The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 661: So You Want To Be A Mountain Man

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Randall Williams. Topics discussed: Order MeatEater's American History: The Mountain Men (1806-1840); Colter and astounding feats; the importance of canoes; politics and power struggles;t aking a meticulous journal; between the British in the north and no more beavers in the south; how you become a mountain man; market hunters today as a bad deal for wildlife; the greasiest, most louse-ridden group; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up, we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men, 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it.

We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters 1761 to 1775. So again, this new mountain man edition about the beaver skin trade is available for pre-order now wherever audiobooks are sold. It's called Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840 by me, Stephen Rinella.

["The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840"] This is the Meat Eaters podcast coming at you. Shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We're hunting. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk,

First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Randall, you know what problem I'm having in the restroom? Continue? Yeah. It's not what you think. It's not like a flow issue.

The problem I'm having in the restroom. Is it a stopping issue? No. You know how I have that, that immaculate, Eric Von Schmidt painting here, fell Custer. I was just looking at it with chili. Well, you know how there's two urinals. It's a long painting. There's two urinals.

There's the short boy and the tall boy. Yeah. I always go to the tall boy. I always go right. So you're only getting- So I like have studied every single possible detail. Of half that painting. Yeah, and it's a very, like it's a famous painting

for really being sort of the most accurate representation from looking from From Custer Hill last Stan Hill or the hell they call it down. It's like very accurate I've looked at the point where I see now that he's got blood kind of staining Custer's groin area of his trousers Custer's kind of already been hit a couple of times. So it's like either a plumber comes and switches the urinals.

Yeah. Or like I get a mirror image of the, I don't know. I was going to say we can't think of how to, or you start like, I just break to the, to the tall boy, start going in the low boy. Yeah. What? Try that. And then it'll give you like a different perspective and experience while you relieve yourself. Well, that's yeah. What if people come in, someone comes in and they're like, why is he going in the low boy?

Can I say something? Yeah. I don't think like, I also go to the tall one as well. The tall boy. Yeah. But I mean, I don't have any, I don't have any like trouble at the low boy if that's my only option, you know? You know, gravity. I, But even today, I went in there knowing. The angles are all wrong though.

The angles are all wrong. Yeah, cause like, I don't want you guys now to get a weird idea about anything. Yeah. I don't know, even today I went in there being like, damn, I gotta go look at the right side of the painting again. Well, I went in there. I'm gonna start going to the little boy. I went in there today and I saw I had beaten Chilly to the door. So I just invited him to join me. And who went to what side? Well, I gave him the courtesy of using the adult-sized urinal.

And I just, you know, squatted my knees a little bit. And then you guys talked about the painting. I did get to take in the left side of that painting, which I admit was pretty new to me. I feel totally left out, because I don't know what that painting looks like. Well, you can go in there, it's a unisex restroom now. Right, oh, wait, were we talking about the downstairs one or the upstairs one?

Right down the hall here. Oh, right, and there's a stall in that one too. Yeah, but you could get one of those cups. There's a cup that women can use to go at urinals. Yeah. You can just leave it hooked at the low boy if you want. Or you could just stand there and not use the urinal. I would definitely lock the door behind me.

That would be- If you're using that funnel? Yeah. If I'm using that funnel. Not sure I care to use the funnel. Um, but- You just stand there and look. That might look weird too. Yeah. Right. Or you lock the funnel. You just stand there and look.

That might look weird too. Yeah. Right. Or you lock the door. Just lock the door behind you. And then you come out and someone says, were you in there going to the bathroom? And you'd have to be like, no. No, I was looking at the painting.

Well, then they say, well, why is the door locked? Because I want to have my own private viewing experience. That's true. That wouldn't seem weird. Yeah. No, I don't think there's anything weird about this at all. I'll try that later today. to have my own private viewing. That's true. That wouldn't seem weird. No, I don't think there's anything weird about this at all. I'll try that later today. The other thing about it, I remember hitting the year that I remember hitting

the year when I was the age that Custer died at. Hmm. She came here when it was not terribly old. I remember being that year. Forties. And when Seth got married, did I ever tell you about my speech yeah you officiated his wedding yeah I married Seth I was there oh you were there yeah what can I relive it for a minute relive it I wasn't there really quick

Custer died at 36 yeah but took note I'm not as cautious age 36 36 that's I know a lot of people are still idiots at 36. So when I, when Seth got married, I realized, but I didn't tell anybody, I kept it secret. I realized that he was getting married on the anniversary of Custer's death. 24th, June 24, June 23. I can't remember. 25th. You sure? According to this article. 25th and 26 was the battle. Okay. June 25th. Seth got married on June 25th. So when I get up to do the preaching, I get up and say, today will forever mark a day when a man made a terrible mistake. mark a day, one, a man made a terrible mistake.

Sure. Kelsey, love that. A man driven by hubris and pride. That's really good. Oh, and I buttered it up forever. Pete this day will be remembered. And then I was like, it was like, of course I'm referring to the defeat of general cost at the battle, a little bighorn, a hundred and whatever years ago today.

And the wedding party visibly relaxed. Yes. Mm hmm. And I heard, I don't want to name names, but there was a family member, there were family members. I don't even want to say what side they were on, there were family members that were already not happy that I was doing it. And then they came away, they came away even unhappier. Steve's stirring the pot.

Yeah, even unhappier. I didn't pick up on that vibe. That's what I heard. Later It was divulged to me. If you're listening today and then all indications are that you are, at the end, we're going to talk about mountain men. We're going to talk about long hunters, we're going to talk about mountain men. We're going to talk about long hunters, and we're going to talk about mountain men. We're going to talk about some other stuff too. We're going to explain what those people are. And then we're going to, you're going to keep on listening.

Me and Randall are going to wrap it up. I'm here with Randall. He's going to, I'm going to ask him about Mexico in a minute. Me and Randall are going to wrap it up. And then in our conversation about market hunting, long hunters, mountain men, a little bit of history about what we mean when we say those things. And then you're going to hear a chapter called Hunger and Thirst, and this chapter is a sneak peek at our new audio release, which is part of

our Meat Eaters American history. If you remember, we did Meat Eaters American History, Volume 1, The Long Hunters, 1763 to 1775. In a minute we'll explain why those dates. Our new volume is, so now we have Meat Eaters American History volume 2 and we jump to, and we'll explain why these dates, we're jumping to the years, sorry it's Meat Eaters American History volume 2, The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840. We're gonna explain what that means. So when you hear the word frontiersmen, what does it mean? When you hear the word frontiersmen, what does it mean when

you hear the word mountain men? What does a mountain man actually mean? We're going to talk about what a mountain man actually means. We're going to talk a little bit about the history of these different market hunters and then we're going to go into a chapter from this book, this audio original called Hunger and Thirst. And it's's is it available now this is released on Monday no it'll be available on Tuesday it's available on the 11th yeah this is coming this is today is the 10th yeah effectively it'll probably be fine now yeah yeah it'll probably available now if not you buy it and you'll have the next day. Yeah, it's like 11 bucks, 11, 12 bucks. Mm-hmm. I think, isn't it? 11.99?

Awesome deal. 12 chapters. Oh, it's five, six hours long. Mm-hmm. It's a five or six hour long history of... How many hours do you think it came in at? 12 chapters, seven hours? I haven't seen a total. I would guess it's closer to,, 7 hours. Yeah, it's like it's a 7-hour history of the Mountain Men. Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, John Coulter, all those guys are explained. Like what actually they did, why they did it. We're gonna talk a bunch about the different eras of the market hunters. Now we're gonna a little bit talk about what's to come in the future as we kind of go down the line of these American mount These American market hunters

you know, we should talk about two for a minute sure is There's a weird wrinkle like everyone's familiar with the North American model of wildlife conservation and in it is this thing about Not commodifying wildlife, but then people were like why can you sell deer hides? You can still sell deer hides Why can you sell beaver meat? Why can you sell, uh, muskrat skins? Right. Why can you sell taxidermy? Right.

Um, because in the market hunting world, you know, like everyone knows the work that Theodore Roosevelt did for wildlife conservation. And one of the big things he did is he kind of waged war on the market hunters. But we still have market hunters. Yeah. And I think it's, I mean, even beyond just the more obvious examples of like selling meat and selling hides, I feel like the commodifying wildlife is one of those elements of the North American model.

That's always people sort of debate over what constitutes commodifying wildlife. Like if you're charging people for access to hunt or whatever, I mean, it's one of those things where people like to make more expansive arguments about what is a violation of the North American model. I feel like it's one of the pillars of the North American model where people debate the scope of it. Another pillar of it is that you take things you want to do that don't seem like they fit with the North

American model and you argue about how they actually kind of do. Yeah. Oh yeah. Rather than just saying, you're right. This doesn't fit with the North American model, but I like it, but I like doing this and I'm not going to try to tell you that it fits with the North American model of wildlife conservation. Uh, one thing, one thing to get into here, make quick note. So a lot of times when we're doing the show, there's a shitload of people in the room. Right now there's not Crens here,

Randall's here because we're doing something a little bit special today. But a reminder, so many of the people that come in and do the show, you know, we have a whole podcast network. So I sometimes fail to point out how many of the people you know from coming on the show have their own shows that are on our network. So Cal is always in here, Ryan Callahan, Old Cal, Cal in the Wild, that's a feed, that's a podcast feed, Hosts, Cal's Week in Review, and the Houndations podcast with Tony Peterson. So those sit within our network under the feed, Cal in the Wild. We got a Bear Grease feed, of course, and on the show you've met and heard from many times Clay

and Brent Reeves. So the Bear Grease podcast feed has the Bear Grease podcast, it has Bear Grease render episodes and This Country Life episodes with Brent Reeves. We have a Wired to Hunt feed, the Wired to Hunt podcast feed, the eponymous show with Mark Canyon, Wired to Hunt, and then Foundations with Tony Peterson, and then of course we have God's Country with Dan and Reed Isbell. I got a big hunt trip planned with Tony Peterson. Oh, where are you going for that? There's a whole secret. Oh, I think I know.

It's the poverty pat hunt. Oh, that is going to be. Yep. Any extra spots on that one? You guys. Did you have fun down in Mexico? I had a great time down in Mexico. What happened? Did you enjoy it? Did you like that down there? Oh my God.

I loved every minute of it. What did you like about it? Randall went on his, was it your first Cuse Deer hunt? Randall? First Cuse Deer hunt, first trip to Mexico. Never been across the Southern border. Really? Yeah.

Did you like it? I loved it. I loved it. Uh, yeah. Uh, I mean, I thought it was sort of an interesting hunt because in some ways it's like a very classic whitetail hunt where you got a bunch of guys staying in the same house and every morning.

Same cold ass smoky house. And every morning you're drinking coffee and saying like, well, what do you want to get? Do you want to go to that spot or that spot? Do you want to go to that spot or that spot? It's like, oh, we looked at that yesterday. Let's check out this other one. So strategically, it reminded me of like a very traditional

whitetail hunt, but then you're, there's not a ton of hiking, but you're going up and down some steep stuff and falling and you know, busting your ass a little bit here and there because the footing's pretty tricky. Yeah, it's never ending 30 degree slopes covered in gravel. Yeah, and it's like, There is a hook to end, nothing's hooked to anything.

No, you need your sea legs. We're like, there was one hike that Seth and I did, and we sort of got to the, we got to take a break and Janice is like, man, I fell hard. I said, oh, I fell hard too. And we're comparing where we'd fallen. And then Seth said, I fell on that one as well. And all three of us had taken pretty serious spills, unbeknownst to one another. So, and then you're glassing all day,

which is like, I can be, I mean, I'm just like always entertained by glassing. And, and so like there are a couple of days, I mean, we hiked up to a ridge and we only moved a hundred yards in the course of the whole day, just behind the tripod glassing and, and pointing stuff out and finding, I mean, not even just deer, but we were watching some coyotes chase some deer. We were finding ducks, we were finding turkeys. Any mountain lions? No mountain lions, we saw some tracks.

