The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 777: So You Want to Be a Hide Hunter

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Randall Williams. Topics discussed: A fascinating period in our history; all about hunting hides; and our new audio original, MeatEater's American History: The Hide Hunters (1865-1883). 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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. For our friends north of the border, Anex Hunt just got better in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than a box of shells. Plus, Anex has dropped big updates to Crownland layers and added parcel boundaries where available. You still get fully functional offline maps, real-time GPS tracking, precise weather conditions,

and customizable map tools you can share with your buddies. If you're hunting in Canada, this is a no-brainer. Download the on-ex hunt app. Try it free for seven days. Real hunts rarely go as planned. That's where First Lights Navigator hoodie earns its place. Our crews have run it from September climbs to cold front sits. It manages temps, stays quiet and close encounters,

and wicks moisture on the uphill push. One layer that adapts without hesitation no matter the pursuit, The Navigator delivers versatility in any situation. Shop now at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. This is the meat eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything.

Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromise gear that keeps me in the field. longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. I got two things that made your interest.

Well, three things if you count Phil. Phil printed off the script of Christmas. What do they call that? A Christmas Carol? Christmas Carol. He printed the script off. He's been highlighting his lines. Who are you playing?

Cratchett. Cratchett. Yeah. God, it seems like you'd play Cratchett. Robert Cratchett. He was only a matter of time. They didn't try to get you for Scrooge. Surprisingly not.

No, I think maybe a few more years. Wait until I get in the 40s. Yeah, that was a joke. I don't think he'd be a Scrooge. You know what I could picture you being, though? What's that? You know what he might be good at? You know, the guy that, like, the, that he's like the nephew.

And he's trying to get him, he's trying to get Scrooge fired up about Christmas. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. But then, like, Scrooge catches him goofing on them. They tried to get me to play Fred two years ago. Oh, you know, your first name bass is with this guy. Yeah, that's right. His name's Fred?

His name's Fred. Yeah. First name basis. You wanted more of a role? No, I was doing a different play. So it's just, yeah. Phil isn't going to be out there. God, preface.

What is the, what does one of crash its big lines? Oh, he doesn't have a lot of big lines. He's just kind of like the anchor for, like, you know. kind of the moral anchor yeah that's the word god blesses phil won't be able to do that no probably the worst part about you're what you got coming up if i had to say let me hear and just i i would just like to say i love how involved and interested you are in this whole process oh because i'll i will be there my my wife like without even knowing you're in it my wife will be like alerting the family soon about what day this is happening about what we're like

We will be there. So I just want to make sure when I get there, I know what's going on. Sure. So I can whisper it, be like, well, actually, Phil doesn't even like this part. Or this guy kind of bugs Phil, you know, like he, Phil wasn't very happy with this actor. I'll spill all the details. Burn bridges along the way, yeah. But what might be challenging to you is, because you have your own kids.

I do. One of them's in the play with me, Steve. Oh, is he tiny tim playing my son. No, he's the middle child. He's, he's, there's, there's, there's an older daughter of Cratchits, a middle boy, and then Tiny Tim. he's playing the middle boy what i was going to say could be a problem for you okay is because you got to deal with your own kids all the time you might not want to go down there and need to deal with this whatever kid it is playing tiny tim you might be like so sort of consumed with your own

kids and what they got going on yeah then all of a sudden you got to get sort of like intimately familiar with this other kid while trying to take care of your kids well that's that's kind of Cratchett's big scenes. He's got he's got to kind of break down over the death of Tiny Tim in one of the scenes. That's the, that's the big moment. Oh, I forgot that he died. Well, you don't see him died. I was going to say, it's a good thing that your kids aren't cast as Tiny Tim because they're too healthy. They're too robust, strapping young men. Thank you. Yes. Randall's, they're not nearly sickly enough to play Tiny Tim. Yeah, my little boy, you know how Matthew's on crutches for six months? Oh, yeah. Were you making a bunch of Tiny Tim? Well, he's a very agreeable young man.

very agreeable um so we what that while he was on crutches that was his nickname because he's so agreeable yeah just a cheery little fella all not you know he's not disgruntled yeah yeah um that's beautiful yeah well keeps posted maybe maybe randle maybe you and your wife would like to go with us i'd love to i don't go to the theater enough you don't take in much theater well i take in one play i went to A Christmas carol. I went to Phil's last production, and it was lovely, and I was seated right behind J.K. Simmons, famous Montana, J.K. Simmons. And he loved it. He did.

Every time Phil made a joke, I looked at J.K. Simmons, and he was just, and I was. Yeah, but you know what? I don't think you, I mean, I'm not knocking on Phil. Yeah, you are. That's okay. I don't think that that was, I don't think it was genuine. No, I think that he knew he's like a big famous theater guy, and he's in theater. And so he's got to act like he's into it. I think he just... That might be part of it. But I think he's so into it that, you know, any good theater he gets, it's just like a

shot of life into his blood, you know? So like a little date night. Well, it's going to be kind of like a weird date night for you because it'll be me, like me and my wife and you and your wife, that'll feel normal, but then it'll be my children. That sounds like a normal outing for us. Yeah. Because often we don't bring children to anything. Yeah, because it wouldn't work for us.

