The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 278: Hunting In Chains

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Steven Rinella talks Scott Giltner, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Jani's first marathon, kind of; skullets and Phil's Flock of Seagulls hairdo; corrections!; alpine parrots pecking at your kidney fat; what it means for a wildlife species to be naturally uncommon; one last good cyst story; buying Alaska and the myth of "Seward's Folly"; Steve's forthcoming anti-Shakespeare book; "Hunting and Fishing in the New South"; the antebellum and post-Emancipation periods; the gang system and the task system of slave labor; hunting and fishing cultivating a sense of independence; how to get a 'possum or raccoon down from a tree without a gun; trying to preserve the scene of the Old South for northern tourism; uneven application of the Second Amendment; "retinue" as a fancy word for shitload of people; explaining the minstrel character of Jim Crow and the system of segregation; Holt Collier and Teddy Roosevelt's bear story; the significance of competence; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, welcome everybody. We're going to get there real soon. We're joined today by historian Scott Giltner, professor at Culver Stockton College, who we've been wanting to have you on for a long, long time. Did we get derailed by COVID or what happened? I can't remember. I'm not sure, but it's great to be here. This is pretty exciting. But it's been a while that we tried to get you on. Yeah, it's been a while, I tried to get you on yeah it's been a while i think uh he's off you probably i don't know you probably wrote a bunch of things different papers and whatnot a lot of papers this is the

only book i sort of thought when i finished grad school i'm gonna write a book every couple years and then i taught at a small college and all of a sudden life has less time than i thought and here we are years later it's still the same book. Dude, this book is fascinating though, man. It's called Hunting and Fishing in the New South. Yeah. Hunting and Fishing in the New South, Black Labor and White Leisure After the Civil War. And I'll tell you what, we'll get into it in greater detail, but just to kind of tease up before we hit a couple of things we got to hit.

The book covers many things, but one of the things I found most fascinating, and this kind of betrays the fact, and I hate to admit this to you, like, I didn't finish the damn book. I really meant to, and I was getting along good, and I was folding pages and making notes,

but then Yanni wanted to check out the book. So it's his fault. That's okay. We'll blame him. But I skimmed around. Maybe collectively we got probably through. I'll give us 80%. I am very, like, well, I'll tell you.

If you scroll, if you went and explored my text message exchanges, you would find where I sent a picture of that book cover to my brother, Matt. I sent a picture of that book cover to a biologist named robert abernathy i sent it to my brother danny i don't do that for every book all right i appreciate that i'm right now i'm uh just tucked into a history of the mung in the cia in the secret wars in laos i didn't send that book cover to anybody i might later later. Like this damn book. But it covers, among many other things, the hunting practices of slaves. It's like, of course, you think about like, of course, they were engaged in the activity in some areas, I'm sure.

But it never really gave it any thought, that aspect of that experience. Yeah. That's sort of how it was, you know, when I first started the project, because it was, it was such a novel topic for some people, you know, their response was really, you want to study that? And then other people said, well, that's so mundane. Of course they hunted and fished for food. What's, what's the larger significance of that? And I thought, well, that's, that's what I'm going to find out. I guess I combined both those people.

I'm a combination of, oh, it makes sense. Of course they did. And then like, but I'd have to know more, which is the path you went down and we'll get to it. But it's not exactly something that they covered off on in your, you know, sixth, seventh, eighth grade social studies class. And then there was the hunting and fishing. For sure.

Well, like you said, we'll get into it later, but like, it seems like it made such a big impact, I think, reading the book that it maybe should have been covered. Maybe, maybe. One of the things that's kind of impressed me over the past 12 years, wow, since the book came out, is that there really wasn't much on the topic at the time. And since then, quite a bit more has come out. And then other topics that are sort of conceptually similar, sort of odd topics that people would think of as a pretty mundane thing that's actually more revealing, whether it's the history of African-American beaches or the history of black barbers, you know,

I think there's all these interesting, you know, studies of environmental use and occupations that haven't really been given much attention before. And it's kind of cool. Yeah. And when we talk about that, we'll get into kind of a twist, an interesting twist or an interesting wrinkle in the much celebrated advent of the American conservation movement. And you'll see. But first, we got stuff to talk about. Yanni ran his first full marathon.

Yeah. Wow. Like in an organized sense, or you just counted off that many miles? It's a little bit of a funny story, I think, because I got into a race here in Bozeman called the Bridger Ridge Run, which is in August. And it's 20 miles, but it's across the mountains. And the course record is somewhere around three hours, which people run two-hour marathons these days, I believe. So anyways, it's an arduous course. Wrap the whole damn marathon up in two hours.

Yeah. I mean, you're running like something crazy, like four minute miles for 26 miles in a row. That'd be great. Because when I think of running a marathon, I think of like, holy cow, that'd be just boring. Well, yeah, because I did it in twice that time. That's a long time.

It took me four hours of running. But no, so I met a fella through some works, kind of unrelated work, but not work stuff. I won't get into the details, but I meet a fella and we kind of became friendly and we're like,

ah, we should hang out. The initials of his occupation are B.I., correct? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Not barber. Not barber.

We have similarly aged kids. Both happen to be girls. And we're like, man, we could probably hang out. Not a baker. No, not a baker. He used to live in Colorado where I used to live. So, you know, we had a lot of connection. Anyways, a week later after meeting him,

I'm running my dog on the little like three mile loop that I run all the time near our house. And he pulls by me and then turns around and comes back and his wife rolls down the window and is like, hey, what's up? My buddy Nick was just talking about you. And then we see you running here and

you know, we didn't know you were a runner. Hold on. Hold on. Back up. I just got confused. Okay. You met the guy. Yeah.

And you had some shared experiences. And then you're running with your dog. Yeah, a week later. And who runs into you? He, his wife, and his two kids. So the same guy runs into you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

They just happen to be driving over to Paradise Valley, cutting through Trail Creek. I'm with you now. I got you now. And so they turn around, and they come just to chat for a little bit. And she's like, you know, we're celebrating Nick's 40th this weekend. And part of the celebration is Leftover Salmon happened to be playing. I don't know who all here knows that band, but they happen to be playing. You never heard of Leftover Salmon?

Don't believe so. They're like a jam band from the 90s, but they're still playing hard. Kind of like in the widespread panic. Exactly. It's a great name. Yeah.

Leftover Salmon is the perfect jam band name for sure. My wife's got the blues. That's widespread panic. Okay. Thank you. I never got into any of that music that much. My wife got them. I stopped at the blues. That's why it's for panic. Okay, thank you. I never got into any of that music that much.

No, I've got them. I stopped at the dead. Anyways, part of the celebration this weekend is Nick wanted to run a marathon for his birthday. So tomorrow morning, they're going to run right here from Trail Creek down to the Loch Laven campsite on the Yellowstone Marathon. You want to go. We could use you. We need some people to pace. from Trail Creek down to the Locklaven campsite on the Yellowstone Marathon. You want to go.

We could use you. We need some people to pace. And it was just an open invitation to be like, hey, you can run the marathon or you could run like 10 miles of it. Just like come and have fun. We've got aid stations and T-shirts and kids with bells. And there's going to be like 10 people or so involved. I'm like, yeah, sounds great. Let me see if I can get some babysitters because I was running solo.

So I had to drop the kids off the next morning at like 6 o'clock in the morning at my brother-in-law's house. And then I actually started. Didn't they wind up spending the night there the night before though? That was my understanding. We were hoping to do that, but it didn't quite come together. I thought I called him in a lie, Corinne. That was a very good plan. Trust but verify.

That's what that's called. Yeah. So why kids with bells? This may surprise you. I am not a runner. Moral support. Yeah, exactly.

Just to cheer and ring bells and yell and whatever. And so I actually started probably half, I caught them a half an hour into their run. Um, because I just, they were starting it. I forget what it was seven and I didn't get there until seven 30. Something just get going when it's still cool out. They want to get going early. Yeah. And so I basically just drove until I caught up to him and then found the next pull off, pulled off. Uh, they gave me a, uh, Nick Benson, uh, birthday marathon t-shirt. I threw it on and we started running. And at that point I didn't like, I was like, I'm just

going to do what I can. Like, I know that I'm capable of 20. Don't know if I'm feeling like I'm going to pull off 26, but at the end, like I said, I started roughly 30 minutes, which is roughly probably at our pace, three miles behind. So at the end of it, I ran another three and a half miles. It's like freaking Forrest Gump, man. By myself. Just kept going. Yeah.

Those are the hardest three miles because when you're running in a group, you're chatting and everybody's pushing each other along. You're caught up in the- Well, everybody else is now in lounge chairs with their running shoes off, dumping water on them. And I'm like, okay, just fill my squeeze bottles back up and give me some more of those salt pills. I'll be back in an hour. And so, yeah. How did you know who went and measured it off for you. So another vehicle, we knew that the dirt road that we had run in on from the pavement

to the campsite was exactly a mile. So I knew I had roughly three miles to go. So I ran out the dirt and then I just timed myself. I ran seven minutes down the pavement, turned around, ran seven minutes back and then back.. I ran somewhere between probably 26 and 27 miles. I can't tell you exactly. Good job. It's all good. You just roped yourself in last minute. I think we need to have a race off between you and Durkin.

Oh, yeah. He's a big marathon runner. He is. He is. You think you'd beat him in a race? Well, yeah, just because of just a pure age thing. We've talked about it. He's not, he's not at his prime.

So Durkin like concedes, he's just conceded ahead of time. Yeah, and I've run with him. I'd be like, do you still want to race though? No, so yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun. Made some new friends Some friends that you actually know Jeremy Our kids go to school with their kids

You know Interesting His His truck He was in his house And a big windstorm came And a giant spruce flattened his truck. I did not hear that story.

You could have been sitting in there texting or something, man. It would have been the end of you for sure. Really bad way to go. Would have been the end of you. He told me a great story about how his, I think only like, how old is that boy his? 10? 11? Same age as my kid.

Yeah. 10, 11. 10, 11? Same age as my kid. Yeah. 10, 11. 10, 11. Bugled in like multiple bulls for him last year into archery range. Really? Yeah. No one told me that story. I'm like, dude.

How did kid? I got to start training my kids up. I'm way behind. Get to work. That's weird because his kid and my kid recently got an English sparrow. And she, the guy that you ran with. No, she ran with you, too. Yeah, she cooked up the little breast fillets for him and some butter. But you think that that would have inspired him to tell me that story?

But he never told me that story. The kid didn't. Either way. Humble young man. Corinne, hit everybody with your correction. Okay. And then rate Phil's haircut hit everybody with your correction. Okay. And then rate Phil's haircut while you're at it. Okay.

Well, yeah. I mean, the last time, I'll do haircut first. Last time, Phil's kind of had like a sideways. Yeah. He looked like a flock of seagulls. Not quite. I wouldn't go that far. But yeah,

looks good. Looks good and time for summer and short sides. Yeah. Solid 8.5, you'd say? 8.8?

Oh, wow. Yeah, it's good. You run like a number three on the sides there, Phil? Well, I've got stick straight hair and I hate almost every haircut I get.

So this is... Do you like this one? Yeah.'t have this i don't mean a rating i mean the clip the clippers i used to just bring take a number two to my whole head when i was growing up that's good um but now i yeah i asked her to go short shorter on the sides longer on top i like it looks great your wife like it yeah that's all that matters exactly Exactly. Thanks, Steve. I'm so jealous. I don't know why we asked Corinne what she thinks about it. I haven't had hair in eight years. I'm so jealous of these young guys running around debating their fuck a seagull's hair. Yeah.

You still got some, though. I can see it growing in there a little bit. Just a little bit. But you could grow the rim out long. I could grow the skullet, I suppose, if I wanted to go that way. I think that when I get there, I'm probably going to do that. That's that long

strip. Yeah, just nothing up front. I've heard that called the Kentucky waterfall. I don't know if that's the official PC term. Corinne's correction. I like where the correction came from. Yeah, that's really the point of me telling this.

So in the spirit of being precise and accurate, in our previous episode when we were talking about deer vehicle collisions, I'd mentioned a bunch of Wisconsin counties ranking up top in terms of the number of collisions. And one of them, I just completely butchered the pronunciation of. It's spelled W-A-U-K-E-S-H-A. And I pronounced it Wakisha And I did say I was probably not saying that correctly And later I'm not a huge Instagram user

But on it for work and such And so I saw that I had a DM DM'd you? Yeah, DM'd me Hmm DM'd me It was important to that person yeah yeah but i would think the only reason i'm surprised by that is it seemed like a good way to have your your correction go unnoticed right something like because you're relying on someone like digging through dms right

yeah yeah that's right this is a real hail mary i mean you know when i'm on there you'll see little notifications so i paid attention i paid attention um but i think the moral of the story here is if you really want your correction to be noted you should email the meat eater the meat eater at the meat eater.com and put in big capital letters correction yeah actually. Yeah. Actually, sorry. It's MeatEater at TheMeatEater.com. Okay. Steve, people DM me all the time trying to get me to feed ideas to you. They're like, Steve will never read if I write to him. But Phil, no one pays attention to him.

