an Indian camp,

and our former acquaintance, young Erskine, among them. They were Cherokees with three young Choctawls, these two tribes being on good terms. Like ourselves, they were out bear hunting, but it had better luck. A quantity of bear meat was hanging about the camp and even the dogs would eat no more, casting ourselves down by the fire one of the squalls, for there were several women in the camp, immediately cooked for us some bear, which we duly regaled ourselves. Night came on and soon we were all sunk in deep repose. Early in the morning we began to move, dividing into two parties for the better chance of finding game.

Conwell went with some of the Indians, amongst whom, he had found an old acquaintance to make a circuit round the pilot rock, while Erskine and I, with three Cherokees, proceeded to the sources of the frog bayou. Night found us far from our camp, so we made one for ourselves where we were. On the morning of February 1st, we had hardly started ere we heard the dogs. Wachiga declared instantly that they were his brothers and disappeared behind the rocks without another word. As we stood listening, the sounds seemed to take a different direction. We ascended the mountain as fast as we could to cut off the chase, but found that we must have been mistaken. For in a few minutes, all was as silent as a grave.

Once we thought we heard a shot, but we couldn't be certain. We ascended to the highest terrace and walked slowly on, looking out for fresh signs, and listening to catch the sound of the dog below, amongst the broken masses of rock. They might be near without being heard. While on the mountaintops, they are audible at a great distance. It may have been two in the afternoon and we had seen nothing. When bears grease raised his nose in the air, remained for an instant or two in a fixed position, then giving a short, smothered howl, dashed down the mountainside.

Listening attentively, we heard the chase coming down the hurricane river. Erskine called out triumphantly, we shall have plenty of bear this evening and dashed after the dog. I was soon by his side. I must observe, by the way, that we were both very hungry. Presently a bear broke through the bushes. A projecting rock stopped him for an instant when Erskine saluted him with a ball. He received mine as he rushed past and disappeared. The dogs, encouraged to greater efforts by his shots and the stronger scent, followed him out.

Bears Grease, who was quite fresh, leading the van. Soon they came up on him and stopped him. We rushed to the spot without waiting to reload and arriving in time to see the beast, excited to the greatest fury, kill four of our best. dogs with as many blows of his paws, but the others threw themselves on him with greater animosity, and if our rifles had been loaded, we could not have used them. Just as a large, powerful brown dog, which had furiously attacked the bear, was knocked over, bleeding and howling. Erskine, Erskine Erskine called out, Oh, save the dogs, threw down his rifle and rushed on with his knife

among the furious group. I followed on the instant. When the bear saw us coming, he exerted still more force to beat off the dogs and meet us. Seizing his opportunity, my comrade ran his steel into his side. The bear turned on him like lightning and seized him, and he uttered a shrill, piercing shriek. Driven to desperation by the sight, I plunged my knife three times into the monster's body with all my force without thinking of jumping back. At the third thrust, the bear turned upon me. Seeing as Paul coming, I attempted to evade the blow, felt a sharp pang, and sunk senseless to the ground. When I recovered my senses, bears grease was licking the blood from my face. On attempting to rise, I felt a severe pain in my left side and was unable to move my left arm.

On making a fresh effort to rise, I succeeded in sitting up. The bear was close to me, and less than three feet from him lay Erskine, stiff and cold. I sprang up with a cry of horror and rushed towards him. It was too true. He was bathed in blood, his face torn to pieces, his right shoulder almost wrenched away from his body, and five of the best dogs ripped up with broken limbs lying beside him. The bear was so covered with blood that his color was hardly discernible. My left arm appeared to be out of socket, but I could feel that no bones were broken.