One day Seth and I went up this crazy, I call it a road, but really the roads down there just sort of bulldozer cuts. Yeah. And there was some fresh tracks. We saw some fresh coos tracks. And as soon as we stopped to look at those, we realized they're lion tracks right alongside of them.

In the snow? No, just in the real loose dust. Because yeah, everything is dust. I haven't really brought anything in the house from that hunt. I'm waiting till I can fire up the air compressor and just blow everything out. Got it.

Because it's just my tripod is a different color. My Bino harness is a different color. Everything's covered in that real fine dust that just seeps its way into zippers and everything you own. For the rest of your life, when you open your tripod legs up and pull them out, they're gonna go, they're gonna make a difference. Oh yeah, for sure.

It's like they'll make a gravelly noise. Yeah, I need to do a good lens cleaning. All the eye cups and all my optics need a good cleaning. Yeah, super fun trip. And I've already, you know, as soon as I texted a couple buddies to say that I was going down there and they're all like, oh, that's a, that's like a, a bucket list trip for me. And so now I'm ever since I got back before I got back, I was kind of thinking about organizing

another the next trip down to old Mexico. Hmm. Yeah. Well, don't stay out on my Hmm. Yeah. Well don't. I'm hooked. Stay out on my little area there. Well you know. I'm joking. Well I mean what the thing that blew me away actually one of the things that I was not expecting is like we stay at the Holiday Inn or whatever it is a quarter mile from the border checkpoint on the Arizona side and we got in a little late like at 9 p.m. you know there's not a lot of

activity and then the morning we get up and Seth and I went down to breakfast at McDonald's no just in the lobby okay we did go to McDonald's on the way back but you look out in the parking lot and it's all hunting rigs. There's like 12 jacked up pickups with Utah, Arizona plates. They're all towing side by sides. Every single person in the little breakfast nook is wearing camo. And they're all like dudes between the age of 35 and 60. And then you get into the checkpoint line

and the truck in front of you is a hunter and the truck behind you is a hunter. January for sure. Yeah, I mean, I was, and then you go to like some gas station across the border and the whole thing is basically a staging point for coos deer hunters. And so that was one thing that was a very unexpected

wrinkle in it was just like how visible it was. You know, it's like being out in eastern Montana the week before Thanksgiving. So I think it's like that all January when they're rutting. Yeah, it was super cool. But it's the good old days right now in Mexico, man. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there was some talk about, you know, in a couple occasions it got brought up like what's

going to change, you know, in the next couple of years, especially like politically. And yeah, the, you know, like the role of the cartels down there, it's a hunt where like you can't really have your blinders on because it happens in this very specific political socioeconomic context that it all, I mean, yeah, it was, it, yeah, I'm still sort of just wrapping my head around it. But aside from that, it was just super fun hunting deer in January. I thought my deer hunting for the year was over and that's the best. Yeah, so great time. Since I've been working on this History Channel show, Hunting History, where we look into outdoor mysteries, man people been hitting me up with all kinds of stuff.

Mysteries? Yeah. Someone sent me something really interesting the other day and there was a picture of the F, so there's a guy like a, like a friend of a friend, his dad was an FBI agent who worked on the DB Cooper case. There's an FBI agent who interviewed, this is so crazy. There's an FBI agent who interviewed all of the people that dealt with Cooper before they went and did the drawings. The famous compo, you know, when you come in and they tell you what you look like. He sends me a picture of the guy, the FBI agent who interviews everybody leading into that meeting

with the artist. The son of a bitch looks exactly like the picture of D.B. Cooper. It was like, they described the last guy they saw. They're very impressionable. And in all the reading and all the reading and work I did on all the reading and work we did on like the D.B. Cooper story, which is like the most, the biggest bottomless pit in the world. I just had to walk away from it eventually

cause you can't. Yeah. It's just, it's a bottomless pit. And all the reading I did about it, no one ever brought that up to me. It's like this dude looks like they're like, wow, let me think. Kind of like you. Describe the guy.

They just, they're describing the guy they just spoke to. That's the power of suggestion. A lot of people wrote in saying how is their dad or whatever. Here's a weird one. Just like an outdoor mystery. Another one I can't believe I've never heard of this this, this is a crazy story. There's a military pilot, right?

Yeah, he's a military pilot. A guy named William J. Wyman, his plane disappears over Lake Huron while he's flying from Saginaw to Ken Ross Air Force Base in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. So, I mean, that base is still there. It's Ken Ross Base in the UP. Guy's flying from Saginaw, up Lake Huron to Ken Ross, Upper Peninsula. His plane goes missing on March 5, 1959. They conduct a big search, no sign of the plane, never find the plane.

He's presumed dead and they call it off. On April 8th, this is insane. I never heard this. On April 8th, these lighthouse keepers go out to Spectacle Reef to reopen their lighthouse and find that someone had been living in the lighthouse. There's a note and the note is explaining, it's a note from Wyman in the lighthouse explaining his plane's engine had quit when he was flying at 5,000 feet. His engine quit a mile from the lighthouse. Wyman's note,

this is a quote from Wyman's note, I tried to make it in but could not stretch my glide this far. I landed in the water. I did not try to land on the ice and it did not appear to be thick enough. The plane went down within two minutes, but before it did, it floated close enough to an ice flow for me to jump. The ice was now over two inches thick. Another large body of water separated me from the lighthouse, so I waited. Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast, and the ice I was on started to move. At the very last moment, one corner of the ice grounded against the ice packed around

the lighthouse. So the letter goes on, but in short, Wyman then runs for the lighthouse and makes it there, but he gets a little wet. His clothes froze before he gets into the door of the tower. But in there, he finds towels over shoes, gets warmed up. He finds a radio transmitter in the lighthouse, but can't get it to work. Set up all night, blink an SOS with the tower's winter light, manipulating the tower's winter light.

He doubts if rescuers are ever going to find him because he hadn't filed a flight plan, so he freezes his ass off in this lighthouse for two nights. The ice thickens up in his note. He explains he's going to try to make the 11 mile track to the nearest land. His note ends, I'm going to take some equipment with me, binoculars, coat, hat, blankets, et cetera. I will turn them in to the U S coast guard. As soon as I get a shore,

they kick off a whole other search for Wyman and still today, no trace. Lost twice, twice. Yeah. How the hell I never hear that. I don't know. I mean, I think like when you get into this realm, there's just a bottomless pit of stories and mysteries of, you know, planes going down and all kinds of weird stuff happening to people. But yeah, for it to be in your backyard. Yeah. That's a crazy story, man. Season two.

Yep. Hey, American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions.

We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10 percent of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters 1761-1775. So again, this new Mountain Man edition about the beaver skin trade is available for pre-order now wherever audiobooks are sold. It's called

Meat Eaters American History The Mountain Men 1806-1840 by me Stephen Rinella. I, when I was living in the upper, I lived for a very brief time in the upper peninsula, spent a great deal of time over there over a bunch of years. I remember there's two things that kind of interest me when I lived there. Two guys got to shoot out over bear baits. And the other thing was a guy is going to his deer hunting cabin and he parks on a steep incline and gets out to open his own gate. And as he's fiddling with his own gate, his truck slides forward and pins him against his own gate where he then freezes to death. Oh no. I, uh, I was telling Yanni this story because down in Mexico, there's, they

love gates and they're all, every single gate has a different mechanical device holding it shut. And I was telling Yanni that at one point we were antelope hunting and I went out to open the gate to be a, you know, I was driving and Sydney was in the passenger seat. I said, Oh, I'll get the gate for myself. I hopped out, forgot to put it in park. And as I'm up against the fence, I turn around and the trucks rolling at me and I barely get back in time to put the brakes on. So whenever we open gates now, Sydney has like a multi-part checklist of making sure that I've put the truck in park. But he said he has a, I believe a relative who died the same way. Pinned on his gate?

Pinned on, I believe a mailbox. Really? Yeah. That's how the actor Anton Yelchin died. Remember that guy? He was kind of like a young and upcoming actor and yeah, he's truck pinned him against a. Yeah.

Man. I remember some people ran over our mailbox one time and my dad was so mad. He went and got a big chunk of phone pole and dug and set that thing down dog, a six foot pit and sunk it in there and put a bunch of concrete in there. And he said, the next time someone hits this mailbox, he's going to be here in the morning. You know, in the newspaper article, whoever just found the news, the old newspaper article of the, they the news, the old newspaper article

of the, they're abandoning the hunt for the airmen April 13th, they abandoned the search for the airmen. Um, did you look at the next article port here on Michigan, April 13th, Patrick Butler, 22 shot himself in the leg last night while practicing a fast draw. Butler told deputies his thumb slipped on the hammer causing the pistol to discharge. And story. And the headline is wounds himself. Here's an interesting one. It's the last thing we're gonna talk about before we get into what we're gonna talk about. It's kind of a crazy one.

The Boone and Crockett club has opened up, I shouldn't say crazy, interesting. This is an interesting one. The Boone and Crockett club has, they've unanimously approved a request by the Fort Peck tribes to accept bison entries hunted on the Fort Peck Indian reservation in Northern Montana. Most places, if you were going to go shoot a Buffalo, you wouldn't be able to submit them for Boone and Crockett club because it wouldn't be regarded as a fair chase hunt Like even if you shoot, um, like if you shoot a high fence deer Boone and Crockett won't accept a high fence deer. Yeah, there's all kinds of rules to Boone and Crockett Club. There's all kinds of rules

That go above and beyond the what's legal, right? They have their own added requirements above and beyond what's legal, right? They have their own added requirements. For instance, if you're radio hunting using radio communications, Boone and Crockett won't accept your score, even if you're allowed to radio hunt where you're radio hunting. So they've opened up as a way to applaud the work that the Fort Peck tribes have done on creating a wild free-range bison herd on their reservation and using a sustainable management plan. They've had the animals since 1999. They got them from Yellowstone National Park. I actually met Robbie who runs that program. But anyways, if you were to draw a Fort Peck bison tag and kill a big bull, you could have

a bull submitted into Boone and Crockett. Boone and Crockett's going to start accepting it as a fair chase hunt. That's great. It's very cool. No, I like it, man. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's very involved in the conservation movement and I was complaining to him. I was complaining to him.

He and I have a slight, I don't want to say that. I was complaining to him about bison management in the state that I disagree with. Like I sort of disagree with the direction the state of Montana is going on bison management. I'd like there to be more bison, more, I'd like to find ways to reduce conflict with land owners and create more areas for there to be more wild bison. And I do it like in my mind, I'm just like, it's like, I'm doing it like, I think that like as a hunter, I'm all for it. And my buddy's like, but hunters just don't see those animals that way. Hunters are gonna, you you know, hunters are going to go, they're going to draw blood over elk, but they just don't

feel that way about buffalo. And I'm like, but they should. Yeah. And someday they might. Yeah. But he's like, hunters don't get riled up about it. Yeah. I mean, we, we went on the buffalo hunt a couple weeks ago when my wife drew the tag on American Prairie. And I have to say like that was one of the better like wild ass days of hunting that I've had. Just like out on the prairie, no one around, making stocks on big groups of Buffalo. It was like antelope hunting, you know, and it was just like not really something I'd ever envisioned.

Like I couldn't really imagine it playing out the way it did in my mind, but man, it was super cool. It's like if I could do that every year I would. But yeah, it's funny, there just aren't that many opportunities. No. And the opportunities that do exist are so varied in, in sort of nature and how they play out and where you're doing it and what happens and who's there.

But yeah, it's tough to, it's tough to sort of, uh, picture what a buffalo hunts like and picture yourself hunting buffalo. Um, but yeah, it yeah, it's interesting. I wish more people were fired up about it. Hopefully there will become. There's nothing more Montana than a buffalo hunt. I met a dude, I was at this thing not long ago, and I met a guy who did the hunt that I did in Alaska,

and he wanted to get in such a pickle, he had to call the state troopers to get him out. Wow. No, same unit, same unit. I drew river conditions or what? Yeah. Yeah. Ran into all kinds of trouble, got rescued by the troopers.