You never tell me the ideas. Exactly. It doesn't work, so stop doing it, people. Well, I mean, I don't. Okay, so walk, Keisha. I don't get too many DMs, so I will pay attention to those that come through. So the correct pronunciation was pointed out to me in a lovely note from a listener who made himself known. So it's NFL linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars,

Joe Schobert. So thanks, Joe. He very clearly spelled out how it should be pronounced. I grew up there, and you pronounce it W-A-L-K dash A-H dash S-H-A-W. So I was like, wow, that's so clear, and I butchered it. Man, we should have, maybe you should reach out to him, because we were wanting to get that football player that likes to eat squirrels. Maybe he likes to eat squirrels. Maybe he likes to eat squirrels. But we should have him on and we could do a thing where we test if he knows, like, we could test

my NFL knowledge against his outdoor knowledge. Oh, boy. I think we've got a lot of NFL listeners. Maybe we need to, you know. We could like rate mine on a sliding scale of 1 to 10, like rate my NFL knowledge on a sliding scale of 1 to 10. Like rate my NFL knowledge on a sliding scale of 1 to 10 and then rate his outdoor knowledge on a sliding scale.

That would be fun. So you get the highest score. Walk a shot sounds like something that we should have Clay Newcomb say. Let Clay pronounce it? Yeah. He'd do a good job at it. He likes those kind of arguments too. A couple of, I don't know if these are correct.

Yeah. One kind of correction and one note. So we covered last week, we got to talking for quite a while about a fish poaching operation in my home state of Michigan where these boys got caught with like way too many fish in their freezer. Okay. Point. There's a couple different points here one is that so these ones we're talking about how in some states let's say you have a daily bag limit of i don't know give me give me something

five five but what ball line okay so people in the south should try to, if they don't have walleye, try to eat some fish. So do you have a daily possession limit of five walleye? No, you have a daily bag limit. It would be called a daily bag limit of five walleye. And you might notice in your fishing regulations that it says possession limit of two daily bag limits. Meaning in your possession, you cannot have more than two daily, you can't have more than 10 walleye.

But what varies by state to state, what varies from state to state, is whether or not, what varies from state to state, is whether or not it being cleaned and in your freezer counts. Right. Like in Alaska, once it's processed and at its final place, so it gets to its sort of final resting place, and it's processed, it is no longer part of your daily bag limit. Or the possession limit.

I'm sorry, I keep screwing that up. It's not part of your possession limit. If you're driving home from a fishing trip and you have uh you're in a you're in this five walleye a day place you're driving home from a fishing trip and you got 11 walleye in your cooler you're one walleye over um but you could get home and put those 11 walleye in your freezer and you may or may not be clear depending what's going on in your state i even had uh i took this question one time to a trooper in alaska they don't have they don't come game wardens the game laws are done by state troopers um who you know kind of have full breadth of enforcement across all laws but a trooper is telling me i was like what if i have a fish shack and i can process and freeze stuff at my

fish shack but then i want to bring it from my fish shack to home and he said and he told me that the way they look at it would be that if i've processed it and got it to you know it's sort of like final form and i put it in my freezer at my fish shack i'm that it's not then part of my possession limit even though I need to do it Even though I need to transport it again To another home He says you're cool Texas it turns out

Same thing You're fine Once it's in your freezer Michigan that's not the case And apologies I have to apologize A Michigan conservation officer Not the case. And apologies. I have to apologize. A Michigan conservation officer wrote in to say he was pretty disappointed in me for some of my comments about this situation.

And here's where he. First off, he goes on to say that. That this freezer search, I should probably explain what it was, right? Yeah, we'll recap. Some guys in Huron County, Michigan got caught with way too many fish in their freezer, and they had 85 bags. 85 bags of ziplock bags of perch and walleye,

with hundreds, way over the possession limit. Laid out like a drug bust. One of the things I said that is warranted here is I said, I bet you there was more going on. Like, it's not like people just show up randomly doing freezer checks. Like I was saying, there's probably something that led to this. And this guy doesn't want to be identified, but this guy said that they had been 120 fish

over their daily limit, which led them to wanting to have a look in the freezer. So there's that. Do we know what kind of fish? It was perch and walleye. Perch and walleye. And panfish, which I gathered to mean like... Bluegills and whatnot. Sunfish species, yeah.

Bluegills and whatnot. So the guy was... The guy's disappointed in me for not condemning having over your bag limit, over your possession limit. And I should. I should be clear. That's the case. was I talked about how common that practice was and how unaware, when I was growing up in that state, how unaware the people I grew up with were about that rule. It just wasn't known.

Maybe they didn't go out of their way to consider it, but I was never part of a conversation as a kid in Michigan about, I can't fish because I already have 10 walleye frozen. It just wasn't a thing. And so I expressed that, man, when I see that, I just see like everybody I grew up with's freezer. I didn't mean that to say that I think that it's good. I just meant to say that it's, you know, that I saw something in that. And he was saying that I didn't clearly articulate that it's simply just not acceptable and that the regulations are there for a reason.

Correct. I apologize. That's true. Don't break that law it's there for a reason and not but and

when I looked at that I just couldn't help but think of my dad's friends and their freezer and they're just how shocked they would have probably

have been to realize that was a thing that's all was that good enough? yeah I also think the way you said and not but it really reveals to realize that that was a thing. That's all. Was that good enough? Yeah. I also think the way you said and, not but, it really reveals that you've been married for a while.

That was slick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. I feel that you got a little too mad about that situation with the kids, and I'll still go to dinner.

Right? Yeah. There you go. What do you think about that? situation with the kids and I'll still go to dinner. Right. Yeah. There you go. Um, what do you think about that? I mean, just sitting in on that apology. I think it was well done.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was well done. Did it feel, it felt very diplomatic. Yeah. What I don't want to do is I don't want to like grovel. No groveling.

No, but I want to be like, you're right, dude. You're right. Yeah. It was straight up. Okay. It's coming from an academic.

It's true. Don't like, you know what it is, Phil? It's that I took for granted, took for granted that people would understand. Don't do that. Like, don't do that. Like, don't do that. Right? Don't go, like, follow your state laws. Like, just follow the state laws.

Yeah. I mean, you've also never said otherwise. You don't practice otherwise. I know, but I could see that, yeah, his saying that I was, like, making light of it, I was just more like, wow. I was telling you before the show, I picked up on the same vibes he was picking up. Just like, hey, it's sort of, even though you just said this isn't what you were saying, it was sort of like, hey, we did this, not we, but I knew people who did this all the time growing up. Yeah, it's whatever.

That's sort of the vibe I got. Really? Yeah. Why didn't you flag it at the time, Phil? It, it's whatever. That's sort of the vibe I got. Really? Yeah. Why didn't you flag it at the time, Phil? It's your show, man. You couldn't see. You couldn't see what was going on in your hair. That's right.

My eyes are open now, though. Oh, that was during the flock of seagulls period. Taking you to task. He had no idea what was going on, man. What else about possession limits were we going to talk about? Oh, I know what I we going to talk about uh oh i know i was gonna talk about um just a observation so uh last night we fished we fished for some brook trout and that was the native trout you know growing up in michigan speaking of you know bring full circle to michigan that was the native trout growing up in Michigan. Speaking of bringing full circle to Michigan, that was native trout. And here in many parts of the West, when was all that going on, Yanni,

when people were turning brook trout loose? I think around the turn of the century. It was back in the mindset was like, hey, more fish, the merrier. If they'll live there, put them there. And they introduced brook trout in a lot of these rivers out here. Same thing. They introduced rainbow trout and brown trout,

but brook trout are kind of like more accustomed to these small, fast flowing kind of nutrient poor, high elevation rivers. Super cold. Yeah. They compete more aggressively with the native trout here, which is the cutthroat trout. And Eastern cutthroat, East slope cutthroat

trout, like East of the Continental Divide cutthroat trout are hurting bad. So there's a lot of rivers where you can't keep a lot of these streams around here and rivers in this district. Like you can't keep a cutthroat out of the river but brook trout which were introduced on purpose but now they're frowned their presence is frowned upon you're allowed 20 a day wow so you could imagine we

talk about the importance of looking at your regs right you could imagine a situation where someone would be uh up in a stream fishing around and you need to understand that that one you can have 20 of that one with a few spots difference that one none at all so luckily they're pretty easy to tell apart that's all yeah byron was asking about that or someone was asking about that they're worried about and i'm like yeah you'll you know just give it a good look bring your trout chart nice you know what uh what uh sort of tackle were you catching them with uh me personally well yeah you and the crew that you were with did you take kids no no it was just a couple work people because we had like a meeting and then went and did that um we had fly poles my wife wanted to try to catch one on a fly rod

but she gave up on that uh and then i showed her how to huck a worm out there and let it sit. We started railing on them. Caught a lot of them. Oh, still water. No, beaver ponds. Well, that and moving water. But there was a big hole, a big deep area behind a beaver,

up above a beaver dam. And they were in there. It was hot, probably down, trying to cool off down there. A. And they were in there. It was hot, probably down, trying to cool off down there. A lot of them down in there. Here's an interesting thing. We were talking about avian raptors

killing livestock. Someone must have wrote in about this. The New Zealand Kia. Make his noise, Yanni. You know, I listened to a few on YouTube this morning, and they're pretty similar to a cow elk.

If you take out the first consonant, I guess, instead of just being like a it's like a and then, depending on what they're saying, it's louder. That's pretty good. You know, back and forth. But, yeah, we experienced kias when we were in New Zealand,

and we were always told we did a bunch of backpacking, and there, instead of bringing tents, you just stay in these huts that are all over the place on these trail systems. What's the name of those huts again? I can't remember. Do they have a specific special name? Yeah, they're cool though. Yeah, they're great. In America

they'd trash them. I think I've told that story about how we were hiking and we had Americans ahead of us and they were trashing the cabins ahead of us. It was terrible. Not all Americans, but a lot of Americans don't know what to do with a situation like that. It's too good to all Americans, but a lot of Americans don't know what to do with a situation like that. It's too good to be true, so screw it up.

Free cabin. With firewood left behind. Golly. There's got to be a catch. I'm going to graffiti it. The tip that was given to us was that they like shiny objects and they'll mess with stuff.

So when we would leave to go fishing for the day, like don't leave, you know, anything out on a deck or somewhere because they, if they can actually get it away, they will just to like mess with it and play with it. But they'll also just sit there and peck at it and mess with it. And you could have, you know, a hole in your backpack or you know a fly reel completely ripped apart and like they said that they would actually get into stuff and just make a mess and whatever so we were very conscious of tucking away things but beautiful bird an alpine parrot yeah i feel like maybe when i was there i feel like maybe we saw one but i didn't really it didn't really register with me. I mean, this thing looks like a full-on parrot.

Red, green. And here he is flying across a snowfield up in the mountains. An alpine parrot. But they'll kill lambs. They'll kill lambs and feed on sheep. Yeah, they like land on the back. This guy said they land on the back and they kind of peck through the wool and peck into the back fat, peck into the fat around the

kidneys. And it's been a big deal. What a way to go. An alpine parrot pecks through to your kidneys. Probably didn't see that coming. No.

No one's going to believe this. Nightmare scenario. People ask me what happened to my kidney, no one's going to believe me. They have some interesting classifications in New Zealand. The bird had a classification at one point in time

as naturally uncommon, which is an interesting classification if you think about it. That's a good one. Like you would apply, you know, it would be applied to, you'd see it applied to wolverines, right? Like just naturally uncommon. Never were many, aren't many. But then they bumped it in 2013,

they bumped it to nationally endangered. But I like naturally uncommon as a way of describing certain species. And the sheep rejoice. Yeah. It's a bad day for kias, good day for sheep. I want to cover off on one last cyst.

We kind of officially put this to rest, but then a guy wrote in. I find that if you say like okay we're not talking about it anymore that's a common story

on this podcast okay we're never talking about this again because then one sec someone just wrote in but people yeah I think a guy

I'll hear like they're not talking about it anymore and then he'll be like oh yeah wait till you hear about my daughter's cyst and then

and then they send in pictures so we're talking about these cysts Wait till you hear about my daughter's cyst. And then they send in pictures. So we're talking about these cysts. I was talking about this crate that my brother had a girlfriend named the Tower of Power. And she had a cyst removed and it had teeth in it. And it's this whole thing. So this guy, he doesn't want to say who he is because He doesn't want to humiliate his daughter, which I respect.

His daughter had to go in and have one of these dermoid cysts removed from her abdomen. He sent in a picture of it to back it up. Oh, goodness. 16 pounder. A 16 pounder. Yep. The doctor's hands are holding it and it's as though he's holding a deer fawn, but it's not spotted or brown. That's hard to look at.

16-pounder. Yeah, tough to look at. Now, if he'd have done an unboxing video of that 16-pounder where they open it up and see what's in there. Teeth and jaws and whatnot. That'd have gotten that little filter they put on there that says sensitive content. Steve would be the first to like and subscribe though to that. I'd unfollow the wild turkey doc and just follow that site. Yeah, I was going to say, no more nature is metal. We're going just cyst cis 24-7.

