Bear Grease - Ep. 44: Where the Red Fern Grows (Part 2) - Character and Manhood

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we’re on part two of our look into the cultural impact of the book, “Where the Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls. He drove the bus to the game where the coonhunters showed pop culture what was up, and made us all proud. We’ll talk with the childhood actor, Stewart Peterson, who starred in the original 1974 Walt Disney movie and learn how he got into acting and why he got out. His reason might surprise and challenge you. We’ll talk again with redbone coonhound man, Ronnie Smith, to get some perspective on the real dogs used in the movie. We’ll have discussion around a key emphasis in the book with Dr. Sean Teuton of the University of Arkansas as we look into that period of life when an adolescent boy becomes a man (and we’ll talk about crying). Lastly, we'll talk with Misty Newcomb about the development of boys and how the system is sometimes rigged against them. If you haven’t watched the original movie or read the book, you ought to go check it out, but regardless you’re not going to want to miss this one. 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.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. They said, Stuart, we've got it narrowed down. We've gone through about 600 other young man. Wow. We've narrowed it down to four.

And you're one of those four. I said, oh, well, cool. On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we're on part two of our look into the cultural impact of the book Where the Redfern grows by Wilson Rawls. He drove the bus to the game where the Coon Hunters showed pop culture, was up and made us all proud. We'll talk with the childhood actor Stuart Peterson, who starred in the original 1974 Walt Disney movie and learn how he got into acting and why he got out. His reason

might surprise and challenge you. And he'll tell us if that mountain line fighting the dog in the movie was real. We'll again talk with Redbone Coonhound Man Ronnie Smith and we'll have a discussion with Dr. Sean Tutan about the key emphasis of the book, which is that period of life when an adolescent boy becomes a man. And we'll talk about crying boys. If you haven't watched the original movie or read the book, you ought to check it out. But regardless, you're not going to want to miss this one.

And the irony is that his lack of education actually makes him a better person. He can get his education from the woods itself. It's mythologized in the life. of Abraham Lincoln. This is what Teddy Roosevelt thought. That's why he went west and reinvented himself. He really wanted to reinvigorate his masculinity in the practice of frontier life. And that is really an American thing. It is. 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. Makes me mad folks like that getting such a fine hound. As sure as I'm alive, it'll wind up being as mean as they are. Billy and his grandfather are watching the Pritchard brothers ride away with a hound pup. Sure would like to bought it for you, Billy. I ain't much better off than your paw. Oh, she'll have your own hounds before long.

I don't know, Grandpa. Sometimes, I think God don't want me to have any. Is that so? Why? Well, I've been asking him for dogs as long as I can remember. Nothing's happened yet. It could be that you ain't doing your fair share. What do you mean?

Well, if God was a mind, it gets your dogs as slick as cutting lard. He'd be doing all the work. That wouldn't be good for your character. I don't want character. I want dogs. You want dogs bad enough, Billy. You're going to get dogs.

But you want his help. You're going to have to meet him halfway. In part one of this series, we introduced the American literary classic Where the Red Fern grows, and we celebrated how the obscure pastime of raccoon hunting with hounds did a 360 slam dunk on mainstream culture. It's a wild case study because the book is so. over 6 million copies and has been mandatory reading in elementary schools from Seattle to Miami since the 1960s.

The book was also made into two major motion pictures, and we already met the childhood actor Stuart Peterson, who played Billy Coleman in the original movie. We learned a ton about Woodrow Wilson Rawls, the author, and how he wrote the original manuscripts on brown paper bags, and late in his life, he finally got the book published. He only wrote two books. and both of them were after he served multiple prison terms in two states. Our interest in his criminal life wasn't to point fingers, but rather to paint on the canvas of redemption, as we looked into the life of an ex-convict that became a beloved children's author and speaker,

fist bump to Wilson Rawls. American literary classics are heavy hitters. They go deep, and you can't cover it all in a short time. I want to continue digging into the book with literary expert, Professor Sean Tutan of the University of Arkansas. He's about to give us insight into why such an obscure place and lifestyle could have such general appeal and will learn something about novels. I read that, well, it was in the preface of this book, Claire Vanderpool,

and she spoke of that Wilson Rawls clearly established a deep sense of place. Why is place so significant if you've never been there? Because most people that read this book have never lived in the Ozarks. Why do we like that? Well, this goes back is actually the history of the novel itself. And the rise of the novels were written as early, I mean, in our European tradition, as early as 1605 with Servantes wrote Don Quixote. Robin Securuso, right, by Daniel Defoe was written in 1719.

Both of those novels, you think about that, what draws readers in the, why are they timeous classics still today? We make movies about Robinson Crusoe. It's the difference, right? It's the unusual life being offered to us, and we learn as we encounter something utterly beyond our world. And that's reason why we call it the novel itself. It means something that's new, right? So this is the novel emerged during the...

So these were the first novels that humans ever wrote. Some say there are earlier novels in China, but in Europe, this is some of the first novels. Okay, in the 1600s. Yeah. During the Industrial Revolution in England, when people had the division of labor grow, where they wouldn't really know about the other lives, people had, you wouldn't work in the same place anymore. Yeah.

And it alienated labor and people were dying to know how other people live, right? And so they saw the novel take off in that moment because people would finally get a window into the daily life of someone living in a... Completely different than them. Yes. Yes. So the whole point of why a place is so significant is if you've never been there. That is the point, is that you've never been there.

Yeah. And so if you can really dive in and see the rootedness of this human in that place, that's the beauty of it. See, that wouldn't have been intuitive to me. If you think about it, the introduction of the novel was probably as powerful a moment for humanity as the introduction of the internet, maybe even more powerful. The idea that made up stories, written as words on a page that could be read anywhere, and could create an out-of-body experience for the reader who'd been trapped in their own mind and world, their whole life, was a wild concept. They didn't have televisions, radio, or video games.