The sun had gone down, and I had gone down. hope that the other hunters might have heard our shots and the barking and howling of the dogs. It grew dark. No one came. I roared and shouted like mad, but no one heard me. I tried to light a fire, but my left arm was so swelled that I gave up the attempt. But as it would have been certain death to pass the night under these circumstances without a fire, I tore away part of the back of my hunting church, and the forepart being saturated with the blood,

sprinkled some powder on it, rubbed it well, and with my right hand I shook a little powder into my rifle, placing the muzzle on the rag, I fired, blowing it up to a flame, I piled on dry leaves and twigs, and succeeded in making a good fire, though with great pain and trouble. Now it was dark. I went to my dead comrade who was lying about five yards from the fire. He was already stiff, and it was with great difficulty that I could pull down his arms and lay him straight, nor could I keep his eyes closed, though, I laid small stones on them. The dogs were very hungry, but it was impossible for me to break up the bear. I only ripped him up and fed them with his entrails. Bear's grease laid himself down by the corpse, looking steadfastly in his face and went no more near the bear. In hoping of obtaining help, I loaded and fired twice, but nothing moved. The forest appeared one enormous grave. I felt very ill. I commented several times. As well as I could, I laid myself down beside the fire

and lost all consciousness of my wretched situation. Whether I slept or fainted is more than I can tell. But I know that I dreamed that I was at home in my bed and my mother brought me some tea and laid her hand on my breast. Such an awakening as I had was worse than I could wish to my bitterest enemy. Bears greased had pressed close to my side lying his head on my breast. The fire was almost out and I was. shivering with cold and the wolves were howling fearfully around the dead, keeping at a distance

for fear of the living, but by no means disposed to lose their prey. I rose with difficulty and laid more wood on the fire. As it burned up, the face of the corpse seemed to brighten. I started but found it was only an optical delusion. Louder and fiercer howled the wolves and the dogs of whom five were alive besides bear grease answered them but the answer was by no means one of defiance rather a lament for the dead partly to scare away the wolves and partly in hope of finding help i loaded and fired three times my delight was inexpressible as i heard three shots in return i loaded and fired until all my powder was expended as morning broke i heard two shots not far off and soon after a third a shipwrecked mariner hand hanging to the side of a plank, could not raise his voice more lustily to hail a passing ship than I did.

And joy upon joy, I heard a human voice and answer. The bark of the dogs announced a stranger, and Wachiga advanced out of the bush. Waw! he exclaimed, staring at the shocking spectacle. He felt poor Erskine and shook his head mournfully. He turned to me. I showed him my swollen arm, which he examined attentively without speaking, forming a hollow with his two, hands and placing them to his lips, he gave a loud, piercing shout. The answer came from no great distance in a few minutes. My old dear friend Conwell, and most of the Indians were at my side. I grasped Conwell's hands sorrowfully and told him in few words how it all had happened. The old man scolded and said it served us right. There's no greater danger in sticking a knife into a

bear's punch when he's falling with the dogs upon him. But if he has been thrown and then catches the sight of his greatest enemy, man, he exerts all his force to attack him and woe to him who comes within reach of his paws. It was all very well talking. He had not been present and seen one dog after another knocked over, never to rise again. Five minutes more and not one would have been saved and who knows whether the enraged beast would not have attacked us then. Meanwhile, the Indians had been digging a grave with their tomahawks. Wrapping the body in a blanket, they laid him in it and covered him with earth and heavy stones. Conwell cut down some young stems and made a fence around the solitary grave.

I could not avoid a shudder at the quiet coolness of the whole proceeding, as the thought struck me that the same persons, under the same circumstances, would have treated me in the same cool way had I fallen instead of Erskine. Like me, he was a lonely stranger in a foreign, land, having left England some years before, and his friends and relations will probably never know what became of him. Thousands perish in this way in America, of whom nothing more is heard, and perhaps in a few months the remembrance of them was entirely passed away. After the dead was quietly laid in the grave, Wachiga came with an elderly Indian to look at my arm. Wachiga moved

it, while the other looked steadfastly in my face. The pain was enough to drive me. mad, but I would not utter a sound. Next, the Indian took hold of my arm, laying his left hand on my shoulder, and while Wachiga suddenly seized me around the body from behind, the other pulled with all his force. The pain at first was so great that I almost fainted, but it gradually diminished. In spite of my resolve to show no signs of it, I could not suppress a shriek. Conwell soon after asked if I could ride, on my answering, yes, he helped me on a horse, then throw up to the the bear's skin and some of the meat on his own, we move slowly homewards. My sufferings on the way were very great, but I uttered no murmur. I only longed for repose. This was just a couple of pages

out of a 400-page book, but I want to take some inventory of the components of this story. A German, a British guy, and an American hunting with a mixed tribe of Native Americans, Cherokees and Choctaws in the 1840s. They were bear hunting with dogs, the Native Americans' dogs, to be exact, for Black Bear in the month of February in the Ozarks of Arkansas. An incredible bear chase ensues, and a man who we only know his first name Erskine, dies at the hand of a bear after stabbing it with his bowie knife.