Like, they're... She's going to make them. go yeah they won't you know sure sure don't tell phil i mean they're not gonna i was 11 year old once as well it's okay i'm not gonna line ago but they'll be down there i mean i've been i've been workshopping with phil as to how we can graft sort of the structure of a christmas carol onto the live tour i think it's brilliant yeah we can have ghosts of hunting season past hunting season present hunting season future well you know now this is going to air randall if this doesn't happen there's going to be some disappointed

fans in the audience. Well, whatever we come up with will have to be equally good or better. I don't imagine. I mean, this is a great idea. I'm just going to say that. But whatever replaces it or supplants it will be better. Clay's planning on having Brent Reeves fry bluegills on stage every night. I know.

I like that. And I like it, too. But you either got to decide you're going to bring it up with the venue. And then they're going to have like the fire department. They're going to have like the fire department down there. And they're going to say our very expensive and thick curtains are going to smell like fish for the next three months. Yeah. Or you don't bring it up and see what happens.

Yeah. I don't know. You know what's going to tickle Phil's fancy. He's going to get jealous. Yeah. I want to do a thing, Phil. And we're already setting this into motion. I'm going to do a thing where it's called interviews with a black bear.

And who's the black bear? I haven't cast it yet. Is there going to be a whole, there's going to be callbacks, do some scene tests? Because if I could interview any animal in the world, I would interview a black bear about like what he's up to, what he was thinking. You're like, like, when you ate the gear oil, like what? You know, like, I could see the first sip, right? You're like, I could see why you might take a sip. But then, but you kept eating.

it is the is yeah is the 20th trash can curiosity or is it just you can't break the habit you know you you throw out black bears as an example see but I think if this you know takes off I think going through a bunch of different animals would be very it'd be a funny series great interview with the turkey interview with a with a dove yeah like if you interviewed a black bear

if you could interview black bear like a blackbird it finds like Clay Newcomb's bait barrel yeah okay and then he slowly put like they'd be like, okay, well, dude, when you first found the bait barrel, didn't you think it was a little, like, a little suspicious? Yeah. All of a sudden, here's a barrel. He's like, you know, things hadn't really been going well for me lately,

and I thought maybe my luck had finally changed. And like, yeah, and you know, all of a sudden there's like a platform up in a tree, like, does this stuff, you know? register or like a black bear that finds his way into a convenience store and he's caught on the closed circuit television yeah yeah did you know you were at risk so is this is this a bear that is is is post mortem like it's a no no no no that's why it came into the bay pile like it's going to be a bear to his like his buddy gets air got it okay yeah we got a iron out i'm not not going to like bring a bear back from the dead you could do you could do a repetitive series

any time of black bears in the news you just have the baby God I can't catch a break honestly my family's so embarrassed here's the other thing how did I what do I say there's three things of interest

doesn't matter I just got out the phone great producing I'm trying to here's a I'm gonna do you guys ever preview radio live segments we hold this up Phil said you can hold this somewhere

so I want to preview I'm trying to get an interview with a guy. I don't even want to say who. I just spoke to a wildlife enforcement agent. I don't want to spoil anything. I got to fill out like a form. I got to fill out a thing to try to get him permission to speak to us. He's got to take it to the suits.

So I don't want to blow it. Yeah. I just got, I just did my pre interview. Hold that up real nice. What Randall's holding is a wild mink pelt. did you know how's that Phil it's looking shiny should I bring it it does look shiny yeah did you know

did you know that if you go in and buy fake eyelashes there is a chance I don't want to put statistics on it but there's a very I'm not saying a probability but a light like a good chance

that when you buy fake eyelashes it is mink not advertised as but it is actually mink and when you put that up and look at it my god does that look like a nice eyelash I don't like that look just

the big fake eyelash look yeah not my style but you know it's popular yeah it'll probably fade from popular I feel like it came into popularity I feel like it already went

I don't know oh it's way popular Like in 20 years, if you're dressing up for Halloween and you're dressing up as a 2025 person for Halloween, you're going to glue on big fake eyelashes. Sure. And people would be like, oh, I remember that. But, yeah, mink. It is striking. And I was wondering, is that like enough to drive up the mink market?

But then, man, think about how many eyelashes are hiding that thing right there. Yeah. It's nothing but eyelashes. Tiny little strips. You could do the whole town. you could give every woman in town new eyelashes with this make we should try to make

we should take a sliver like a dental floss sized sliver off the side of that and try to make a set of fake eyelashes for someone in the office. It would be a great idea yeah what they do when they're testing I don't want to blow the interview I'm gonna give this last little tidbit away

against my better judgment when they're testing a shipment guess what the test is did I already tell you what the test is you did and I like it take a cigarette lighter Does it smell like hair? If it smells like burning hair It'll either smell like burning petroleum base Or it'll be like oh that's burnt hair

That is a mink That's great Fake eyelashes is made from a mink And what I won't be able to tell you Even when we do the interview I won't be able to tell you The country of origin is not known We're not knowing if these mink

Are American Claw mink Or European Wild Mink Third thing of interest Can you pull the photo film? do it. This is of tremendous interest. You got your thing handy? I do. Randall and I just did probably one of the best, probably our best piece of video work ever. In terms of what I think is interesting. Phil has a picture held up of me and Randall here holding two, it's the big hunks of fat that come off the back of a buffalo. It's called the DePooey. The DePooey.