Imagine a world with no fiction books. I don't think I've realized how much identity and instruction we get from novels that have impacted our culture. Even if you're not a reader, your life has been influenced by fiction writing. In Professor Tutan's book called Native American Literature, he said this. In reading, we enter a world where actual people or characters relate experiences, perhaps extremely different from our own. Through that process, we may come to understand or even share some views or values of another. And literature is the power to transform.

End of quote. Professor Tuchon, part of the book that Wilson Rawls, I think, did such a great job of showing just a window into Billy Coleman's life was when he went to Talakawa. He traveled 30-something miles upriver from where he lived and he went to the big city of Talaquah, Oklahoma, which is a real city. And it is not a big city at all. It says that there were 800 people in the city of Talaquale, which to him was this massive place. And there's a series of things that happen that it's just such a powerful literary mechanism because by showing us the city and Billy's response to it, we see his world. Yes. And one of the things that happens is he He walks in front of down an old downtown street where there's shops and stores and big glass windows.

And he stops in front of a window and he sees for the first time the full reflection of himself in a window. And he just kind of becomes a little bit self-conscious about that. I mean, where did Wilson Rawls come up with this? I mean, that is such a powerful moment there because you just think, holy cow, these people were so poor. They didn't even have a mirror in their home. It's also humorous. Yeah, it is. It's a genius passage.

Excellent, right? Because the way that works is a piece of irony in literary theory. That'd be irony. What happens is we are drawn into Billy's world so seamlessly that we're not really aware of it. We get a little description of him, but it's a literary device to put something in front of a mirror. And you're not going to have a mirror in a frontier kind of home like that. When he finally sees himself, we're kind of jarred by this. Yeah.

You know, especially the ladies who are on the sidewalk, we see that he's wild, right? Which again, like I was talking about wilderness and the notion of being uncivilized, you know, in a good way, right? You're also innocent and you're uncontaminated by society or town. Yeah. Right? And that becomes clear when he walks along very politely and runs into the kids from the school. That school is a two-story schoolhouse. It's got a fire escape that they're playing down, going down the tube.

So it's a big school. Yeah. And they're not nice to him. Yeah. And he doesn't care. He shrugs it off, you know. What do they, what slang derogatory term do they use when they see him? They called him a hillbilly.

Oh, cut through the heart. They called him a hillbilly, you know? What's interesting to me about that is that these were kids from Talaquil who were rural kids by every estimation anywhere in the world. Yes. These, quote, city kids from Talaquale would have been viewed by anybody outside of this region as hillbillies themselves. They were familiar with that term in a derogatory way, obviously, because it was a very good. way they used it and then they see a real hillbilly in their mind and they're like you hillbilly yeah and i love that term i i i to me it's a term of endearment now but uh oh it irped billy man

rich me there and he's holding for dog rancers this is the classic scene where billy coleman fights the city kids hmm you guys mine let me buy hey this guy's trying to escape So in the dog. I got it. Don't do that again. No, but don't touch my dogs again. Come on, honey. So in the movie, they didn't use the word hillbilly, but Wilson Rawls did in the book.

I would have probably been offended if Walt Disney had said it. At some point, I'm going to dive into the deeper meaning of the term because it's different than some of the other descriptors used to define rural people. But in my book, it's got a touch of nobility. And it sure was a fast way to tick off Billy Coleman, which was not something you wanted to do. I had some advice that I would have given to Wilson Rawls, but let's see what Dr. Tutan thinks, and we'll cut right to the heart of what this book is about. A boy becoming a man.

As I read this book and looking at it from a literary perspective, I'm amazed at the amount of stuff that's going on that's really intriguing. from the dogs fighting with the city kids to the Pritchards to winning the championship of Coon hunt to the dogs dying and a red fern popping up at the end I mean it's just like it just stacked with these little subplots if you would have told me that I would have advised Wilson Rawls well buddy you might be getting a little too complex this is just weaving people like in and out of so many ups and downs you know you may be you may want to simplify this a little bit. How did he pull that off? Or is there, and obviously, that would have been terrible advice, is it common to have that many ups and downs that weave into a story?

You can map a novel, you know, and scholars have done this. And a good writer, you can get books on how to write a novel, and they'll tell you how to map it out. Often, if you read a novel and you put it down, it doesn't keep your interest, it's because they didn't honor that the continuum in the novel. A novel has to have a crisis action and a falling action. That means you have to have conflict, and usually that conflict occurs somewhere in the middle, and then you have maybe one more minor conflict, and then everything's resolved. And then the other point is that characters have, it can be flat or round. If they're flat, it means there's people walk in and out like the sheriff and you'll never see again. But a round character is a character that has to grow. So by the end of the novel,

they're changed. There's something different about them. In any rate, when you map this novel, it fits perfectly to that crisis action. You got, certainly you got the Pritchards, you know, the terrible death, then you have the competition, and then, of course, you have the cougar. But the way that the novel ends in a beautiful resolution, if you will, is the dogs buried on the hillside. Is that kind of what makes it what it is, the resolution at the end, that it's like a bitter pill to swallow, but also really redemptive? Yeah, yeah. And his father even tells him right here at the end. It's not, he's, Papa tried, Billy, he said, I wouldn't think too much about this if I were you.

It's not good to hurt like that. I believe I'd just try to forget it. Besides, you still have little end. That's a dyes from a man to another in Scipia. man. He didn't become a man soon. This novel is so full of tears. I mean, Billy cries at any moment. He cries all the time. All the time. I thought that was a little unusual. I did. I thought so too. But as a writer, I think Wilson Rawls is trying to make it clear there's a contrast, you know, between what a man, how a man experiences emotions and deals with loss from how a boy experience emotions deals with loss. When his father says, this is not good for you, you shouldn't do that. It's kind of a bitter, like you say, bittersweet, right? His father's saying, like my father would tell me, you can't cry like that.

So that's another aspect of this novel. It's very, like I said, I thought it a little, I have to say, if there's a critique in the novel, maybe a little overdone. On the crying. Yeah. I had the exact same thought. I thought, again, he's crying again, man. Yeah, he was crying at stuff that I wouldn't have thought a kid would have cried at.

