Bear Grease - Ep. 60: The Deathwind - Lewis Wetzel

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast we’ll be looking into the life a man whose legacy is wrought with conflict. To Americans who lived in the Ohio River Valley he was a folk  hero, but to the Native Americans he hated and murdered in cold-blood, he was known as the Deathwind. Clay Newcomb went to the Ohio Valley to interview outdoor writer and author, Chip Gross, to learn about the life of Lewis Wetzel. This dark-deep-dive comes at the request one of Steve Rinella of MeatEater, who is also a guest on this episode. We’ll talk about Wetzel’s life and the brutality of the American frontier. Lastly, in an effort to understand the mind frame ofWetzel, Clay will interview mental health professional, Zach Newcomb, to learn if our boy Wetzel was truly a sociopath, a serial killer, or if his actions simply the result of life lived in a war zone. We doubt you’re going to want to miss this one.  We know folks let their young kids listen to Bear Grease (which we love), but we’ll warn you -- in this episode there is lots of talk of graphic violence. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. In that time, in those years, people were dying by the thousands. Death was just everywhere. Every family was touched directly by death. On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we'll be looking into the life of a man

whose legacy is wrought with conflict. To Americans who lived in the Ohio River Valley, he was a folk hero. but to the Native Americans he hated and murdered in cold blood, he was known as the death wind. I went to the Ohio Valley to interview outdoor writer and author Chip Gross to learn about the life of Lewis Wetzel. This dark, deep dive comes at the request of one Steve Ronella of Meat Eder, who is also a guest on this episode,

and we'll talk about Wetzel's life and the brutality of the American frontier. Lastly, in an effort to understand the mind frame of Wetzel, I'll interview mental health professional Zach Newcomb to learn if our boy Wetzel was truly a sociopath, a serial killer, or were his actions simply the result of a life lived in a war zone. And yep, Zach's my brother. I doubt you're going to want to miss this one. And hey, I know a lot of you folks let your young kids listen to Bear Grie. which I absolutely love. But I'll warn you in this episode,

we talk about some pretty gruesome and graphic stuff. There was no guilt in his mind. There was no regret. It was just, I've got to do this. And he continued doing it basically until the day he died. 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 a bearerese podcast. 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. Well, in one of the stories that I've written about him, I say if he were alive today, he would be labeled a serial killer, and he really would. But he hated Indians. He wasn't killing white people, but he was killing Indians. He would kill hostile Indians. He would kill not hostile Indians.

He just hated them. And where I think this came from is when he was younger, when he was just 13 years old, he and his brother, who was 11, were taken captive by Wyandots. He later that night, he and his brother escaped, got back home. But he made a vow to himself when he was a kid that he would kill Indians anytime he could. And then later in life, one of his older brothers is killed by Indians. His father is killed by Indians. So he had a real vendetta there.

The Shawnees called him Longknife. The Hurons called him Destroyer, and the Delaware's called him Deathwind. There's a Death Wind coming moving fast cross the hill, and he's been looking for the men who burn and kill. Who burn and kill. And when he's coming, you can feel the death of chill And he won't stop blowing to this peace And the night is still

In the days of the settlers, we struggle to survive We saw death and hunger and we fought to stay alive Came a man with a gun He stung the vile and he was a hero to the people He was known as a devil win As a dead win The cultural impact of a frontiersman can often be gauged by if they have a musical ballad written about them. This is one from a band called The Backroads, called The Ballad of Lewis Wetzel.

I love these old songs, and how about those backup singers? And I'll give you a digital fist bump if you've ever heard this one before. Lewis Wetzel is a controversial figure, and it's interesting to read about him, hear him sung about, and see him honored and then go back into his life to try to make sense of it. Many Americans in his time viewed him as a hero, but to somebody was a criminal, a murderer, a madman. But the confusion isn't surprising. The time period when the American frontier was being pushed into the middle ground,

what is now Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, heroes in madmen could easily be confused because of overlapping traits. Wetzel was by profession an Indian scout or Indian hunter, and he became known as the most effective Euro-American single combat fighter potentially ever. He was believed to have killed in one-on-one tussles as many as 100 Indians in his short 45-year life. He claimed to put a bit of silver in his bullet to protect him from Indians. Some of his killing was done on the clock, and some of it was done. done with a recreational flair. He took scalps with pleasure, but in doing so, protected his people, elevating him to a folk hero. There's a county and a wildlife management area named after him in West Virginia, along with multiple businesses, parks, and springs that still carry his name to this

day. Born in 1763, Lewis Wetzel and his family did some fighting in the Revolutionary War. It's also believe that Lewis Wetzel served as a scout on the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. He served multiple prison sentences and escaped once in a coffin. The feller had quite the resume.

If you've been following Baragreuse, you know that I'm prone to tell stories with crescendos of redemption. This one doesn't have one. It swoops low, arcing towards darkness. But lucky for us, darkness creates

a context for light to be seen. And I think by looking at the roughest examples of a time period, it puts into context others that we've learned about, like Boone, who compared to Wetzel was the Billy Graham of the middle ground. He was a saint. Chip Gross, the first voice you heard on this podcast, has laid the foundations of what built Louis Wetzel. As a kid who was taken captive by Indians,

and later his father and brother were killed in a riverside bushwax. Lewis made a vow that he'd kill every Indian he ever saw as long as he lived and he proved to be a man of his word. If you recall on the Meteor podcast, Steve Ronella made a public petition to get me to tell the story of Lewis Wetzel, which I agreed to do as long as he agreed to take to heart some friendly advice on how to blow a crow call. Here's Steve. Steve Ronella, how did you get connected and interested in the Wetzel brothers? I'll answer that first. I want to thank you for doing this because I want to learn more. I want to learn more about the Wetzels. I'm fascinated by him, even though I didn't know about him that long ago.