French. If you imagine like, picture that you pull the hide off a deer, because more people have done that than pulled the hide off of buffalo. Pull the hide off a deer and he's got like the big caps of fat on a real healthy deer, the big caps of fat that lay over

the backstrap. But these are, in this picture we're holding up, these are like giant slabs of fat removed from over the backstrap and hump of a buffalo. And working on the latest installation of Meat Eaters American history, the hide hunters, 1865 to 1883, we ran across this passage, which Dr. Randall

share with you. Another important article of food, the equal of which is not to be had except from the buffalo, is De Poir or De Pui. De Pooey. It is a fat substance that lies along the backbone next to the hide, running from the shoulder blade to the last rib, and is about as thick as. one's hand or finger. It is from 7 to 11 inches broad, tapering to a feather edge on the lower side. It will weigh from 5 to 11 pounds, according to the size and condition of the animal.

This substance is taken off and dipped in hot grease for half a minute, then is hung up inside of a lodge to dry and smoke for 12 hours. It will keep indefinitely and is used as a substitute for bread, but is superior to any bread that was ever made. yes we made it we made a whole video about making it we followed those instructions

why do people say to the T I don't know we follow them to the T that's a great question you want to know why the whole nine yards you know what that means no

it's like the in a Pth is it was that what was that like Spitfire P38 airplane in World War II is it a P38 a P38 a P38 is a thunderbolt I believe.

Oh, well, you know, Nate Mason? Yeah. Big Army guy. Mm-hmm. He was telling me that that belt, that machine belt, the ammo belt, 27 feet long. So to give them the whole nine yards is to give them 27 feet of ammo out of that aircraft. Gotcha. Yeah.

I don't know why people follow stuff to the T. We followed it to the T and I'm not going to tell you what happened. You know how I tease the Ming thing with I'm not telling the secrets? I'm not telling the secrets of what happened with our Dupui. yeah this project is sitting with Seth Morris right now who's editing it I had a crisis of of confidence to my answer the P3D8 is the lightning just correcting myself circling back there and I did fact check Nate Mason

on that he takes a lot of pride and being able to offer up little things like that yeah now that I feel like I have heard that somewhere takes a lot of pride and that kind of stuff if he waves you down you know on the staircase or something it's going to be to tell you like a little tidbit or to correct you about something you got wrong Yeah. Here's an interesting one. We're going to talk a whole bunch more about Buffalo because we're going to talk about the Hyde Hunter era.

Really quick, just before you get into this, can completely derail you, Steve. It says that there's no consensus about where to a T comes from, but the best accepted candidate is that it's a shortened version of to a Tittle. The word Tiddle refers to those tiny little additions you have to make when writing letters like dotting an I or a J or crossing a T. Hmm Hmm That sounds like Something Bob Cratchett

And say Yeah To the tail To the tail Tidy Tim But sir It's Christmas Is that a

Bob Cratchett line Uh Yeah It is actually He does He tries He tries to leave Right at the stroke

Of five or six And Scrooge gives him A dirty look And he says But sir It's Christmas God bless Is the biggest goose

In all of London here's a really good one that the guy sent in we have done one of these in a while first of this guy starts off by saying he's rarely heard our team that points to me passed up an opportunity to discuss

argue about semantics so check this out this this cannot stand this this guy recently moved to South Carolina gets to study in the state hunting regs just to get a grip

on what's going on. And he notices within South Carolina's hunting regs that they have an explicitly stated still hunt season. Still hunt season.

Now ask any American boy what still hunting is and what are they going to tell you. creeping quietly through the woods slowly slowly slowly shooting a deer before it sees you take a couple steps

stop and listen take a couple steps stop and listen still hunting so he's like why would they have a season where you can only still hunt so he calls fishing game to say what's up with how you can

oh like why why are you saying like you can only hunt this method. Can I sit in a tree stand? You can't stand hunt during the still hunt season? To which they say, no, you dummy. Still hunting is hunting without a dog. It is the no dog season.

Yeah. Who in the world? I would have just called it quiet. I'd call it no dog time. Right. Big good song. No dog time. I'd call it no dog time.

Is it a bluesy song or is it like an upbeat pop song. No, it's like a country party song. Yeah. Party. It's a party. It's like a Morgan Wallen. It's a honky talk party song, dude. No dog. Yeah, that's a great one. That's a great one. I have never, but it might be

the, like, I don't know. If you, like, it'd be curious, I don't mean the dog on it because I'd be curious. Oh, that's good. Oh, your day I was with. Already halfway through the lyrics. Okay. Here. Oh, man. I need to even get into this. I was with Dan and Reed Isbell. Mm-hmm. Okay. From God's Country podcast.

And we're eating this. We're in this restaurant and they got like a paddlefish eggs, paddlefish caviar. And I'm eating mine and I get a little bit of that caviar on my upper lip. Mm-hmm. And it's like Marilyn Monroe's birth mark. Yeah. Dan Isbell goes Marilyn Monroe. That's good.

But then there was like, I, everyone, at the table detected a pause before he like did like a gotcha. Yeah. And the debate was, did he know? Or did it only occur, that he was going off

the birth mark and said Marilyn Monroe, because Marilyn Monroe has a famous birthmark. Did he know before the delivery, the Roe connection? So we wanted to get the security camera footage from within the restaurant to see if like

When the twinkle in his eye I felt the twinkle was like delayed Like he goes like Marilyn Monroe and then And then does a Ha ha ha Yeah yeah yeah But he's like no I knew all along That's why I said it

I don't buy it I don't buy it for a second No one bought it no I was like There was like You said it And then there was like a beat And then it hit

Yeah I'm dubious I mean I'm still impressed Oh yeah totally It's great It's great Why was that time about her dogs

dogs you don't mean to dog on the set why about I got talking about the row well you did one of those you said I just did one you said I don't mean to dog yeah that's what it was

yeah that's what it was so Marilyn Monroe no I would be curious if you went to dog hunting states and I don't know I honestly don't know the answer to this people can write in

like if I went to a dog hunting state so I go to Arkansas South Carolina. There aren't many left, which makes me a little bit sad. And I said, hey, I'm going to still hunt. Like, or people said, like, how'd you get that buck? And I said, oh, I was like, I was still hunting. Would they be like, huh, he was hunting without dogs? Or would they be like he was actually still hunting? Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, like if it's a universal convention in states that have dog hunting, that's still hunting, is hunting without dogs.