They didn't have time to reload. His comrade charges in and kills the bear with a knife, And in the process, gets smacked so hard, it dislocates his shoulder and knocks him out. Gershalker spends the night within arm's reach of a dead bear, five dead dogs, and Erskine's corpse. Gray wolves, which used to be in Arkansas, kept him awake, howling through the night. He laid stones on the eyelids of the corpse to keep his eyes shut. The next morning, he's found by the hunting party, and the natives set his shoulder into place and buried the dead in a shallow grave dug with tomahawks.

They throw the bear meat and the hide over the back of a good horse and head home. End of story. Now you know the story of Erskine's death, and you've seen a bit into the life of Gerstocker, but we need to know more information to understand the significance of this wild story, and I'm still wondering why and how this short snippet of time, Just a little part of somebody else's wave has impacted me the way it has. As I sit down with Dr. Brooks Blevins, he's wearing a black suit and a pink tie.

He's all dressed up because he was just on a documentary for TV talking about the backwoods of the Ozarks. He's an in-demand guy. You see, Dr. Blevins is a professor at Missouri State University, and he is the Jedi master of Ozark history and probably one of the coolest. guys I've met in a long time. He drives a mid-1990s sedan with duct tape on one of the side mirrors, and he's written over 15 incredible books about the Ozark region. I wanted to get some context from Dr. Blevins about the time period that Gerstocker was here. Context is king. So Dr. Blevins. Gersh Stocker was in the Ozarks and Wachatatat from 1837 to 1843. What can you tell us

just about that general era, who was here and kind of what life was like? Well, first of all, in Arkansas, this is right after Arkansas becomes a state in 1836, one of the things that we would immediately notice is how few people there were. You were, you're talking about fewer than 100,000 people in the entire state. The Washtals and the Ozarks especially would have been very, very thinly populated. And, of course, that's why he's there. He's there to find animals, not people. You're talking about a sparse population.

You're talking about a population of people who have mainly come from the upper south, east of the Mississippi. So you've got lots of Tennesseans who are here. You've got Carolinians, people from Virginia, Kentucky. Those are the people who are, for the most part, coming to the Ozarks and Wachitales. And a lot of these people are going to have backgrounds in hunting of very, various kinds. And in a lot of cases, that's why they're out here in the first place. You know, they've kind of exhausted their hunting grounds back east. So they just kept moving west. A lot of people come because they want to hunt, especially if they want to hunt commercially. You know, the commercial

hunting was pretty much a dead letter by the 1830s and 40s back east of the Mississippi. And if you were interested in making a living selling skins and bear grease and meat and stuff like that, you had to go to the edge. This would have been during that time considered part of the western edge of the frontier, really. Oh, yeah. I mean, so we don't think of Arkansas being the frontier or the west, but this was like far west. So, yeah, the Washtals and the Ozarks, Arkansas.

they're all the edge of American civilization. Gerstocker seemed to have the intent of coming from Germany to hunt in America. Was that common? I mean, and I guess my question is, what was the reputation of the American frontier on the global stage? I think, well, I guess it depends on how you define common, but I would say it certainly wasn't uncommon for Europeans, who had the means and the interest to come to the United States and especially the western part of the United States and hunt. I mean, we see that happening even after the Civil War where you have European buffalo

hunters come over, for instance. Would they have heard of Daniel Boone by that? I mean, Daniel Boone would have already been dead for 20 years or so. I mean, would they have heard of Daniel Boone globally by that time? Yeah, I think, well, if you were well-read, like Gerstaker obviously was, if you were educated person and you were interested in the exotic, you know, American frontier, as these guys obviously were, you would have been well-versed in Daniel Boone stuff. But as late, we know that as late as 1811, so we're talking about roughly a quarter century before Gerstiker shows up,

Daniel Boone had done a long hunt in the Ozarks. A long hunt is a description of a style of hunting. It may be intuitive, but, you know, it wasn't to me. It was a term used from the mid-1700s through the mid-18-hundreds that simply means dudes went hunting for long periods of time, like six months up to a couple of years. But what you're dealing with, especially with Gershticker, is a young man who is really, really influenced by romanticism.