Every day he digs a little deeper into that cis and just makes an Instagram channel out of it. I would be enraptured. Someone who wants an IG profile to really blow up, it should be something with cis. I'm sure that exists already. Have that removed and you just lost 16 pounds yeah i almost want to know a little more backstory like you think something like that must have been uh messing with her health oh he doesn't really lay out a lot he just kind of gets to the cold hard facts but there's gotta yeah i mean there's gotta be like it can't be like oh wow I didn't know

what's the time frame on how quickly do these things grow before they finally made the call okay let's get rid of this thing you know what we'll never know folks we're not gonna talk about it anymore great point Steve you know what next time we have Adam Lazar on oh yeah maybe he can do like a quick

final word on dermoid cysts whew man I was not expecting on dermoid cysts. Yep. Whew, man. I was not expecting pictures of giant cysts this morning. Have you seen this picture? I just looked at it. I'm pretty impressed. It's the size of your head. If you showed me that picture, I would, and you said, like, what are you looking at? I would say it must be a, someone had a baby,

and they put the baby back in the placenta and took a picture of it. Yeah, it looks like a fetus. I wish I could do that. Can you do that, Phil? Where you're like, like a, like a, wow. Wow. No, that's more. I completely understand why,

why you don't want to talk about this again, but that it keeps coming up. Oh. Because this is great. No, no, it's titillating. Yeah. It's classic train wreck. Watch this, Scott.

Speaking of titillating, let's talk about hunting and fishing in the New South. Oh, transition. let's talk about hunting and fishing in the new south oh transition hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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So hit us with the book. I mean, it's funny that it's such an old book, but we're here talking about it now. Yeah, part of that. I never knew about it until. I think part of that has to do with, you know, like I said at the beginning, you know, started teaching at a small private college and all of a sudden, all the time I thought I was going to be spending researching and writing. It's just time I spent teaching and doing administrative work and things like that.

But part of it is I didn't know my ass from my elbow when I published the book and I didn't really know how to, you know, how to promote it. And the mistake I made at the time, I think, was to, you know, ship it out to people, academics who were studying these topics. To be honest with you, it never occurred to me to try to connect directly with the hunting and fishing community. It just never dawned on me. So Field and Stream didn't do a little letter to the editor about it or nothing? Yeah. And then the press, basically, they didn't say this, but I think the implication was, okay, first-time academic, you know, we do support and

promotional work and lots and lots of aggressive stuff for people that are established. So good luck with that. And I didn't know what I was doing. And by then I was focused on teaching more and just sort of did some local events and didn't worry about it. But yeah, I mean, in hindsight, I wish I had, uh, been a lot more aggressive with, uh, getting it out there. Is most of your work as a historian, you focused on sports? I didn't know that they allowed you to do that. Well, that's kind of the interesting backstory of how I stumbled into the topic. Because when I was finishing college, I thought I was going to go to graduate school. And

I didn't know much about the profession of history and some of these, you know, novel topics that I thought would be great. People haven't written on this. Of course they had. You know, I thought, okay, it would be kind of fresh to study sports. No, it's not fresh to study sports. Plenty of people study sports and plenty of people still think. Like there's historians who focus on sports. Yeah, exactly.

And I didn't realize that. And for a lot of more traditional academics, you know, studying sports is a little frowned on. It's seen as frivolous. Academics can be elitist, you know, D-bags. No. Yeah, amazingly. Not me, though, of course. No, I don't want to lean into that.

I don't want to lean into that. I don't know why I just said that. We have all kinds of academics on, but I guess we just filter out the bad ones. I don't know. Do you ever talk to an academic and think he's just not right? That he's a D-bag, Corinne? No, I don't think we've...

I haven't had that experience yet. You never D-bagged anybody. For this podcast, no. But everybody seems to have a story that they heard about an academic being elitist or the academic community being elitist. In person, absolutely. But for this podcast, I think we just have kind of a good sensor for the non-DBAGs. Yeah, but it is one of those things that everybody's like, oh, yeah, those pretentious.

But then the more I think about it, it hasn't been my finding. I was recently saying, I don't know if I said it here, but if there's one story Americans like, it's a story about a celebrity who was an asshole. And if there's another story they like, it's about a celebrity who did something really nice. But in that order, they prefer one about like, oh, I met him and he was horrible. He was yelling at a waiter. But then the other one would be, oh, and he gave the kid $20. Like people love those stories, you know, and people love a good story about a bad academic. Yeah. And you know, it makes me wonder when you all went around the room and said, I don't know that I've come across a lot of academics who are D-bags. It reminded me of the old expression that if you don't know

who the office asshole is, it's probably you. So maybe I'm the douchebag academic. Hey, you know what? Pardon me for one second because you might already know this. But when I was reading the other day, I went down this kind of like research. I had to research something, and that led me to wonder about something something and that led me to wonder about something else and that led me to wonder about something else. I'll tell you real quick what I was doing.

I was reading about, you know the guy we bought Alaska off? One of the Romanovs, Alexander II, the Russian czar. We bought Alaska off him. His kid in 1872 for his 22nd birthday came out and hunted buffalo with Buffalo Bill Cody and Custer.

Went on a hunting trip. 1872. And then Buffalo Bill Cody shortly after got a Congressional Medal of Honor in the Indian Wars. It was then rescinded and then given back to him. But that got me reading about uh why they sold

us alaska in the first place and you know that it's like how when you learn about that you learn about the seward's folly seward's icebox that because like seward was the guy on the u.s that did the purchase and you always hear that people that he was ridiculed and lampooned for buying Alaska. And people like to point out like, and look now, right? But this historian was saying that is one of like the undying myths in American history was that it was ridiculed and lampooned. And he went and looked at newspaper editorials. He found like 50 newspaper editorials about the purchase.

49 were overwhelmingly positive. Public opinion was overwhelmingly positive. But some guy threw out this Seward's Icebox thing, and people latched onto it, and he said, you can't kill the myth that Americans didn't want Alaska.

They wanted it bad. And the Ruskies sold it to us because they were in a fight with uh they were always warring with britain and they knew that with the british presence in canada that the next time they got in a fight they'd lose alaska anyways and so they just wanted to dump it on us because we'd be able to hang on to it and they didn't want to have to deal with the that so anyways hunting hunting and fishing in the New South. So you were interested in sports. Yeah, I thought I was going to study sports.

And when I went to grad school, this sort of sports, another guy wants to do baseball. I have interesting ideas. I'm sure you do. But baseball, come on. Can you help us understand if you're going to do sports as a historian, what does that mean? Like, you know, like baseball, like what aspect of it, right? Well, you know, it's really about the kind of the social and cultural implications. What larger connections, you know, can you draw? Basically, for me, I always tell people that, you know, we try to think of what historians do as a mirror, you know, so what kind of refracting mirror can you get to demonstrate larger social truths

by one specific topic? And I think that academics have a tendency to be really elitist and they think... I've actually heard academics say this at conferences. When I did a panel on my book a number of years ago, somebody said, I don't know, I just don't get the topic. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of people hunt, but just because a whole bunch of people are really into something, that doesn't mean it's worthy of study. And I said, well, I think you need to think about what you just said. If a whole bunch of people are into something, it's by definition worthy of study. And historians are famous for sort of declaring certain topics acceptable and unacceptable. You back up 75 years.

I had no idea this was a thing. Presidents, diplomats, kings, popes, generals, that's what we study. You know, if you just said, let's study the environment. Let's study women. Let's study sports. They would have said, why? You know, what's the point of that? No one cares about that stuff. Just because everybody in the world loves this stuff.

And, you know, what the funny thing is, and this is maybe off topic, but one of the complaints I have about the discipline of history is when people indulge that, like, well, okay, sports, okay, it's popular, but let's study something more important. What that does is it removes historians further and further away from the lived experiences of real people and makes them less relevant. And then people wonder, you know, why people don't read books anymore. You know, so it's sort of like in my mind, it's embrace the things that are popular. If they're popular, that means they're culturally resonant and it matters. So part of the reason, you know, like a lot of people, I,

you know, kind of, you know, didn't exactly cruise through grad school. It got to be kind of a drag after a while finishing the dissertation. But one of the things that kept me going every time I run across someone who would say, oh God, you're hunting and fishing. I'd be like, all right, let's, let's finish this thing. Sure. Just to show. I'm going to steal the argument you just made for when I retire and I write a book, a anti-Shakespeare book, I'm going to kind of adapt that argument for my anti-Shakespeare book. That sounds good. Removing people from things they can even, like, removing kids

at an early age, introducing them to the idea of reading things they'll never understand. Yeah. And, you know, and... And relate to. You use the best example, I think, too, because I hear this all the time. You know, people bring up Shakespeare, and they'll say, well, what most people don't understand is the voice they would use. They say, well, yeah, exactly.

I've heard it enough times. Not that it doesn't come naturally to me, obviously, but I can fake it. I can fake being a D-bag. What most people would say, at least the kind of arrogant academics, is they would say, well, what you need to understand is that Shakespeare was consumed by the masses. It was art for the average person back then. That means it would have been great for them. Exactly. It was great for the average people back then. Good for them. And what I tell them is-

So what we do to demonstrate this is we don't do that. Exactly. So it's like, you're saying we should study Shakespeare because the average person really connected with that at the time. Well, my thought would then be what does the average person connect with now? And let's study that. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I like Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong.

But I don't think the idea holds that – the sort of division between high and low culture always sort of ticked me off as a historian. Because if you're not studying history to study people, what the heck are you doing it for? But you don't, there's not like a movement of like populist historians, are there? Is there? Yeah, there actually is. Actually, part of the reason

I have kind of the outlook on history that I do is I went to grad school at the University of Pittsburgh. And there's a movement in the discipline of history that's been going on now for the past 30 or 40 years called history from below.

And it's emphasizing working class people and cultural traditions and political movements that start from the bottom as opposed to from the top. And looking at history not from that old perspective of kings, princes, generals, but the average person. Marcus Redeker and a few other professors that I had when I was at Pitt were proponents of that, and that's sort of where I come from. I try to not be one of those academics that's studying something that's completely esoteric or completely irrelevant to people's lives, although people would tell me that for them maybe this topic's irrelevant. But it's definitely not high culture is what I'm trying to avoid, or at least an exclusionary high culture is what I'm trying to avoid, or at least an exclusionary high culture.

So how did you, tell us how you hit on the idea eventually as you explored the sports landscape? Well, I knew I wanted to stick to sports because it was just something I was really into. And I really rejected that idea that because sports is so popular that it must not be worthy of study. That seemed backwards to me, but I did recognize that I got to shift gears a little bit. And I took a seminar on slavery. And I had the idea of maybe I'll do a research paper on slaves in sports. And the professor teaching the class said, well, the best place to go there are the Works Progress Administration slave interviews. In the 20s and 30s, there was a part of the you know the uh worst progress administration wpa uh they sent uh interviewers all over the

country to interview former slaves before they passed away because they were you know pretty old by then and uh he said you know reading those is going to be your best bet if there's mentions of slaves in sports i thought maybe i'd find stuff about boxing or whatever when you start looking into slavery you were still looking at sport. Oh, yeah. Looking at what – I don't know, like I guess the definition of sports more toward games. Yeah, how did the slave system allow for that? And I had been kind of really interested in certain stories.

For example, there was a slave boxer named Tom Molyneux who, uh, actually was, was, uh, sent overseas to England by his master. And he actually fought the British champion, uh, in a, in a very publicized boxing match in England that nobody in the States paid attention to at all. You know, so there was some interesting, yeah. He was owned by a person. Yeah. He was, he was an enslaved boxer and they wasn't, you know, all that common, but it did exist. And I thought, okay, I'm going to find all kinds of interesting stuff like that. And then I found there wasn't any of that. It was occasional brief little snippets. But what impressed me was.

What was that guy's name? Tom Molyneux. I think it's M-O-L-Y-N-E-A-U-X. And he was. It's surprising to me that he... I don't want to spend too much time on it. It's something we could go find out. But that you go to

a place where there's no slavery, like slavery is abolished. You think he would get there and he'd just walk out the door. Well, that's it. I've heard that argument before and this is way more than you want. But when England, you know, passed a series of laws after what was called the Somerset case in the early 19th century, the argument that the courts used was that English air is too free for a slave to breathe. And there were slaves that were set freed when they were brought to mainland England by their master because the judge would rule, hey, there's no slavery in England.

All the possessions we own, yeah. But then once they abolished slavery, they were setting slaves free that arrived on British soil fairly regularly in that time period. Didn't seem to happen that way for Tom Mullen, though. It was a little different situation. That is bizarre, man. And it actually kind of, now that I think about it, sets up the kind of argument of the book a little bit because a lot of people found it strange that a boxer, like this guy's going to make a celebrity out of his slave boxer, travel with him, let him fight people, fight white men.

That doesn't seem like it would fit with the slave system. But the critical thing, I think, that helps get going with the book's argument is that so much of how white observers are going to look at the sporting activities and for that matter subsistence activities of slaves and then free people of color is what is their kind of orientation toward me as the master. So you certainly would never want to go, hey, look, there's a slave and he's over there beating the hell out of that white guy. Somebody shoot him. That's awful. That can't happen. But yet the same thing is going to happen in a boxing ring because the owner of Tom Molyneux is going to say, well, since he's my slave, he's an extension of me.

That means I have the best boxer in the world. I have that status. So sort of more independent, assertive activities by slaves, if they're done for the benefit of the master, we're seeing is pretty okay. Who won the bout when he went and fought in England? Of course, I'm going to blank on that. I think the English champion's name was Tom Cribb, C-R-I-B-B, and I think Cribb won. Hmm. I think. But I also think, now that I think of it, I think there was a return match. I'm not sure if it was in the U.S. or if it was there.

We'll dig in. Yeah. It's a cool topic. We'll stay in your area of expertise. Yeah, it's a cool topic. Yeah. Yeah, so I started reading all these slave interviews, former slave interviews. And it was, you know, there's several thousand of them.