So I said, well, did you get one? Yeah. He's like, no. Uh, yeah. All right. So let's dig in on Randall. Do me a favor. You're going to start off. Explain Randall, explain what a long hunter is. So the long hunters were a group of individuals in the late colonial period, based primarily in western Virginia, you know, and like the New River

Valley and sort of the area tucked up against the Appalachian Mountains. And at the end of the Seven Years' War, the end of the Anglo-Cherokee War, when sort of violence on the frontier had quieted down, they went across the mountains into what is now Kentucky. Give people a year. So like in the 1760s, so 1763 is sort of how we periodized it. The end of the Anglo- Cherokee War was in 1761. But essentially these were like cash poor farmers who were basically producing enough crops to support themselves and didn't really produce a surplus. And so one way that they could actually make cash to buy the things they needed was to supply white tail deer skins to basically a leather market in Europe, primarily in Europe. Europe. And so guys like Daniel Boone and these groups. Casper Mansker.

Casper Mansker and the Henry Skaggs. You know, they're these kind of like remote clan based settlements. And they would get together groups of like 30 or 40 guys cross over the mountains on horseback and white tail deer hunt for up to a year or more than a year and Boone famously spent like two years across the mountains on a long hunt but you know they're going over into territory where they're not supposed to be and they're shooting deer by the hundreds. I mean they're accumulating thousands of deer skin pelts, thousands of deer skins in the course of a hunt and

hauling them all back on horseback and then selling them off and that's sort of the cash economy of Western Virginia and Western North Carolina during that period was largely based on white-tailed deer skins. So these are market hunters. They're rural people. They didn't leave behind a lot of records. A lot of times, what you hear about them

is sort of based on what was written a couple decades later when people are writing down stories about the early settlers in this county or that county and, you know, say like when he was a young man, he was a long hunter. But it's sort of this fleeting moment of our history of market hunting where, yeah, hunting deer across the Appalachian Mountains was the way you could make a fair bit of money as someone without a lot of means who basically, and you also have to have a little bit of gir in you to go out and do that, you know, it's a dangerous proposition. A lot of gumption.

Yeah, a lot of gumption. But yeah, that's the long hunters, think and then The end of the long hunting era really is brought about With the onset of hostilities in the in the out the lead up to the American Revolution Because the frontier becomes a very violent place and it becomes exceedingly dangerous to And it becomes exceedingly dangerous to grab a couple dozen guys and go out on your own for a year at a time and sort of no man's land. When there's a lot of hostilities going on between tribes that had aligned themselves with Great Britain. And you know, you're a colonial land hungry colonial Westerner. You're kind of the bad guy. So that's that's sort of what brings an end to it.

There's still some long hunters, but a lot of them are either called into military service or they stay home to protect their household or they're just too scared to go West. So. There's a few geopolitical wrinkles within the long hunters that I found to be very interesting. Randall's talking about these sort of, very interesting. Randall's talking about these sort of, if you picture, he's talking about these years that are lead up to the

American Revolution. And when you hear about like revolutionary fervor and the building of the like American patriotic movement, you're thinking of like, you know, Boston and the Boston Tea party and the establishment of the, the minute men and Paul Revere, right. And Thomas pain writing common sense and all these people who are sort of yearning for Liberty and imagining this country that would get free of England. Um, and you sort of want to extend that sentiment out to those frontier settlements, like to, to Boone's clan and these other clans that live way on the frontier.

Um, that is not really how they're feeling. These are by and large, like groups of people who, I mean, they've, they've been born colonists that, you know, they're, they're many of them are US born colonists, but they're, they're much more aligned in their own little frontier world than they are tied to any sense of like the brewing sense of America. But man, they cannot escape. Like they do not escape the war. Because like what Randall mentioned that when they're going off into the first far, what they, what we call the first far west, when they're going off over the Appalachians to hunt deer, Randall said they're not supposed to

be there. They're not supposed to be there for two things. There's one that's kind of obvious, now they're not supposed to be there because there's Native American tribes who claim the land and some like protect it, violently protect it. But what Randall's referring to is, under the own colonial law, the British don't want their American subjects going over there and causing trouble with tribes. So they're all, like Britain is always trying to like, deal with the tribes and try to like, find a sort of, I don't know, man, like a sort of

some kind of static agreement. Yeah. Wars are expensive. They're costly in lives and, and sort of the attention of the colonial administrators. And it just, it's bad for business. And, and, you know, empire is largely a money-making enterprise. And so, yeah, as if they can have peaceful borders with the tribes and maintain sort of stable relationships with the tribes, that's what's best for the crown. Yeah. And, and, and tribes are basically saying like, what, what is with your, these crazy redneck hillbilly American guys pouring over like they're not supposed to be here. But they're often met with hostilities. And then as all

these tensions start to rise between America and England, well, that is a little more complicated because it's like such a mess on the frontier. For a long time, the French to the North and the British are at odds and they each have mercenary forces. Like if you've paid attention, if you ever paid attention to what was going on in, if you looked at like what was going on in portions of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, where we would have these proxy wars, right? Like, the US wasn't supposed to be operating in Cambodia and Laos. So we would align with indigenous groups in Cambodia and Laos to like fight the communists. So we allied with the Hmong, like I think there's like

Montnay forces we allied with, and we would arm them and give them direction and they would like kind of do our bidding. So in the American frontier, it was always this really complex thing because there was tribes aligned with the French and they would attack English colonists, and then later you had, later as the war did get going and stop this, this, stop the sort of long hunting era, you had tribes aligned with the British who would come and attack American settlements. Yeah, and I think too the, you know, there's also a larger recognition by the 1770s among Native people that with the French out of the picture largely, that if British governance in North America goes away, these Americans are going to be unrestrained, right?

And I think like a lot of tribes along that line recognize that the crown was trying to hold back all these settlers. And if America gains its independence, there's going to be no restraining force preventing them from gobbling up more land and more land. So I think, like, in addition to working as proxies, there's also an understanding among Native people that, like, this war is for control of North America, and it's part of this longer, much longer struggle for Indigenous autonomy. When we got done, if you listen to our Longhunters piece, we end it in a interesting, I don't want to call it, I want to say it's interesting

because we did it, but we ended in a very deliberate way. Go ahead, go ahead. We end the Longhunters in a very deliberate way because we end it at a time when the, the first far west, which we're calling the, what we call the first far west sort of melds into what you might think of when you think of the west. Okay. So if you're sitting there right now at home and someone says you, the west, you're typically thinking of the Rocky mountain west in terms of like in American history terms you're thinking of the Rocky Mountain West. At the time the West, at the time the colonial period

the wild west was Kentucky. The wild west was basically south of the Ohio River, south of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was like that was kind of the first, what we call the first far west. And many of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was like, that was kind of the first, what we call the first far west. And many of the same sort of attitudes play out about it, right? It was like the land of promise. It started out where hunters started kind of like poking holes into it and finding ways in it because they were hunting. And then they're coming back and saying, Hey, that place is pretty sweet. There's a lot of money to be made there. And so following the tracks of the saying, hey, that place is pretty sweet. There's a lot of money being made there.

And so following the tracks of the hunters, you have settlers and people trying to establish towns. And then we repeat that same thing in the Rockies. When we end the long hunters, the way we kind of mainly explain what these long hunters were is we do much of it through the lens of one individual, Daniel Boone, the name, Daniel more than any other name in the book, you hear the name Daniel Boone,

because he's come to in many ways, exemplify the period, the period and exemplify the long hunters and was a, and was esteemed in his own time as a hunter. Boone as Kentucky filled up, Boone got very bitter about America. And he got very bitter about Kentucky. Boone had made a lot of land claims and had like bought land from guys that didn't actually own it and made claims. And then other people made claims on top of his claims. And at a point he would have been on paper, extraordinarily wealthy with land holdings, but he gets into legal battle after legal battle, after legal battle,

where it's like, well, sure. You bought it from so-and-so, but so-and-so didn't really own it. Right. Like so-and-so bought it under some dubious stuff. Congress undid the purchase. So yeah, you bought it, but you bought it from a guy that didn't have it. I don't know what to tell you about your money, but the land's not yours. Or he marked areas and then he didn't file it properly. Which is a very common thing throughout America. Like when you talk about these

rolling frontiers, there's layers and layers of land speculators and fraudulent claims and battles over who has rightful ownership of land. So Boone is just wrapped up in all of this and on the losing end. Comes out of it, like Boone comes out of it broke. He leaves the first far west and goes to kind of the new western frontier of Missouri. But he goes to

Missouri before the Louisiana Purchase. He says he's never going back to Kentucky. And one of the things we talked about in Longhounds is you have this idea of there's this historian that even said, or a commentator, maybe you remember who it was, who said not only is Daniel Boone, he says he's a Kentucky emotion. Oh yeah. But he says that he's an honorary founding father. He's become in the American imagination, an honorary founding father. But Boone, one of his final acts as an American is to be like, I'm done with America. Done with Kentucky, done with America. I'm going to live under the Spanish crown.

And be a subject of the Spanish king. And the Spain said to Boone, hey, come live in Spain. We'll set you up. Come live in Missouri. We'll give you land here. And he's like, adios, America. Yep. So it's funny, like the way that Boone is this regarded now as this,

you know, there's paintings of Boone going through the Cumberland Gap and they kind of set it up, like he's like Moses. He's like a Moses figure bringing his people to the promised land, you know? Like going through the Cumberland Gap is like the Red Sea being parted, right? And Boone became very celebrated like this, like a leader of men, you know, and he was, but he was like kind of in it for himself in it for his family. Not did not identify as an American patriot, but I'm kind of getting to the main thing is Boone winds up in Missouri and then completely out of his own control. He winds up back in the U S he winds up back in the U S simply because before he dies, the US buys, does the Louisiana purchase, and thereby takes possession of Boone's new place in Missouri. The frontier caught up with him.

We end the long hunters with this place, like I said, where the first far west melds into the new, into the new far west, the second far west, the American west, is we get into the, the, the, the myth, perhaps reality. No one's quite sure that Boone, as the old man, he starts hunting with a, he has a slave and he starts hunting with his, a slave and goes on a bunch of trips with a slave toward the end of his life. But before he gets too terribly old, he hooks up with some guys and does or doesn't go up the Missouri all the way to the Rockies. people are still like, it's really not known. He definitely would go up the Missouri to hunt. Some people think he made it all the way to the Yellowstone river, perhaps. The historian Ted Franklin Blue has written about what is the evidence that he did,

what is the evidence that he didn't. But like Boone, the long hunter, could have been like a very early version of a mountain man or not. Yeah. When you looked into it, what did you wind up feeling about it? I mean, I think there's, he obviously went up river and my sense is that most people are skeptical of the idea

that he made it up to like see the Rockies for himself. Yeah. But I think regardless of whether or not he saw the Rockies, that parallel is really astounding. That like he's going up the Missouri River in the early 1800s, right as this new sort of like ball of like frontier energy is getting unleashed westward up that river. And I might be jumping the gun here a little bit, but one of the interesting things that I found in the research for the new book is that, as Boone is an old man living in, I

believe, St. Charles, Missouri, sort of in the St. Louis area, one of his neighbors... No, he stayed there at the boat art, and he, the, his family stayed at the mouth there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but one of his neighbors there towards the end of his life was a man named John Colter, uh, who settled there after he lived out one of the most legendary careers as a mountain man. Oh, is that where Colter wound up?

Right? Yeah. By Colter, Colter and Boone were neighbors for a brief period. Oh, is that where Coulter wound up? Right? Yeah, Coulter and Boone were neighbors for a brief period because Coulter died shortly after coming back from the mountains. But there's all these weird, it's a small world, like a small little fraternity when you, in the grand scheme of things. And so there's all these weird overlaps and parallels, but Boone's Boone's life, especially is like really interesting for just mapping all of this historical transformation that unfolds from East to West in the course of a, you know, a lifespan.