I became aware of him in this way. I was interviewing a Daniel Boone historian. And in this, we were talking about how Daniel Boone was this very noble, ethical individual, somewhat of, opportunistically pacifist when he could be. He was a pacifist when he could be. Yeah. Right. He was a friend of the Native Americans when he could be. Sometimes went out of his way to be that way.

Talked remorsefully about taking an Indian's life unnecessarily, right? This historian, Ted Franklin Blue, then made a comment to me about some real bad dudes and mentions the Wetzel brothers. I didn't know who they were. but a buddy of mine, then text me, how the hell do you not know about the Wetzels? The Indians called him the death wind. And that's when I decided to start lobbying you to do a thing about the Wetzels.

You'll hear us throughout this referring to the Wetzel brothers. But the most famous Wetzel and the one we're talking about the most is going to be Lewis Wetzel. Lewis was born on a section of the Wilderness Road in West Virginia in 1763, wrapped in a union jacked flag. His father and mother were on their way to homestead on big wheeling creek in the panhandle of

West Virginia, 14 miles from the Ohio River. It seems your life is usually more exciting if you're from the panhandle of a state. Nine states have panhandles. That's not relevant. His father was considered by many to be reckless, or maybe just naive, because of how far he settled from permanent white settlements. He was way back on the very edge of the frontier. And it was a time of great instability and constant guerrilla warfare between whites and Native Americans.

The Wetzels ended up having seven children, and they had seven peaceful years before Wynoddots burned their cabin and captured Lewis and his younger brother Jacob. Four of seven Wetzel children would be captured by Indians at one point in their life, and a couple of them got captured more than once. That's an incredible stat. Here's the story of Lewis's beginning. And you'll begin to see the inklings of the young Lewis's uncanny ability to navigate backwood's life. So in 1776, he and his younger brother, Jacob, who was 11, were kidnapped by Native Americans. They were working corn. And the boys had seen a black bear.

They had reported seeing a black bear around the corn. Hornfields. And Lewis thought the black bear looked funny. And so he goes back and tells his dad, Martin, the older brothers, says, saw a bear. And Lewis goes, I don't think it was a bear. I think it was an Indian and a bear skin. And it kind of red flagged the family. Well, sure enough, that night, they hear something and they're kind of on red alert and they look outside and they see an Indian coming up to him. And the dad shoots and kills the Indian. Oh, this isn't when he gets kidnapped. Well, it's connected to that. That brings retribution from the other Native Americans

within a couple of weeks or a couple of days. He and his brother, Wetzel 13, Jacob 11, are kidnapped, straight up kidnapped by, and that's when he got shot. He was in a cornfield and a bullet grazed his chest. He gets caught and they stay in captivity for two days before he makes a pretty daring escape. And he showed a lot of intuition inside. of situations with Native Americans even from when he was young.

Like they had him tethered with like leather straps. And they had him tethered up at night. He and the brother together. And they started moaning about the straps being too tight. The guys come over and loosen their straps. Long story short, they escape after the guys are all asleep. This sounds like five or six guys. There's a detail about this escape that starts really speaking to his sort of coolness.

And also just kind of the person he was where a, the Indians had taken his father's rifle. And here he is like at any second, as far as he knows, he's going to get tomahawked or taken and has the, has to run a gauntlet. You could get killed doing that. Like this guy has no idea. He gets away, but they don't want to leave without recovering their old man's gun. And there's like a detail to you that the Indians had moccasins that they were drying by the fire,

but they shrunk up. The boys couldn't get the moccasins on their feet and had to go down to the creek, stole the moccasins, but then had to go down to the creek and soak those buckskin not moccasins in order to get them stretched out enough to pull them over to their feet and then take off. Right? So rather than running off barefoot, getting free running off barefoot without the old man's gun, they get free, get their old man's gun, get some footwear, and then take off. Well, and the story was he had to go back. So they escaped and actually left the camp. And then they realized they didn't have shoes. This is a version.

Allman tells. They didn't have shoes. They didn't have the gun. And he, and Wetzel sneaks back into the camp and gets the stuff and comes back out, which is risky. I mean, you know. Yeah, like the guy was laying on something and you had to kind of get it off from under his head. Alman didn't go into that, that detail. But that was the foundation, which would be the vow that Lewis Wetzel made as a young boy, that he was going to kill every, you know, Native American that he came in contact with. Yeah, and not in an or, I don't know. It sounds. It sounds. so weird to say in an organized fashion. Not with the military.

Not in support of like military campaigns. Not in support of any kind of strategy. It was just like in and of itself. Yeah. Even to kill allies. Stuff that happens in a person's childhood is always an important player in their life. Whether good or bad, we're formed by our experiences.

And I do believe that we have a choice of how we respond to the good and the good. bad. Later in the podcast, we'll hear from a mental health professional on this stuff. Here's the account of the first time Lewis killed a Native American. As a matter of fact, he killed three. When Lewis was 16 years old, so this is three years after he and his brother Jacob had been captured, they went on a mission with a bunch of adults to retrieve some stolen horses. So there were a group of Indians that stole horses. His dad's horse was in the mix. And so

they go out, the guy's getting a little shootout with the Indians, and the adults retreat. And Wetzel goes back and is like, what are y'all doing? And they go, well, yada, yada, yada. And he goes, well, I'm going back in. And he basically employed a tactic that he used most of his life in certain situations. And that tactic was, they called it being treed when the Indians would retreat but hide. and be waiting for you. And basically he knew where these Indians were hiding out.