Everything that may, and I'm not talking about, you know, Valentine's Day and Kissy stuff. We're talking about the sort of dark unknown out there that calls to people, especially young men who want to go out and explore and see what's out there. And that romanticism would have been like portraying something as just like amazing and mystical and like looking at the positives in something that actually may not have been very positive. Like he romanticized about the West and about hunting.

And you can tell that. You know, one of the things that I did in my book, Arkansas, Arkansas, as I contrasted the romantic thinkers and what I call the Enlightenment thinkers. And that's a good point. What Gerstekker saw as romantic and positive and earlier traveler, like, say, Henry Roe Schoolcraft, who came through roughly 20 years before Gerstekker did, schoolcraft would have found repulsive and uncivilized, and he couldn't wait to get back. I never liked that guy.

Right. I mean, you know, he really couldn't wait to get back to the Hudson River Valley and to civilization. But they were both educated young men, but one just had a different outlook on life. I mean, he had chosen to come here. You know, thinking about the reputation of the American frontier, like what Gerstocker would have maybe heard and seen. back in his home in Germany, it's hard to imagine a section of a massive continent that would just be unknown.

Like, we don't live inside of that paradigm any longer. Like, the Earth has been explored. There's microcosms that hold mystery today. But this was, like, massive mystery and intrigue of the West and even the animals. I mean, like, they were introducing animals to these people that they had never heard of before. I mean, bison and elk and black bear.

They didn't have black bears in Germany. They would have had brown bears. It's hard for me to imagine. I can see the draw. I can imagine the draw to the American West. I mean, it would have just been this, like, mythical place. And now, what we see inside the book and what Gersh-Garsterger does such a great job of showing

is how difficult it was. I mean, what I came out of this book understanding and having respect for him, him was just, and these people was just their resilience and their just ability to persist through hardship and they didn't know any better. I mean, they didn't, they didn't know any different. They didn't know the comforts that we have today that they could have compared with. So, I mean, you would assume and you would hope that the resiliency and internal strength and physical strength of us today would have been comparable to them. But it's hard to make that jump.

Like, I'm a hunter, and when I hear these stories of Gerstocker and Erskine, I just think, I couldn't have done it. But there's this hope inside of me, Dr. Blevins, that if I didn't know any different, that I would have been able to do it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. And the amazing thing about Gerstaker is, to a certain degree, he did know different. It's true.

He did grow up in a middle class, in as civilized and modern a place as you could have grown up. As there was in the world. Yeah, that's right. on planet Earth. So the Ozarks became nationally known during that time period for bear hunting. How did that happen? Well, part of it is that there was a basis in fact for all of the legends. I mean, this really was, and you find this not only from Gershtacker, who gets here relatively late, but earlier explorers who talk about the wealth of wildlife in this place, the Ozarks and the Washtunals were in the middle part of the continent. They were this just sort of promised land of

wildlife by the late 1700s and early 1800s. Part of that's because the Ozarks especially had been uninhabited. It had been the hunting ground of the Osage for a century or more by the time the first European settlers got here. But they really didn't live here. They didn't leave a really big footprint on the area. So there was just this abundance of wildlife of bears, deer, elks, buffalo, you know, you just name it, and they found everything here. What Dr. Blevins is describing may need a little explanation. We often have this idea that Native Americans had permanent settlements in regions for thousands of years without interruption. However, the archaeological record shows something different. Paleo-Indians arrived in the old

Ozarks about 12,000 years ago and used bluffs for shelter and they left a lot of artifacts. They lived here in very small numbers for thousands of years. But the last 1,000 years, it's less certain who was here and for how long. It's believed that the Ozarks was only used as a seasonal hunting ground for the Osage tribe, meaning there would be long stretches of time where there were no humans here. Just think about that for a minute. When the French arrived in the Ozarks in the 1700s, they found the place almost entirely devoid of permanent Native American settlements. What starts happening is by the late 1700s, the Osage, to a lesser degree, the Cherokee who are starting to come in and the Chalktaugh and some of the other groups, start to convert from their traditional lifestyles to market hunting.