But I cried my fair share as a kid, but I don't think I would have been known as like a crier. But I did know some people that were, quote, criers. I look back at a period in a boy's life when he would be. be a few steps away from tears at any moment. And that's pretty, that is a really vulnerable, beautiful, unique period of a man, you know, what will become a man of a man's life. And that's kind of the whole point of this book. I think Wilson Rawls was just like trying to pound it home. This is a boy. He acts like a man. He does things that a man would do, but this is a boy.

As a father, it's painful to watch, you know. And I remember my father telling me, and he was kind of rough about it. He'd say, suck that lip in. You can't cry. I'm a little more gentle with my kids, my sons. And yet, I'll tell them then. There's other ways to handle this, you know, because sometimes they'll cry out of frustration. I said, you got to take deep breaths and we'll make a plan. We're going to fix it. And I try to be practical with them, but. I think about the same thing about how dads handle boys crying. Because, yeah, it evokes something in us of like, boy, you better stop that. Because that's not what a man does. And we're in this mentality and movement of bringing them, to manhood. But yeah, it kind of made me wonder if I was too hard on my boys because you know

they're going to grow out of it. Yeah. But in the moment, you're like, man, what if this guy's 25 years old and still crying? Yeah. And so you feel like you got to do something. You better suck it up, kid. But then you see Billy's dad probably manage him the way you would hope to be managed. Yeah. But I bet a real Ozark dad probably would have been a little rougher on him. Yeah. His mom's the ones gives him the whippings though, too. Yeah. She gets a switch and she's, you know, she's whipped him before. It's always a question in fatherhood, whether your son changes it gets beyond a difficult point in his life.

And you think, was it because I said stop crying or did you just grow out of it? You never know. Yeah, exactly. Because if you didn't say it, maybe he'd cry his whole life. Yeah. So, you know, you don't have to be a perfect father. You just got to be a present father, I think. Yeah, that's the important part of that.

And I never would have known the novel would be about fatherhood. But I'm also thinking about the father. You know, I have a feeling these good, incredible works of the literature, find us where we're at. Good writers find us where we're at, and that's exactly what old Wilson Rawls did, but why do a bunch of coon hunters like us care about literary mechanisms? If I am irrationally moved by something to the point of an impacting my life, I want to understand why. A fundamental and constant in our lives is media.

And by media, I mean books, television, social media, podcasts, basically any type of human communication that isn't human. human to human. And don't say, I don't take in media, Clay, because you're listening to a podcast right now. Our lives are full of media in different forms, and it uses natural forms of human communication to draw us into being interested in something for better or worse. News agencies often use hype and hysteria to get people fired up. Podcasters use long-form conversation to make us feel like we're in the room. Television uses radical and often unrealistic circumstances

to draw us into a captivating stupor. Sports engages with our love of competition and delivers a magnetic pull towards tribalism. The point is this. There are great powers at work, and if we are aware of ourselves and those powers, we can choose where to spend the energy of our life. I'm very interested in things that control us,

beyond our recognition. Personal awareness and responsibility is powerful medicine. Back to the central idea of this novel, which we've declared is a boy becoming a man. I think this issue of bringing boys in the manhood is extremely relevant, as it seems manhood in our culture is up for grabs on its definition. Of all people to speak on the subject, I'd like to introduce my wife, Misty Newcomb. you would have heard her on the render. She's an educator.

She runs a private school. She's a mother of boys. And she has some insight into the development of young boys, which is the theme of our book. So I run a private school, a K-12 private school. At the seventh, 12th grade level, we have a student population that's 73% male. We found that parents were bringing their young boys to us because of concerns about how modern Western culture treats young boys. And there was concerns about how they're being brought up to kind of loathe certain aspects of their just natural identity. And these young boys have a very unique

biological developmental trajectory. And a lot of what we consider bad, not well-behaved, not good is actually really normal. So there have actually even been studies where, and just so that you understand a little bit about academics, test scores, standardized test scores, are not. not subjective at all. That's the idea behind having a standardized test is that there's no human opinion. Grades at school are very subjective. And so a teacher's opinion matters on how they respond to essays, how they respond to participation points and things like that. Studies have shown that even though boys and girls, they've looked at a group of boys and girls and they don't have any difference on their standardized test scores, but the grades that teachers give them are different based off of whether

they're a boy or girl. And I don't think teachers are sitting back there saying, you know, I don't like boys. I'm going to mark them off. I think that there's behaviors that boys naturally have that are less desirable in a traditional classroom. And that's a problem. Like that's, that's a problem because it's communicating that these characteristics are bad. What you see inside of the Redfern grows, for example, you see Billy just kind of running wild, working with his hands and having to think through complex situations with these coon dogs. And there's not really a lot of experiences or environments that young boys have to develop those types of skills in modern society.

So Billy's development. Now, he lacked on the academic side. We do know that. But this idea of letting a boy be a boy is a good thing. And now that, I think we could get confused. And we're not saying let a kid be rebellious and not do what you say. No, no. Billy didn't do that.

No. His dad would have whooped him. But we're not saying tell all the. little guys to sit still, put their paper. Sit still, never get dirty, never run around. Right. Never move rocks. Never chase the cat.

Yeah. Instincts are always something to be suppressed. Sometimes they should be suppressed. Really, there's a lot, like if you think about just the wildness of Billy's life and of his experience, that is extremely valuable. It's not the only thing that's valuable. It's not the only thing that should be emphasized. But there's an aspect of his upbringing that.

you as a young man look at and say, man, I'm glad I had parts of that or I wish I had that, and you want it for your sons. You probably want it for your daughters too. Great. Hey, let me say one more thing. I will say that we had two girls and then two boys. And everyone I ran into always told me, oh, your middle school years are going to be so hard with those girls. They're going to cry. They're going to be so emotional. No one, no one told me about middle school boys. And I remember being an absolute shock. More emotional than any girl. So you think Wilson Rawls was really tapping into something here? I think he was. I mean, I'm just saying it is, it will shock you how much boys cry. I don't think, I don't think he was

overplaying his hand at all. I think that he was tapping into. He had to have been a crier. The conversation right now about the definition of manhood is very interesting. There's got to be an accurate definition of masculinity. And when it's right, it's healthy and productive in the life of the young man and everyone around him. Kind of like Billy Coleman. He respected his mother and father. He respected and took care of his little sisters. He worked hard.