And he snuck in there and he put his hat on the end of his gun and leaned it out from behind the tree. He knew that they were watching him. And when they shot and hit his hat, they thought they killed him. And so they exposed themselves. And he had a loaded musket. So a one-shot musket was a real big deal back in those days. Because you pretty much had one shot and then you had 40, seconds to two minutes of loading a gun, depending on how fast you were. So they shot, they thought

they killed the guy, and then Wetzel lets him get in close, steps out, it's two Indians, shoots one in the chest, and takes off running. And what they didn't know and what he became known for was he could reload on the run. And he became famous throughout that part of the world in the Native American tribes for always having his gun loaded. But he could, he could load on the run. And so he runs and these guys has already shot their bullet. And so he takes after him and then he runs for however long and then just turns with a loaded gun and shoots. And they'd never seen anything like that. And so he came back with all these grown men. It was like, holy cow, who is this kid? Yep. Came back with scalps. They collected scalps like trophies. I don't want to glaze over the

act of scalping a dead enemy. I think it's easy to go numb to the brutality of the act. Maybe it's Hollywood, books, I don't know. But scalping started in Native American warfare, and then as Europeans got involved, many took up the practice. Perhaps it was unrestrained retribution, or maybe it was to communicate with their enemies in a way that they could understand. Anyhow, the 16-year-old Wetzel took three scalps that day by what would become known as Wessel Spring near St. Clairsville, Ohio. Lewis's success in guerrilla warfare was that he could load his gun extremely quickly. Chip Gross is from the Ohio Valley. He's a retired game warden, authored multiple books, and has had over 1,000 of his articles published about hunting, shooting, and frontiersmen.

Years ago, he took an interest in Lewis Wetzel, and here he'll give us a critical detail of how he was able to reload so fast. Now here's another wilderness skill that he had, and not many other frontiersmen had it. Simon Kenton could do it, a few others could do it, but reloading on the run. And he was very, very good at this. And what he would do, he would take two or three lead bullets and actually put him in his mouth, believe it or not. Now, this is before they knew much about lead poisoning, I'm sure, but he didn't seem to care. Yeah. He would carry these extra bullets in his mouth, and that would help him reload.

much quicker on the run. Some historians in the past have written that Lewis got lead poisoning from all the mouth bullet stuff, and it turned him into a madman. Though that can't be healthy, I don't think that's the only culprit to his obsession with killing. Here's Chip with more on loading a musket fast. Once your, the firearm is empty. What you have to do is you have to pour powder down the barrel. That's step one.

That's step one. Step two is then you have to take a bullet, which is a round ball, lead ball, and drive it down against that powder with a ramrod. And then the last step is to take a small amount of powder and put it in the pan, the firing pan. That's not easy to do. And then you have to hope that everything is going to work when you pull the trigger. Because a lot of times a gun might fire, call a flash in the pan, but the powder in the barrel doesn't go off. And sometimes that did happen with him. And then you're down to hand-to-hand combat.

And he was good at that too. He had all the wilderness skills. You know, it's interesting now. We're all used to firearms and we're used to firearms that shoot cartridges that are essentially fail-proof. Just pull the trigger and a gun goes off. That's no longer a question. But during this time period, a warrior's world was dominated by this possibility

that his gun wouldn't go off when he absolutely needed it number one. And then number two, he was dominated by this limitation of time. You get one shot, boom, and then you have to go through a pretty detailed sequence of events to get it loaded again. Exactly. And so that was actually a tactic of Wetzel in his fighting was that he could reload so quick that the Indians knew that if a guy shot, there was a span of time when he couldn't shoot again, and they would rush in. They would draw the volley of their, their enemies, and then they would say, okay, now we've got a minute before they can reload, and we're going to go in and take them hand to hand or whatever. And that's where Lewis Wetzel,

I mean, that was his trick, was that he could, I mean, it'd be interesting to actually have the data on it. I'd love to see it. I mean, could he do it? Could he do it twice as quick? Yeah. Could he do it? I don't know. And 25% of the time. Lewis being able to reload his gun, Fast was probably his most valued skill. I want to read you an excerpt from the book, The Life and Times of Lewis Wetzel by C.B. Allman. This book was published in 1931. At the age of 17,

Wetzel may be said to have entered on his life's work, that of hunting Indians. The warfare with the Reds was not restrained by proclamations or politicians. It was a free fight. anybody could enter and keep at it as long as he liked. The rules were simple and consisted of get his scalp. Wessel was a stern, sober, silent sort of person, never boasting of his exploits, but pursuing his way with the tenacity which made his name as much feared by the foe as they were hated by him.

He shunned the company of other people and was never so content as when roaming the forest like a wild animal. Wetzel's picturesque appearance joined with his growing reputation for daring added to his popularity with border folks. Five foot ten inches tall, unusually strong and well developed in arms and shoulders, slight and active of limb, with piercing black eyes, scowling brow and black hair, which when combed out hung to his knees. This ranger was the object of much approval on part of the young ladies. at the settlement, graceful, morose, fascinating, and blind to their charms. The dashing youth, doubtless, wreaked considerable havoc among the feminine hearts, not recorded

by tradition or listed and printed tales of the frontier. His true love was the long trail and the thrill of the encounter. End of quote. The intel that we have about Wetzel is sparse, and many authors have published contradicting stories. There are, three main books about Wetzel that I found. One is C.B. Allman's book, The Life and Times of Lewis Wetzel, which I thought was pretty good. Another by Robert Myers published in 1890 was called Lewis Wetzel, which honestly I didn't think was that well written. Sorry, man. And the latest was in 1996 called That Dark and Bloody River by the famed author Alan Eckhart. It's not all about Wetzel, but he talks about the Wetzel brothers.