And it was kind of fun to read them. And I was stunned by how often hunting and fishing came up. And I brought that up to some professors at Pitt. And, you know, some of them were like, well, okay, that might be an interesting thing to study. And others were like, well, of course. It's a mundane daily activity. Who cares? There's probably no larger significance there.

So the more I read, though, the more I kept thinking, you know, when they write about these things or talk about it in these interviews, they're not just saying, wow, this is great. I could feed my family, which is huge. In and of itself, that's a huge thing, you know, for a slave. If a master is trying to reduce food costs and, you know, feeding slaves on the cheap, which most of them did, slaves were often malnourished and it was not a good scene in that regard. So you could see a lot of slaves hunting and fishing, but they didn't just talk about the nutritional value or the food or even the income from selling, you know, extra through some market activities. I started to run across more and more little mentions of, you know, little things like, you know, I felt free or, you know, I felt like I was more of a man. And those kinds of mentions made me think, now there's something more here. It's not just about food. There's, there's, there's this story of independence. You know, if you're off in the woods and, you know, you're hunting small game, you may or may not be doing something the master wants you to do.

And if you're doing something he doesn't want you to do, well, then that's, you know, defying the system. And that's significant. If you're feeding yourself and your family when the master is trying to keep you, you know, slightly malnourished, so you're more dependent upon him, then you're pushing back against the system. I think what did it for me was I was reading a published diary from a former slave named Charles Ball. I'm forgetting where he was. I want to say Georgia, but that might not be right. But he had this long entry in his memoirs because he toured – after emancipation, he kind of toured the country and did a lot of speaking about his experience. Like giving lectures. Yeah, which was fairly common.

Not fairly common, but I mean there's a handful of pretty well-known former slaves who traveled the country and first as abolitionists and then later as kind of reformers after emancipation. But Charles Ball wrote about the first time he got a shotgun because it was, you know, it was prohibited. And he just happened to meet someone who had an old rusty shotgun and he had a hiding place and he thought, I'll get this. And he quietly stashed it away and began to hunt. And he talked about the first time he went out and hunted with this old shotgun that he found. And I remember the quote because it struck me so much. It was a short quote too, that helped. But he said, I now began to live well and to feel myself at least in some measure an independent man. And that really stuck with me.

And I thought, well, if that kind of attitude is there, if it was seen as by slaves as in some ways guaranteeing independence, while at the same time it was seen as a thing from the master's point of view that benefited his operation. Like it sort of had both sides to it. I was really curious how that would shake out after emancipation. Basically, if I'm a slave owner and I can, oh, you want to go hunt and make some extra game for your family? Go ahead. Look what a wonderful, awesome, benevolent master I am. I'm saving money on food provisions and this is great. What could go wrong? But then from the slave's point of view, it's like, yeah, I'm feeding myself in a way that you don't intend.

I'm sneaking off a lot of times to check traps or hunt what I'm not supposed to or go fish what I'm not supposed to. Engage in market activities that are usually not permitted for slaves. So for me, it's going to be more about asserting my independence, my mobility, my liberty. So there's this really deep tradition of sort of different purposes. You want to go back to the very older European part of the story. It's no different than the poor peasant hunting the king's deer, kind of same thing. Deer for a king, it's a thing to be granted as a privilege. It's a way to control.

It's a way to be granted as a privilege. It's a way to control. It's a way to show your standing in society. And as long as my slaves are doing it in such a way that doesn't mess me up, I am totally fine with it. I'll cultivate that image. I'll tell my friends, I have the best huntsman. I have the best dogs. I have the best equipment because it's an extension of me as a master, because that was an important thing in the minds of elite Southerners back then. Can you real quick hit on the word antebellum?

Sure. Just I want to establish like sort of the timeline a little bit. Sure. Well, the basic definition of the word just means before the war. But when we think about the antebellum period in the U.S., we sort of think about sort of the period between the Constitution and the Civil War. That's sort of the antebellum period. And more specifically, I would say even once we get into the early 19th century. That's usually what historians mean when they say antebellum. Yeah, like it's like that antebellum period, like that antebellum became like the antebellum. Yeah, capital A with all the cultural images and all that.

Because your book spends a chapter or so on the antebellum period and then spends a lot of time on – what's the opposite of antebellum? Well, postbellum i guess you can say that's a little clunkier yeah people don't use postbellum as easily post-emancipation is kind of what people say in in uh these circles so uh explain like what hunting and fishing would look like for slaves like what kind of activities they're not what it would look like but what are they actually doing how are they getting game well i, the kind of the key point, I think, for both slaves that engage in these activities and then freed persons after emancipation is that it's 100% a story of what's effective and what can I do? So, you know, there's very little concern for like, well, we got to use

the proper sporting methods and we've got to make sure we, you know, well, we can't hunt with fire. Mm-hmm. Any method, any animal that they could get. I think what's interesting about that question in the antebellum period is because slaves were often limited in terms of what they could go after. For example, if you're a slave and even if you have permission, you're probably not going to go out and start shooting a bunch of deer because local planters are going to say, hey, what the heck are you doing? That's not for you. So they developed a pretty good reliance on small game. And that was just a matter of practical necessity. They were abundant. It was easy. They could set simple traps.

They could go out when they had free time on the weekends. And they had dogs. Yeah. And slave dogs were everywhere. It was just a part of the scene on plantations in the south and huge part of getting extra food. And you could embrace every method imaginable. In some states, slaves could hunt with firearms if they had written permission from the master and if the master purchased a bond. Basically like, okay, you

want to have a slave with a gun to be an official huntsman for the plantation? We have a state law that says you've got to pay a thousand dollar surety. So if something happens, if that slave does something with that gun that they're not supposed to, you got to pay us a thousand dollars. No kidding. In other words, how secure are you that your slave can be trusted with this gun? So it was rare. That's anti-2A stuff right there.

I mean, you could imagine the concern about slaves with firearms. It was just not something they wanted. Oh, yeah. That's why – that was one of the things that surprised me about the book is I would assume like, well, of course not. Then you mentioned cases where people – that a slave would be allowed, would, the resource provided to be allowed to go into the woods and hunt. Yeah. Which brings up all these, which just brings up all these practical questions. And I know it's kind of beyond the scope of what you did, but how hard, like how you couldn't just go into the woods and then just vanish.

I mean, you're separated by hundreds of miles of territory. It's just hard to imagine someone kind of fluidly moving out of supervision into supervision. Yeah. Going out at night to hunt, right? You're not supervised. You're not. But then it's just impossible and practical. I mean, you have a family probably.

So you'd be abandoning your family to take off and all kinds of other obstacles. But just kind of – you almost wish you could look back and see sort of the parameters of it. Was going two miles away like no way? I can go two miles away. You can go down to the river bottom, but – Yeah, it's hard to imagine sort of epic excursions with the limited time that slaves had. You know, because, you know, if you're in, you know, say,

you know, parts of the South where they're growing tobacco or cotton, you know, these are what they call the gang system. These were just huge groups of slaves in the field, worked by an overseer, you know, working for when the sun comes up until when the sun goes down. There's not a lot of time or energy, you know, for these kind of activities. You know, Sundays, you know, you had to give slaves Sunday off because, you know, good Christians. So Sundays would be a day you could do it. If you had young kids that weren't working out in the field yet,

they could certainly go out there and fish and, you know, trap small game and things like that. But a lot of it depended upon where you were. If you were a slave in South Carolina, for example, and you're on what they call the task system, where rice cultivation and some other crops tended to, rather than just, hey, get as many slaves as you can, put them out in the field and work them with an overseer, there's too many individual small tasks that need to be done in, say, rice cultivation.

So instead, you would just make a list of all the work that needed to be done, give individual slaves individual tasks, and then tell them, as soon as you're finished, you're done for the day. So then slaves in those parts of the South had motivation. That was called a task system. The task system, yeah. And you were then – you then became a specialist at a task. Well, not necessarily a specialist, but you were basically told on a daily basis what you would be doing. Oh, so daily, not like a – this is your deal for the year.

No, it's like, make a daily list. Here's what I want you to do. As soon as you're done, you can go do your own thing. Um, of course the catch was that was a system where, you know, if I could have the time to go off and hunt or fish or do whatever on my own time, uh, the system was built to put in some pretty severe punishments if I stepped out of line. Yeah. So in, in the gang system, there was less time for these activities. They still did them system, there was less time for these activities. They still did them, but there was less time. And then in the Tassin, there's a lot more time,

but slaves were limited by not wanting to push it too much because the, you know, the task system had the most brutal punishments of any, you know, slavery system in the U.S. anyway. Yeah. In the book, you have so many quotes from interviews, right? So like Slay's recounting experiences, newspaper articles, a lot of editorials, letters to the editor, opinion pieces. There's some magazines that just come up again and again and again and again.

These old sporting magazines. Yeah, Forest and Stream and again and again these old sporting magazines yeah forest and stream and you know spirit of the times yeah from the 1800s and then cartoons and other things but you do get uh you kind of get a sense of the things people did would be uh and talk about that not having guns would be that they would hunt with hounds and tree possums and raccoons and then need to go get the thing. You can't shoot it down. So you'd climb up and get it. And then just certain practices I was surprised by that you'd catch a possum

and bring it back live. And how they'd cut a stick to hold its tail. And you'd kind of walk around around, like bring it home like a, you know, like ready to go, like a live creature. And then netting, fish netting, running lines. Yeah, I mean, I've come across, I mean, any method you could think of. Yeah. They clearly weren't. They talk about trapping, but, you know, different people talk about trapping.

Uh-huh. Oh, they used to poison streams to, you know, get as many fish at once as they could and fish with dynamite. Slaves couldn't do that because, you know, you have a hard time getting dynamite. But, you know, it's one of those things that points to one of the real kind of divisions, points of division in, you know, kind of the hunting and fishing, you know, kind of the discussions of emerging conservation, you know, it comes along in the 19th century is, you know, poor people, whether they're slaves or, you know, whoever, that are independent beyond slaves, you know, they don't care about, you know, oh, I'm only going to use the best weapons and the most pure sporting methods and I'm going to make sure that all the codes are – no, they want to catch as much as they can. They want that freezer full of, you know, 80 bags of walleye or whatever it is, right?

So, you know, they're really focusing on methods that work. So the interesting thing that happens is, you know, when you read about the hunting methods of, you know, of lower class people from the perspective of elites, you know, during slavery, you know, they're a little hard on it. And, you know, they criticize it. But it's like, yeah, of course, you know, poor, they hunt, you know, they're a little hard on it and they criticize it. But it's like, yeah, of course, poor, they hunt, they need the food. We won't give them guns. Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, we don't have to do that, but the poor people do.

But what's interesting and the question that kind of got me thinking about it for the dissertation and then eventually the book was, okay, so they're not too critical of these activities now, but what happens when the boards reset with emancipation? You know, you know, I'm okay with a slave having a gun as long as I can think of them as an extension of me, or I'm okay with them going off on their own and hunting and fishing because it benefits my operation. I don't mind that they have these skills and, you know, people are starting to think of African-American sportsmen as among the very best in the region.

I'm okay with that because of slavery. What I really wondered was, is that going to switch? Is that going to remain consistent or is there going to be a mental shift on the part of elite white Southerners? From the slave perspective, I was really curious if emancipation would mean, well, these are the extra things we had to do because the system of slavery wouldn't allow us to take care of ourselves. Otherwise, will they still indulge those traditions as much as they did? With the desire to participate still going on.

Yeah. So I was really curious how things would shake out after emancipation. And then, as I mentioned to Corinne the other day, I was prepared to write a dissertation on just the question of slavery and hunting and fishing. And then somebody wrote another book about it. And I cursed a little bit and then set my sights

on the post-emancipation periods. Oh, really? I mean, I hate to almost ask this because we're talking about your book, but what book is that? Oh, no, it's a great book and he's a great guy, actually. So the book's called

Bathed in Blood. It's a great title. It's called Bathed in Blood, Hunting and Mastering in the Old South. And a guy named Nick Proctor wrote that. Oh, that's a titillating Blood. It's a great title. It's called Bathed in Blood, Hunting and Mastering in the Old South. And a guy named Nick Proctor wrote that. That's a titillating title. Really interesting book, yeah. Bathed in Blood.

Huh. And his study kind of set me up. And that deals with slavery hunting and not the issue that came out of emancipation. Yeah, yeah. It ends with slavery still around. Well, let's jump to emancipation. And I'll set up another thing that is very obvious, but I just hadn't given it much thought, would be that after the war and after Lincoln's emancipation, there was still demand for cotton.

There was still demand for rice, right? So people still need a resource. I never thought about just the simple practical thing of what do you do now that you need to attract laborers and the tension that that set up. Yeah, that was, you know, in the late 1860s, that was like kind of the question. And they called it the labor question. Oh, really? It's got right to the point. Yeah, what do we do now?

We need to find a way to make sure that we have enough labor. Federal government was intensely interested in that. And, of course, I don't want to sound like a liberal that says anti-government things. I'm not supposed to do that, right, as a liberal. But federal government kind of screwed this up right after emancipation. They were thinking, okay, we need work. We need cotton. We need the southern economy to get going again, which makes sense. But we know that former slaves don't want to work for their former masters. And we know that former masters don't really want to do this either. But we have to get the southern economy going. So what the federal government mandated during the reconstruction period was that,

look, former slaves, you will go back to work. And former masters, you will pay cash. That's just all there is to it. They're free. You're going to pay them. They're wage workers now. So you're going to work and you're going to pay cash. When you say that people didn't want to go work

for their former master, do you mean like specifically for their former master or do you mean for former masters? Well, both. Like some people were like, I'm done. My days of laboring, you know, for you are over. And some people just hit the road and split. And that was that. And other people, it was more like, hey, you know, now that I'm free and I want to stay here, it's home.