And when they do that, you really start to see the wildlife numbers start to go down. And then when you add to that, all of these white market hunters who start coming into the region in the early 1800s, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in his first book about the Ozarks mentions that just in the White River watershed, he estimated there were between 1,000 and 1,500 full-time market hunters in 1819. And you can imagine the destructive capabilities to the wildlife populations that that many hunters combined with Native Americans who had made the switch over. And so you've got bales and bales of pelts and hides coming into St. Louis and Memphis and these other cities. By the time schoolcraft comes, bear hunting is just starting to be the big thing. It's the next big thing.

Gershtaker really comes in at the end of that, at the end of the commercial bear hunting age. His timing was just right that he didn't miss it. And he even mentions this. He realizes that this is coming to an end, that these destructive practices of these hunters is quickly bringing an end to this, what once had been a wonderland of wildlife.

He was noted, and he's noted today, of having foresight and having kind of a conservation mindset, even though he participated in it, you see inklings in his writing that he recognized that this wasn't sustainable and it wasn't good. For his time, that was kind of progressive thinking, which is noteworthy of him. Yeah, that's right.

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 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.

Gerstocker's main dog that he had his whole time in Arkansas was named Bears Greece. Right. Can you talk to me about bear grease and its importance in the region? Bear Greece was, it was part of that market. It was even in 1819 when Schoolcraft first gives us some numbers, he even tells us what the price of Bear hides, Well, I think it was a buck 50 at that time. He talks about the price of bear meat.

Right. At that time, bear meat was highly valued. It was the most expensive meat in the area. But also, bear grease was, it was used for, it could be used as actual cooking grease. And bear grease is the rendered fat of a bear. Yeah, yeah. So it's bare fat, it's cooked down, heated down, and turns into a liquid. liquid oil, semi-solid.

It could be used actually for cooking oil, but it was often used as well for candle making. But it became one of the really valuable products of the bear hunting process. There was a, at one point, in the 1830s, we know that there was a bear oil rendering plant that was established at the mouth of Bear Creek near the Arkansas-Missouri line. It would have been probably, I think it would have been in Boone County, modern-day Boone County, Arkansas. But we know there was a rendering plant there that, by some accounts, employed several dozen people. They were shipping the oil down to Louisiana or down to New Orleans. That's right.

Is that right? Yeah, they would ship them to New Orleans. And that was a big thing. Why do you think he would have named his dog that? Like, does that tell us anything? Because it, like, you know, there's certain things inside of society, and we do it today, that has, like a metaphorical meaning. What was he alluding to, you think? It could have, it could have just been a something that, I mean, the word itself for a German could have just sounded very American or

something. I'm not really sure. I mean, obviously, it would have been symbolic for him as a guy who aspired to be a bear hunter to have a dog named Bears Greece. But it could also reflect how valuable the dog was to him. It was as valuable as Bear's Grease. I mean, and, And we know, I mean, we know not just from Gerstaker, but all kinds of bear hunter's stories that there was nothing more valuable to a hunter than a good dog. I mean, it could mean the difference between life and death. If you remember, the most emotional that the German Gerstacher ever gets in his book is when he has to say bye to his dog.

And he tears up, you know, he has to turn away so bears grease won't see him crying. I heard you one time say that bear hunters were the, rock stars of the antebellum south. Can you describe what you meant by that? Because I like it. What is the antebellum south? Can you tell me? The word antebellum means before the war.

Human history is so wrought with war that we have an English word that generically means the time before the war. Clearly, in this context, the war we're talking about is the civil war. You know, you're talking about an era when most of the modern sports that we follow were not even invented yet. You're talking about an era when, you know, horse racing was probably the biggest competition type sport that there was. So it's an age when people, again, romanticized and sort of made heroes out of people who did these kind of brave, dangerous things, especially on the frontier.

there was nothing that qualified better than bear hunting. So there was this kind of daredevil rock star, you know, athletic hero quality. Yeah, yeah. And it's even better than modern day athlete heroes because some of these guys didn't make it out. I mean, you know, there were guys like Erskine who died and further sort of burnished the stories of the survivors. When I first read this book, I was intrigued by Gerstocker's relationship with the Native Americans. Many times in the book, he recounted camping and hunting with them, and their interactions were always peaceful, and he seemed to have the utmost respect for them. Once, Gerstocker describes staying at a native camp and the men coming back into camp the next morning with a giant black bear, which was, quote, the largest I'd ever seen.