Lastly, the author who's attributed with making Lewis's nickname the Deathwind famous was a novelist named Zane Gray, which in his book, The Spirit of the Border used the nickname because Gray's novels, which were fiction, used the Wetzel brothers as characters, which is kind of confusing. So it's not 100% clear where the nickname came from, but a poem called The Ballad of Lewis Wetzel, written by Glenn Baker, gave me the only true citation of the death wind that I could find. Chip is a native Ohioan, and he has studied Wetzel a lot, and here's him describing what he knows about the nickname, the death wind. And the death wind name was kind of interesting, because where that comes from is you probably know if you take a muzzle-loading rifle and you blow over the end of the barrel, you'll get kind of a hollow.

sound like blowing over a bottle, you know, empty bottle, that type of thing. And he would, he would use that to mess with the Indians. If he got up to a group of Indians, maybe an Indian camp, and there was too many for them for him to take on, he would get within hearing distance and he would blow across the top of that muzzle to let him know I'm here, you know, and I may be coming for you tonight, it may be made the next night, it may be down the road, you know, two or three months. And so that's where Death Wind comes. And another part, he grew his hair very long. He was a big man, grew his hair, which was totally black, as long as he could, which was

knee length. And he was basically taunting the Indians, come take it from me if he can. Wow. And none ever did. It's striking to imagine a buckskinned frontiersman with cold black hair down to his calves. And apparently, he wore his hair this long until his day. death. Glenn Baker's poem agrees with Chip's version of what deathwind means, but I've heard three possible sources of the nickname, number one, being blowing over the end of a muzzle to intimidate

Indians. Number two, someone inferred that he had a trademark scream that he made when he killed an Indian, and the escapees said it was like a death win. Lastly, some have thought it just meant he swept quietly through the woods, dealing out death like a deathwind. Here's Steve on Lewis's start as an Indian scout. At age 17, he became a full-time Indian scout. It was like an employment. I don't know how he got. Yeah, the settlements would have, you know, you hear him described as militia.

And then there was, so you had like these informal militias. Then you had Rangers, which were more tightly, like, like, Samuel Brady, who was a contemporary at Lewis Wetzel, who was under-employed of the army, like, underemployed with the army, but ran a group of frontiersmen who were known as Rangers.

But these were guys who were just on the lookout for raiding parties. And the thing they might do is they might just travel the north shore or the south shore of the Ohio and pick up tracks going one way, follow those

tracks to see if they had stolen anything. intercept tracks of Indians that were coming south and alert villages, alert settlements of what's coming. If there was were kidnappings or burning of buildings, they might get on the trail and follow to go get retribution. And at any given time, there were any number, any small collection of these groups out doing like the scouting.

Or these groups, these frontiers might also ally themselves with the military. And when the military is going to do like a formal campaign, they're out ahead to find where they're camped to make sure they don't fall into ambushes. Yeah. Same like in Vietnam, the long range reconnaissance patrollers. Yeah. They were just out in the jungle, listening, looking, gathering intelligence. When you understand that too, it helps to understand why these guys, you give some context for why they were doing what they were doing and why that these guys would be potential.

folk heroes, not even folk heroes, like just legitimate cultural heroes, because they were the ones that were protecting, quote, unquote, you know, these white settlements. Yeah, first line of defense. Yeah. And also delivered, imagine you're a Euro-American, you're a white settler at this time. Your child's abducted, and someone delivers your child back to you. I mean, that's one of the things that made a Boone famous. It's the most kind of like iconic hero tale. yeah. Wetzel never looked back after becoming an Indian scout. Here we'll learn some of his exploits that made him a folk hero of the region amongst the whites. Wetzel, there's two times that he was documented on having saved somebody's wife. And it was the same story both times. He's out

hunting with somebody or traveling with a man. And the woman was back home, you know, with a family. Two different times. He went back. with the guy and found the cabin burned and the family gone. And usually the, usually the women were spared and the children. Also painting an idea for just the brutality of the era, the first guy, his last name was Tush. He was hunting with his young guy. And I don't even think they had kids, but there was an extended family there with some men and the man's new wife. And they, they're going to have dinner. You know, I mean, they're like coming home and they get there and they see smoke and they come and they find the

dead bodies of all the men scattered about and the hogs had gotten loose their their tame hogs and had eaten the bodies like it just mangled the bodies and then but the woman is missing and louis wetzel i mean it sounds like a movie you know louis wetzel finds the tracks of a size six woman shoe going off with the moccasins, you know. And so they know that she's alive. And so it takes them two days, but they catch them and kill the Indians and save the lady.

And I mean, that was a common story. 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 day and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast. born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper,

from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest.

Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's hard for us to put ourselves into the shoes of people who lived in an era with such brutality. Here, Chip will tell us a story showing us that Lewis's killing of Indians was motivated by far more than it being his employment. He was cold-blooded. There was a time he was living in the Marietta area, which Marietta is a town right on the Ohio River. It's the oldest town in Ohio.

I think it's the oldest town in Northwest Territory. At one point, the people there were getting tired of the Indian Wars and so forth. forth and they decided we have to try and settle this, you know, make a treaty or do something. So they got a hold of a bunch of tribes and they said, let's get together. Let's have a piece of about three months and the tribes agreed. And they camped about two miles north of the river and would walk back and forth to Marietta for meetings and that kind of thing. Well, there was one Seneca chief who always walked by himself, which was not good. Guess who was living there and notice this, Lewis. And Lewis knew that these were, you know, not hostile Indians at this time, but he didn't care. So at one, one day, he lays for this chief. And as soon as he got within, you know, 50 yards, he steps out from cover, didn't say anything, just pulls his rifle up and shoots him in the chest. Of course, the chief goes down. He runs up, he scouts him, runs off, and everybody knows who it was. This guy had long.

long black hair. He had a particular colored hat, blah, blah, blah. So they go grab Lewis. They put him on trial, and they bluntly ask him, Lewis, did you kill this Indian? Yes, I did. And he didn't feel guilty about it, no remorse, no nothing. So the judgment was, well, you're going to hang for this. What I haven't told you yet is that this wasn't the first time that Lewis killed an emissary of peace. In 1781, Lewis Tomahawked a Delaware chief that was involved in peace talks, but the war combined with weak backwards justice meant that nothing was done to Lewis. The murder chip told us about took place in 1789, and Lewis was sentenced to hang for the murder of the Seneca chief to Gunta. However, he broke out of jail two consecutive times and was recaptured, but was ultimately released. and functionally acquitted of the murder

when the famous backwoodsman, Simon Kenton, brought a large gang of ruffians to the jail and demanded Wetzel be let free, or they'd take him by force? So they let him go. Kenton coming to Wetzel's aid shows the favorable reputation that he had in the region. This wouldn't be the last time that Wetzel ended up in jail, though.