If I was to become a playwright and I won't, but if I did, I would do a play, Maybe Phil would help me out and we'd turn it into a musical. Well, we've already got the one. We've already got the one play idea in our, uh, play idea. Yeah. Remember this. We're going to do a Glen Gary, Glen Ross, deer camp. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, my body's going to see, I'm so jealous. Bill Burr is doing Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross right now. Oh, he is?

It's a stacked lineup. It's Bill Burr, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKeon, Kieran Culkin, it's nuts. My body's going to do it. That's cool, it's gonna be awesome. I met Bill Burr very briefly, and he seemed to be annoyed with me. Doesn't he spearfish or something?

I think he should be, I think that's a compliment. Yeah, well, I was talking to- I saw him live. Isn't he spirit? I think he should be. I think that's a compliment. Yeah. Well, I was, cause I was talking to, I was at, I was, I was back at the, I was at, uh, Joe Rogan was doing a comedy club bit. So I was there hanging out and I got to come back and you know, you hang out with all the comedians, you just stand there cause you're not funny like they are. So you just try to be like, I don't say shit.

Cause I don't want them to think that I think I'm funny. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? You just stand in there, but I've got an idea. You really want to talk to Joe and you can tell he was very annoyed that I was like back. Like it's like, who's this idiot? Yeah. He's not a comic. Does he know? Well, he probably knows that. I ain't funny. Like bill bird. You figured that out in a hurry. Uh,

Oh, the play. Yeah. It's Boone hunting with his slave. Hmm. As an old man. Yeah, that would be interesting. And they have a lot of deep conversations. Another play, because I'm developing this theory that John Coulter, that John Coulter had, that John Coulter had a horrible post-traumatic stress disorder. Mm-hmm. I don't think that's a stretch. No. Based on what we know about his life. Going through what he went through and then the timing of when he quit being a mountain man

and how short his life was after that happened to him, I think that it kind of blew his mind out and I might do another play follow-up play but I don't know how to write plays but you know if I did Phil Phil no one knows how to write plays until you until you start writing a play anyone can be a playwright anyone can write books Steve no no um how dare you film? We've been talking about market hunters. You know, let's jump ahead for a minute. We just wrapped up what long hunters are. Yeah. So there's an interesting way that American history flows and we're trying to like kind of follow this line of American history where you'll see we have these bracketed chunks of dates and they're imperfect, but we say 1863 to 1775.

Meaning there's a big frontier war, you know, a big war between colonists and tribes on the frontier. And it's just way too hostile for long hunters to go hunt to the West. The war dies down. It gets like, you're like, you'd be like, Hey, you can go over there and not die. And they hit it real hard. Probably.

Yeah. Well, they let them die. You have less of a chance you're going to die if you go on the first far West. And then all of a sudden the war blows up again. It's just, it's, it's like suicide to go hunt the first far West. And so the era ends And the primary thing they're

after is they're after deer skins. When I say it's imperfect because they're also trapping a lot of beaver and they're trapping otter. Because they only want the deer skins in the offseason. You want thin deer skins, not winter skins. So they would hunt deer and then at some point beaver furs had come prime and they would trap beaver and otter and some other fur bears, but they're mainly after deer skins. When we pick up this next big like commodity push, this next big market hunting push is when you get into the strictly the beaver trade, and we talk about the mountain, which we're going to talk about. The mountain men, when you go through all the mountain man stories, they are fixated on beaver skins.

They do some otter for sure, but they are not also hunting deer. They are not hunting deer hides. They're eating all kinds of stuff, but they're very, very focused on beaver. Yeah, if you read like a journal and they arrive at a new river valley, they don't say like, oh, there's no beaver, but it's still kind of cool. There's some elk and buffalo and a couple otter here and there.

They just say no beaver moving on. Yeah, that's what they're after. As it's funny, cause we talk about, we'll explain these date ranges, but we talk about the main mountain man era run 1806 to 1840. What you get when you get outside of, when you go on the far end of that, you get where you wind up having these like mountain man type figures, or what they would call trapper traders at the time. And you start to see that they're getting very interested in trading buffalo ropes. So all that like Larpenture,

Charles Larpenture got as trader. It's like they're doing some traffic and beaver hides, but there's an emerging market for buffalo and they're engaging with tribes to get buffalo. They'll still talk about beaver, but they're into Buffalo. And then if you drift a little while later, then you drift up into the 1870s, it's just all Buffalo. Like that's it. It's the Buffalo trade. Yep.

So we're going to do one where we explore the Buffalo trade. And it's funny because when we do that, we're going to have this segue where these like Beaver, where the, like the American West and the beaver trade in the West kind of transitions into a Buffalo industry. Yeah. And the trot, the trade in Buffalo robes, because initially the most valuable commodity you can get is a, a skin with the hair on, called buffalo robe. That's an extension of this bigger umbrella

of the fur trade. Yeah. But by the 1870s, it's a totally different animal. It's a fully industrialized slaughter for just the skin to be used in leather making. Later when we get into the Buffalo hide hunters, the Buffalo hunters, you'll see this, there's this thing that switches.

Early, there's like this thing called, there's an era called where they're at and they're interested in what they call the robe trade. And in the 1860s, the robe trade was a big deal. What they mean by the robe trade is you are American, the American economy wants what they would call Indian tanned robes. So tribal hunters, that's who drove this market, is like tribal hunters, Great Plains tribes, would go and kill buffalo in the winter time,

and they would tan the hides and sell a completely tanned, ready to go hide. And that was the robe trade. The robe trade eventually moves to the hide trade, where you're just selling dried skins, tacked out dried, from any season, didn't matter. We're gonna explore that whole thing, but I'm just kind of setting up the way that I guess the point I'm trying to

make is when we're looking at like this history of market hunting in the West and all these different things they're after we're trying to bracket it. But like I said, it's imperfect bracketing because these things bleed into each other. Daniel Boone was a beaver trapper in Kentucky and a deer skin hunter. A guy like Jim Bridger was a beaver trapper in Wyoming,

Montana, Colorado, Idaho, whatever, became a robe trader. Right? It's not like one generation of these people dies and a new generation starts up, it switches. But what we're doing is we're trying to look at the most with hunters and trappers kind of like what are the most sought-after commodities and when do these commodity markets peak? And so with that Randall, talk about why, explain why we wound up when we kicked it around, why we decided the 1806 to 1840 was the mountain man era. Because someone might go like, well they were trapped in Beaver before that, they trapped Beaver after that. Yeah, and they're, yeah

exactly. And I think for the purposes of our project, we chose 1806, I think maybe August 17th. Yeah, we have an exact date. 1806, because that's the date when John Coulter turns around and heads back up to Missouri to trap beaver. And so really the beginning of our story is the Louisiana Purchase and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, the Corps of Discovery, sent by Jefferson to explore a water route to the Pacific.

And among the different sort of economic opportunities and commodities that they're taking note of in their journals, as they make this unimaginable journey to the Pacific and back, is they're noting that there's a lot of beaver. And at the time, beaver is a very valuable commodity, beaver fur used to make felt. And so by the time they're on their way back to Missouri, the Lewis and Clark expedition, they have a hunter with them named John Coulter, who was recruited specifically for this Mission and as they're on their way back to st. Louis the expedition encounters two

Trappers and traders who are headed up the Missouri and they want to check out some of the stuff that Lewis and Clark and the gang had just been through and so John Colter seeks To end his term of service with the expedition because he wants to join these guys and head back upriver to the you know quote-unquote untouched trapping country that they'd seen near the Three Forks of the Missouri outside of present-day Bozeman, Montana. By Sess House. By Sess House. Yeah, he basically just wants to go to Sess House.

President Dave Hoesman, Montana. By Sess House. By Sess House, yeah, he basically just wants to go to Sess House. And yeah, and that kicks off, I mean, for Coulter, that kicks off a several years of some of the most harrowing and sort of just jaw-dropping wilderness adventures that you can imagine. Solo journeys across vast expanses,

running for his life from a group of Blackfeet who had captured him. I mean, Coulter is sort of like a having his buddies got smeared all over. Yeah. Coulter is sort of like a, I mean, he's almost like a comic book character of just like astounding feats. Yeah. Um, it's, it's funny that how little is known about them. Yeah. You know, there's very little known about them. You can kind of tell that, uh, he, he at least got drunk once. Yeah. He got in trouble. He got in trouble for booze.

And yeah, as did, you know, several of the Lewis and Clark expedition members when they're sitting there waiting to head up river, because they come down to St. Louis prior, the winter prior to departing to the Pacific. And so sitting around in their camp, there's a lot of disciplinary action required to keep these guys in line. But yet- A good detail about the Coulter deal is when the Lewis and Clark expedition is coming down to Missouri, and they're getting close to getting back you know they're kind of

the smooth sailing portion of the trip Colter's runs into these trappers and he wants to go back up with them and he asked permission and I was like this little detail yeah Lewis and Clark the the the leaders say, if everyone else here will promise not to ask the same thing, you can go and everyone agrees. I won't ask to leave and thereby they let culture go. If everyone had to promise they wouldn't ask to, if everybody wants to do this, we're going to have a real issue. I'm going to start doing that with my kids. Yeah. One of them asked to do something. I'll say, if you can get your brother and sister to promise not to ask me the same thing, that's fine. It's a good system. Nothing would happen. It maintains order. But yeah, we kind of kick that.

That's, Coulter turning up river is why we start with that year of 1806. And you know when we're talking about mountain men, we're talking about a type of individual who is a nomadic beaver trapper. And so Coulter sort of turning around and heading back up river without a real destination in mind just wants to get out there and accumulate furs. We're sort of calling him the first mountain man. And obviously like anybody could, you know, someone could make any number of arguments pointing to other figures.

This is like one of the choices you make when you're telling a story is where do you start, where do you end? But I think Coulter symbolically, especially as associated as he is with the Lewis and Clark expedition, the opening up of the, the upper Missouri river, the upper Missouri region and his exploration of the Northern Rockies, like Coulter is as good as anybody for sort of the honor of the first mountain man. Did you hear the Kentucky writer, Chris Offit? The name's familiar. He wrote a book and a bunch of people had a problem with some of the honor of the first mountain man. Did you hear the Kentucky writer, Chris Offit? The name's familiar. He wrote a book and a bunch of people had a problem with some of the things he said in his book.

His response was, you should write your own book. Yeah. Tell me about it. That's totally fair. So that's how we decided, that's our choice. Yeah. We debated it. We weighed the pros and cons.

And we're not the first ones to make that argument. I mean, I think a lot of, a lot of historians over the years have argued that culture, you know, symbolically represents the beginning of a new era. Um, it also helps me know his name. Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, that's because there's other dudes, you know, there's dudes that could slip through the cracks. Yeah. But he just, he's a convenient cause we know about them.