He said the men would sit around the fire at night, smoking their pipes, stoically staring into the fire and not say a word. He would try to talk, but they basically told him to be quiet. Anyway, I asked Dr. Blevins about the relationship between natives, traveling Europeans, and Americans. How would they have known that these Native Americans weren't hostile? As I was reading this book, playing the story through my head, they had nethered. no qualms hunting with these people. And I mean, the Native Americans had no qualms inviting these guys into their camp. Like, was that normal? Well, if you're, if you're dealing with, say, the Cherokees, that would have been normal. The Cherokees were, I mean, it's, you know, it's a, it's a cliched

and a statement that, you know, contains racist ideas within it. But historians used to call them the so-called civilized tribes. And the Cherokees were one of the four, most of those. And what that meant to historians a few generations back is that the Cherokees had adopted the ways of white people. And by the early 1840s, you're talking about generations of Cherokees and mountain white people who had lived in the vicinity of each other. There had been intermarriages and there were all kinds of connections. And certainly the Cherokees who were in the Indian territory, lived lives that were very, very similar to the Conwells and these other white settlers in the backcountry. I mean, they were raising cattle and hogs. They were

living in log houses. They were growing corn. So they had adopted many of the trappings of white society. Many of them would have known English. So it would have been pretty common for them to interact with white Europeans. Gerstocker describes in detail the burial of Erskine by the Native Americans. He noted the cold, stoic, and precise nature of the procedure. And Gerstocker even said that odd deaths and unceremonious funerals were common on the American frontier. Dr. Blevins had some unique insight.

I guess the short answer is I don't know how common that stark and that sort of of detached, you know, a burial would have been. If Erskine hadn't been such a stranger, you know, he's not related to any of these people. We don't even know his last name. Yeah, he's not even American. Yeah. He's not Native American. He's a traveler from another world like Gershtacker is.

If he had had more of a connection, I can't help but think that his burial would have been attended with some more, you know, feeling and maybe, you know, ceremony or something. But at the same time, they're deep in the woods, deep in the mountains. You know, they got bears to haul back to where they're going. It was just functional. And, yeah, I mean, if they take his body out where, I mean, who's going to want it? You know, he doesn't have any family. So I think that's obviously what scares the dickens out of Gershticker is he's thinking, I'm Erskine. You know, to these people, I'm, they bury me just the same as they did him. And that's what he says. I mean, this, this could have been me, just this unceremonious start, throw some dirt over him, and let's get out of here. And that's really, that ends his career. I mean, that's really when he decides, you know, I may need to go back home. Think of it from this standpoint, if you're talking about, if you assume that these guys are Cherokees, it's possible that they just lived through the Trail of Tears five or six years earlier. And we know in the Trail of Tears, there were a lot of people.

people buried on that trail. You know, that may not... These guys were familiar with death. Yeah, that may not be terribly unusual for them. You know, I think that's a great point because these would have been people that would have been familiar with death. Oh, yeah. And Gerstocker said they had a very specific way that they did it.

It wasn't haphazard. Yeah, they knew what they were doing. They lined the tomb with stones and they covered it with stones and they just went to work. It was efficient, you know. Yeah. I've never connected that to... the trail of tears. And also, you think about it like these people would have potentially been hardened, not hardened, but you would speculate that to deal with that kind of trauma that for sure,

if not them themselves, but their family members would have gone through. Oh, yeah. They had a way of emotionally dealing with death that probably would be different than I would. We don't know exactly where Erskine's 180-year-old grave is, but we don't know. We don't know exactly where Erskine's 180-year-old grave is, but we do know it's in the Hurricane Creek drainage in Arkansas. The only clue we have was documented in a 1950s paper in the Arkansas Historic Quarterly when a professor from Oklahoma got curious, drove to the Ozarks, and set out in search of Erskine's grave. He recounted stopping at houses in the remote region and asking locals if they knew anything about the grave. He only found one clue. One young man,