Or do even dog guys look at the rags and they're like, what? Yeah, they could have pretty much picked any other descriptor there. And it would have caused less confusion. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots whether you're chasing elk in the mountain spotting mule deer in the coolies or looking for big woods white tails annex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder you'll still get fully functional offline maps precise weather conditions real-time gene GPS tracking and customizable markups to share with your crew.

Big Country demands better intel. Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre-order right now. Meat Eaters American History, the Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal

to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys. Guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot,

how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era and don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre-order Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks,

and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14. Here's another quick one. This is good. Thing came in. An obscure question, Steve, may be uniquely equipped to answer. And I got to tell you right off the bat, I'm going to let you down, buddy. Mm-hmm. But it's good.

There's a phenomenal book that I recommend anyone out there called Shadows on the Koyukuk. It's about the, it's about a Koyukon, so the Koyukon people are like a, like a tribe, it wouldn't be that, but like a tribe of native Alaskans and they, and these native Alaskans, the Koyukon. people are centered around the Koyukuk River, which flows into the Yukon River. Sydney Huntington is a, is a Koyekan man. And Shadows on the Koyuk is like his story of growing up on the river. It's a phenomenal book. In the book, there's this passage, and I am very, the person that wrote in, you're right, I'm very familiar with the passage. And in this passage, he says, basically, in Shadows on the Koyuk, a big part of the book is that,

But this boy and his siblings, like their mom dies, and they're just, they're just, like, left out in this cabin. It's a true story. That's a big part of his life story. He's just trying to, like, keep his little siblings alive without parental help. And he says, supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. He's talking about the night his mom died. Supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. Whitefish have a hard, grisly part in their gut that looks as if it has tentacles all over it,

which is a favored delicacy of Coyacan Indians. Mom fried and ate this part. He says, that whitefish gut killed my mother. Mom called us into the cabin and told us she wasn't feeling well. Go upstairs and go to bed, she said. We found our mother lying at the bottom of the stairs, half out the door, as she had been when we had gone to bed her eyes were closed. Most of her tongue

protruded from her mouth and it was bitten almost in two. The author, this is the guy that wrote the letter in Matt continuing. The author doesn't elaborate any further on how the hard, gristly part in the whitefish's gut killed his mother. Google searches have failed to shed any

light on the mechanism of death. He's wondering, you got any thoughts about that? I don't think I wasn't there But I remember reading it I don't think that that's what his mom died from When she bit her tongue Wouldn't it be that she had a seizure

Possibly Bitter tongue in half Yeah Although you don't know it triggered that No Yeah I did my own I felt it was coincidence I did my own five minutes of Googling

And I found the part of the stomach That looks like that And I A lot of fish have it And I found I actually found a co- book book of of like traditional how many minutes to take you to do all this oh five to 10 sure not lying pretty good with computers five it's just double 10 you know what's that film well I thought

you started to call them out and it jumped I thought you're so impressed by the depth of my research that I thought five seem unrealistic I really don't know how much time I spent on this it was in the hazy it was in like the first cup of coffee stage of my morning go on um just try to do without but I actually found you do it without bragging sure Sure, sure. There exists available online to any internet researcher, a book of traditional koiakan recipes. And there's pages and pages about how to prep whitefish. And you spent a couple hours going through that, huh? Yeah, I scanned through it. I scanned through it poorly, because I'm not bragging.

I scan through it, I scan through it haphazardly and poorly. Specifically neg yourself now. But I was unable to find anything. Surely a more talented researcher could have found the answer, but I was unable. But you found the recipe. I did, yeah. And you found no reason, you found no reason like the, hey, it's like, you know, what's that, what's that fish liver that is toxic? You found no thing like, hey, be careful when eating.

No, I couldn't find anything like that. But I couldn't have found anything anyway just because of how bad I am in that stuff. so it doesn't really say it doesn't mean it's not out there no i think someone else should probably back back me up i don't even know why we're trusting a single thing you say surely i missed it on the first time yeah i always read that and it like again i can't recommend that book enough you haven't read that book a long time ago um i read that and wondered about that i i just feel like it's like i would hate i'd never want to argue with the brother but but um um um um um um I think something else happened.

Yeah, there's just like, it's hard to make a one-to-one connection there. Yeah. Think about when you get real sick from eating. Like, your mind will kind of find culprits. Oh, yeah. You know. I remember one time I got super sick in Mexico, like, like deathly ill. And I couldn't eat avocados for forever.

But I had a ham and avocado. We bought like some room temp. Air-dried ham and avocado and bread. I got deathly ill. It wasn't the avocado. Yeah, yeah. But dude, a week later, I could have had a big old ham sandwich, but avocado, I couldn't go near an avocado for two years.

So I feel like stuff stands out in your mind. Yeah. Oh, sure. And you're looking at this crazy octopus tentacle looking. Yeah, you're looking at that and you're like, good Lord. And then like, you know, having a bit, like your mom dies the next day, you're like, it's got to be that stomach. Yeah.