Here's Chip with more. insight into Wetzel's tactics for killing that showed his brutality in the mind frame he had. And this is interesting, too. I think Lewis was at times just over the edge. You can be courageous, but you can also be stupid sometimes. And you got to the point where he didn't care. If he was outnumbered two or three to one, he'd figure out a way to kill those Indians. And there's several times where he was tracking Indians and might come across a group.

of just two or three. So he figured out that instead of just charging in the camp, just let him go to sleep. You're going to go to sleep sooner or later. And there's several times this story is told when after they were asleep, he would slip in there with knife in one hand and tomahawk and the other and drive the knife into the heart of one, tomahawk the other. And if the third one heard something and jumped up, he'd get the same thing. And he would kill all three. I mean, he was that obsessed with killing Indians, and he was that good at it. It's scary to talk about. He was very much a warrior. You know, he really was. And again, there was no guilt in his mind. There was no regret. It was just, I've got to do this. And he continued doing it basically until the day he died.

I heard them mention, and this put it into context for me, is that he viewed killing an Indian no different than he viewed killing a bear, which is kind of a wild thought. Yeah. The cultures were so different that they, a lot of people back at that time, Wetzel probably included, did not think of Indians as human beings. I don't know how you can do that. And we certainly today aren't there, but there was a time in history when people thought that, that they're not humans. They're like us, but they're not humans. So we can go ahead and kill them. Yeah. And it's hard for us in 2020. to put our mind there. Well, really, I mean, it's a trend inside

of human nature. And it makes it easier to kill your enemy if you think they're not human. That's part of the psychological aspect of it. If that person is not a person and they're a bear, that's a lot easier. Yeah, almost like a coping mechanism for guilt. Exactly. And you build that into your culture

and your dad tells you that. And his dad told him that. From the time you're young, you're taught that. And then, the more you do it, the less you're bothered by it. The human story is wrought with tragedy, and in North America, the dehumanization of indigenous people is one that happened here.

But to be historically accurate, many Native American ideologies didn't believe the white man to be fully human either. The Shawnees believed that whites were of a lesser order and were created by an inferior God to the one that made them. and, in turn, they were often extremely brutal towards the white interlopers who invaded and took over their ancestral lands. It was a bloody and wild time period. I think this would be a good time to talk briefly about some of the other Wetzel brothers, because you're going to need to just know they were there.

Lewis's older brother, Martin, was the second most notorious of the brothers. He once executed 16 native captives with his tomahawk. And he once snuck up behind an Indian in the midst of a peace negotiation and literally split his skull with a tomahawk. Martin was once captured by Native Americans and was their captive for over a year. And by deceit, he gained their trust and then escaped after murdering one by one the three Indians he was hunting with. John Wetzel Jr., another brother, he once infiltrated an Indian village by, dressing like an Indian. He stayed undercover for several days before he murdered two Indians outside the village and later complained about only bringing home two scalps.

All the Wetzel brothers were involved in this war and in murdering Indians. Now let's talk about a critical moment in the Wetzel brothers young adult life. The biggest marker in understanding who Lewis Wetzel was and all the Wetzel brothers and why they did what they did was when their father was killed. And it was in 1787, and it was Lewis, his brother Martin, his brother George, and his dad. So four Wetzels, the father and three sons, they're in a canoe on the Ohio River or some type of boat on the Ohio River. And they get ambushed from the bank for no apparent reason and essentially kill John Wetzel Sr. and George Wetzel. And so the two that are alive are Martin and Lewis.

And they survive in kind of a wild story of jumping in the water and being on the back side of the boat. And they go and make retribution for their father and kill a couple of the Indians that were a part of this. And they say that that was the thing that solidified his vow. So he's made this vow when he was a young boy after being captured when he was 13. He becomes a scout when he's 17. And then at 23, his dad and brother get killed in front of him. They bury him in a shallow grave on the banks of the Ohio River in Hickory Bark Coffins. So that, that, like, solidified the next 20 years of his life before he died,

if he was just going to kill everybody that he could find. This is a great place to try to venture into the mind of Lewis Wetzel. Zach Newcomb is a clinical social worker. But he has also served as the clinical director of a psychiatric hospital. He spent his career in the mental health field, and I wanted to get some clarity on the possible conditions of somebody with a resume like Wetzel. And, yep, Zach is my brother, my older brother. You know, as you described for me, Wetzel in his life, a couple things pop out that I would want to explore deeper. One would be the initial childhood trauma that he experienced.

to go there. So me as a, as a clinician, I'm going to, you know, PTSD is something that's going to be strong on my radar. Honestly, with trauma like that, it would be hard for me to believe that there's not PTSD there, right? Sure. I mean, that's pretty, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder. Okay. Yep. From as a child being distressed by confrontation with these Indians being kidnapped. Yep, absolutely. That just grew through his life probably. Yep. So you've got that trauma right there, which changes a man, right? that changes a human being. And then as you described to me, the environment he lived in, which my understanding, I mean, he was basically, that was his profession, was to kill Native