He told the truth. He admitted fault. He took responsibility. Pop culture has declared manhood as dangerous, incompetent, and self-focused, which I take offense at. But I think that many know that true manhood is defined by sacrifice and service to our family. It's about leading by example

and living a governed life. A life guided by principles outside of our self-interest. Seems like it would be difficult for anyone to find fault with this. That's some good stuff. 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. 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. All right.

If we were on a coon hunt, the dogs just struck a track in an unexpected direction and We're going to head toward them. On the last episode, we met Stuart Peterson, the childhood actor who played Billy Coleman. We've already heard his voice on this episode. Ironically, Mr. Stewart has been on the show Meat Eater, and you can watch him on Netflix season 9 when he guided Steve Ronella, Janice Putellis and Adam Weatherby on a mule deer hunt in Wyoming. That was him. The episode is titled Wyoming Mule Deer. His story is a winding road, and I want to try to try to.

to connect the dots from Hollywood actor to backcountry guide. So, Mr. Stuart Peterson, you have no idea how neat it is for me to see you and how kind of shocking it was a couple of years ago when I learned that this boy in this movie that was real impacting to me guided my friend Steve Ronella in Wyoming for mule deer. And then to be here in Wyoming with you now, it's pretty neat. So my main question I want to start off with is how did you get into acting as a child? How did that start? Well, it all really started with my mother's brother, who was in the motion picture production business.

At some point, he had had the idea that he wanted to do a film based on the book where the Redfern grows. And when he finally got the rights to do that, at that point in time, he had begun kind of feeling out how, you know, how he was going to cast and who he might cast. So he was he the director? He was the producer. The producer of the show. Now, where did he live? He lived in California at the time.

Of course, growing up here, all I knew was ranching. So the film industry, and even any aspirations for that, never, ever, and still don't enter my mind. But when he got ready to do the film, he had had a script put together and had taken it up to Wilson Rawls, the author of the book, who lived in Idaho. Deho Falls, and on his way up, he had kind of put out to somebody here in Cokeville. I might have been a fourth grade teacher because she was the one that actually made a reference to someone in Cokefield that she thought might fit the part.

Someone that wasn't you. Wasn't me on my uncle's way back through, on his way back to California. He thought, well, I'll just stop in and see if I can't meet this other young man. As he came through, I happened to be at my grandparents' home, and this young man shows up to be introduced to my uncle, who then took him into my grandpa's den and proceeded to interview him slash let him read out of the script to see what he was going to be like. Meanwhile, I was just out messing around out there, you know, in the living room, probably talking with grandpa.

Probably barefoot wearing overalls. I never went barefoot in this country. That was really a new one for me. But in any case, when he got through with my uncle, this friend of mine, why my uncle came out and he said, hey, Stuart, why don't you come in to read for me in the den? And I said, I'm okay. He says, it's not a big deal. He said, just come in and read a few. He says, you know, there's no pressure. I thought, okay, well, so he brings out a script and he thumbed through some pages. And he said, well, here, why don't you just read Billy Coleman's part here and read

it as if you were going to, you know, you were going to say him to somebody. And I, I did a little bit of that. And it was kind of a half-hearted attempt when I did it initially, because I wasn't No acting training. No acting. Just read this. Just read this. And so I did. There was never an aspiration that was a burn to say,

God, please, Uncle Lyman, why don't you let me do this? I just left it. I just walked away from it as if it was just something that I had no interest, which I didn't. After this initial impromptu read through with his uncle, Stewart's mother got a call a few weeks later asking if he would fly to Los Angeles to audition in front of the director, which he did. After that trip, he got a third call. And a few weeks later, they said, Stuart, we've got it narrowed down. We've gone through about 600 other young man. Wow. We've narrowed it

down to four. And you're one of those four. And so I said, oh, well, cool. But that's, again, as far as my thought process went, I just didn't have any inclination. Ended up in the last phone call, they said, we'd like to do one last set of screen tests. We'd like you to come to Tulsa, Oklahoma. we'll fly you. There will be these other three young men down there. I thought, gosh, Little League football was going to be coming up in a few short weeks. Was this like a high budget movie for 1974? You know, I thought it was high budget because I'd never heard of those kind of numbers,

but I think it was just under a million bucks. But it was a high quality production. It was a high quality production. It was like a first-rate movie for 1974. Yeah, and for the people that the director, he was very well known. he had directed a lot of Disney films. The impression that I got as an adult, as I've gone back and watched that movie, we gathered up and the whole family and watched it just other night.

It was really neat. The impression I got was that it was actually a really well-put-together film for the time. And I was just trying to make a connection of... I think, as I understood it, you know, based on the casting of the other people that were fairly well-known and the interests that they had, because as I went to Tulsa, I did the screen test. And there's four. It's now down to four guys.

Four guys. So they had us all there, and there was something that kind of clicked in me that said, okay, I became very competitive from the standpoint. I wanted to win the part, and I could have cared less whether I did the part after that. I understand. I started trying to pay attention to what they were trying to do to help coach me, maybe how to express myself in this scene or that. When it was all said and done, and my uncle was careful, he knew that with the production, the financials that they'd put into it, He needed to try to remove himself from the decision-making process. He turned it over to the director and said, you know, you're going to be the one working with the young man, so you need to make the decision.