didn't know anything about Erskine, but years before had found some suspicious old carvings on a rock in the Hurricane Creek drainage. The man told him where the carvings were. After examination, it was decided they were likely connected to Erskine's grave. And to this day, it's the best and only clue we have. This is where the story gets interesting. That young man in the 1950s was named Orrskine's. province. You may have heard an interview I did with Ori on my past podcast, the Bear Honey Magazine podcast titled Old Mountain Hunter, episode 21. You can go back and listen to it. In early March of 2019, I drove to Ori's home and interviewed him about his life. I'd known Ori for at least 10 years prior, but one month later, after our interview, Ory passed away in April

of 2019 at the age of 92. My kids and I turkey hunted the morning before his funeral, not far from where he lived. We changed our camo into funeral clothes on the side of a dirt road. So many people were at the country church. There was no room in the main hall, and we had to sit outside. Orie was an incredible guy. At the end of the interview, I asked him about the professor, the carving, and what he knew about Erskine's grave.

I just couldn't tell this story without including Ori. This is what he said. Hey, how are you doing? Oh, I'm doing fire, I guess. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you. Hello, Miss Mary. How are you?

Hi, there. This is my youngest son's shepherd. I don't think he's ever been over here before. No, I don't ever have seen him before, anyone. Come around and have a seat here. How are you all doing? Good, pretty good. Excuse the floor.

I was in the middle of vacuuming, but I ain't got all done, so don't worry about the house. Oh, this is great. So back in the 1950s, there was a college professor from Oklahoma that came over here looking for a grave back in the Hurricane Creek drainage. Yeah, that's it. And they came here and asked you if you knew where it was. Is that right? Yeah. Tell me all that you remember about that.

Well, they come and ask about it. Then two of my brothers were with them over. I was sitting on this rock eating dinner, deer hunting, you know. I just eat dinner. There's got looking kind of on that rock. And there's their initials there. Anyway, it had an arrow putting right up the hill. Yeah.

And I found that, and I told different ones about it, you know. Right. And so. And nobody had ever, to your knowledge, nobody in recent time had found that. No, no. So you just were up there on that rock hunting. I was on that rock and I was one of found it to him. Yeah.

Yeah. And then, so these guys came back in here in the 1950s looking for an old grave. Right, yeah. These guys believe that the engraving that you found was connected to that grave. And they were looking for Erskine's grave. Yeah. And so you gave them some end. tell back in the 1950s for where to potentially find that grave.

And they claim to have found it back in there. I haven't been back over a long time. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, yeah, the grave was just, oh, for them here the fence are above them rocks. Mm. Something like that. Well, you know, you're in an article in the Arkansas Historic Quarterly that was written sometime in the 1950s. Whoever that professor was, and I'd have to look back.

I've got the article. Yeah, it's in the, he's from Oklahoma. Yeah, but your name is in there. Yeah. I mean, because he said, or he may not have said your name, but it was, it was you that he was talking about. Yeah. That had, you know, there was a young man that had found this engraving on a rock

that had an E, and they felt like that stood for Erskine and that it was marking where the grave was. It had two or three leather and had a cut markin pretty deep down in that sandrock. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a neat story. I'm fascinated by that story of Erskine's death. Yeah. I really am. We've got to wind back the clock about a decade. In 2010, Ory had told a friend and I where the rock carvings were. I swore a vow of silence to its exact location, and I don't plan on going back on my words that don't ask me where the engravings are. I won't tell you. In the spring of 2000,

My 2010, myself, my son Bear, and my friend Moe, set out on a series of expeditions in search of Erskine's grave. Our search for the old Bear Hunter is one of those odd experiences that impacted me and my family in ways that's hard to describe. I want to take you into the hurricane drainage. You all ready to go? It's not a short walk. It's cold, too. I don't know. It's at least it's over a mile and a half. What do you think of this country?

Man, it's beautiful. What do you think, Shep? Pretty cool. This is pretty easy walking though, isn't it? No, not really. This is about as rough as it gets in the Ozarks. Oh! Down here!