She says she wasn't feeling well. It probably could have not mattered what she had for dinner. All right. So we're going to dig in and explain a, we're going to dig in and explain a really fascinating period of American history. And Randall and I have done these in the past. We did one on Daniel Boone and the Longhunters. We did one of these episodes on Daniel Boone and the Longhunters.

we did one of these episodes on the Mountain Men so Jim Bridger John Colter and the Mountain Men and we're going to do one right now on sort of the era that the era the backwoodsman era that came

after the really big hit that came after the Mountain Man era which was the hide hunters so to start Randall's going to lay out a little bit about like he's going to why are we talking about those three things like like why are we bucketing those three things why are what makes them similar what makes them distinct yeah so

these are the first three installments of this mediators american history series and what we've focused on in that series are these eras of sort of frontier market hunting um where large groups of individuals are going out well i should say relatively large groups of individuals are seeking sort of a new life by harvesting wildlife resources for profit. And that's a phenomenon you see repeated over and over again in American history and often aligns with bigger shifts in the larger national story, like the mountain men aligns with the Louisiana Purchase and the opening up of the Rocky Mountain West. The Longhunter era, which is in the late 1760s, early 1770s, that aligns with,

to this window of opportunity between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, broadly speaking. But in each of these instances, there's these individuals that go out into what is then land largely unknown to them and occupied by native people. And they're harvesting wildlife resources on the scale that's sort of unimaginable to us today. And in doing so, they also leave behind some of our most told and retold stories of wilderness living and outdoor adventure that have sort of, you know, been passed down to us as like the origin story of like American hunters and anglers, right? But in this series, we're asking what were they doing really? like what were they after how are they acquiring it who were they selling it to what was it being used for and what are the various like larger contextual factors that shaped how they lived the lives the way they did so like i said the first one was the long hunters and daniel boon is the most well known of those these are guys uh largely coming out of western north carolina western virginia and they're going across the apple lachian mountains to shoot white-tailed deer for their skin, which is used in leather goods, primarily manufactured in Britain.

Breaches, but all sorts of other, and breaches are like knee-length pants, like the goofy things you see on paintings of old guys with big white wigs. Yeah, yeah. When you see, if you see like an old guy or like, or Napoleon or someone, he's got like some white pants, some tidy, some tight fit and white pants with buttons on the front. Might be buckskin. Like a little button fly flap. Yeah.

could be american buckskin yeah and so um yeah these are essentially poor farmers living on the frontier and and it's an economy where they don't have ready access for cash but one thing and and their their farms don't produce enough of a surplus to really sell on a market but the one good that they can take to market and sell to buy the things that they need to buy is white tail deerskin so uh after the french indian war when it's a little bit safer to go across the appalachian mountains they start going over to kentucky ten Tennessee, basically the Ohio River Valley and the Cumberland River Valley, and shoot deer by the hundreds and thousands and pack them by mule train across the mountains, and they

stay out there for months, sometimes a year or longer, and that's how they get the name long hunters. Long ass hunt. Long ass hunt. It refers to the duration of their trips. And these are sort of smaller groups. Oftentimes it's like family members, neighbors, and they organize their expeditions along these lines of kinship and sort of clan. You know, and it's a really interesting sort of fleeting moment because in 1775,

the first permanent white settlement is established in Kentucky. And then also you have the beginnings of some of the frontier violence. that ultimately bleeds into the Revolutionary War. So that's the Longhunter's. Yep. That's a, that's a interesting thing that we compare through all these, is these like, what are the groups,

the group dynamics? And you made a point with the Longhunter's. When you're reading about Longhunter expeditions, it's tons of brother-in-laws, tons of cousins. tons you know i mean brothers father-in-laws brother-in-law's this guy married this guy's sister exactly and he's like sort of like these familial very neighborly clans yeah but it could be as many as 40 people and they're and one of the big differences too between the long hunters and some of the later

volumes uh the individuals we look at in the later volumes is they don't leave behind a lot of records they're rural people they're largely illiterate um most of their stories that we have of them are recorded after the fact by interviews with their survivors or maybe interviews with them later in life um you know like talking to an old man about what he did in his 20s and so the source material for that with the exception of daniel boone is very uh very thin so we had to do a lot more sort of piecing together and hypothesizing in that story than we did in some of these other ones. Okay. Recap Mountain Men. Like when you hear the word mountain men

it's an abused term. It is. It is. It means like yeah. It's not like an old hermit that lives up in the mountains. And there's like when you see Mountain Men from a historical standpoint, it's something very specific. yeah so as we use the term and most i guess people who are in this field use the term it's referring to rocky mountain beaver trappers um who went west after the return of lewis and clark so that's 1806 it really is sort of becomes a big thing in the late 1820s mid 1820s late 1820s when they developed the rendezvous system which is a way of supplying these trappers and and also getting their furs to market,

but they're out there in the Rockies, sort of nomadically traveling from watershed to watershed in organized groups, trapping beaver, which is being used to produce wool felt. So really, they're not after the skin, they're after the hair, and the hair not attached to the skin, which is sort of an interesting twist

when you think about the fur trade in general. It's like when you make a mink, eyelashes like make eyelashes exactly i was curious when we're talking about that if they're keeping no if they're just gluing them in place on something else they're just plucking them there's no way they're putting the leather i think it'd be cool if you had the leather on there you had the leather on there you have the under fur yeah oh you know what we failed to mention what's that meat eaters american history the hide hunters so volume three yes is out now out now out october 14th this is being released october 13th so unless you're the type of person that listens to it