When they came in and told me that I had the part, I didn't know quite how to feel, other than the fact that I was already now starting to feel homesick. Because they told me, they said, my uncle came, he says, well, Stuart, you've earned a part. We're going to start here probably next week. And so for the next week, I'd like you to start toughening your feet. up. So you need to start going barefoot a little bit. That was one of my questions was how did you get such tough feet? I didn't have tough feet because, you know, and I tried. I truly tried. I took my shoes off. I went and tried to walk on the rocks and I just never went barefoot around here. We just didn't.

But there was somebody that worked, you know, that was a little more creative thought out of the box. They said, hey, why, we just put some duct tape on the bottom of his feet. And so if I had to run in the stubble, if I had to run on the, on the gravel, they would just get the duct tape and they'd go over there and they'd just slam it all be layered on the bottom of my feet. Is there anywhere in the movie where you can see that? I don't think so. I think it was all so quick, you know, with the stride. That was my introduction. And I was thinking, I wanted to be home so bad.

I really didn't want to be out there doing the film. You know, and of course, mom and dad, dad was in the middle of the, in the haying, and mom had five other kids at home that she was busy with. So she just basically assumed that my uncle Lyman was going to be, and he did. He watched over me, but I thought it was, for me, it was kind of a chance to be independent. It was my first experience ever. They gave me a per diem for the week. And I remember my, they brought a little vanilla envelope to me and it had cash.

And it was like $88 for the week. And that's what I was to use for my meals. And of course, at that age, I don't need to eat that much. Yeah, that's quite a bit of money. That was a lot of money for a 13-year-old. So there was actually a real Billy Coleman story going on inside the of the Billy Coleman story. Yeah, because I just wasn't used to that.

Being raised on the ranch, we never saw that kind of money. Well, this is the responsibility of a young man with money and stuff. So how long a period, how long did it take to shoot the film? It was two months filming time. Is that all? Yeah, it was two months. Okay. Took two months to film, and then the production, it came out in the spring with the premiere.

Where was the movie actually shot? The movie was actually filmed in Talaqua, Oklahoma, within miles of the old homestead and the same places that Wilson-Rolls roamed as a young boy. It's interesting to get a behind-the-scenes look at how all this went down, and we'll continue to see the parallels between Mr. Stewart's real life and Billy Coleman. In the last episode, we talked about some Redbone coon hounds, which played a significant part in the book and movie. We're coon hunters, so this kind of stuff is interesting.

Here's what Mr. Stewart had to say about the actual hounds in the movie. And how about that dang mountain lion scene, man, I need some answers. We had for that film, because of the age groups, there were 13 dogs, you know, because they had the pups, and then they had the half-growns, and then they had the adults, dogs. 13 different dogs, because you consider the two-month period of time that we filmed, that you see them as pups, and then you see them as the half-grown, and then you see them as adults. Yep. But they also, they had some, when they were doing the scene where the mountain lion, where he's, you know, coming back with the dogs for the first time, he's nestled down for the night there and that mountain line comes in.

When they had those dogs, those older dogs going against, they had a, they had a tame one and they had a wild mountain lion. And the wild one, they had a cable tied to a collar on that cat. The cable you couldn't see. I was able to watch those scenes at night as they were filming it because it was at night. And I was just enthralled by how those dogs would go in there and, you know, keep that cat at bay. But they had a few different dogs because there were a few dogs that they'd send in and they got smacked and they'd kind of yiping off camera and they'd have to send another one in. Wow. So I wanted to ask you about that because that wouldn't fly today.

No. You know, to have a, and when I watched it just as an adult, and now that we see all this animation and everything in Hollywood that has to do with animals, A lot of it is fake and computer animated. When I watched that last week, I was like, that is for real. It was our red bone hounds baying a real live mountain line. The winning of the Gold Cup brought me and my dogs even closer than before. We became an inseparable team. And although I'd always known their love for me was great,

I never realized how deep it went until the night of their greatest sacrifice as we hunted together in the cyclone timber country. What is it? What do you see up there? I don't see anything. Do you think the Hollywood world would frown on a real mountain lion and a dog fighting today? Clearly in 1974, this wasn't an issue.

If we're talking about historical revision, which is taking today's value system and placing it in a different time, This brings up some interesting questions about what has changed. But we're in the weeds, boys, and we've got to get up out of here, and we'll do it by talking to Mr. Ronnie Smith. He was the Redbone Man from Arkansas we went hunting with on the last episode, and his grandson bet me $52 that there was a coon in a tree, but it was a den tree, complicated situation.

Mr. Ronnie has some information on the real hounds used in the movie. I've always wondered if those were just Hollywood dogs or real coon dogs. So you have some intel on the dogs that were in the movie. So there are two movies that were made. What do you know about those dogs that were in the movie? Well, at the time, I was a young fellow in the 70s, not 74. You know, I graduated high school in 74. Okay.

So the movie came out, and it was no big deal, really, but we were. We watched it, of course. Did you watch the movie theater? Do you remember? Yeah, it'd been at, there's one in the town of Rogers up there. It's called The Victory, and it's open for plays now. It's not open for the movie pictures. But the original dogs, and they were local dogs in Taliqual.

The owner of the male dog was Glenn Davis. And I didn't know Glenn personally, but I've been in this Redbone Association since 1980. So it's a good while, you know. And he had the male dog, and he called that dog Rambling Red. The dog that they called Dan was rambling Red. Just rambling Red. That's all it was. And Glenn got paid to use his dog.