And then he did a lot of things to kind of set up the trade. Yes. He did a lot of things that would sort of push how this would go down. Yes. And I think before we get into the, where we end up in 1840, the sort of arc of this mountain man era is important to understand sort of the general contours of how it goes because initially people who want to capitalize on the FURs of the upper Missouri attempt to mimic a model that had been established by the Hudson's Bay Company, which is the Canadian fur trading monopoly. And it had largely operated with big forts controlled by traders. Can you hold tight one minute? Yep. You folks listen, no doubt you've in some way heard Hudson Bay Company. So just as America has their holdings, okay, to the North. Kind of a, basically you think of it like basically the line was pretty well established, our border with Canada. Yeah, there's some fuzzy areas, but you could sketch it on a map without too

much inaccuracy, based on your understanding of contemporary borders. Yeah, like roughly imagine the US-Canada border. remained British. Um, and when you hear the word Hudson Bay company, people kind of think of it like synonymous with the crown. But what it was is they basically gave a charter, it'd be like, like, let's say we were to seize Greenland and we then said to a company, Bechtel, I don't know, we say to a company,

you have sole ability. Greenland is effectively yours to conduct business on. It's yours. Yeah. We're going to control competition to you, right. For, for a time. And it's like, you have the license to conduct business. So Hudson Bay company was a company, but it held the like charter from the crown to exploit the resource. Yeah. They had, they had a monopoly on all the waters flowing into Hudson's Bay, which stretches a real long way into Western Canada. So they weren't the government, well it gets tricky because I mean they kind of were the government. Yeah. I mean they operated with the blessing of the government, with the force of the government, but they were a company. Yeah, it's not the Hudson's Bay company is much closer to sort of an empire in its own right than it is to

like a trading post. Yeah. Um, it's There's no American parallel. Not at that time. Not an obvious one. Yeah. I mean, I mean, like you could compare it to maybe Exxon as in terms of like it's, yeah, not, not at the time, but like a company

that has the power to sort of move the needle in terms of international affairs and, and control over a huge swath of territory. And, um, but yeah, the Hudson's Bay company was founded in the late 1600s. It was founded in the late 1600s and it set the standard for efficiency and profitability and running a fur trade at a scale that no one had ever really seen before. So they have this network of forts extending to the west through the Great Lakes. Um, and what's happening at these is native people are the ones supplying the first and then their trade, the Hudson's Bay company is trading with native people for, you know, manufactured goods and commodities from Europe. And so the, the Hudson's Bay company is this huge logistical, like octopus

reaching into Western Canada and bringing huge quantities of furs to the East for shipment onto Britain. And if our symbol of the American West becomes the horse, the symbol of the Hudson Bay Company is the canoe. Yes. They run a water, they run a water based system and they, they develop this whole culture of, um, the voyagers paddlers 60 strokes a minute. Yeah.

All this shit is moved in giant canoes with dudes that can carry at portages, dudes that can carry 200 pounds that you can portage 200 pounds at a time. And they run this whole thing. I mean, not there's exceptions, but generally this whole thing is run in canoes. Yeah. And, and I think too, like the, in addition to canoes, the essential ingredient in their operation is having these trade relationships with tribes in the areas where they operated. And they're not always good,

like there's obviously flare ups of violence and hostility, but there's sort of this underlying everything they do is they are able to get indigenous people to produce the furs they want wherever they go. Yeah. Unlike the Americans who tend to start every negotiation with a shootout. Yeah. And so that's what, so that's sort of the start of our story is like all of a sudden

the Louisiana purchase happens. The United States claims ownership to all these lands, west of the Mississippi river. And, um, people who want to capitalize on the beaver furs there begin to imagine like their own domestic counterpart to the Hudson's Bay Company. And they don't really, they sort of just try to reproduce this model and it doesn't work the same on the Great Plains and in the Rockies as it did up in Canada. One, the political situation is more fraught and they are running into violence and getting

themselves on the wrong side of tribes like the Blackfeet, who are more resistant to white incursion. And then the other thing that's sort of interesting when you look at it is that a lot of tribes that they encounter aren't that interested in upending their life way to become beaver trappers. At this point in time, a lot of the people that they're encountering are equestrian buffalo hunting people, and they have a system that works for them. And they have a system that works for them and It's just not compatible with breaking up into small little bands of beaver hunters and Hitting every Creek and River in the neighborhood and bring them all back to these trading posts. So some felt it was demeaning. Yeah

Some thought why bother I get everything I need from buffalo hunting. Yeah, there there's, there's one, there's one coat we have in there. That's from a tribal member who I believe is talking to an emissary from the Hudson's Bay company who's kind of gone down to the Dakotas. And he says something like, you know, I could get on board with beaver hunting if you could do it on horseback. Like if this was like a real hunt, like, but I'm just not interested in crawling around as he puts it in the bowels of the earth on my hands and knees to catch these beavers.

So it's just like not, you know, the, the American interests are not as readily able to establish productive trade with the tribes encounter as the Hudson's Bay Company has been. So there's another kind of cool wrinkle in it is they encounter later beaver trappers encounter some big horn sheep hunting specialists of Shoshone band that people call the sheep eaters later maybe at the time they call them the sheep eaters. High mountain people. And when they, the mountain men, the trappers explained to them that you know they were after this giant rodent and they were kind of like, oh shit we ate all those. And then he pointed out that they

actually burned the hair off them when they get them. Yeah which is the valuable part, the only part that they're interested in. Yeah they're like, my bad we ate them. And I think he says they burned the hair off them because they could get better drippings that way from the meat. Yeah. Keep the fat in. We talked about Colter, like why he's a good guy to talk about why Colter is helpful and talk about the mountain men. Colter kind of has these two,

besides his time with Lewis and Clark Colter, John Colter has these two besides this time with Lewis and Clark Coulter, John Coulter has these two big adventures. The sort of the most celebrated adventures of John Coulter. One is Coulter's run, um, which has been reenacted and reenacted in every documentary show about the West, like ad nauseam, right? Coulter's run. Um, the other thing is, is Coulterters, Coulter maybe may or may not have been the first, uh, European to go through Yellowstone national park, which is called a Coulter's hell of these two

famous things. It's kind of like one happens like really as a mountain man. And one happens in a pre-mount man era, because when Coulter did his big mega hike, a mid winter, oftentimes solo mega hike through the Tetons, through the Absarokas, like all order damn place, through Yeltsin national park, he's trying to establish this Hudson Bay thing. They go up and they build a fort where the bigorn river flows into the Yellowstone right around there. And they need to go find tribes who want to trap beaver and trade. So that big loop Coulter does is trying to talk tribes into becoming beaver trappers. Yep. And then you see just a couple of years later at the Coulter's run period, Coulter is trapping beavers and he probably always traps some Beavers, but you see the switch where they're like,

it's not that thing Coulter tried to go do, like say, hey boys, trap Beavers, come sell them to us. Like it just doesn't take off. Yeah. And there's one historian has described this period as a period of trial and error where fur interests are trying to figure out how they're gonna get these beavers to market and to make a long story short by the 1820s it's clear that if if the US is gonna take advantage of this resource they're gonna send American trappers out to trap the beavers themselves.

Tribes be damned. And yeah, not work through the tribes. And the result of that is they need a way to, if they're not operating from fixed posts and fixed bases where the FERS come to them, they need to find another way to get these huge quantities of furs back to St. Louis. And so that leads to the invention of the rendezvous, which is a logistical invention whereby every summer there's a fixed location and all these trappers spread across hundreds of miles come come together,

and trade the furs they've accumulated for what they need to survive the year ahead. So these trappers are basically, and these are the mountain men, they're living year round in the Rockies, they're not traveling back and forth to quote unquote civilization with their harvest, they're living in the Rockies year round,

providing all their own meat and shelter and all that. And then once a year, they bring their accumulated harvest to this gathering that's like a huge encampment, trading them to the fur companies who come out in caravans with supplies, and then the caravan brings the furs back to market. So this rendezvous is kind of the, like the beating heart of the mountain man era.

And the first real rendezvous is like in 1825 and the last real rendezvous is in 1840. And so that's the book ends of like the Rocky Mountain rendezvous system. So that's where you get to circle this all the way back around. That's how we get to the end date of 18040. So 1806 to 1840. And yeah, there's certainly beaver trappers after 1840. Some of these guys go out to Oregon and they start, they had their own little spin-off rendezvous, right? But like, this, this like fabled age of the mountain men that, you know, was getting headlines in newspapers in New York and, you know, international interest in these strange figures

who are nomadic trappers. That golden age is really the rendezvous period. One of the reasons that people that grow up hunting, you know, it's true of me, it's true of Rand, like you grow up hunting and you grow up admiring the mountain men, however like superficially your understanding is of them when you're a kid. I kind of got it, but there's parts of it I didn't understand, but I knew enough to know that they were the epitome of self-sufficient hunters and trappers, right? They were like the gold standard of American backwoodsmen. Part of that is that self-sufficiency. Like, when we talk about that Hudson Bay model, where you have these big river systems and you have hired canoers and you have people that live in forts and they grow crops. They might hire hunters, they're supplied with food, right? So you come in in the

summer, they get all, you bring in all the flour and sugar and coffee and if you work at a fort for the Hudson Bay Company, you might not really need to leave the fort. And they're fed by Hudson Bay company. The employees are. What's so crazy about the mountain men thing is when they finally hit on this system that works for them, they just say, you boys are going to have to figure it out. Yeah. And you'll have trappers, you'll have mountain men that'll do three, four, five years. it'll do three, four, five years. And it's, it is a diet of wild meat. No support, no structures, no cabins, no support with food whatsoever. They have one chance to resupply and they have a horse and a pack horse or maybe a couple pack animals. One chance to resupply, one chance to get any news

from the outside world. And then they're just figuring it out. Yeah. Three, 350 days a year. They are living off of what they have on their pack horse, which is basically a couple of traps, a rifle, a blanket, a knife, maybe an ax. It's a very limited kit and they're simply going where the beaver are. And it's, it's really like a day to day existence. There often aren't long plans of like, we're

going to hit here, here and here. It's like, we're going to go to this valley, see if anybody's trapped at recently. We get there, someone tells you, oh, and a lot of times too, they're encountering tribes who might point them in the direction of a place they might want to go, or point out to them that they might not want to go to this other place where they're thinking of going because they're going to get killed if they go there. So it's a very, it's a very, um, because they're gonna get killed if they go there. So it's a very, it's a very like improvisational life, like it there's, it's the only dates on their

calendar are the rendezvous. Other than that, it's like how can we get as many beavers as we, as we can between now and then? We do, we have a chapter in the book called Strangers in a Strange Land, and in it we explore this very, very complex relationship that the mountain men develop with the tribes. Complex, I'll give you a handful of reasons why it's very complex. There are some tribes, the Flatheads, Nez Perce, who throw in really heavily with the mountain men. They kind of become mountain men. They ride with the mountain men.

They group some camp with the mountain men. Like they throw in and become like trappers. Some tribes just absolutely resist them. Like the most classic, not the most classic, but so like, if there was a primary enemy to the mountain men was the blackfeet. The blackfeet never got comfortable with the mountain men trapping beaver on their land. Other, there were other tribes where it was a little more touch and go, like things with the crow was a little more touch and go. But that is, it was very, like a very complex part of it. If you look at some of these expeditions, they seem like rolling gunfights.

Yeah. They're going to shoot outs all the time, but they're often in shoot outs, um, where they're with members from one tribe and they're fighting with the tribe's ancestral enemies, or just trappers are fighting with a tribe, or just trappers are fighting with a faction of a tribe, but then there's other factions of the same tribe that they're not in conflict with. At the same time, they're adopting native mannerisms, adopting native dress, marrying native women, adopting native religion. At the same time, they're using ways of describing Native Americans, which is like highly derogatory.

But then you look like they grow their hair long, they have feathers in their hair, they decorate their horses, they marry native women, they learn native languages. Yeah, there's a quote from one of the accounts that we looked at, where they basically say you can't pay a free trap or a higher compliment than to tell them you'd mistaken him for an Indian. Even guys commenting, they start

walking, The mountain men would start walking like an Indian. So it's just this, it's like you can't, on one hand you want to go like, oh there are these great egalitarians, you know, and like totally adapted to this lifestyle. But then what contradicts that is they demonstrate at times a very hostile relationship to tribal members, stereotyping tribal members all the time, not giving people the benefit of the doubt. And the other hand, you want to go, oh, they were like these rapacious marauders. But what complicates that vision is all the contradictory material about how well they interwove with some tribes.

Yeah. And I think, I think to maybe just step back and look at the bigger picture, it's not like the mountain men were this big wave of white quote-unquote civilization, you know, coming head to head with Native America. Like, there's this pre-existing politics in the Northern Rockies and the Upper Missouri. All these tribes had these pre-existing relationships and power struggles with one another. And it's a very dynamic period of time in native history because of the introduction of firearms and horse culture has only been there for, you know, 150 years, maybe, um, and there's trade goods coming down, like firearms

coming down from the North, from Hudson's Bay Company. And so if you're a tribe like the Blackfeet and you see American traders and trappers developing good relationships or at least trading material goods with your historic rivals, like all of a sudden these interlopers are a threat to you. And so the mountain men are pretty insignificant in their relative numbers, but what they represent in terms of upsetting the status quo in Native America is pretty significant. And so I think part of what we do in that chapter

is try to explain the underlying dynamics that shape Day-to-day encounters between a mountain man Who runs into a band of Shoshone hunters or who runs into a band of Blackfeet hunters or? Whatever else because it's it varies widely And it also depends on the individuals involved. Yeah, you know, there are some individuals within tribes who are much more hostile to white incursion and there are some individuals in those same tribes who are Perhaps more accommodating and so it's just like you never really know What you're gonna get?