Many people did. But the guy that owned me was a real tough piece of work. I don't want to work for him. So if I have mobility, I'm going to go somewhere else and find someone else to work with. So you started to see this kind of mobility and people crisscrossing parts of the South. Just curious. Did you encounter cases where a slave was emancipated and then turned around and the master's like, all right, I give up. And then like puts them on payroll and they stay and work for the same place? Yeah.

Not – that happened quite a bit. Man, what a strange, strange experience. It's a very strange experience. And it's easy to use that fact to sort of, I think, run off in the wrong direction. I've heard people say like, oh, well, then there must have been a lot of slaves who were fine with it. They must have liked it. Yeah, they loved their master. It's like, well, no, it's like you live in southern Mississippi, you know, migrating to the north, which, you know, a huge percentage of the black population does later.

But in the 1860s and 1870s, this is where we live. This is where home and family is. Yous, this is where we live. This is where home and family is. You know, this is where I'm at. So, you know, I've got to just make the best I can. And if my best option is, all right, I'm going to go back to work for the same guy, you know, then I will. But the problem was with that contract system that forced by the federal government is former slave owners didn't have any money because of the war just, you know, wrecked the South. And then former slaves, by and large, would rather not be forced to go back to work for the same people that they wanted more freedom. So that contract system kind of limped along for a few years with everybody hating it.

Did they establish a minimum wage equivalent? Yeah. I don't know much about that, but I know the individual states did that because the South was divided into military districts. A day's work is worth three cents. Yeah. There was sort of a kind of a general thought about that. And to get back to the hunting and fishing question, the sort of the solution that emerged to this contract problem was the sharecropping system, right? People always talk about how bad sharecropping was, and it was, and you could argue that it wrecked the Southern economy by the 1950s. But at the time it came out, it was a great compromise. Like, oh, so I don't

have to work when you say, and I can pull my wife out of the field if I want to, and I control what I grow and when I grow it, and I can sell it and I can keep a lot of the money. Great. And then the master's like, oh, so I'll give you the tools and you can work the land and you give me a cut of it. Okay. That sounds fine. That's a good description, but just like very quickly hit like what sharecropping is. So basic idea behind sharecropping is, you know, so if I'm a landowner and I don't have the capital to pay wages to workers, what I can do is I can say, okay, look, I'm going to break my farm up into 10 different parcels. I'm going to sign a contract with 10 different families and they'll work those parts of my acreage in exchange for a share of the crop. So whether it was a quarter or a third, whatever the individual contract was.

So, um. Like the landowner gets a third or the farmer gets a third? It depended. Okay. Usually, usually it was, it was the landowner. Um, and the idea was, I'm going to front you all the tools, equipment. Yeah. Livestock, whatever you need.

And then at the end of the season, sell the crop, pay me back out of the profits. I keep my proceeds. You keep your proceeds. Everybody's happy. And former slaves thought, well, that sounds great because what I'll do is I'll save money up year to year. And then eventually I'll buy my own land and then, you know, American dream. And about 25% of former slaves managed to acquire their own land, which is not a great percentage. The problem is that's a good system when it's a good year. Prices are high.

There's no boll weevil. There's no drought, whatever. But years where there's bad prices, bad weather, bad crop yield for some reason, you're not going to make enough money even to pay back what you owe. So you wind up seeing this kind of cycle of perpetual debt. Yeah. And it winds up being a disastrous Economic system but so everybody involved for everybody involved. Yeah landowners weren't getting rich No landowners saw, you know, really really valuable land

Especially the really the real story here is the the international cotton market You know you start to see cotton from India and a few other places come on the market in the 19th century and prices just go in the Toilet and pretty soon the of the South is in shambles. But we still see former slave owners that don't want to pay wages. I'm not acknowledging this. I don't want to pay money to these guys. This isn't right. This isn't the way it used to be. And then former slaves still wanted that freedom. So even though the system was inefficient, from the former slaves' point of view, it beat the hell out of slavery. And then from the former masters' point of view, at least you weren't shelling out hard cash to your laborers.

So it was a system that was supposed to be a really good thing for the South, but it didn't work out that way. And then they – in your book, you describe this, this thing that becomes like a very articulated problem. And there's magazine articles written about like how to deal with the problem. But people start, landowners start pointing fingers at things, conditions, behaviors, activities that are enabling people to not come work. Yeah. And among these is this propensity for like going out and shooting your own food. Like that's a problem because if they weren't doing that, then they'd be more obligated

to come work for me. Absolutely. You know, the, the, the title of the last chapter of the book, the one about the conservation, which I guess we'll get to, but, um, uh, the title of that last chapter is when he should be between the plow handles, which basically, you know, there's so many, you know, mentions I came across in sporting magazines and legal debates and things like that, you know, really pointing it at, you know, self subsistence activities is a real problem. You know, like, Hey, if this guy can, you know, self-subsistence activities is a real problem.

You know, like, hey, if this guy can feed himself and his family without working for me, what kind of leverage does that give me? Yeah. Yeah. So I need more control. And it's also eventually going to provide a pretty handy kind of cover for convincing reluctant Southerners to embrace conservation laws. We're not really going after you. We're going after former slaves because they're the ones that we're concerned about. Yeah. So it also, and this is maybe too much at once here, but the other thing that's really interesting to me about that transition, immediate transition from slavery to freedom is, you know, slaves, you know, reliance on small game, on whatever method worked on, you know, effective, you know effective hunting and fishing. That was understood at the time by white observers.

Yeah, they're slaves. They're limited in what they can do and that's the stuff they hunt and they make the most of it. And then some of those same observers, when they're writing in the post-emancipation period, it's no longer, well, slaves privilege practical sporting methods. It's, well, Africans, they're just by design, they're incapable of appreciating the finer sporting traditions of the elites. So they do small game and they don't understand sporting methods and honor and things like that. So it becomes a handy way of kind of hanging some racial stereotypes. The thought is, it was at the time, if former slaves have complete freedom to just feed themselves however they want to, not only does that hurt our ability to control labor,

but the interesting thing is if I've got a really fantastic slave plantation huntsman, I can tell my friends about this guy. I can brag about it. I know we're going to have great supplies of meat and it's just going to be a really good thing for the plantation. But I don't want to acknowledge this guy's sporting prowess after emancipation. It's like after emancipation, here's a guy whose abilities threaten my operation. Someone whose skill flies in the face of the emerging idea that white sportsmen are the best and African sportsmen, African-American sportsmen are a level lower. So if you want to maintain the sort of white supremacy that's sort of emerging as the Jim Crow period begins to

deepen, all of a sudden, these same activities that for some people weren't that really big of a problem, they're a big problem now. Because not only does it, you know, the master-slave relationship is gone because of emancipation. And the methods that we used to celebrate slaves using, we are now seeing as dangerous to the supply of game, which is eventually going to be really bad for tourism. Because once the southern ag economy goes down in the late 1880s and 90s, tourism becomes their big source of revenue. So there's what was sort of a quaint feature

of the antebellum period. Oh, loyal slaves out in the woods hunting because I allow it. After emancipation, it's independent people out in the woods making a living away from me, hunting in ways that I don't think are appropriate and that could even be dangerous because, you know, because of firearms. You know, uh, oh, go ahead.

I was just going to ask, I had a question related to that. And just, if you can explain it with with that because it was cool to write like before during antebellum period right to have like a slave that was a great huntsman and you you talk about how when people would come in from other places how that was part of the whole experience to go hunting south would to be to hunt but hunt, but it would include these black slaves. Did that same feeling continue after emancipation? Like for just the general like hunting tourism industry. So it was like a double conundrum at that point, right?

Because they still wanted them for that. But again, they would maybe have to start paying them. Or do you get my question? Oh, I do. And it's a good one. So the double conundrum issue, it's a really tricky one because, you know, think about it from the point of view of a slave owner. And, you know, so you've got slaves working for you that are engaging in all of these activities and you have no problem with it, right? In some cases they did. There were masters who didn't want their slaves to hunt

because they were like, not too much independence. I want them dependent on me. I don't want them out running around. But if you were a slave owner who said, nah, I can't trust my slaves to go out and hunt and fish. Somebody might say, why can't you trust your slaves? Are you a crappy slave owner? I mean, if you were a good master, you'd be able to let them do these things and it would be to your benefit. So there was almost this sense of, you know, they're an extension of me, so it's okay. But that connection is broken by emancipation. And the interesting thing is it becomes more important after emancipation is what I discovered because in the minds of, say, northern tourists, the antebellum period doesn't really become the antebellum period until later in the 19th century when we start to get that sort of gone with the wind, rose-colored glasses, romantic notion of what the South used to be. And that was really appealing to Northern visitors. You know, countries industrializing, changing rapidly.

You know, what's traditional in the country? Well, the antebellum South, quaint plantations, women in fancy dresses, you know, all those images. All the chivalry. Exactly. And part and parcel of that memory for a lot of Americans was the presence of people of color. So what landowners in the South started to realize after the Civil War is, well, the land's not very good in some spots here for plantation agriculture anymore. We got all these northerners that want to come down here and consume the old South.

Hunt the whale. Yeah. They want to hunt. They want to get out there and feel and feel like a Southerner of old. And from the white perspective back then, what better way to feel like a Southerner of old than to have black laborers attending you just like white masters did before emancipation. So it was almost like recreating that scene. And it really became a way for white southerners who were especially former slaves to kind of convince themselves, okay, the world is still right. It's still us here. We're still served by people of color just like the old days.

So on the one hand – So they were just like – at that point, did they become hired like help because it was post-emancipation yeah when when you started to see and then i get and can you on the on the heels of that can you answer like what did it look like then did did the african-americans like work as guides or were they like cooks or like how did it how what did that little scene look like when someone from the north came down to to hunt sure whatever well that really started kind of in the 1870s and 1880s and uh you started to see the kind of the the trickle of visitors to the south that were interested in going there specifically for sporting reasons uh really turns

into a flood it's just a huge number of people start going there and the reason that is is because as the the farmland especially rice rice was one of the crops that was just becoming really difficult. And then coastal cotton was also becoming a tough sell. So it hit some of these landowners. I bet we could sell our land to a developer who wants to make a tourist retreat out of this. Or I could even run it myself as a sporting operation. And what they found is when these visitors started to come down, they expected black laborers. That was the way to complete the scene. And so basically, you name it, I mean, you would have

people of color on plantations to serve as cooks, guides, kind of basic laborers, people that carry the tents, people that carry the guns, people that manage the dogs. Right up until the larger outfits would have choruses and performers of color that could entertain their guests while they were there. So it was almost like blackness was a big part of the scene. And I came across hundreds and hundreds of references in national sporting magazines that are basically like, oh, man, you've got to go down to Mississippi. It's like 1830 down there. It's amazing. So you can really see the racism and the sort of racial attitudes alive and well. And that was something else that surprised me when I switched to the post-emancipation period. I didn't realize how much race would be discussed in national sporting publications. It was incredible.

It's one of the things that blew my mind about mind about it and like if you're listening to us talking about this you have to understand that when you go read the book it's not like he's it's not like scott the author is drawing wild conclusions i mean it's all it's documented it's like all laid out quote for quote for quote like what people said how were advertised, how they described their experiences, what the articles wrote about. Yeah. It is amazing. It's funny. You wouldn't now, you wouldn't be able to read out loud newspaper articles.

Yeah. Because of the use of certain language that was just talked about blatantly. Yeah. Like you almost kind of can't believe what you're reading when you read some people's attitudes toward other human beings that they decided was fit to write in a letter to the editor to the hunting and fishing mag yeah it's that and just say insane like not even i shouldn't call insane just. Just say blatantly, like blatant, horrific, racist stuff in a letter to the editor pointing the finger at certain individuals who don't conform to whatever kind of hunting and fishing standards they had. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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onxmaps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all another thing you actually bring this up is people struggling with to just the prowess of some former slaves who they would admit, like, this guy's the best hunter ever. Which is okay to say. Oh, they'd do a juggling act. In the antebellum period. They'd be like, yeah.

Or they might describe it like, oh, man, this guy has really something to watch in the woods and always knows where the game is. But at the end of the day, he's a bad guy. Yeah. You know, it was like they just come like, kind of like balance it out. They want to like, there's a, there's an element of praise and then there's an element of like context.

Yeah. And then you see people just struggle with it. Yeah. My, my, so real quick, there's, there's two, two little episodes I'll mention. One is on the first thing you mentioned about these letters to the editors of sporting magazines. There was a, a really well-known sportsman in the 19th century named Emerson Huff. I think it's pronounced Huff or Howell. I'm not sure which one.