He got $500. They could have probably got the dog and some feed along with that if they had won it in 1974. That's a landslide, $500, you know. Now, are you saying that's a lot? That was a lot of money in 1974. That was $500. That was $1,000. good coon dog? The local fellas, and I've talked to a couple of them recently since you and I spoke,

one of the fellas hunted with the dog quite regularly. He said he was sure enough a top-notch hand. Really? Mystery solved. Quote, sure enough a top-notch hound means a lot coming for Mr. Ronnie. Now that we've got the dog situation squared away, let's talk to Mr. Stewart. I want to know how he pulled off being such a great actor with no experience. training. So had you, at age 13, had you read the book? I had not. They encouraged me too, but, you know, I was never an avid reader. I just assumed been outdoors. It's not like I was again so interested in trying to become Billy Coleman that I was living my own life of the outdoors, so to speak. You know, Mr. Stewart, what's so unique about that movie? And I've said this before

I knew you or knew that I would ever know you. It's what a good. good actor you were. I mean, that was pretty, because there's all, you know, all of us have watched movies where there's a kid actor and they're kind of the weak link of the thing. In that movie, man, you just carried it so well and we're such a natural actor. Like, how are you able to pull that off? Well, and see, in my mind, when people, I've had people tell me that before, I'm still saying, are you sure? Because, and I was telling Steve this the other day is when Steve Ronella called me. I told him, I says, I really didn't know that I was acting. I think I was maybe reliving a lot of who I am.

Right. I honestly don't know other than I believe that a greater power, which I firmly believe in God, was how I was able to do what I did, unknowingly, because it wasn't something I thought about, okay, I need to do this, this way or that way. I did it the way I felt. And I guess if that's, that was, you know, they say, well, that was good acting. And I'm thinking, well, I don't know if it was good acting or just portraying what the emotion of I felt at that time. Well, I think what you just described is good acting.

I mean, to be able to live a character because you're so familiar with that character. I mean, it was just one of those things that you didn't have to act like a country kid you were. And the genuineness that you came across inside of it, even inside kind of the moral issues inside the story, I see that today inside of you sitting here talking to you. character matters to you. And in that movie, that was such a strong theme of it. It really was. If I had to do a part that was different than that, maybe wasn't me, I don't know what I could do it.

Right. It's clear to see that character mattered to the real Stuart Peterson. Character also mattered to the fiction character, Billy Coleman. And character mattered to the author Wilson Rawls who created this story. But what's ironic and redemptive is that in the last episode, we learned that Wilson Rawls served time in prison in his younger days for what we can pretty much say was a lack of character. And by the way, Mr. Wilson pleaded guilty to those charges, so it's unlikely he was wrongfully accused. My intent in speaking with Mr. Stewart was just to get a look behind that period of his life and to see how it affected him.

I asked him what it was like going back home to Copeville, Wyoming as a movie star. Through the rest of my junior high in my high school years, I was very aware of the fact that my competitors, whether it was football or wrestling, they knew who I was. That was a little bit of a challenge for me because I've never forgotten the story of, we had a little tournament here in Cokeville. Wrestling tournament. And I had the fellow who was in my weight, had just moved there, I guess from California, was supposed to be somewhat of a big deal.

And when we got there, he'd sent one of his little buddies over and said, hey, so-and-so wants you to know that you were going to be counting lights, which is a terminology used in wrestling, you're going to be on your back, you know. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm not going to let that happen, just because they think I'm a movie star that I should be, you know, some kind of a badge of honor if they can beat me. Right. You're kind of a target then.

I became a little bit of a target, and I kind of... I wouldn't have wanted to have fought you. If you're anything like Billy Coleman from Talaquah, well, I just didn't want that kind of a you know I didn't I didn't want them to think just because I was in a film that they were going to be I was going to be easy pickings and it was just it was it was kind of a poetic justice for me because I was extremely nervous but I was so excited when you know when when it all said and done you know he was the one counting the lights instead of me so Billy Coleman won I won you know I I just thought well you know

that's that's what I dealt with though I thought a lot about that and it just kind of felt like it was a little bit of a ball and chain in many ways because I never wanted, I never wanted to be and receive the accolades because I've been in a film. I wanted accolades to come because of my efforts like in my wrestling or my football. That's where I wanted. And the movie would have been widespread enough. I mean, this thing was released nationally. You probably had people recognizing you on the street. I mean, did they? And even today, as I get, you know, even losing my hair a little bit and, you know, this many years down the road. Really, you still have people that recognize you. Oh, yeah. Somebody that might

have recognized Mr. Stewart was Mr. Ronnie. Ronnie was in the target audience for the 1974 release of this film. However, you might be surprised by his response to it. What year were you born? 56. Okay, so Wilson Rawls wrote the book where the Red Fern Grows in 1961. Would you have read that book as a kid? I have read the book. I might have been, but now I'm an avid reader, most folks that was up, that I knew never read books in their life that didn't go to school very much, to be honest with you. But I've read a little bit of everything. Yeah. But I would have read it. I don't know that that book was readily available to me. I mean, your dad was, you had red bone hounds at that time. We had a black and down

house. Yes. Did you think much about it or just, it was it just normal? Was it kind of like normal, you know, I mean, it was just like an everyday kid would have done here. Okay, so the book wasn't maybe that even that special. It was like life to us. Yeah. You know, really. Yeah. We literally made money picking up soda bottles, you know, for five cents deposits.

You know, I mean, we really did. To buy a hound puppy was, you know, that's just life. You were just like, what's the big deal. Yeah, we do that. That's what we do, you know. Yeah, yeah. Getting to the train station, you want to have been a big deal for us more so than buying the puppies, you know.

Yeah. Any book you read, if you're a good reader and you've had a good author, then you're, you become part of that book in my mind. Yeah. You know, I read a Western novel literally almost every night, one complete novel before I go to bed. Do you really? You know, Lewis Lemore and Zane Gray, and I've been that kind of reader. I mean, I've read the Red Fern Grows, you know, I read the book, you know, probably a couple of times. Yeah.

But it wasn't that big a deal. Because it was life in the hills. It truthfully was. Which that's not far from here. Talakawa is not very far. How far as a crow flies away from Talakawa? I mean, 50 miles, 60 miles, maybe. Yeah, it's an hour and 15, 20 minutes driving.

It was interesting for me to hear the impact of a movie on a person who was almost play-by-play, living out a version of Billy Coleman's life. The literary mechanism of connecting a faraway place and a foreign lifestyle didn't hook Mr. The truth of it is this. Living in some version of hard times in the Ozarks wasn't that romantic of a life. It was just life. If you listen, this next section is the most impacting of my interview with Mr. Stewart. I asked him if he did any more movies, and his answer surprised me. So after the movie, did you do any more movies? I did. My uncle who was into family. valued movies. We did about three or four more. Okay.