Yeah, a good way to think about it like Randallall makes a good point, that there was no starting point with Euro-American tribal relations. There is, but you have to go back hundreds of years and even then it's fuzzy. But like earlier we talked about Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark, they really hit it off with the Nez Perce, right? They kind of made it like a little pact. We would later violate that pact, but long after the Mountain Man era, we would violate that pact in the mid mid 1870s. But they made a pact and the Nez Perce stayed true to it. They're like, we're friendly with the Americans. And they held that for a long time. The only Indians Lewis and Clark killed, Blackfeet. Yep. And Blackfeet did not have a friendly pact with the Americans. So even then, like

this guy like Coulter, who was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition and our first mountain man, like he has some exposure to how complex relationships were. Right. There's not like a pan tribal. I guess the thing people try to picture is that there's like a sort of pan tribal attitude to Euro-Americans or a pan-tribal attitude to the mountain men, it was not. It was, yeah, allegiances and hostilities and those things that change all the time. Yeah, and there's another, there's another quote we use in the book from Elliot West, who's been on the podcast, who's a Western historian, and he says there's a lot of times sort of unconsciously people think about Native Americans as sort of just waiting in the

background for Europeans to show up on the scene. As if they're apart from history until Europeans arrive there. When really like, Europeans are walking into a political and cultural and socioeconomic environment that is just as complicated as any, you know, relationship between royal families and France. You know, you think about Europe, you think about all this palace intrigue and rivaling factions and, you know, these relationships that go back hundreds of years and how all this factors into the decisions that are made on the ground. And like, that's the same environment that the mountain men are walking into, but they're ignorant to all of that. And so it's really hard to just simplify and say, mountain men did this, native people did this, or there's no real model of relations

that can be simplified between the mountain men and the people they encounter. Yeah, in the book, we really spell this out by looking at a period of a few months where a mountain man who kept the meticulous journal named Osborne Russell, a period of a few months of examining his interactions with Native Americans, wildly varied. Yeah. They shoot at him. He shoots at them.

Some of them save his ass. Some of them, they party, they feed him. They tell him where to go. They save, they steal his stuff, you know, and they were using they in quotes. Cause like he's encountering people from different cultures and different political groups. Um, but he never knows what he's going to get. Yeah. he never knows what he's gonna get. Yeah, he never knows what he's gonna get, but the one thing you can say is that his life during those few months is profoundly shaped by his encounters with native people. And he

also, one of the things we point out in there is he has learned the Shoshone language and he takes great pride in the fact that he can speak Shoshone and that he's able to repay his, a chief who hosts him for a few days, he says he can repay him by telling jokes in his own language to him. And like that's the mark of a good guest. So it's like, whatever you might assume about how mountain men and, and native people interacted, it's probably a lot more, it's a lot messier than you think. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think that every, um, every aspect of the story, no matter how well you think you know it, every aspect of the story, you're gonna, you're gonna come away from this

with being like, oh, like a lot more to it than I thought. The way we divided it up, we divided the whole project out, we're gonna share one of them right now. We're gonna share chapter six out of 12 chapters. But the way it rolls is we talk about mountain man country, meaning there's an introduction and then that introduces the mountain man era. And then we talk about mountain man country, meaning

since we narrowly define what a mountain man is, we define where a mountain man was. Right. What, why at a certain point north, you weren't a mountain man. Why at a certain point East, you weren't a mountain man. Why at a certain point West, you weren't a mountain man. And why at a certain point South, you weren't a mountain man. I'll give a clue to one. You go much further South and there ain't no beavers. Not many. I'll give two clues. You go north and you got problems with the British. We explain all that. We

explain the start of the mountain man era in a chapter called Up the Missouri. We explain kind of who the mountain men were, like what kind of dude became a mountain man. It's mixed. A lot of orphans, and a surprising number of people who were escaping indentured servitude is kind of a theme. And we also talk about in that chapter how they become a mountain man, how they insert themselves into this whole sprawling logistical financial corporate operation. We could have called it, So You Want to Be a Mountain Man. Maybe we'll save that for volume three. Chapter five, Running the Line, it's about like, you

know, with all this crazy intrigue and all this, you know, tribal interactions and hunting and starving to death and dying and gun fights. We keep reminding people that they were there to catch beavers. Running the line is like, how were they catching the beavers? How did they trap beaver? And you'll, you'll be a little surprised about how much guesswork goes into that. There's a thing we run into working on these projects where there's some things that are so mundane that no one, there's some things that are perceived to

be so mundane that no one explains it. Like picture 100 years from now, someone trying to figure out how we flossed. Yeah, or, and you'd be like, well, I see it says he flossed. Well, did he start like with his molars? Well, I don't know. Just says he flossed. Like there's not a really like, like the right people weren't writing it down or, or somebody, somebody shows up today and they're like, they're on their phones all the time. And someone who's using a phone in their diary, they're not gonna say, well, I got on my phone

and I opened Instagram and then I got a few emails. And when you wanna send an email, you have to go click this button and click that button. And so they're not writing that down, but someone who arrives there and goes, holy shit, these guys are on their phones all the time. That person probably has no idea what he's looking at when someone's on their phone. And so a lot of the more detailed accounts we get of like setting traps and trapping

operations, they're written by outside observers who find this fascinating, but they don't know what they're looking at necessarily. The analogy we use is, is picture that you have a plumber, a very skilled plumber, and he comes in to do a repair in your house. And then you have a land, a homeowner who has no idea about any of it. And later you say to the homeowner, Hey, how did he fix that? Well, I mean, he, uh, he had like a ranch. Hey, he turned something. The thing about toilets is I don't really know. It took him about an hour. There's two heights of urinal. And, and often the accounts of like how they did what they did are from people later outsiders who had no idea trying to offer up their sort of synopsis of what it was

that they saw happening. But we get somewhere in it. The chat that we're gonna share with you guys is Hunger and Thirst. It's about being in a land of feast and famine. We have a chapter about the rendezvous. so that collection of days that that couple weeks every year. We have a chapter about the fur. What happens to the fur? How does the fur get to Europe? What is it used for? How does it, basically this is everything of like, how does it get from a

trapper's hands? How does it get turned into a product and how does that product flow through time and space? Tricks of the trade is just all the crazy shit they knew how to do and how they knew how to do it. Amputations, whatever. Like stuff they had to know and where they got it from. Chapter 10 is about what happens in the wintertime? They would spend months just the wintertime. They would spend months just stuck in places. They would spend months stuck in valleys. Every 10 days is about death. We pull that name from, there was a historian, what was his name? I believe it's from Stanley Vestal's biography of Bridger.

There's this one historian who, who takes a look at it and he, he, he comes, he has this idea that when he, when he takes a look at the time period and the people involved, he throws out that it seems like a mountain man died every 10 days. Um, Randall spent a lot of time on that. Randall doesn't think that that's right, but what does seem right is one in ten died a violent death. Yeah, and I would point out too, like, there's whole, there's so many secondary sources when you're researching this stuff. Like, there's a historian who's published an article in the Journal put out by the Museum of the Mountain Man where he has cataloged every reference to every Mountain Man dying Hmm and cause of death date what we know about him what happened and so he has like quanta fit quantitative

Findings about what killed Mountain men and when and why. And so when you look at something like that, it's tougher to believe sort of the anecdotal like Stanley Vestal argument, but there's no question that a lot of them died. Yeah. Well, we've, in this, we're able to put some numbers around some things

you might be surprised that there's numbers around. Yeah. One thing be surprised that there's numbers around. Yeah. One thing that surprised me is, is there's about the way we define what a mountain man was, there was about, there was probably three or 4,000 mountain men. Yeah. During the period we're talking about, it's probably three or four, three or 4,000 mountain men, three or 4,000 people would have kind of met that definition at some point in their life. And, and hundreds of them died violently. Chapter 12, the last one is trapped out and it's about the, it's about the sort of two things. There's the thing that killed the mountain man era

and then there's the other thing that would have killed it if that hadn't killed it. In the end. Economics and ecology. Yeah, economics and ecology. What we didn't do, if we were smart, we would have done this. I'm only just current to me now. We would have found a way to bleed into the Buffalo trade. Well, maybe we can do that. Maybe we can do that bleeding in chapter one of

volume three. Yeah, we'll bleed it. That's how it goes. That in short is, yeah, when you hear the term a frontiersman, which is kind of synonymous with a long hunter, when you hear the term a long hunter, when you hear the term a frontiersman, which is kind of the synonymous with the long hunter, when you hear the term a long hunter, when you hear the term the mountain man, that's what we're talking about. Dig in more, check out the chat, check out the chat that's coming at you right now, hunger and thirst, and then 12 bucks, 11, 12 bucks? I think so. To get the complete thing. Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840, dropping now. And if you're listening on the day this comes out, you can pre-order and it'll download on your phone at midnight. My guess is you could just buy it. I don't know.

Yep. I think it'll just be there all of a sudden. Yeah. But for those of you who listen to this, the day after it drops, you can go buy it and listen right away. And trust that we are working away on the next one, we're going to jump up to, this closes at 1840. So the Longhunter is closed at 1775. This picks up at 1806. This closes at 1840. The next one is going to pick up 1865 with the end of the Civil War, and it will conclude in the winter of 8182. So it'll wrap probably in the end, we haven't figured it out yet, but it'll probably wrap of March 1882 and that era will close. Outside of Mile City. Perhaps more dramatically than any other era, that era has like a end. Like an end and and a very visible legacy. Yeah ecological legacy and

In that one we're talking about the buffalo hide hunters And you just kind of start running out of heroes Yeah You got long hunter heroes boon American hero. Yeah got mountain man heroes, Jim Bridger, American hero. There is no hide hunter hero. No. They're all villains. No, and it's, I mean, I think that's one interesting tension

in this whole larger project is just like, when we think of market hunters today, we think of it as a bad deal for wildlife and it is. But throughout American history, these people who are engaging in this trade in its various forms also leave behind some of the craziest stories of wilderness adventure that we have.

And so you're kind of always wrestling with that tension of like, you don't want to completely romanticize these figures, you know, you want to understand them, why they're actually doing what they're doing and what the consequences of that were. But also it's not interesting if you write a book about how bad the Buffalo Hunters are. So, you know, especially in that volume, it's kind of a tricky line to toe of like,

you're not going to write a book condemning the Buffalo Hunters for the bad things that they obviously did, but you're also not going to write a book celebrating how many buffalo they killed. So it's kind of a, yeah it's a trickier subject I think in our contemporary perspective. The other day I was writing a thing where I had to try to talk about, try to sum up these different groups and the best thing I could come up with when I got to the hide hunters, as I was like, they're the kind of the greasiest, most louse ridden group. Yeah. Which is a, which is a standard of evaluation that I often use and greasy louse ridden is there high.