Americans. And so as you described that to me, the first thing that comes to my mind is, I mean, that's not an environment that any of us, at least in the U.S., live in today for the most part. I mean, that's a war zone. What you're describing to me is a war zone. Yes. And so, you know, so if you're assessing antisocial personality disorder or is somebody a sociopath, you know, is a soldier a sociopath for doing what he does on the battlefield, right? So those are things you're going to have to take into account. So the context matters. The context matters. The context matters. That's good to know. I asked Zach if he would be able to diagnose Wetzel and here's what he said after he almost slapped me. So it would be unethical. It is

unethical for me to diagnose someone who's not in front of me that I'm not actively assessing. So when people ask me these things, hey, this character from the past or this, that, and the other, or it happens to me all the time, like, hey, my brother is doing these things. Or my boyfriend or my girlfriend. Are they a psychopath? I can kind of look at things little stories, and they're all kind of anecdotal right at this point in time. And I can say, hey, you know what, if they were coming into my office and I had this information, I can say, you know what, these are the things I'd be looking for. Okay, man. Okay. So it's unethical to go back and die someone that you can't actually speak with. That is good to know. So now let's learn about sociopaths,

psychopaths, and how both of these fall under the category of antisocial personality disorder. And people throw around, like you just threw out the, like sociopath. Sociopath is not an official diagnosis. It's a just kind of a term to describe a set of behaviors, right? And so sociopath and psychopath fall into the category, most of the time, of antisocial personality disorder. So what is the sociopath? So if you're looking at sociopath versus psychopath, it's kind of the easiest way to see them. Yep. A sociopath would be somebody who, you know, they lack empathy for others. Generally speaking, the sociopath is aggressive. Like there's a lot of anger outbursts. There's a lot of aggression. The sociopath, they can be demonstrative and

and people can explosive. But also like what I'm trying to get at is people can, can enjoy their company to a certain degree because they're wild and crazy and fun. Okay, okay. So they could be like almost normal people in some social settings? Oh, yeah. Now the psychopath more, the contrast of that would be the psychopath would, again, not have the emotional connection to people, not really feel empathy. But generally speaking, would be able to discern, I'm going to laugh and smile to manipulate this person. But really, they're not laughing and smile on the inside.

That's a psychopath. Yeah, very clinical, very, very unthinkable. feeling. So do you think a guy that would have killed this many humans, he could fall under a category of a sociopath? Yeah. Okay. So somebody like Wetzel could be considered a sociopath. But this is the main source of the problem, this antisocial personality disorder. We need to learn what this is. All right. So antisocial personality disorder. And this is straight from the DSM-5, which is the diagnostic manual. This is straight from the text. That's right. This is textbook. So somebody, for them to meet that criteria, they have to meet three or more of the following. Okay. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest. Hmm. So check, check. Check. Check. Deceitfulness as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure. I would say check. Would you? Okay. You know him more than me. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.

Man, I might fit into that one. See, that one, at least based on the stories. So just those three things? Well, no, there's more. There's a list of seven here that we'll go down. Okay, okay. So he's got to have at least... Oh, he's got to have at least three of those?

At least three of the seven. He's a shoe in. Now, we can't diagnose him because that wouldn't be ethical. Yeah, yeah, we're not going to do it, but this is like a good guideline, right? Gotcha. Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults. Check. See, okay.

I mean, he compulsory, he killed people just constantly. Yeah, but in the context of war. Yeah. So then reckless disregard for safety of self or others. Check. Consistent irresponsibility is indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations. Check.

Counterfeiting. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt and mistreated or stolen from another. Oh, wow. Triple check. So based on those criteria, Those are the seven? Those are the seven.

He only needs three. Well, he for sure had six. This isn't a diagnosis, but these are the things Zach would be looking into if Lewis Wetzel came into his office. So as we move forward, the definition of a serial killer is simply someone who has murdered more than one person. Here are Zach's final thoughts. From everything I'm hearing in our conversation, you very potentially have the labeling. of a serial killer. You very potentially have the labeling of a sociopath or somebody with antisocial personality disorder. And you highly likely have some post-traumatic stress disorder.

We're going to learn that Wetzel got into some serious trouble with some counterfeit money later in his life. But I think this general checklist is pointing us in the right direction as we try to understand him. What I learned about this antisocial personality disorder is that it's very serious and that really less than five. percent of the population could be diagnosed with it. And it doesn't mean that you don't like being in public or don't like talking to people. It actually doesn't mean that at all. It means that a person wouldn't comply with the very basic premises of society.

And a high percentage of people in prison have this disorder. But let's get back into Wetzel's life and look at the only thing we have, which are the stories that are recorded about him. We're going to tell two stories of cold-blooded, bushwhacken murder that had to do with turkey hunting. But first, Steve will discuss the hazy nature of human storytelling. You know when you were talking about how stories get a little messed up into telling? I have a friend who tells me a great story that involves him.

So my buddy Ronnie tells me a story about Ronnie. I then tell my friend a story that happened to Ronnie. A couple years goes by. my friend is talking to Ronnie telling Ronnie a story that happened to me. Toward the end of the story, Ronnie says, wait a minute, that didn't happen to Steve. That's my story. Yeah. I bring that up where there's a, there's like this apocryphal, Wetzel story about a Native American who is hunting whites by mimicking the sound of a wild turretsy.

gobbling and lures and kills too who he's targeting people who are out hunting turkeys in the spring wow he gobbles when they come slipping in he kills him lewis wetzel gets wind of this sneaks into the area where he knows this individual's hanging out throws a rock to make a noise the individual who's masquerading as a turkey reveals himself to see what the was and Wetzel outsmarts the guy who's outsmarting everybody and kills it. They called that guy the gobbler Indian. And it's like, did that really happen? Do you know what I mean? It's like so crazy, but also so it's like a perfect story. Alman tells that story and he he staked out where he believed this Indian was. He got up in a bluff and there's actually a photo in this book of a bluff that

is believed to be where he shot the Indian from. I mean, so it's like a plight. It's like a plump. And it's like a place that they think it happened. I know, but it winds up being, it's like, how many adventures is one guy get to have? Yeah, no, I'm saying. And that's where it just starts to stack up thick. Because listen to this one, Steve. So somehow they knew that there was some Native Americans hunting over in this area and that they were keyed in on turkeys.