So how long did your acting career span in terms of years? You know, tell about 19, 20. And then I had opportunity and have had a few other little, I guess, checkbacks with me. And I just haven't ever been compelled again to want to say, yeah. Really? So when something like that, like you've kind of got to fuel it by just like going and trying to trying out for parts and taking the chance of flying somewhere for, I mean, I guess somebody in movies, like stuff just comes to them, but that's not necessarily true.

That's how everything for me, it all came to me. It was never an aspiration or my saying, I want to do it. I'm an aggressively approach it. When I got through with Pony Express Rider, and did I mention that one, anyway, there was one called Pony Express Rider. I think that was one of the last ones I did. The director of that, he later did a film called The Sackets. It's a Western, and he wanted me to play one of the Sackett brothers. And as I read the script, there were just some things that were kind of, went against the grain of my values. And I told him, I said, I just really don't think this is a part for me as for my person.

And I've always felt that way that if you act and you are into the part, you're going to feel a lot of the same things that you would in real life. And in the case of this one, the Sacketts, you know, there were some. things where they'd been out on the range for a while and then they came into town and it was party time. And, you know, with the women and the alcohol and I just said, that's just not me. Yeah. I can't portray that.

Yeah. Even though it's acting, I can't do that. Yeah. And didn't want that to carry over in any way, shape, or form. And as a result, you know, once I got married, I understood exactly why I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to have to feel anything that would be contrary to what it should be, and that's fidelity and commitment to my wife. The mind and body don't know the difference when you're faking it and when it's real. So was that a factor in closing down your acting career?

It was. I love it, man. It's bizarre to me how media portrays human life. They often prey upon our extremes and in turn promote the normalization of those extremes. I think as a society, we could almost universally agree that infidelity degrades people and families. However, you can hardly watch a sitcom movie or program that doesn't portray it in a compelling way. Think about it and think about how bizarre that is. I absolutely love it that Mr. Stewart had the fortitude and wisdom at age 20 to see the potential pitfalls in a life as a Hollywood movie star and he intentionally navigated around it. Bros, that's some high-level stuff. This is the part of the Bear Grease podcast where we proclaim that having character is cool.

Around here, you're not the cool kid because you do dumb stuff. You're the cool kid because you do wise stuff and having a value system that you live by. Nope, none of us are perfect. But you got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything. Cue the Aaron Tippin. Not really. Don't do it, Phil. Mr. Stewart truly was an up-and-coming Hollywood movie star. The road was paved before him.

He received the Star of Tomorrow Award in the 1970s, and he purposely walked away from a lucrative future. I love it. He went on to build custom homes, run an outfitting business called Crooked Sky Outfitters in Wyoming, and have a wonderful thing. family. So you, after they, in the early 20s, you were done. I was done. Yeah. And you went off to have an outfitting business and build homes. Build custom homes. You know, I do some rustic

furniture. I like to be creative with my hands. I'm, I'm a person that likes the physical aspect of life and not merely an entertained part of life where, you know, a screen or, you know, some of that stuff. And I'm not saying, I'm just glad there's, there's all types to make up the world because I wasn't born to be able to make things happen on a screen or that kind of stuff. Let's get back with Professor Tutan for a final look at Wilson Rawls and some of the American ideals that shaped this book. I'm interested in why we are the way we are, and I'll reveal what the saddest part of the book was for me. Now, biographically, we know that Wilson Rawls did return. I mean, not just to go to prison in Oakland.

No, he did return. He returned. I know that he returned, because I know some Cherokee folks over in Oklahoma that said he came to their classroom back when they were kids. So he did come back. That makes me feel good. But even if he didn't, Clay, that land has been sanctified. It's sacred now. And there will always be some of him there in that land. The sad to me in the book, even more sad than the dogs dying, is that he had to move away. And that's that line that he never came back. Because what makes me pass. on the table is, I mean, I just love rural life so much, people's connection to place. And just modern, the modern world just disintegrates that in so many ways. And it's just part of life. And the fact that Billy's, the winnings of his championship coon hunt were the thing that gave them the money to be able to move away and never come. And in the book, they moved to Tulsa and presumably never come back. That's what got me, man. Yeah. This is the genius of literature

is we continue to read it. People say, well, what do you want to read that again? Well, some say that literature reads us, you know, when we read it, we read it. And every time we read it, especially the years have gone by, you read it differently.

When I was a kid, what struck me most was the death of the dogs. But like you, when I read this recently, when the wagons packed up and they're going to leave, and he's looking back at that land one last time and that humble cabin where they worked so hard, it's a tear-jurker in that moment. Yeah.

It is, because you know he'll never be back. All of us have that tie to home. And many would say that when we dream, when we dream, we have a childhood home that's in our dreams. And it's always the same house. For me, it's always the same house, same place. I know the smells. You know, and that's home. You know, what's wild, too, is that in the movie you can actually see this cabin, you know, and where they lived.

It's like, oh, man, that's, I want to go there. Back in those days, for those people that really lived in that kind of poverty, that kind of isolation, that wasn't a dream life. And so them going to town was like major upgrade in everything. So right now when all of us live in cities and have these urbanized lives, we dream of going back to the country. So, you know, you kind of have to switch it around and where they were seemed like paradise. Yeah. And they were leaving to go to this thing that we now all know, which is just interesting. Now, you know what makes a great work of art in literature is irony, right?

when something turns out to be the opposite of what we assume. And in this novel, when Billy finally goes to Taliqua, which is the big city, he runs into some kids who are in school, and they're not nice to him. Is that city living? Is that what it means to get an education? Is Billy going to turn out like that? Yeah. You know, and the irony is that his lack of education actually makes him evader person,

that he can get his education from the woods itself. And that's very much an American theme, right, in our literature, is that the land itself can teach us something, right? And we can get, you know, it's mythologized in the life. of Abraham Lincoln, you know, he learned to write with a piece of charcoal on a wooden shovel by firelight in a cabin, you know. So we really value that kind of education that can occur in the woods without much technology or our city living. There's even an assumption that city life will weaken men. This is what Teddy Roosevelt thought. That's why he went west and reinvented himself.