But he's from Chicago. And he wrote pretty frequently to Forrest and Stream. And he was writing about his thoughts on the very best place to go to hunt. And he said, you know, for my money, you got to go to the South. And he talked about the game and the conditions and sort of the technical stuff. But then he said, you know, the best thing about it is there are all these former slaves, he said, Negroes, with all these Negroes, and they're great. And my God, they're incredible servants, because that's, you know, that's their history. And it's just the best. You go down there and they do

whatever you say. And it's just the most amazing experience. You feel so served and you feel like a king. And then he wrapped up his editorial by saying, if I could have one of the fondest wishes of my heart fulfilled, and I'm quoting somehow the quotes in my head. If I could have one of the fondest wishes of my heart fulfilled, I would export four thirds of Chicago Negroes, and I wouldn't send them to Liberia either. In other words, I'd love to send them back down to the South where they still know about white supremacy and hierarchy and servitude. And that sort of praising of the old South was really common in sporting publications nationally. It was a huge part of the draw.

And they were there to hunt quail and deer, right? Quail and deer were two of the big ones. Black bear in the Deep South was a big one. But that was, you know, that was a big money. Usually the elite elites were the ones who went on big excursions for black bear. But yeah, quail and deer were sort of the big ones. Explain the gun rights issue back then because the Second Amendment was well understood. But man, it was not applied uniformly.

No, not at all. And that's really one of the big sticking points, you know, as you could imagine, because when you start to get, you know, there's this big tension that emerges, right, after emancipation in the South. So we started to see the emergence of this really popular resort tourism based on hunting and fishing, particularly hunting in the South. And that's making a lot of money for Southern landowners and Southern, you know, proprietors. And that really kind of puts certain demands on them. One is to make sure there's an available supply of black labor to satisfy the image the public wants.

The other thing is we got to protect the supply game because if this kind of tourism is going to be where our livelihood comes from for the foreseeable future, we've got to protect it. So Southern started talking about the need for conservation laws and the need for state licensing or bag limits or restrictions on guns, things like that. And most average Southerners, especially non-elites were like, hell no, no way. We want no part of this. And there was massive resistance to it. So conservation in the South lags behind really the whole rest of

the country. You're saying, so just make sure I got this right. Poor, like poor white Southerners were not hip to game regulations being handed down from elite plantation operators. No, not at all. Because, you know, really the, you know, removing race from the equation for a second, when hunting sort of arrives in the colonial period, and not everyone hunted. I mean, everyone did it because it was a practical thing. But when elite southerners, when plantation owners began to hunt, they were not shy or elusive at all about saying, we're doing this because aristocrats hunt. So we're going to hunt fox and we're going to hunt stags and we're going to pretend like we're just old school European privileged nobles. That's how they set it up. And poor southerners knew that and they were deeply suspicious of any attempt to regulate access to or methods for acquiring game because they thought it was just old school, these elite guys trying to

control things so we don't get our fair share. So when the process in the early 20th century then becomes, okay, these pain in the ass, poor whites are resisting these conservation laws. They just don't get it, why it's valuable and why it's necessary. So, okay, fine. What can we do to convince them? Hey, everyone, here's the race card let's let's put this right in front of your face you know hey if you want to control the black population make sure they're in their place make sure they're not owning guns they shouldn't have make sure they're not killing all the big game that we want to kill we need these conservationists we're not coming after you we promise so it was sort of using race how was that how was that? How was that actually? How was that actually articulated?

Well, it's interesting. So articulated or enforced or it's rarely if ever articulated in the law. And that's one of the interesting things about the whole post-war period. You know, as Jim Crow becomes, you know, more and more powerful, you know, by 1900, African-Americans are largely disfranchised across the South. Hardly any black people are voting because of the new state constitutions. But those new state constitutions don't say black people can't vote. They say you can't vote if your grandfather couldn't vote, or you have to pay a $10 poll tax to vote, or a bunch of measures designed to keep black people from voting. And the same thing with the conservation laws. You're not going to see, you know, you have to pay $10 to buy an in-state hunting permit now so we can keep people of color in check.

It basically just says $10, you know, in-state license. I think it was South Carolina in like 1906 or whatever passed a $10 licensing fee. Man, what's that in today's dollars? No, I'm sorry. It was a dollar for residents, $10 for non-residents. That's what it was. And they didn't mention race at all in the law, but it would be a simple matter of, okay, you got to go buy your permit. And then a white person shows up to buy the permit and they go, I don't worry about it.

Or they're out in the woods and they come across a person of color, doesn't have a permit, well, I'm going to find them, poor white guy, whatever. So it was sort of the enforcement where the flexibility was there. But then it's funny because that might be the case in terms of how it's codified, like how it's actually spelled out in the law. But then as you demonstrate in your book, just with, again, people in their own voices giving their own perspectives, at the same time, it's being articulated in public book, which is with, again, people in their own voices giving their own perspectives. At the same time, it's being articulated in public opinion very differently, very explicitly.

Yeah, absolutely. Like they're explicit. Yeah. Like people are explicit about what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. Even if the rules they draft aren't explicit, but you look at like the people pushing for it and they make no bones about it. Oh, absolutely. Like what they want to see happen.

You know, South Carolina is a good example. I'm trying to, I want to say it was Richardson was his last name. Anyway, he was, he was chief game warden for South Carolina and this is really early 20th century. And basically he's on a PR campaign. He's traveling across the state, speaking at farmers clubs and sportsman organizations, talking about this new licensing system and some of these new laws. And even though the law itself doesn't say it, you don't find those descriptions in any kind of official government publication. But I have some transcripts that I quote in the book from some of those speeches he gives. And he explicitly says, you know, look, we want to get guns out of the hands of former slaves.

And these kind of laws is kind of the only way we can do it. It looks remotely constitutional. So help us out here, folks. We got to play the game. It was really obvious when it was spoken. Because, you know, and the reason they didn't bother putting it in, they didn't want to put it in the laws, is the sort of big picture fear that hung over all southerners back then as Jim Crow was emerging is that the federal government would come back. You know, when Reconstruction ended and military rule ended and, you know, the North pulled

out of the South and states were given control back of their individual operations, you know, the sentiment was basically, okay, let's find a comfortable level of control that we can assert over people of color in a way that doesn't risk the federal government getting back involved again. We don't want them in the civil rights business. And it worked, right? Because the federal government sends troops in the South with a civil war and they withdraw in 1877. Federal troops don't go to the South to enforce black civil rights again until 1955 with Central High School in Little Rock when they integrated.

So they were trying to get what they wanted without being too overt about it. But the local level, they were just, you know what this is about. Please support this. And even that, it was a tough sell. I mean, I thought about doing another book on just the conservation movement in the South. Yeah, I still will. But- That's where my next question goes. doing another book on just the conservation movement in the south uh yeah still will but um that's kind of that's where my next question goes because if there's a thing i feel like you don't

not that you don't get it right but i feel like you you didn't like accentuate it enough and and i already told you i didn't read it in its entirety but i did a thorough like you know so maybe you'll just prove me hopefully you'll just prove me that i'm wrong is it the same conversations though when you get into the early 1900s the same conversations even outside of say that better the same conversations about certain hunting practices the same conversations about commercial market hunting the same conversations about commercial market hunting, the same conversations about bag limits, the same conversations about netting game are all happening in the North. Absolutely. Where there is not a master slave history, right? But it's simply people like Roosevelt.

And sure, I'm not aware of it. There's no doubt it exists that roosevelt probably had as a someone alive when he was alive probably had racist sentiments like i'm sure there's probably books written about it but he was from a hunting perspective and he's there here's a celebrated conservation figure okay from a hunting perspective he's like if we're going to continue to hunt into the future, if it's going to be a thing, then we need to put up real serious guardrails. And we're going to introduce all kinds of stuff, licenses, seasons, ban on commercial sale of wild game, right? And really clamp down or would kiss the whole thing goodbye. So I don't know, like, and maybe you can tell me that you did.

I don't know if you're accurately kind of like divorcing that, that it perhaps wasn't entirely like a racially motivated thing, that it was coming from a legitimate place, that we have to stop the bleeding. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not trying to suggest, in the book either, I don't do this. I'm not trying to suggest that conservation was completely a racial thing, but rather

that in the South, there was this racial dimension, particularly in the selling it to the general public. Oh, and you make that, and again, you make that case clear just through letting people say their own thing. Like you put down, here's what's said, here's what's said, here's what's said. Like you lay that out well. The motivation was there. But it's just like I look and I'm like, man, but the exact same things were being said elsewhere, but they just weren't selling it that way.

Yeah, well, it's interesting. It's interesting you say that, though, because in full disclosure, I'll just, you know just weren't selling it that way. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's interesting you say that though, because, and I'll interest the full disclosure. I'll just, you know, just to get it out. I don't want this to be a freezer full of fish issue. I am a big fan of the conservation model. I think the conservation system that we developed in that period is one of the great achievements of the American system. Really is.

I really believe that. This is side trip, but I mean, like, if I got to choose between a conservation model and a wallet off and nobody can touch it model, the conservation model is better, just in my mind. But what's interesting, when you look at how conservation was sold in other parts of the country, there was a racial angle to it, but it wasn't African Americans. You know, I've read articles, you know, complaining about the need for tougher laws in the West. And they're talking about native Americans that are abusing things. And they're the reason we have to pass this. Yeah. Yeah. This is really funny. We recently had an episode with a Hmong hunter and I talked to

him about, um, just the conversations I've had with people where it's like, well, you know, who kills all the game? It's the Hmong guys. Yeah, it was European immigrants in New York State, right? Up in the Catskills. It was like, oh, these immigrants are gunning all the game down. So it seemed like it was just a kind of a wish. You know where I grew up?

It's just that people that were poorer than you were by definition, if they're poorer than you, by definition, they're more likely to be game hogs. Yeah. Poachers. Yeah. Someone probably, someone certainly thought you were a poacher and then you thought the next guy down the line, he was the poacher.

It was very class-based. Oh yeah. And that, that is what, what struck me, uh, initially, you know, leaving, leaving race out of the equation for a second. When I first started reading all these sporting publications so intensely, I was amazed at the obvious class dimensions at work here and the tension in the individual sporting – even like in Force and Stream, that was written about a lot. Like who does this thing really serve? Is this about America and democracy and open access? In which case, hey, rich guy, you shouldn't always get the system you want. And then the elites would say, hey, if you want to preserve this system for future generations, we've got to start being more strict about this. And some of the people on the lower class end of things were like, no, we're just not going to buy that. And it seems like in different parts of the country, they needed a little extra nudge from the boogeyman, right? If you're afraid of – if you live in the West and Native Americans are your big nuisance, they're the problem.

Italian immigrants in New York. It's Hispanic immigrants in Arizona. It's an easy way of getting a little extra support for what you're trying to see by kind of racializing. That was pretty common actually. Yeah. Identifying the people that just don't get it. Yeah. And it doesn't diminish the value of the conservation laws, but it just shows that who are the convenient scapegoats that are available. And definitely in the South,

the main scapegoat was African-Americans, especially because they had two argumentative tracks they could take with people that were, let's say, I'm a poor white and I'm just not buying into this licensing system. I could say, look, they'd say to me in turn, like, look, one, this is about control. We're trying to keep guns out of the hands of people of color, keep them working for us. And on the other hand, this is about protecting our new tourist economy. We have got to protect this because the region will collapse if we don't preserve this. So it was sort of a kind of a double whammy. And there was a reason to make sure that as much as possible, if African-Americans are going to have a big place in the Southern sporting field, it's got to be in a subordinate

place, working for us, not independent. And if they are hunting and fishing independently, let's set up a system where they are limited to small game. We get rid of methods that they prefer that we don't like. And we control it as much as humanly possible. So, again, it goes back to that issue of how far away from the white observer are they. They're working for me or they're doing things I approve of. Fine. But when they use it to avoid work or where they're doing methods that I don't approve

of, then it's a problem. You know one area where the double standard, I think, came through real clear is you spend a little bit of time talking about, I think it was kind of more in the immediate post-war years, that you'd have people go out in the swamps and basically set up encampments, families camped, just living off the land, man. And you can imagine it'd be easy to romanticize that, right? Off in the swamp, living off the land. But man, folks did not like that.

Yeah. That was like, holy, what is the world coming to? Yeah. There were so many interesting visuals that came out of that research. You know, you might read about a very elaborate hunt that is essentially, you know, a bunch of locals. They're not rich. They're just some Southern guys that like a hunt. So they, they hire a bunch of laborers and they, you know, go off into the woods for a week and they bring tents and, you know, they, they live off the land and, you know, and they, you know,

they just, they just do what they do do but then you hear these descriptions of these like massive hunting parties i can't think of the guy's name but the um guy was a ceo of dupont he bought an island off of south carolina just for the point the purpose of hunting and you know he would bring these giant retinues down there with them and they would head off, you know, head off into the woods and, you know, the black laborers would be carrying, you know, everything you could imagine. I didn't know that. Don't know that word. Retinue.

Oh, retinue. Yeah. So it's a fancy word for like the, your posse. Shitload of people. Yeah. Your entourage. Retinue. They would have called it a retinue because that was the fancy, makes me sound like an

aristocrat term they wanted to use. Got it. The more guys that are with me, the more people carrying my stuff, the more my hunting camp looks like my house, the more that means I've made it. Yeah. So it's sort of that set yourself up as an aristocrat kind of thing that visitors were so drawn to back then. What are, are there, I mean, there's a ton I missed because it's a big book, but are there, where you're, from where you're sitting right now, are there questions you wish I'd asked you to explain various aspects of this book? Well, yeah, I think, I think one, there's a couple things that I think would be good to talk about. So one is, what I didn't mention yet was the positives, right?