Louis Wetzel had killed a turkey the day before, cuts off its foot, its wing bone, and puts it in his pouch, it said. and whether he was using that to turkey hunt because he was a good hunter too I mean he was making a live in hunting essentially I mean just for his own food and you know when he was in the frontier at least and but he knows that there's guys around

and what he does is he takes the track I'm pretty sure Lyman Draper is the one that recorded this so it would have been like third hand like Lewis Wetzel told a guy and that guy told Draper so you know it's about as good as we can get and Lewis said that he made turkey tracks in the snow bank.

So he didn't leave his tracks. He left turkey tracks. And went up on the hill, staked out, 100 yards away in a clearing. And he made the sound of a fly up, a turkey flying up to roost by slapping the wing. Yeah. A strategy used by modern turkeys, but you use the wing to make the fly down. Right. But the difference between us and them, we hunt them in the daylight.

and they would hunt them oftentimes in the dark. Well, he made the loud sound of a turkey flying up to a roost, and then he had a wingbone call. And I mean, the guy, a Native American, appears and starts tracking those tracks, and he shoots him, kills him dead. I mean, so it's wild, you know. These stories, I think you have to take him with a grain of salt, but you know they come from, I mean, that may be just the way it happened,

But it also might have been a fraction of the truth as well. Yeah. What we know is that in that time, in those years, people were dying by the thousands. Death was just everywhere. Every family was touched directly by death. You could not get through years without seeing dead people laying around. You couldn't get through life without seeing mutilated corpses. You couldn't.

Yeah. So was every one of these little murder incidents or whatever he said? Like, I don't know. But what we do know, there was a lot of people killing a lot of people during those years and that part of the country. Think about being in the spring turkey woods, hearing a gobble and trying to decide if somebody's trying to lure you in to kill you. That is next level. Here's a suite of stories that continued to paint a picture of Wetzel's wildlife. There's a story of once of him escaping from Indians.

He swam the Ohio River a lot. You know, Wheeling, West Virginia was right on the edge of the Ohio River. And then the Ohio Territory was where a bunch of the stuff was going down. Multiple times he swam the Ohio River in bad conditions. And once he and a buddy escaped, they had one horse. the buddy takes the horse for whatever reason I guess he was riding it the horse takes him across the Ohio River swimming

Wetzel has to swim and I mean they're fleeing for their life and he gets across it's in the dead of winter and he's dying a hypothermia and the story is they kill the horse split it down the middle Wetzel crawls in the horse and survives hypothermia inside the horse

That's kind of a throwback to the old You wonder where the guys that Star Wars got that Well, I know. There's accounts as well of hide hunters, buffalo hide hunters, surviving storms inside the abdominal cavities of buffalo they kill. They didn't get it from Star Wars. Well, I'm saying the Star Wars guy got it. Star Wars, Spilberg.

He got it from those boys. Okay. In my knowledge of Wetzel, this was his most cold-blooded move ever. So in his adult life, Lewis was captured by Indians, and he stayed with them for some period of time. And they capture him and they know who he is. And interestingly, inside of Native American culture, if they capture a great warrior even from the enemy, they treat him different. You know, I mean, you'd think with us it might be like, kill him immediately. Not good, different always, because you know the story of Jacob Greathouse, him and his wife?

Mm-mm. Oh, Jacob Greathouse, another bad, very much in the vein, very much in the vein of Wetzel, Jacob Greathouse commits some atrocities. And when they caught him, they took him and his wife, and they opened their bellies right above the pubic line, pulled out the lower intestine, tied it to a sapling, and made him go round and round in circles. The wife died pretty young, but they say Jacob Greathouse went so far as he pulled his own stomach out before he died. because he had done some bad stuff and they knew him

and he paid for the bad things he did in his case just unprovoked unprovoked killing of friendly people yeah well in the account that is told by wetzel because he was the only one there they are trying to figure out what to do with him because they've got a real trophy

on their minds this is a great warrior and he can hear him and he can speak Delaware and he can speak multiple Native American languages fairly well so he can understand what they're saying and they say well we're going to burn him at the stake tomorrow pretty much that's what they decide but there was a war chief that didn't like that idea and in the night came and turned wetzel loose freed him and actually gave him a gun and gave him a horse and in his mind a great warrior even if it was a warrior against his own people didn't deserve to die

that way. What does Wetzel do? Shoots the guy that's turned him loose. That's cold-blooded, brother. If you remember, I mentioned that Lewis and his family participated in the Revolutionary War. Here's a war story. This is an interesting story.

This is a Revolutionary War story. Martin and Lewis are at Fort Beeler in West Virginia. They were in a log fort. The fort was being attacked by Native Americans. which they were on the side of the British. Yeah. And so, and there was,

they saw where some guys were digging a tunnel under the wall. And Lewis is standing there with his tomahawk, and the first guy makes it under the wall. Tomahawks him in the head. They go ahead and pull him through under the wall. Well, the Indian behind that guy just sees his feet go under the wall. There's a war going on, so they can't hear much. And there's a thick wall there.

Well, the second Indian, goes under the wall. Comes up, there's Louis Wetzel. Walk. Hits him, kills him. They kill six guys. Crawling under the wall and just stacking the bodies

before they finally figured out, well, I don't know, they quit coming under the wall. Isn't that wild? Yeah. Brutal. There are just too many stories to tell about Wetzel,

but I can't take a swing at telling you about his life without telling you about this one. He ended up in Louisiana and got involved. in this counterfeiting money scam. Some say he got romantically involved with the Spanish officer's wife and was framed.

I would imagine the black locks down to his calves would have been hard to look away from for some women. But that's neither here nor there. But however it went down, he went to prison twice for counterfeit money. However, just like the first time he went to prison, he found a way to get out. But the wild thing is, is so the second time that he escaped from confinement, and he was in a real prison at this time, was he got someone on the outside to bribe the head of the prison, paid him money.