Hey, look, you see that? That's it. That's it. Yeah, let's go to it. Every time I come through here, I look for anything, that resemble the pile of rocks, but 180 years later, I don't think you really expect to see a pile of rocks. All that we know, the only clue of this whole story,

is what Ori Province told that professor in the 1950s. They came back in here, and at the time, the professor claimed to have actually found a grave, you know, like a pile of rocks that looked like a grave, which at that time would have only been like, you know, about 110 years later. Today, there's no pile of rocks. Like so we're kind of speculating that this engraving has anything to do with this other than it fits the geographic location to a T.

And, you know, we're kind of taking this old professor at his word that at one time there was a grave here. So what I'm trying to understand, and I've kind of just come to terms with, it doesn't, we don't need an understanding. We can just make a choice in our life to be impacted by people and stories and what people did. But like this story really shaped my life. It shaped my adventure. It shaped like not very many days to go by where I don't think about Gerstocker and Erskin. A man we didn't even know his last name.

He died back in these mountains. Why do you think these stories can be so impacting? This is my wife, Misty. I don't know, but I was thinking this week about that same thing. When you said we were going to go out here, I was thinking about you reading that story to our little bitty kids when they were little and kind of seeing the imprint of Erskine's life. And, you know, our daughter still wears, she's a high school senior.

She still wears a bear claw around her neck, a real pretty one. but a bear claw and I think that part of her sense of adventure comes from that. I think our boy's interest in the wild comes in large part because of these stories that they heard and I just thought it was notable that

this guy, you know, he died out here and in the book it even says his family might not even ever know why. But I just think about how his life and the loss of life might have seemed insignificant or unnotable, but yet what happened in these woods still impacts us 150, 200 years later.

Well, there's a lot inside this story. These guys were involved in market hunting and wanton waste of wildlife in many ways. And so we can look back on these and remember that. And that informs our future about how we'll never do that again. Right. And we're now like these ultra, focused managers of wildlife that are trying to use wildlife commodities to the highest extent. And we've placed cultural value on eating the food, utilizing the animal. But even as important

is we've placed cultural value on valuing the hunt, the experience, the immersion into the wild. This is a wild place for where we live. And this story gives this place value. If this place had been devoid of human experience for the last thousand years, we would come here and it wouldn't have as much meaning. We're humans. We value other people. We value what they did. And to me, Gerstocker, he's the one that lived, his life is an inspiration because he, at his time, had foresight into the future. He was one of the few guys of the time that said, hey, the way these Americans are doing this is bad, talking about market hunting and want and waste and stuff. He also, just his spirit for adventure and he valued people.

Everywhere he went, he talked about the people. Even in this story, he talks about his old dear friend Conwell. Like as I read this book, like, I saw how he cried when he left the Conwell's home. This is a German with this American family. And like, that's me. I want to value people like that. His deep sense of adventure, I mean, Gershacher, holy cow. He did stuff that makes us look like city slickers.

Yeah, I think his appreciation for the story and for documenting the journey and documenting the process and all the things, I mean, that's so valuable. And that, I mean, that's why we know the story is because he took the time and energy to write it down. And that indicates that he saw value in the experience. It was a storytelling. Yeah. And those stories give this place meaning and give this place life and share.

and, you know, the land impacts people and people, people give meaning to the land. The reason we love stories and there's such a powerful part of the human experience is because they have an impartational value. Though we weren't there, an understanding of what happened and how people responded inspires and instructs us in a very functional way. In modern times, stories are often just seen as entertainment, but they're a highly effective means. of transferring values and knowledge, even in what seems like mindless entertainment on television, which is essentially a story, is powerfully transferring values into your home. You have a choice of what stories impact you and your family. As a family, we weren't big into superheroes,

but we allowed Gerstocker to become like one in our family. I have a framed sketch of the scene of Erskine's death that I drew framed in my office. My father-in-law and I made a commemorative bowie knife that we called the Gershticker. I don't have a great reason why this story impacted me so much. On the surface, it's probably because he was a bear and deer hunter and he hunted in the Ozarks, like me. Gershiker valued people, and he had some uncommon insight for the time period, and I respect that. Gerstocker's life can't be seen in this one small story.

I guess I don't have a good answer, but I'm content just letting stories do what stories have done for a long time. They have impacted us and instructed us and inspired us. And if we choose the right stories, it makes us better people. 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.

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