So we're talking about the concerns that landowners had or the conservationists had or white Southerners in general had and why they wanted to kind of restrict these practices. But on the other side of the equation is the benefit, right? So it isn't like it's just, I'm forced to work for these white guys. No, that's a major omission

because you have some amazing stories of people getting established in business and stuff. And yeah, go on that. There's a big benefit. So for one thing, it's a rare thing during the Jim Crow period for a person of color to have sort of a public way to demonstrate I'm better at something than

a white person. That was a no-no. Can you tell people specifically what Jim Crow means? Sure. So Jim Crow is sort of the shorthand for segregation. These sort of both formal and informal laws and practices that popped up starting in the 1890s that sort of governed black and white social interactions. And it was, if you don't know much about the Jim Crow system, it's pretty mind-blowing. You know, the big picture stuff, you know, like, you know, whites only water fountains and things like that, that we think of most commonly, but then, you know, chain gangs

and, you know, lots and lots of strange social rules. You know, a black person can't work at a shoe store that caters to white customers because you don't want black people to work with white people's feet. Black barbers generally would have white customers, but the reverse usually wouldn't be true. You'd have to have a good old black barber if you were a black person. Like beaches, swimming pools. Yeah. All that stuff segregated. So Jim Crow was basically just a way of making sure that everybody was kept in their proper place.

Was that a guy? Was that a person's name? Jim Crow was a minstrel performer. His name was Charles? His name was Daddy Rice. I can't remember. It might be Charles. Daddy Rice.

I can't remember. But Daddy Rice was a famous minstrel performer in the 1820s and 1830s. And he became world famous, traveled the world by blacking his face and his hands, putting on rags, and then performing in ways that whites would have recognized as stereotypically slave. So he's a white guy. Yeah. White guy performing in blackface. Who would do like blackface performances. That's Jim Crow. And that was like his handle? Yeah. That was the character's name, Jim Crow. Really? And there's books published about this character jim crow it becomes this hugely popular thing and then the interesting thing is that that's where that word comes from yes somehow that was like some kind of like i don't know it was like a politician politician from the time well no the basic idea is um you

know these this jim crow character is kind of based on the idea that people of color are childlike, stupid, uncivilized. I mean, it's very negative, very racist, you know, this character. And it fit what white audiences wanted to believe about people of color. So it's kind of a character designed to show, you know, this is what we're dealing with here, folks. It sort of became an easy shorthand in the 1890s. Well, these laws designed to keep black people where they belong, let's call them Jim Crow laws. So that's sort of organically how it evolved.

Yeah. And then you were going to get into, and there's a handful of things you have in there of people that maybe established a fishing business and then became out of that, like owned multiple vessels, bought land, established businesses. Like people who had like real success stories. Yeah. There's some great ones. That came out of hunting and fishing that went on to be, have generational impact.

Yeah. I'll tell you about Hulk Collier in a minute. That's my favorite individual person from the book. But my individual favorite story, it's not very long, but I just love this one. And this is the kind of freedom you could have with the kind of weird relationships that emerged in the post-emancipation period, right? Like on the one hand, you know that your guides, your laborers are really amazing at this. But acknowledging that is going to sort of threaten the white on top sort of white supremacy model that we have by then in the South. So there's this great story I came across where a guy from – I think he's from Philadelphia is out on a duck hunt or a quail hunt, whatever it was, with one black guide.

And they're scaring up birds. And a bird is scared up. Flushed. A bird is flushed. Thank you. And I know words like retinue, not words like flushed. So birds are scared up. White guy jumps up, takes a shot, misses.

The guide stands up, shoots it, and says, good shot. They scare up another bird. The white guy misses. The guide says, oh, great shot, sir. And then that went on the whole day. And then they're walking home. And the guy was talking about how pissed off this white guy was walking in front of him the whole time, knowing that he didn't do a very good job with those birds and only imagining how pleased the guide must have been thinking like, yeah, we both know that I'm better at this than you, but I can play the game if I have to. So I really liked that one example because it was just a nice little, I can dig you a little bit in a way that I couldn't before, you know?

But the one that stands out, and it's just one of the great stories of all time, and I'm not the first person to talk about Hulk Collier. There's been a book written about him and some children's books, actually. But Hulk Collier is, I think, I would say the most famous sportsman in the South, probably of all time, unless you count someone like Daniel Boone or, you know, some of those folks. But Hulk Collier was a slave in Mississippi, and his story is just absolutely incredible. Before he was a famous hunting guide, he was a slave in Mississippi, and his master was a man named Colonel Howell Hines. And when the Hines family goes off to war, when the Civil War starts, they took Hulk Collier with them as a servant. And he wound up working as a scout for whatever army outfit that his master belonged to. Scouting against the Northern Army.

Against the Northern Army. That's got a conflicted position. Yeah. And he is officially recognized by the Daughters of the Confederacy as a Confederate veteran. I mean, it's really interesting. And he continued after the war was over. Like above and beyond the call of duty. And that's the whole, when you think of Holt Collier, above and beyond the call of duty. He was a loyal servant, and then he was a loyal soldier.

And then when the war ended, he went to work on the Heinz Plantation as a sporting guide. And was so good that he's one of these ridiculous figures that you hear about his sporting prowess. And you think, really, did you really kill 500 bears? That seems like a lot, you know?

So he, there are all these legends about him. And the reason he becomes so well known is because when the Roosevelt hunts, as they were known, Roosevelt had these huge, two huge hunting excursions in the South, and one was like 1903, one was like 1907. When he contacted some of his buddies down in the South,

hey, I want to do a really big elaborate hunt, put it together for me. They did what we've talked about before. They got some guys that knew the best places to go, and they said, okay, who's going to assemble the army of African-Americans that we need to provide the setting the president needs? And they tapped Hulk Collier to head the hunt. So he was the guy in charge of both of those Roosevelt hunts. And the specific story that makes him so famous is apparently for four or five days, this was – one hunt was in the Louisiana cane breaks and one was in the Yazoo Delta. I can't recall which one was which,

but the first of the two, apparently Hulk Collier, they didn't have a lot of luck finding the bear because Roosevelt had dreamed of a Southern black bear forever, he said. So Collier apparently had gone off to do some scouting to see if they could switch locations.

While he was gone, apparently some of the other guys had captured a black bear, which was weirdly common back then because people would capture bears and then they would use it for bear baiting, the grossest sport ever. We used to get sick dogs on a bear and then bet on how many dogs it would take to kill it. So they captured this black bear so Roosevelt could kill it. And Hulk Collier got back to camp and he said, whoa, you can't, this is a chained up animal. You can't shoot this.

It's not sporting. And Roosevelt was, yeah, that's a great idea. That's not sporting. I'm not going to do it. So Roosevelt ordered that they released. Was that the teddy bear incident? That's the teddy bear incident. So it was Holt Collier that apparently told Roosevelt that he shouldn't kill the bear.

So the cartoon of Teddy's bear comes from Holt Collier. Does that? And then he sent Collier some kind of a... I mean, I've heard that story a hundred times, but I never knew that the guy that involved in it had that story. Well, yeah. I never knew anybody involved besides Roosevelt, right?

Yeah. Well, I guess in the future, if you come across kind of stories from this time period, how often do they really go into discussions of the guys, whether they're white or black, right? Usually it's just the guys. We're the ones that we talk about. And then you're not going to talk about your labor and that Collier used that for the rest of his life, because it was the rifle that Roosevelt had sent him. Probably in 1895.

I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, that sounds about right. Why are you saying that, yeah? Well, that's Roosevelt's rifle. Winchester Model 1895. Oh. Where's that gun now? If I'm not mistaken, I think it's in a historical society somewhere in Mississippi.

I thought I may have read somewhere that they have that. I'd like to fire a couple cracks with that gun, man. But it's pretty amazing. And it brought him to some national prominence. And when there was a little bit of a blowback on Roosevelt, he was publicly praising this guy. He sent him this rifle. And some people were like, what's the president doing hanging out with this black guy? What this isn't right. A lot of people in the South were kind of angry about this. And it just didn't visually match what they thought the president of the United States should

be doing. And editorials appeared in Southern newspapers after that. And they were like, look, you gotta understand this guy was the best slave ever. This guy was a soldier for us. He's the best. He's the perfect servant. If anybody deserves to be talked about by the president, it's Hulk Collier. So the question that got me thinking was, okay. Did Roosevelt ever weigh in on it anymore? Basically, he would just kind of – I don't think Roosevelt and he were pals or anything. He basically would just say like, look, this is one of the best sportsmen I ever saw. Okay.

But he didn't like engage in that conversation at that point. Just one line here from Wikipedia about how badass he was. He killed more than 3,000 bears during his lifetime. More than those. This is the real humdinger here. More than Clay Newcomb. More than those taken by Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone combined. So his fake number was better than Boone and Crockett's fake number. No, he didn't.

No, he didn't. Yeah he goes, too. No, he didn't. Yeah, Wikipedia does have things wrong sometimes. But, you know, for me, the extraordinary question is about Holt Collier. Undeniably an amazing sportsman, even if his numbers are, you know, wildly exaggerated. Prominent, famous, for his day, fairly wealthy, fairly well-known. There's not a whole lot of African-American sportsmen who become celebrities in that time period. He did it. So it's a great thing. And what a great way for him to support his family and carve out a niche. But then I also wondered, but what's the cost of that? If you're Hulk Collier, you basically have to position

yourself as the quintessential servant. And for a lot of white Southerners, you know, they would look at that relationship and they would see Holt Collier and they would see, see that? That's alive and well. The old master slave thing, it's alive and well. It's like the way it should be. So for a lot of Southerners, they really look to the sporting field, you know, not just a way of preserving the sporting tradition, but to preserve the racial tradition. You know, where else can you find that the sporting tradition, but to preserve the racial tradition. Now, where else can you find that pure? I'm always going to have people of color around me serving me.

Now that emancipation is here, we're still going to find it in the sporting field. So it was a way of kind of resurrecting that old South and keeping it alive. So on the one hand, if you're that that guy who can make fun of the white guy, yeah, that's a good thing, and I'm sure that's pretty satisfying, but isn't it interesting that basically you find a niche for yourself in an occupation that demands subservience?

Yeah. And that must have been tough. That must have been a real double-edged sword. Now that Yanni's brought Boone into it, did you read about or consider writing about Boone's relationship with his old slave? Like when Boone got old, he was going blind. He, I don't want to, I hate to use the, I don't know. They were like, people around them described them as best friends.

However true that is, but it's like Boone had a slave. That was his hunting, people described that. That was his hunting buddy. That was his hunting partner. Like the two of them would go on big canoe-based hunting trips. Did you ever spend any time on like what the hell that relationship was? I haven't jumped into that much. It's an interesting topic, though.

I should check that out. Boone would hunt in his later years. Boone would like, that's who he hung out with. Yeah. I mean, he could have hung out with virtually,

I mean, he was famous in his time. Mm-hmm. That's who he hung with. Yeah, I mean. He'd go on these trips, you know. And I could be

totally misremembering this. Didn't he take that guy with him to the Alamo? Boone didn't go to the Alamo. No, I'm sorry. I thought you meant Crockett. I'm sorry. Yeah.

Because Crockett brought a bunch of pals of his that were hunting buddies. Oh, okay. They didn't stay. Yeah. Down to the Alamo. Yeah, but those two get tangled up a lot. But yeah, he died in Missouri.

Okay. I have one more question for you. Have you ever spent time reading about the slave that lewis and clark brought with them no i've not done that either but i would like to yeah it's you know it's it's a fascinating freedom afterward yeah but so you got like they got like a whatever 100 guys on payroll they got the one they got like one dude who's not just weird it's one of the things that's that's so tough to to tease out in these stories, like you mentioned Boone and his slave, and I don't know this story.

But what I can probably say with some certainty is that we've based our view of that relationship pretty much from white sources because that's probably all we have. So what's interesting about – when you read about these master- these master servant relationships in the post-war sporting field, you never get, or rarely get the laborers perspective. It's almost always the white guys. Oh, it'd be fascinating to know what that guy's. Yeah.

So like how he comprehended his relationship with this, like, like very, very famous person. Yeah. Like what is, what is, what does that guy say when he walks away?

Right. If, oh, they're, they're best friends. What a great relationship. Maybe he saw it a little differently. Yeah, same thing with York, the Lewis and Clark slave. And maybe with him, I mean, in that circle, you were in a world where they were celebrated.

I haven't read into it. Maybe there are accounts from him. Lewis and Clark would point out that the Native Americans definitely recognized him as different. And many were quite attracted to him. Didn't like the white groove, but liked that skin. Would single him out. But yeah, and then they emancipated him afterward. But no, to hear his take on it, I mean, his take on it, would it have been, yeah, it was cool.