And Louis Wetzel fakes being sick and fakes his own death. And they carry him out in a coffin. Like Lewis Wetzel's dead. I mean, the prison is like, Wetzel's dead. They're carrying him out in the pine box. I ought to said, good. They probably did.

And then he gets out and escapes. And it's just, I mean, that's pretty bizarre. But as far as I can tell, that is like a fairly well-documented thing that happened. Man, the coffin prison escape, that's classic, man. If I'm ever wrongfully imprisoned, and if I am, you guys will probably hear about it, I'm going to remember this little stunt.

With all the outlaw and talk of late on this bear grease, I might need to be thinking ahead. I still think Brent Reeves is after me. But hey, we're all friends here, and y'all are the only ones who know about this, so y'all be looking for me walking down the side of the road. Here's Chip with some deep thoughts. What do you make of the idea that at the time he was a hero?

He was a hero of the frontier. But then now we look back at him and we see that he was essentially a serial killer, was killing Native Americans for sport. How do we, what do you make of that? Let me say this. It's very difficult for us now in modern times to put ourselves back on the frontier. And I make this statement in one of my stories. I said, and again, I said, if he were alive today, he would be labeled a serial killer.

but to early pioneers living in the Upper Ohio River Valley in the late 1700s, he was considered an Avenger because they were losing family, friends, two Indians, and they didn't know how to stop it. Yeah. The only way they could stop it is move back east, and that's where they came from, when they didn't want to do that. They wanted the land that was here. They wanted to live here.

And so for those families, here's a guy out front that is killing the people that are killing us. Yeah. So that's the way they looked at it. And it was a time period of significant warfare and conflict. Oh, constant. So it wasn't today to think of all these people dying and houses being burned down. I mean, Wetzel so many times told stories or there were stories involved of his peers being, their houses being burned down, their families being murdered. And, I mean, think about that today. Like, if that happened one time in my life.

It'd be a big deal. Oh, it would, I'd write a book about it. Yeah. But how traumatizing that would be and how that would affect society, create instability. Yeah. I mean, like internal personal crisis. Yeah. You know, here we've had gas prices or, you know, $5 a gallon and people are nervous and getting crazy.

Well, what if there was a pretty good chance that your house at some point in your life was going to be burned down and a fair chance that your family might even be murdered? like what who would you then look up to sure who would you look to for security and here's this guy that is taken on the threat and so yeah i'm not justifying it i'm just trying to make sense of it but you're right if we were back in those times our heroes back then would be a lot different than they are now our heroes now are sports figures you know people like that that wouldn't have been the case back then because those people were dealing with life and death every day i like what you she said there that our heroes are sports figures today. Back then, they would have been Frontiers. We're always looking for heroes, aren't we? Oh, yeah. That's human nature.

Here's Steve with his final synopsis of Wetzel and the time period he lived in. A thing I think about with Wetzel is informed by our understanding now of what happens to veterans, first responders, law enforcement individuals who are just subjected to these, like, really traumatic experiences. We're now very versed in this idea of PTSD. I know that my own father from his experiences in the war suffered

from PTSD, right? I think that some sort of future historian, some kind of future like physician slash historian individual will someday look at like, how was all of that death and violence?

To what extent was it scrambling the brain? of all those people involved. Do you know what I mean? If you now came and said, if you're talking about a guy down the road, oh, he was shot, kidnapped and shot,

escaped, watched his father die, watched his brother die. Yeah. Lost all this family to all this bloodshed. Siblings were kidnapped. And then you learned that he went on to be a mass murderer, a serial killer. What would be the first thing that would come out of your mouth?

Figured. Yeah. And it's like when you, if you grow up watching like westerns, you know, and I know you have and I have and war movies with the heroes are celebrated for their indifference to it. Right? You shoot the bad guy down and go have a drink. Play some cards. Yeah. But there must have just been a lot of, I don't like to run.

around, you know, I'm not one of the people that runs around like attributing everything around me to some version of childhood trauma. Right. But this isn't that. This is dismembered, hog-eaten, tomahawked bodies, man, of relatives and stuff. On both sides of this,

let's call it a war, just mass, I mean, ruthless, inhumane atrocities. right and it's like to what degree was all that just fueling itself like to what degree were all these people or many of these people just kind of uh you know suffering from these things that like it's unimaginable to us now yeah had to have scrambled their brains up had to have they were tougher

enough but how tough can you be man you know yeah humans weren't supposed to live that way that's the thing that's that's the part is I think about all the time Lewis Wetzel, the death wind himself, ended up near Natchez, Mississippi and died at his cousin's house in 1808 at the age of 45, probably from yellow fever. He was buried in Mississippi, but in 1942, a hundred and thirty-four years after his death, they exhumed his grave and moved his remains back to McCreary Cemetery in Marshall County, West Virginia. That's a bold move. They claimed his calf-length hair was still visible and that there was a musket line beside him in the coffin. This grave moving was likely connected to the author Zane Gray,

reigniting an interest in the old frontiersman and then a bunch of these other guys writing about him. Man, we're going to have to start talking about some light-hearted stuff on the Bear Grie's podcast to pull ourselves out of the dark ditch that we found ourselves in. As a matter of fact, the next episode is going to be a deep dive into the life of Mr. Rogers. Or I guess we could just move on

and know that we've all come from a dark and bloody past that's full of some wild stuff. The wild nature, physical hardship, and brutality of the lives of those on the American frontier continue to put my life in modern times into perspective. Thanks so much for listening to Bear Grease. I feel like a giant monkey is off my back now that Steve has his podcast on the deathwind.

Hey, be sure to check out Themeat eater.com for all kinds of hunting, camping, and outdoor apparel stuff. You could even get a super cool bear grease or believer hat there. And thanks again for listening and have a great week. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? that's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com.

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