And just like, it's like from a different planet. Some of those stories. Yeah. Yeah. You're getting into, um, you're getting into like some Cormac McCarthy, blood Meridian type shit. Yeah, exactly. Like very sort of post-apocalyptic scenes of destruction. Yeah. All right. Uh, okay. Here it is. Chapter six, Hunger and Thirst. Dig in. Chapter 6, Hunger and Thirst. Despite the rugged, unforgiving landscape on which they made their living, the existence of a mountain man was in all scarcity and suffering. Gluttony and excess were a staple of life for these isolated wilderness travelers. In chapter three, I mentioned the most famous

mountain man movie of all time, Jeremiah Johnson. You'll have to pardon me as I return to it again, this time to the final conversation of the film, which is the saddest and loneliest 120 seconds in the history of American cinema. In it we find Johnson in the high country, pondering with a surprise visitor what month of the year it might be. He's cooking a rabbit on a spit. While nit-picky viewers might note that no wild rabbit on earth would

tear as tenderly as that one when cooked in such a fashion, you have to give credit to the filmmakers for capturing the breadth of the diet of the mountain men. By this point in the movie, Jeremiah Johnson has dined on grizzly bear meat, attempted to dine on cutthroat trout, eaten elk, eaten buffalo, and eaten beaver, which he refers to as proper food. One thing that Jeremiah Johnson never eats in the film is the mountain man delicacy known as boudin, which was described in real life by the British explorer and

writer George Ruxton, who witnessed a memorable scene during his western travels in the mid-1800s. Ruxton had been all over the world by this point in his life. Between the ages of 17 and 27, he'd served in combat in Europe, hunted with indigenous people in northern Canada and journeyed into the heart of the African continent. But of all those places, none captured his imagination like the Rocky Mountain West, and no figure fascinated him more than the American Mountain Man. At one point in his travels, Ruxton watched as two trappers sat on a dirty saddle blanket

with a long coil of boudin between them. Now if you've traveled much in Louisiana, you might have encountered boudin, a type of sausage built on a base of hog liver and rice. But mountain man boudin was different. They would take the intestine of a buffalo and invert it. Ruxton notes that it would often be partially cleaned, but that this step is quote, not thought indispensable. They then fill it with diced buffalo meat, liver, kidneys, whatever, and brown it over the ember of the fire like a crude sausage. So these two trappers are sitting across from each other on a filthy saddle blanket. Between them, quote, like the coil of a huge snake,

Ruxton writes, sits one of these boudins and they are eating it from opposite ends. So that, quote, the serpent on the saddle cloth was dwindling from an anaconda to a moderate-sized rattlesnake. The two guys start hurrying to try to eat more of the boudin than the other before they run out of intestine. Such were the culinary exploits of the mountain men. For them, food was more than just sustenance. It was a source of pleasure, a badge of honor, and a currency of camaraderie in a world where survival often hinged on the strength of one's stomach.

But as one historian observed, the mountain man would often spend one month luxuriating in the wealth of buffalo meat and the next reduced to the very brink of starvation. They got wild fruits when and where they could. Wild plums and service berries were favorites of Western travelers, but they lived a mostly carnivorous existence. They had a saying, meat's meat, which demonstrates a certain gastronomic open-mindedness. The fact that it's meat matters more than what kind of meat it is, but that doesn't mean they didn't appreciate the idiosyncratic qualities of each. Rufus Sage, an American journalist

who traveled west to document the culture of the mountain men, shared a sentiment of the era on the qualities of prairie dogs. Quote, the flesh of these animals is tender and quite palatable, and their oil is superior in fineness and absence from all grosser ingredients. As we know the mountain men were living year-round in the wilderness. They're staying mobile enabling them to move from stream to

stream in search of fresh beaver sign and they're limited in what they can carry with them in terms of supplies. So the difference between life and death was what sort of food they could pull from the land around them. Hunting of course offered the most practical solution to this challenge and the mountain men were legendary for their ability to put away vast quantities of the meat they killed. William H. Ashley, who you'll remember, was one of the partners behind the expedition

that led to the creation of the rendezvous system in the first place, claimed that, "'Nothing is actually necessary for the support of men in the wilderness than a plentiful supply of good, fresh meat. It is all that our mountaineers ever require or even seem to wish. Ashley drove the point home with additional clarity, quote, the circumstance of the uninterrupted health of these people who generally eat unreasonable quantities of meat at their

meals proves it to be the most wholesome and best adapted food to the constitution of man. In the different concerns which I have had in the Indian country, where not less than 100 men have been annually employed for the last four years and subsist all together upon meat, I have not known at any time a single instance of bilious fever among them, that means a fever with nausea and vomiting like the flu, or any other disease prevalent in the settled parts of our country,

except a few instances and but very few of slight fevers produced by colds or rheumatic affections contracted while in the discharge of guard duty on cold and inclement nights." Of course, Ashley's observation about a lack of infectious disease is likely attributed as much to a lack of outside contact as it was to diet. The mountain men lived in quarantine bubbles, to borrow a phrase from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it wasn't just

these white trappers who believed in the supremacy of living off wild game. The Plains tribes had long recognized the power of eating meat and even looked down upon tribes who practiced agriculture or relied on white man's food. Again and again in the historic record you find accounts from white Easterners coming to the West and experiencing a new vitality when adopting the strict diet of wild meat that supported Native American nomadic hunters. A few decades after the close of the mountain men era, when sickly, malnourished veterans of the Civil War were coming west to try to expel Indians from their buffalo hunting grounds, they encountered in their

enemies a level of strength and physical endurance that they could overcome only through advanced firepower and superior numbers. One-on-one, a white soldier fed on beans and salt pork and hardened bread riddled with larvae was little match for a native combatant raised on buffalo meat. In Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which is in my opinion the best thing that ever has been or likely ever will be written about General Custer's humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the author describes an unkpapa Sioux warrior named Gaul who played a central role in that fight. Gaul happened to have his

portrait taken in the infancy of photography. Connell writes quote, Gaul was a man of such explosive strength that he fairly cracks the Connell writes quote, legs and a torso the size of a beer keg. 12 years after the great fight he stepped on a scale. He weighed 260 pounds. At the little big horn with white stripes painted on his arms and a hatchet in one thick hand and the fullness of manhood, he must have galloped through Custer's desperate troopers like a wolf through a flock of sheep. How's that for a buffalo meat testimonial? And when it came to the preferences of the mountain men, buffalo was top choice. With their wooly hides, massive hump, and sharply curved horns, these creatures roamed the Great Plains and

intermountain valleys of the Rockies and herds numbering in the thousands. At the beginning of the mountain man era, the total population was perhaps as high as 30 million. The animals were seemingly everywhere in mountain man country, so much so that their absence rather than presence would be noted in journals, unless of course they were too present. Then you'll encounter mentions of an annoying abundance. One traveler wrote, During our progress we were obliged to keep men in advance to affrighten the buffaloes in our path.

That day, the author mentioned, his party killed 110 buffalo, saving only the tongues and hump ribs. I could fill this whole chapter with nothing but accounts of people trying to describe the immensity of the herds, and I wouldn't be able to fit them all in. Here's just one about a herd of unfathomable size trying to cross a river. There was, quote, such a dense and continuous column that it formed a temporary dam, causing the current to, quote, rise and rush over their backs. The roaring and rushing sound of one of these vast herds crossing a river may sometimes, in a still night, be heard for miles.

In my own book about the animals, American Buffalo in Search of a Lost Icon, I describe the immensities through witness accounts of mass buffalo drownings that occurred as a result of these chaotic river crossings. In May 1795, a man counted 7,630 that drowned en masse in Saskatchewan. In 1829, another man in Saskatchewan counted 10,000 dead in the river. In the early 1830s, a traveler along the Missouri River found multiple sloughs holding 1,800 or more drowned carcasses. Another traveler watched thousands of carcasses drift by in a river in a continuous line where the stench was so

bad he couldn't eat dinner. The Indians he traveled with told him every spring was about the same. Given the sheer abundance of these animals at the time there aren't a lot of mountain man stories about wild and daring buffalo hunts. For the most part, they rode up on them or did a short downwind sneak on them and shot them through the lungs with a rifle slug. There just wasn't much to it. Hunting buffalo was often more of a grocery run than anything else. The mountain men butchered Buffalo

in what was known as the Indian manner, which wasn't terribly dissimilar to what's known as the gutless method among big game hunters today. Positioning the animal on its belly, with the knees folded and legs propped out on either side to hold the body upright, they'd cock the neck around sideways so it looked like the animal was watching its back trail. This stabilized the

animal from rolling in that direction. You could wedge a rock or an old buffalo skull opposite the head to prop it up on the other side. It's hard to generalize about what the mountain men would and wouldn't use from a buffalo carcass once they got started because it depended a little bit on personal taste and depended a lot on how hard up for food they were. They got picky when resources were abundant. One observer described how men were quote, rendered dainty by profusion and would cook only the choices pieces. So in relatively normal times when a buffalo was meant to provide a night's meal for a small band

of trappers who weren't worried about what they'd eat tomorrow, here's what might happen. They'd open up the animal's hide with a cut along the spine, then they'd peel the hide back on either side, exposing the back straps and also a sometimes two-inch thick layer of fat along each side of the hump that they would call the Dupuy. This layer of fat was a favorite cut of the mountain men and native people alike. Beneath the fat were the hump ribs, the protrusions of muscle on either side of a buffalo's spine just behind its head.

Removing the hump ribs required the use of a hatchet or tomahawk. The Cheyenne warrior wooden leg described using a buffalo's legs as a mallet to bust off the hump ribs, and he pointed out that the hump ribs were the only bones he'd typically remove from the kill site. Same with the mountain men, who'd often satisfy themselves with just this cut alone, plus maybe the tongue, removed through the triangle of soft hide underneath the animal's lower jaw. If more meat was needed, or if buffalo were scarce, they would de-bone the front and rear quarters as well and bundle it all up, maybe 20 large pieces or so, inside folded sacks made from the buffalo's hide. Depending on mood and taste and need,

they might also remove the fleece, a word for additional layers of fat found beneath the hide. They'd take the femurs and shin bones to be roasted in coals before smacking them open with a rock or hatchet to get out the marrow. They'd crack the skull open with a hatchet and eat the brains raw. They'd drink the blood. They might mimic the Plains tribes and drink the mother's milk from ripened mammaries. They'd squeeze the contents of the gall bladder over the liver and eat it raw as well. Sometimes they just drank the gall straight. As one account

suggests, quote, a man could get quite a glow if he took it straight on an empty stomach. The mountain men did not travel with an assortment of cast iron pots and pans and wire grates, which would have been too heavy and cumbersome. Instead they had a minimalist kit. They demonstrated a fondness for spit-roasting meat, often skewering great hunks of buffalo on a green stick and slow cooking it over the glowing embers of a campfire. Out on the prairie, where firewood was hard to find, buffalo dung

served as a substitute. A common technique would be to alternate chunks of fat with chunks of lean meat on a sharpened stick, which would then either be held over the fire or pushed into the ground next to it. In other instances, a big hunk of meat would simply be placed in the coals of a fire directly. The mountain man Osborne Russell described a camp keeper rolling out a quote ponderous mass of bull beef, meaning meat from a male buffalo from a smoldering fire pit and then smacking it with a club to knock the ashes off of it.