You know, they freed me. Or would his take have been on it? Come on, man. Like I didn't have any, no one asked me. Sign up. And there's the single biggest challenge of studying a topic like this it's sources you know so what do people of color think about this topic okay well i've got letters to forest and stream you know and sporting publications and agricultural journals and people of color aren't contributing to those so i'm getting the white perspective well okay well

i'll read the interviews with former slaves that were done during the WPA interviews. Well, most of the interviewers were white. So we don't know to what extent people are being as candid as they might. So you're always trying to tease out that other perspective. And that's really been one of the big weaknesses that historians always wanting to focus on the elite story that I mentioned at the beginning in that time period, didn't even bother trying to figure out what the poorer folks were thinking in that story. So it kind of fell to later generations of historians to think, OK, where can we tease out? How can we find what people were actually thinking about this? Can we look at court transcripts or interviews with former slaves or how can we use a white source that talks about hunting and fishing

in a way that you can sort of reveal, you know, some kind, like that story of the guy talking about his friend who was being, you know, outshot by the laborer, right? The guy was never going to tell that story. But his buddy to make fun of him

quotes that story in Forest and Stream. So I was able to get a little bit of that story. But it's hard to find. That seems like quite the magazine. It was cool. And I got to tell you, I get pretty easily distracted because I get pretty enthusiastic about stuff. And I pick up a 19th century copy of Forest and Stream. What I should be doing is flipping through it and seeing if I can find mention of Ray.

Instead, I'm reading them all. So I've read so many issues of Forest and Stream over the years because it's just fun. I love find mention of Ray. Instead, I'm reading them all. So I've read so many issues of Forrest and Stream over the years because it's just fun. I love looking at the ads. You know, buddy, Randall Williams could have a good conversation. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we got a friend who, he came on the show before. We'll have to find out what the hell episode this was. Very early, in the infancy of this here show, he looked at, did he look at 100 years? It was not quite. I want to say it was like post-World War II, I think, is where he picked it up, right? And I can't remember if race was one of them,

but he reviewed attitude towards gun rights, attitude towards the environment, attitude, a handful of things. Just in a couple publications over 100 years the evolution like basically the evolution of the american sportsman's mind opinions interests perception yeah as captured in 100 years of these and mostly through the editorials right a? A lot of editorials. But you uncovered interesting things, man, that we talk about in the show is when freezers became a thing.

That changed shit. Like, when people are hunting in the 40s or whatever, I can't remember when it happened, but you didn't have a freezer. The whole idea of shooting a deer and putting your freezer and eating all year wasn't a thing uh-huh just wasn't a thing then all of a sudden it became like everybody had a freezer it just changed the whole conversation about game oh that's that makes you want to dive back into something because freezer full elk meat right how many times

you heard that but like no it's like wasn't the case you have there's nothing you can do with it you got it and you had to find gave it away and everybody ate it and that was it. You know, the big thing for elite sportsmen, especially on these, you know, these big excursions, lots of visitors, lots of money, the really prominent ones where they would have the other retinue, right? So one of these big hunts, the kind of standard move for these elites was they would get every single thing that they captured, that they caught. They would divvy up some of it among their guides and laborers. And then the rest, they would just have a big old party and give away to people in the area to show their sort of aristocratic, whatever they call it, their generosity. I wonder how that changed with the freezer. Because I would imagine giving it away, if you're not going to eat it, because someone's going to say,

oh my God, did you see what Mr. John, he was eating what he caught. Is he having hard times? What's going on here? Because that was sort of the thing. I don't have to eat what I catch. I give it away. I wonder if once freezers were around, if they go, hey, throw that in the freezer. Let's not give that away. You got to go read Randall's dissertation.

That sounds really interesting. Yeah, I wish I could. Yeah, you'll find it. Go way back. We know now there's like a lack of diversity, right? In the hunting, general hunting and fishing crowd in this country. And obviously it stems from what we've just been talking about. So can you kind of put that in perspective? Well, yeah.

And I guess I would have to say I didn't get explicitly too much into this in the book because I sort of kind of shut it off around the 1930s, 1940s. But I think there's a lot there. I was actually talking to Jonathan Wilkins about this not too long ago, the sort of stereotype that people of color don't like the outdoors or don't swim or don't hunt as often as whites. It's predominantly a white thing. And you touched on that in that blog that you posted a few weeks ago, the idea that diversity can be an issue sometimes in the contemporary scene. Yeah. And I always attributed it or imagined it being like a demographics issue that after the war, so many people came to work in the industrialized North. That's one of the things

that surprised me, how prevalent hunting and fishing were at a time, right? Yeah, absolutely. And the way I would look at it is, you know, there's this very deep and rich sporting tradition in the Black community. You know, slaves free Blacks, you know, and it intensifies after emancipation because of sporting tourism. So it's a big part of black life, especially in the rural South. But then we can look at restrictions on sporting practices in the South. They're used the same way that other Jim Crow laws are used. They're really trying to regulate black behavior. So by the time we get to, you know, 1900, 1910, the black population in the South was like, look, you know, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, voting restrictions, hunting and

fishing restrictions. It's all part of a big story that's, you know, really making the South a less hospitable place. So the great migration begins. And then- To Northern cities. To Northern cities. Yeah. I think probably the thing that helps people remember just how connected African-American population was to hunting and fishing in the South, which we think of as hunting and fishing as a rural thing, right? For most people. Well, in 1890, African-Americans were demographically the most Southern and rural population in the United States. But then the migration period starts between, say, 1900 and 1950.

And today, African-Americans are demographically the most northern and urban population. No kidding. But if you back up far enough, it's a rural population in the south historically relying on these forms of land and wildlife use to get by, it gets harder for them to do that. And I got to believe it's on the list of factors that influenced the Great Migration. So I feel like there was a sort of a forced separation. If you back up 120 years, I don't think you could hold the idea that people of color don't use the natural environment as much as whites. That was just, that was kind of separated.

They were, that was taken from them. And not only did they use it, but they were, sounds like renowned as possibly being the best ones at using it. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a real tradition there. And, uh, I think if we remember that, uh, I, you made the point in the blog, right? The idea that, you know, the question of what's the way forward, bringing new people into this sporting community or preserving the traditions of those who already do it. Well, for the people who are

saying, you know, let's preserve the traditions of those who already do it. Um, the, the list of people that, that have a tradition in those areas is bigger than our current list of people that think of themselves as traditional sportsmen and sports women. There's this other group of people that used to be a huge part of American hunting and fishing and not quite so much now. So it's not like we can just say, well, you know, clearly historically, people of color haven't really wanted to be involved. Wasn't their jam. Yeah, we don't need to think about it. So there is a question of, you know,

participation in outdoor activities, hunting and fishing among diverse populations. Yeah, it does bring up- It needs to be encouraged. Yeah, it does bring up interesting, just the idea about tradition, you know, depends how far back you want to delve back. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and I've talked to a lot of people over the years that I about tradition, you know, depends how far back you want to delve back. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, and I've talked to a lot of people over the years that I've met, you know, just not in the context of my work, but I've just met them and, oh, you do hunting and fishing. Oh, yeah. My family used to be really big into that. And, you know, not so much now. I said, where'd your family come from? They said, oh, we migrated from Mississippi, you know, 1900, 1910. I'm like, well, that's consistent with the story. Yeah.

I regard myself as having a deep family tradition in hunting, but my ancestors came from Sicily, Western Europe. Probably not. By deep, I mean my grandpa. Do you know if those ancestors that were in Europe hunted? No, no one has any idea who the hell they were. Well, no, that's not true. The Sicilians we do. The Ronellas we do.

I don't know if they didn't hunt, but the dams didn't hunt when they got here. So I'm just saying deep tradition for me is that my maternal and paternal grandfather you know one of whom i met and hung out with so that's how deep that is well you know in in a sense i would argue there's a different kind of depth there there's an historical depth to those kind of connections because it what i've what i've learned over the years from reading different books about hunting coming out of the European tradition is a lot of people, even like these maligned European immigrants that go to New York State and are accused of being game hogs, you're an immigrant that comes from most of Europe.

They've got a long history of really restrictive game laws, a game system that just flat out gives all the privileges and rights to the landed aristocrats. Yeah. You can explore that through like elements of that through the Robin Hood narrative. Yeah, exactly. It's a tremendous source of conflict. And when people migrate to the US and they're like, whoa, we can just do this. This is amazing. So there's this sort of instant tradition. Like, look, I am allowed to do this now. This is what a land of opportunity when I can actually freely hunt and fish without having to worry about the rich guy always gets first crack. So I think that a lot of sort of the more recent sporting, even if you are the first generation to pick it up, you're kind of continuing that tradition of something that demonstrates independence. Sure.

That's common across white, black, rich, poor. When people do these things historically, they think this is about sufficiency, independence, individual competency. Yeah, it feels like, for many people, it feels like an American birthright. Exactly. And that was going to be my closing thought. And you're just, you know, saying it way better than I could. But it was just that, like, reading the book has given me a completely

new and better, stronger appreciation for hunting and fishing as a means to freedom. Because if these slaves didn't have that, just imagine. I mean, we don't know what the outcome

would have been, right? But with hunting and fishing, it immediately gave them a means to be like oh even though we're free even though you still hold you know some power over us because we you have to survive and we need to work and we need to feed but because they had hunting and fishing they were allowed to be freer yeah before you came in yanni and i were just having a quick chat and he kind of pointed out, he didn't use these words, but he pointed out the ways in which it's a, it's like a celebration. In some ways, a celebration of hunting and fishing. Yeah. Which is like what it meant to people. back to Charles Ball, right? The guy who had the quote about feeling like an independent man. He's a slave. And this kind of powerful idea of competence, which we sort of lost. We don't

really dig that these days. But the 19th century model of competence was, I'm independent, I own my own land, I can feed myself and my family, and I'm beholden to no one. I'm debt-free. So that was like the goal. You're a competent American. I'm still big into competency, but I don't describe it that way. Yeah, it's not a term we use much anymore. It's a great idea. Now you're just able to fix stuff. And so there's this notion of being a competent citizen.

And it was really understood back then is that was really a white thing, or at least that was the white view. Competence, a slave's not going to have that, right? They're owned. They're literally, they can't have honor because they're owned by somebody else. And they're not going to be independent. They don't feed their family. I do. So that just wasn't a thing that I, as an owner, thought that was for them. But then you're Charles Ball and you're like, you know what? You own me. You own my family. You control what I do. You control my days. But you know what? I am the best sportsman you have. I go off on my own time and earn game and income for my family that you don't want me to have. And I do it anyway. And I demonstrate skill

that you say shouldn't be demonstrated by people of color. And in the sort of limited world of options of a slave, that's, those are a couple of extended middle fingers to the master. In and of itself, that's worth something, I think. All right. Scott Giltner with, we're going to hit it again, Culver Stockton College. That's it. But it's not in Missouri. It is.

Oh, it is? Canton, Missouri, yeah. What were you saying? I thought you were saying, what about Illinois? You were born in Illinois? I live right across the river in Quincy, Illinois. Oh, that's why.

Yeah. Canton's on one side of the river and Quincy's down the street on the other side. The home of the guy that was flying the Enola Gay when it dropped the... Yeah, Paul Tibbetts.

Yeah, he was born in, his mother, Enola Gay, was born and raised in Quincy. His mom was Enola Gay? Yeah, that's Yeah, Paul Tibbetts. Yeah, he was born in... His mother, Enola Gay, was born and raised in Quincy. His mom was Enola Gay? Yeah, that's why the plane's named that. He got to dub his own plane? Yeah, named it after his mom. And it dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki? I think Hiroshima. What happened to that guy? I have no idea. I do know that about, oh geez, 30 years ago or so, one of the historians in town told me that there was a push to name an elementary school after him. And then some people were like, I don't know, Atomic Bomb Elementary School, and they eventually shelved the plan. But they were going to name a school after him, and they were afraid.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I doubt, you know, I mean, the guy was doing a job he's sent to do. Did his job, did it well. We'll talk about that one some other time. That's a tough one. No, it's not tough. I mean, come on. For some people, it's a tough one. Yeah, for some people, it's a tough one.

All right, y'all. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Scott. This has been great. Yeah, thank you a tough one. Yeah, for some people, it's a tough one. All right, y'all. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Scott. This has been great. Yeah, thank you all so much. Great book. Everybody should read this book.

I appreciate it. And yeah, it is, I'll just mention this, a shameless plug, if you don't mind. No. You can grab this on Amazon. It is currently out of stock, but I checked this morning and it's listed as restocked on June 26th. Oh, awesome. So that's not too bad.

So yeah, as usual, when you, when there's a book in low supply and then all of a sudden you see it selling for big amounts of money, have you seen it go for a lot of money at sometimes? Cause it's like, there's like not many for sale and some guys like, oh, I'll, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll sell you for $300. Yeah. And, uh, and, uh, two things to any of you out there that may listen to this.

If any of you paid that amount of money for my book, I have two thoughts. One, thank you. And two, you're out of your mind. What were you thinking? Let me hit you with a quick book story. So there's a book I'm a great admirer of by a guy named duncan gilchrist it's called hunt high not like baked but hunt the high country and um i love the book and he was a very accomplished alpine hunter and i always talk about this book but the book was out of print and eventually i

realized that someone run off with my copy so i go online and then there's some guy selling it for 100 bucks or 75 bucks i'm like that's ridiculous's ridiculous, you know, but I wanted it back. So I buy the book. The book shows up in my house with a sticky note on the cover. And it says, dude, you're the reason I bought this book. Yeah. Then you had to give me that copy of that book, which I now proudly own. I'm glad to know that it's a $100 copy of that book.

Because I had loaned out to you a, like a first edition Jack O'Connor that you had given away. So now I'm the owner of your $100 copy of Hunt High. Oh yeah. You're not getting it back. I forgot about that. That's the way it's supposed to be, right? They say

that books shouldn't have owners, just readers. So just pass them around. I don't abide by that. I like the other stuff you said, Scott. Thanks again. Thanks. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

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