the day it drops it's out now as you listen to it it's out now so meat eaters american history the hide hunters which we're giving you a we're giving you a crash course in the subject right now we're giving you a free crash course in the subject right now for an hour little tease but then the actual thing is how many hours uh close to seven yeah yeah so you're getting a little you're getting a little little titillator right now but then the big helping the big christmas goose with all the trimmings with all the trimming shilling in a pence

is out now seven hours anywhere you get your audio books anywhere you get your audio books okay um so yeah mountain men is this story that I think a lot of people might be familiar with just when they think of a frontiersman trapper

but one of the interesting differences between mountain men and long hunters is that uh these expeditions because they're going across the continent and there's a ton of logistics involved they're they're actually organized by corporations and they have a lot of capital and there's a lot of sort of behind the scenes jockeying for control of different corporations and so-and-so sells their interest whatever but out of that

you get um the fact that these these trappers a lot of them just see an ad in a newspaper that's like do you want to go west and trap beaver for two years three years three years three years and sign on and so like while daniel boone and some of these long hunters were going and hunting with their their family and their neighbors uh guys like jim bridger were sort of you know he's he's 18 years old and he doesn't have a lot of uh he's sort of rootless his parents are dead and he sees an ad in the newspaper and shows up at an office in st louis and signs signs yeah signs an employment agreement yeah that's the funniest thing you think about or do you think about these guys like the mountain men that are out there living off the land for multiple years with very little

resupply. Most of those guys start out. It's like it's a job. Yeah. And it has a pay scale and you commit. It's financial security. There's not like an HR office. No. I mean, it's like a job though. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And like the I mean, it's it's interesting because whenever you read a story about like the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, they always mentioned this one really famous advertisement where they're seeking a hundred enterprising young men to go up the missouri and so yeah like although it seems like this really distant sort of ancient world they're finding job ads in the newspaper and no and following up on them to become a a trapper um and then that story dies out really with the virtual extirpation of beaver

from the Rockies and at the same time there's a collapse in the in the beaver felt market there's a bunch of different reasons for that but the the silk top hat becomes the preferred fashion and um essentially the the beaver trade sort of vanishes and in the 1838 1839 when these guys are coming together for rendezvous to sell their furs they sort of see the writing on the wall and then 1840 is the last official rendezvous which is like the big commercial exchange that sort of keeps

this whole world turning when Randall's talking about for hats like if you imagine Honest Abe Lincoln um so honest Abe Lincoln is running around that hat 1860 if he was running around in that hat in 1830

his would have been wool felt beaver wool felt but I believe leave honest abe was wearing was by civil war was wearing a silk hat i think it was a silk hat yeah same cut like those crazy looking hats yeah you keep like a house cat up inside there but seems like a very inefficient oh it's just an insane like when you're wearing a backpack and it catches on everything over your head and he just oh shit i'm wearing my backpack yeah you know i would imagine that a guy with the top hat would have a similar issue yeah it's like a guy trying to wear a cowboy hat on an airplane Especially a tall guy like Abe Lincoln.

Better have high door, door openings. Where are we at? Yeah, we talk about that. Yeah. Which moves us into the Hyde Hunter era. Mm-hmm. Okay. Here's one of the funny things about working on these series of all these American commercial hunter, market hunter periods.

For the first couple volumes we did, The Longhunters, the Mountain Men, you have all these American heroes, these mythologized characters. And what's interesting about these American heroes, these mythologized characters, is there's more awareness, there's more awareness about the individuals

and the lives they lived, then there is awareness about what they actually were doing for a living. Meaning people know the name Daniel Boone. Okay. So if you went out and just took, it just pulled random adult Americans off the street and said, have you ever heard of Daniel Boone? You're going to get a nod. Yes. What was up with him?

Some kind of hunter or some kind of frontiersman. He lived in the woods. Yeah. But if I said, can you explain me what he did for a living? You're going to have a very low success rate on getting a good answer. So people know the name. They know these pioneering figure, but they're not clear on what he was doing. he's known for um people have understanding that he was a sort of explorer settler

which he was but not necessarily intentionally being like he wasn't like like uh he wasn't a promoter um he is very tightly affiliated with people know him as a kentucky figure he left kentucky died elsewhere right there's not a lot of awareness of what he was same with if i went to you and said davy crockett People are going to be like, yes, familiar with the name Davy Crockett. And I said, can you explain to me some of the things Davy Crockett did for living? And they probably wouldn't have a very good sense. The Mountain Man era, people know Jim Bridger, explorer, whatever.

But if I said, but why was he exploring? They might not know that his sole focus over much of his professional career. His sole focus was like trying to locate populations of beavers in order to trap them. But they stayed. And as these American icons or American heroes. Now that we're moving into the hide hunter era, and when we say the hide hunters, what we're talking about is buffalo hunters, but there's a long history of being buffalo hunters. When we talk about the hide hunters, we're talking about a very specific type of buffalo

hunters, we're talking about a type of buffalo hunter who was hunting buffalo in order to get the skins, which were just sold as dried, what they call flint hides, not tanned. They were collecting skins, pegging them out to dry, and selling them, and these were skins that were being tanned into leather products in the east. That is what we call a hide hunter, someone who's using like a systematic system of slaughter of buffalo in order to sell hides in a specific period of time. One of the things that struck me the most we started in on this hide hunter period is that here you're now entering into a type of a type of frontiersman a type of market hunter

from an era that produced zero heroes there rhymes well if I left the S off it woulda put it in the dog song um there's no heroes like there's no mythologized figure

and you can ask why are there no famous heroic hide hunters and I think that there's probably one main reason why. While the long hunters like Boone extirpated deer from certain areas

or greatly reduced deer herds wiped out elk herds, wiped out buffalo herds. They're not known as the guys that did that. That crime hasn't been pegged on them. The mountain men, Jim Bridger,

they extirpated beavers across a bunch of their range. They wiped out regional populations of beavers, but the crime hasn't been pinned on them. And a lot of people probably don't even know there was a crime. They probably don't know that those things happen.