Each whack with the club made the chunk of meat fly in the air quote, like a huge ball of gum elastic. Once the man dropped his club, the others knew it was time to pull out their knives and dig in. Most accounts suggest that buffalo was typically consumed rare, probably in part because they were too impatient to wait very long for their meals, but also because game meat dries out quickly when overcooked. John Ball wrote of feasting on buffalo meat, quote, uncooked or slightly roasted on the coals, taking a bite of the fat part with the lean, eating it like bread and cheese. In another instance, George Ruxton observed several men, quote, retreating from the campfire

to enjoy solo their half-cooked morsels. Trappers also made jerky and pemmican to preserve their harvest against spoilage. To make jerky or jerk, thin strips of meat cut along the grain would be hung on racks of cottonwood branches or willow stems. Sun, wind, and a slow fire underneath the racks would dry out these lean strips into a product

that kept well in the arid climate of the West. Pemmican would be produced by removing connective tissue from the jerky, which was then pounded into a sawdust-like powder using a wooden mortar. The dried powdered meat would then be mixed with melted fat and or bone marrow inside a sewn up bag made from buffalo hide with the stitching sealed with buffalo fat like seam sealer on your tent. Other times the meat, dust, and fat or melted marrow would be packed into separate sacks

or as was often the case buffalo bladders and then mixed together at meal time. One account mentioned that pemmican was quote used throughout the country as familiarly as we use bread in the civilized world. Of course buffalo was rarely the only thing on the mountain man's menu. Elk was probably the second most commonly eaten meat after buffalo. Either that or depending on the area bighorn sheep. They ate mule deer too and bears, both black and grizzly, and pronghorn or antelope. Mountain lion meat, or painter meat, was especially prized. There were far, far more bighorn sheep on the landscape back then, before huge numbers of the animals were killed off by a strain of pneumonia introduced

to the West by domesticated sheep from Europe. Places that now hold decent herds of elk used to hold tremendous herds of bighorns. Osborne Russell recalled sitting atop a mountain where, quote, an eye could scarcely be cast in any direction around or above or below without seeing fat sheep gazing at us with anxious curiosity or lazily feeding among the rocks and scrubby pines. Numerous accounts compare the meat of bighorn or mountain sheep as they were known to mutton. Frequently stories about killing sheep remark on the difficulty of getting a shot at and recovering these animals. William H. Ashley observed that quote they were so

wild and the country so rugged we found it impossible to approach them. Likewise the artist George Catlin observed that bighorn sheep had a tendency to make themselves, quote, secure from their enemies to whom the sides and slopes of these bluffs around which they fearlessly bound are nearly inaccessible. Pursuing these creatures was, quote, attended with great danger, Osborne Russell wrote, especially in the winter season when the rocks and precipices are covered with snow and ice. These efforts were worth the rewards, however. Washington Irving noted that the, quote, gourmands of the camp pronounced bighorns to have the flavor of excellent

mutton, while another count states that sheep were known as, quote, the game par excellence of the Rocky Mountains, which takes precedence in a comestible point of view. George Ruxton declared it to be a choice supply of meat, certainly the best I had eaten in the mountains. One winter, Osborne Russell and some 15 of his fellow mountain men attempted to stay as long as they could at a place they called Mutton Hill, 40 miles southeast of Fort Hall in southeast Idaho.

There they lived on bighorn sheep until heavy snows drove the trappers out of the area in February. Another time in 1839 Russell and some other mountain men attempted to overwinter at Fort Hall where they figured they could live off buffalo meat. When they got tired of dried buffalo instead of going lower to seek milder weather they actually pushed higher into the mountains, to the head of the south fork of the Snake River, and, quote, spent the remainder of the winter killing and eating mountain sheep. While Ruxton preferred bighorn, he was cool with pronghorn as well. The animal, he wrote, quote, affords the hunter a sweet and nutritious meat,

when that of nearly every other description of game, from the poorness and scarcity of the grass during the winter, is barely eatable." Among those barely eatable critters, according to Roxton, were elk killed mid-winter. "...the meat of the elk is strong-fl strong flavored and more like poor bull than venison. It is only eatable when the animal is fat and in good condition. At other times it is strong, tasted, and stringy. The three elk Jedidiah Smith killed in mid-June of 1828 were probably in great shape. As he recorded that,

men could be seen in every part of the camp with meat raw and half-roasted in their hands, devouring it with the greatest alacrity. Bear meat, both black and grizzly, was well regarded. According to Rufus Sage, bear meat, well regarded. According to Rufus Sage, bear meat, quote, "'To be tender and good should be boiled "'at least 10 hours.'" Sage recounted an episode when a bear was drawn into camp by the smell of fresh buffalo meat.

After several of the men shot and wounded it, the bear charged and spooked off their horses while the trappers climbed trees for safety until one managed to kill the bear with a pistol shot to the head. They then butchered their quote, greasy victim and enjoyed a ample feast of bears liver heart and kidneys basted with fat. Then they filled a large kettle with its fleece and ribs which they boiled overnight and enjoyed the following day.

Osborne Russell described the preparation of a stew made from two fat grizzly bears. Kettles filled with bear meat and fat were hung over a fire, and the group appointed one of the old trappers to determine when it was done. Having not had much to eat for the past few days, Russell noted that, quote, I thought with my comrades that it took longer to cook than any meal I ever saw prepared. Beaver carcasses being as central to a mountain man's existence as grease to a short-order cook, trappers had their preferred ways of dealing with them. The mountain man's passion for beaver tail is well documented. When you pierce a beaver tail

on a skewer and let it roast next to a fire, the blackish scaly skin bubbles and peels away to reveal a tailbone encased in gristle and fat that's not unlike what someone might leave behind on their plate after enjoying a steak. During lean times of eating poor or thin game meat, that fat would have been heavenly. As one account described it, the beaver tail was, quote, considered even a greater dainty than the tongue or the marrow bone of a buffalo. We get another picture of what hungry mountain men were forced to eat from the trapper James O. Paddy, who was born in Kentucky and worked the beaver streams of the Southwest in the late 1820s.

He was the fella I mentioned earlier who cleaned up while trapping on the lower Colorado River, catching 36 beavers and 40 sats. At one point, while traveling through some tough country, Patty and his party got caught for four and a half days without anything to eat except for a small jackrabbit caught by his dog. It didn't go far when split among seven men. Patty noted that we were all reluctant to begin to partake of the horse flesh, but they apparently got over whatever uneasiness they felt. Unfortunately, they found that quote, the actual thing without bread or salt was as

bad as the anticipation of it. Later, Patty's men would kill and eat a raven, which he described as a nauseous bird with unsavory flesh, a buzzard which was disagreeable, and finally, after a bit of heartbreak, a dog. The men drew lots, like drawing straws to decide who would be responsible for killing their canine companion, but Paddy noted that the meat was sweet, nutritive, and strengthening. Rufus Sage couldn't in good conscience hide his affinity for dog meat. Quote, justice impels me to say the flesh of a fat Indian dog suitably cooked is not inferior to fresh pork and by placing

side-by-side select parts of the two it would be no easy task even for a good judge to tell the difference. Whether they liked it or not the Mountain Men would have had a hard time avoiding dog because some of the tribes they interacted with would honor visitors by preparing a meal of dog. Right after the mountain man era in 1846, the writer and historian Francis Parkman partook of the meal with the Sioux. He described the ceremony rather unceremoniously. A woman with a stone-headed mallet approached a, quote, litter of well-grown black puppies,

comfortably nested among some buffalo robes. Seizing one of them by the hind paw, she dragged him out and, carrying him to the entrance of the lodge, hammered him on the head till she killed him. Holding the puppy by the legs, she was swinging him to and fro through the blaze of a fire until the hair was singed off. This done, she unsheathed her knife and cut him into small pieces, which she dropped into a kettle to boil. In a few moments a large wooden dish was set before us filled with this delicate preparation. A dog feast is the greatest compliment a Dakota can offer

to his guest, and knowing that to refuse eating would be an affront, we attacked the little dog and devoured him before the eyes of his unconscious parent. But let's return to the subject of starvation. Patty's account of eating ravens and buzzards opens a window into how bad things could get, even though we know they could get way worse. Anyone wanting to explore the incremental steps of desperation taken by starving folks might look to the infamous story of the Donner Party, which is fair game in an account of the mountain men because Jim Bridger himself provided them with some poor advice on their route selection. In doing

so, he helped them along toward their agonizing ordeal when stranded and snowbound high in the Sierra Nevadas of California. There, the party is forced to eat the starved oxen that were supposed to pull their wagons. They use the oxhides to cover their makeshift shelters, but soon they're boiling and eating dried strips of the oxhide roofs. Then they're eating one another. First they're scavenging the carcasses of the already deceased, but before long they're hurrying one another along to death with the help of a bullet.

If dead mountain men could talk, no doubt they'd have better, which is to say worse, stories to tell. But the mountain man Jedediah Smith, who is no stranger to horrible experiences, observed that starving men prefer to keep quiet. According to Smith, quote, men suffering from hunger never talk much, but rather bear their sorrows in moody silence, which is more preferable to fruitless complaints. One time a group of mountain men traveling along a tributary of the San Juan River in present-day Colorado was caught without food and tried roasting some cactus in a fire.

They must have chosen one of the several poisonous varieties on the landscape. A few hours later, the men felt weak and then began to shiver and vomit. An overwhelming sensation of pain took hold in their bowels, and three or four of the men, according to this account, began rolling around on the ground writhing in pain. At this point, the other men in the party decided to kill one of their mules in an attempt to restore their comrades and reduce the suffering of the rest of the group, which by that point had gone without food for nearly seven days. The mule meat quote, proved both sweet and

tender and scarcely inferior to beef. Now this is something that you'll see again and again in accounts from this period. A hungry party killing and eating their horses and mules. But not everyone gave such rave reviews to the flesh of their domesticated animals. Charles Larpentour described eating the liver and ribs of an old mare shot by one of his comrades as quote needing a great deal of seasoning to make it palatable. The liver had been thrown into the coals and quote turned so very black that at first I thought it was impossible to eat any.

But Larpenture was a generous food critic. He was starving another time and went three days without food. That's when he quote, thought of a dried buffalo sinew which I had in my bullet pouch to mend moccasins. I pulled it out and cut it in two, offering my hunter, meaning his companion, a part of it, which he refused. So without asking a second time, I demolished the sinew, which I found excellent, except that it was too small." In desperate moments like these, the mountain men were liable to devour anything they came across that resembled food, whether

they had any right to it or not. Joseph Walker, a Tennessee-born trapper who worked out of Taos, New Mexico and later made his way to the Green River Country, recalled stumbling upon a small native village in the Great Basin region, today's Nevada, whose occupants fled at the sight of a party of white men. The mountain men were in rough shape, having been out of food for several days, and they were delighted to discover among the abandoned lodges several bags made of animal skins filled with quote, what appeared to be fish, dried and pounded. They stole the bags and ate heartily that night around the

campfire. In the morning they were startled to find that the bags had in fact been filled with insect larvae. In another instance several trappers, among them Richard Lacey Wooden, known as Uncle Dick, were traveling along the Colorado River in 1838 when they approached a Yuma village in hopes of securing something to eat. A few of the men brought back to the rest of the party what they assumed to be bread, but noted that it had a very unfamiliar taste. Upon closer examination, the biscuits were in fact cakes made of crushed red ants mashed together and dried in the

sun. Starvation was not the only danger that lurked in the wilderness. There was also the ever-present threat of thirst, which is far worse than hunger. When traveling across the prairie on the way back to Missouri, Rufus Sage and his men ran out of water, still fifteen miles away from the nearest river. Under the high July sun, he found it to be maddening. I can endure hunger for many days in succession, without experiencing any very painful sensations. I can lie down and forget it in the sweet unconsciousness of sleep,

or feast my imagination upon the rich spread tables of dreams. But not so with thirst. It cannot be forgotten, sleeping or waking. It will make itself known and felt. It will part your tongue and burn your throat despite your utmost endeavors to thrust it from memory." The mountain men did have tricks to get through it. They'd drink the blood of freshly killed game or even their own piss or they'd chew the roots of Oregon grape which were said to have medicinal properties that could stave off the worst effects of dehydration. When offered the heart of a dead bison, one man wrote that, quote,

Immediately as it touched my lips, my burning thirst got the better of my abhorrence. I plunged my head into the reeking ventricles and drank until forced to stop for breath. But you still just had to press on. That's what Nathaniel Wyeth's rendezvous bound expedition did in 1834 when they went for several days without water in Wyoming. It was miserable. Their tongues were swollen and their lips were cracked and bleeding from the relentless Sun. According to our source, a man by the name of Richardson was masticating a leaden bullet to excite the salivary glands.

Finally, they took a mangled buffalo and tipped it on its side. One of the men stuck his knife into the animal's distended belly and was rewarded with a gush of quote green and gelatinous juices mingled with the half digested contents of its stomach Gagging the thirst crazed men half-heartedly strained the liquid into a tin pan hoping to remove the worst of the impurities. And then, with trembling hands, they raised the dripping pan to their lips

and drank deep, quote, with the satisfaction of a man taking his wine after dinner, a desperate act of survival in a land that knew little mercy. Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American history series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men 1806 to 18, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions.

We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer-skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters, 1761- 1775. So again, this new mountain man edition about the beaver skin trade is available for pre-order now wherever audiobooks are sold. It's called

Meat Eaters American History The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 by me, Stephen Rinella.