Yeah. You know, and started hunting, wearing bearskin coats and Indian looking clothes. Yeah, yeah. You know, he got rid of his glasses. You know, he didn't... Yeah. He really wanted to reinvigorate his masculinity in the practice of, you know, frontier life.

And that is really an American thing. It is. You know, I'm trying to understand this rural American identity. Yeah. And what interests me is specifically where it's connected to hunting. So that's why I ask you, is it really an American idea that we learn from the land? And, you know, we've done a series on Daniel Boone

where we've seen that this idea of solitude in the wilderness is really an American idea. Like much of the world prior to a couple hundred years ago, we were doing our very best to get away from wilderness because wilderness is where you died. You know, there's themes inside the Bible of wilderness being separation from God and all this. But then when we get here to what is now America, it was different.

I guess I'm trying to understand even the European settlement of America in all its trouble and wild stuff that happened. It was pretty unique to the world. world in that it was the last big block of the world that was kind of modernized, if that's an appropriate word. But a lot of for some unique stuff to happen in terms of the way we interacted with the land. And I'm also interested in how Native American culture deeply impacts kind of rural American culture today in ways that we don't understand. And this book shows that strongly too. Yeah, definitely.

When Europeans arrived here, they invented the notion of the frontier. If you think about it, I mean, it's probably obvious, but, you know, Indigenous people didn't think of a front, they didn't have a frontier. This was just where they lived. Yeah, they didn't have a notion of wilderness either. They said, you know, there was nothing wild. I mean, they say, Luther Standing Bear, I'm been reading him right now. He's a famous suit chief.

And he said, and he lived in a time before I even saw a white person on the plains. And he said, it was not wild. It was tame because they were so comfortable in their ancestral land. And it's taken centuries for Americans to become comfortable in this land. When the Puritans arrived here in 1622, they were in armor, breastplates. had muskets and were, you know, are armed and ready for that great threat of a wall of forest. And beyond it, they knew nothing,

just that there were already stories of savage people that would kill you. And they were absolutely terrified. And the first thing they wanted to do was clear a path. I mean, get some of the trees down so they can get seed. We were talking about the fear of the dark. You know, it's picking Europeans in North America, were absolutely terrified of a forest. You know, I mean, the imagination runs wild with, you know,

indigenous people ready to kill you and scalp you, absolutely terrified. And it took, like I said, centuries for people to move Europeans and move into the woods and understandably adapt some of the ways of Native Americans who knew how to do it and slowly became more American in that process. And that's something I didn't come up with that. Frederick Jackson Turner, the famous historian, said that long ago. He called that as frontier thesis. And that's what makes us uniquely American. Yeah. If you look into the accounts on the frontier, as Europeans would call it, Native Americans and frontier people, you know, white settlers were living. side by side often.

Yeah. They were neighbors, you know. But what's important members, these people knew each other. They knew each other by name and would live within, you know, a gunshot of each other. That was the rule back then. You had to be within a gun, far enough so you could barely hear a gunshot. And so it's a process that we're very proud of, right? And still today, those are the values that many of us, whether we're thinking,

becoming a back to the lander or, you know, wanting to, you know, join the Boy Scouts and take hikes. All of that, we're kind of, in a healthy manner. we're reenacting that frontier spirit. And sometimes it can be corny if we're not self-conscious of it and reflective. Like you said a moment ago, we can romanticize tough living in a cabin, something that, like I mentioned my father, they had no running water. You know, they had no electricity.

And as a child, I'd romanticized that, but he was very happy to escape that life, you know, although never quite comfortable in a suit. Never. And as soon as he retired, he was oddly regained his southern accent. Came back to him, huh? Yeah. I've never been back to the Ozarks. All I have left are my dreams and memories.

But someday, if God is willing, I'd like to go back and walk again in the hills I knew as a boy. And I'd like to touch the heart that's carved in an old sycamore tree that says Dan and Ann. And I'll look for that sacred spot by the river where the red fern grows. Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on it, but whatever culture you're a part of, you've been impacted by its literature and stories. Going back into deep human history since the beginning, stories have been inoculated with a live value system that is looking for hosts to carry it onward. It might be pertinent to ask which came first, the story or the value system. Do we create stories to carry values, or did the values create the values create the? the stories. A famous Native American author named Mo Meday said, quote, man tells stories in order

to understand his experience and achieves the fullest realization of his humanity in literature. End of quote. Undoubtedly, the book where the red fern grows is one American classic that I can fully get behind, aside from Billy hunting them red bone hounds. The story is replete with character and it also has a fundamental component of spirituality that I believe is an important and vital part of the human story. I still marvel at the widespread reach of a book about Coon Hunting. Surely Mr. Wilson tapped into an awareness of his own humanity and was truly gifted in his ability to connect us to place in such a seamless way. We all felt like we were there, regardless of our past background, geographic location, or economic status.

The story is a humble human story. And therein lies a pattern for those of us interested in seeing our lifestyle of living close to the land persists through time. Nobody cares about coon hunting, but they're moved by people's stories and their connection to place. Thank you all so much for listening to Bear Gris. All the things we talk about on this podcast are deeply personal to me. And me and the team at Meteeter work hard to bring you quality content every week. And I can't thank you enough for the support and for listening. Please do me a favor and share our podcast with friend and foe this week.

Thanks to you guys, the demand for our bear grease hats is off the chart. It was sold out again. Our apologies. But we should have some new hats by May. And when they come in then, you better get them quick. But we do have some of those Black Panther Believer hats on the meat eater.com right now. See you next week on the rental. 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 hip. 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. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.