But when you get into the buffalo hide hunters, who as will explain the years, from the end of the Civil War to about 1883, they virtually eliminate. They kill about 15 million buffalo.

They kill them until there's less than 1,000 left in the United States, it is very well understood that they committed the crime. And we're still living with that consequence. That consequence today.

Like, even though they didn't wipe out the Buffalo biologically speaking, the Buffalo never recovered from that episode as a wild animal. Yeah. The way, the best way I've heard that distinction explained as I remember

years ago, someone explaining that They weren't driven to genetic extinction, but they were driven to ecological extinction, meaning they ceased to be, they cease to have an ecological function. Part of the landscape, yeah. And we understand that these buffalo hunters did that, and that crime has been pinned on them. And when you watch a documentary that deals with this era, they're usually just treated as villains. they're the villains everyone agrees that they're the villains we don't have buffalo hunter heroes we don't make buffalo hunter movies there aren't movies where the buffalo hunter winds up being heroic and saving everybody right and jeremiah johnson he doesn't run into and get saved by a buffalo hunter

because they're villains yeah he gets saved by an old mountain man because they're heroes and they And the other thing, too, that we get into this in the in the audiobook is that there's a shift in consciousness that occurs during their lifetime where all of a sudden you see the rise of the modern conservation movement, the founding of the Boone and Crockett Club, the curtailment of market hunting by the federal government, and this all happens during their lifetimes, sort of almost as soon as the smoke is cleared from their shooting all of a sudden market hunting is a very bad thing in sort of the cultural and political American consciousness and so they sort of live

in this weird space where the world that they did these acts in and killed all these buffalo was not the world that they lived in 20 years later hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart you got steep ground

long distances and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land

layers and new parcel boundaries where available. Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots. Whether you're chasing elk in the mountains, spotting mule deer in the coolies or looking for big woods white tails, Anex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder.

You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time GPS tracking, and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big Country demands better intel. Download Anex hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. Mega important announcement, in fact, the most important announcement you ever heard, The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre-order right now. Meat Eaters American History, the hide hunters, 1865 to 1883, tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War.

You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emory, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era.

And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre-order Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14. Randall and I we're going to touch on this today. I'm just going to touch out now. I think we're

going to touch on this today. Here's the thing about to keep mind about this hide hunter thing. And we're going to talk about why the years. Well, you know, let's do why the years now. Because I want to talk about the way in which this air era, the way in which this era turns into the modern era, you know, we'll get into this

more, but we make the point in there that these, some of these buffalo hide hunters lived to see the publication of San County Almanac, right? They lived to see the presidency of an individual, Theodore Roosevelt, who was like an adversary of the market hunters. Yeah, wanted them eliminated. Yeah. So they were like living a period of sort of watching their peers, watching their contemporaries come to condemn them.

Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, you were making that point, but I mean, I just think that it's important to realize that like, there was no, there was almost like no period when they were celebrated. A lot of them got bitter about this. And we tell that story in the book. A lot of them get to be old men, and they're bitter. Yeah.

They're bitter about how they've been disparaged in their own lifetimes for what they did. Yeah. And in some ways, I mean, there are other parallels I could draw, but they're in their later in life, once they're no longer living in this world where the hide hunt was a good thing or, you know, even a neutral thing. Like once it became a hot button topic and the buffalo are wiped out and, and conservation's on the rise, they often would look back and explain what they were doing in a different way. They tried to re, they tried to reimagine what drove them to do what they did in order to align themselves with things that were still okay at that time.

And so a lot of them said, well, we did it to tame the frontier. We did it to conquer native people. We did it to sort of break Indian resistance and open up the West for settlement. But what's fascinating is when you go back and you read the accounts that were written at the time as opposed to like what they wrote down in 1900 or 1910, they always say, I was young, I needed money.

It was free for the taking. All you needed was a rifle. You go out there and you get as many as you can, make a lot of money and there's none of these guys at the time are sort of thing are are explaining their actions in a in a way that's like part of a broader national story of quote unquote progress but as old men oh yeah living living now living in the 1920s 1930s uh or even just back in in like during the rosevelt presidency they're saying oh well you know we were part of we were part of the american story we weren't bad guys the the whole money thing was just to

side issue what we were really trying to do is open up the west for white settlement yeah they get terribly sentimental too um this isn't this isn't a direct quote but it would be that you'll get this kind of sentiment from them as old men like when i look and see children coming out of sunday school yeah in the texas panhandle running into the arms of their waiting mothers yeah i think by god i did the right thing and one of the interesting things about these sort of after the fact explanations for their actions especially as it comes to like the consequences for native people like they in the night in the early 1900s they said well this was a good and necessary thing we did it so that we could we could defeat the tribes of the plains um at the time they did that

because they thought it was something worth celebrating they said what they did that way because they explained their actions because in a way that would be celebrated but then decades later once people started thinking differently about what happened to the tribes of the plains they latched on to those explanations because it made the guys seem even worse and made the hide hunters seem even more villainous yeah yeah and so like you almost have to go back to um what they were saying while they did it rather than what they were saying long after the fact once their actions had sort of taken a big shift in sort of the public opinion. Yeah, we, well, I'm just going to say it now.

I keep trying to be, like, really disciplined about what we bring up when. But there's a hide hunter who kills over 10,000, the Buffalo, okay, who lives to, who lives through the Korean one. yeah he lives to see we mentioned he lives to see like playboy magazine being published yeah he lived to be a hundred and four years old lives to see here's a guy that's on the texas plains fighting comanches shooting buffalo for a living and he lives to like read playboy magazine see the introduction of the corvette the first burger king opened before he died and the first nuclear submarine launched before he died. Yeah.

But he, you know, he listened to the president on the radio. He, he, he drove cars. You know, like there's stories about these buffalo hunters. The wife of one buffalo hunter later in life said, you know, I hadn't been back to Dodge City since the Buffalo hunt. And the interviewer's like, well, why did you go to Dodge City? Why did you go back? And she goes, oh, there's a motorcycle race. We're going to watch a motorcycle race.

Yeah, the extreme, like that, that thing we spent a lot of time on is just how abrupt at the end of this era, how like abrupt the country changed out of it. And a thing we bring up as well, we keep talking about these certain, these certain hide hunters who lived through the Buffalo slaughter and became, they kind of stayed like they kind of wanted to continue to to, to defend. defend themselves and we talk about that there's no hide hunter heroes now that's not entirely accurate because there's a lot of mythologized western figures who became mythologized later for their exploits as gunfighters lawmen gamblers but who you wouldn't realize cut their teeth as hide hunters uh wider there's like historians a little bit question like how into hide hunting white herp was he he was hide hunter adjacent maybe did some hide hunting white irp did some hide hunting i'll tell you who um absolutely was a hide hunter pat garrett

the man who killed billy the kid we recently had um um Brian Burroughs Brian Brian Burroughs on no burrow it's burrow bro bro bro bro bro bro bro bro this thing of William Burroughs I know that's what that's what screwing me up. I always do that. We recently had the writer Brian Burrow on and his very excellent book, The Gunfighters. And in the Gunfighters, he tells the story of the night Billy the Kid died in New Mexico. And he talks about the last person Billy the kid addressed. He said, Keynes to a man named John Poe.

and then was shortly thereafter shot and killed well said it again said the same thing goes goes into a bedroom he passes a guy outside and says who is that goes into a bedroom says it again to someone in the room not knowing who he's looking at and that guy kills him dead those two guys were buffalo hide hunters but no one knows john poe and pat garrett as buffalo hide hunters yeah they're former buffalo hide hunters at the time yeah bat masterson

gunfighter becomes a sports writer, Buffalo Hunter. So it's not fair to say that the Buffalo hunters didn't produce heroes but they didn't produce heroes from that era. They shed that identity and became new people.

Some became like dudes that were presidents of banks. A lot of them got killed in bars and card games. Many like many died violently. And that's another thing about like the legacy of the hide hunters is

you'll find people say, oh, the hide hunters were nothing but horse thieving scoundrels. Yeah. And in other historians, including Elliot West, who we had on the podcast years ago,

Elliot West has this passage like, oh, they became candy salesmen and high school principals. Yeah. And you're like, both those things are true. They were some horse stealing scoundrels.

Yeah. And some became candy salesmen. Like, they became all things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Elliot West,

in that passage, he makes a point that, like, the hide hunter's stepped out of normal life to become hide hunters you know they were like farmers they were guys that worked on the railroad they were they have these they they weren't born to be hide hunters yeah right and like boon was born to be a hunter right and there was there was an opportunity and they stepped into that world and they they did what they did and then that world vanished along with

the buffalo and they moved on to the next thing uh it's more appropriate to say this is a segue it's more appropriate to say that these buffalo hide hunters who we know and understand and have condemned for exterminating the American Buffalo yes they stepped out of normal

life but it's more it's better to say they stepped out of the American Civil War yeah yeah and that's something that I it's something that you hear about this era

like a lot of these buffalo hunters were former former civil war soldiers or somehow affected their lives were affected by the civil war but you really don't have a full appreciation for it until you start reading their individual stories by the dozens and it's just it's overwhelming um Frank mayor

the guy who lived to see Burger King and Playboy magazine he was a 13-year-old drummer boy. What if you ever read Playboy while eating Burger King? I think he... In a Corvette. At 104, I hope he was doing all that stuff. It's doubtful, though.

Is it, baby? I'm going to take my Corvette down. Pick up the April issue. Get a burger? Get a Whopper? Just for the articles, of course. Yeah. Well, that was back when you really could read

some good stuff in there, you know? We used to be a country. So he, he, he, Yeah, Frank Mayer, the guy who lived to be 104, he was a 13-year-old drummer boy serving, they think, in his father's artillery unit at the Battle of Gettysburg. If you can imagine what he witnessed

during that period of time as a 13-year-old, like, it's hard to imagine him going on to just live a quiet life somewhere, right? And he even makes the point in his memoir that after the Civil War, There were a ton of men who didn't know what was next, but they knew they knew they had to move on, right? And so they're sort of lost. They were looking for purpose.

A lot of them, like they'd lost family members. They might have lost fathers. John Cook, I don't know if we mentioned Cook yet. No, we haven't mentioned Cook yet. But a very, like, Cook also comes out of one of the most ugly, violent aspects of the Civil War, which, and we explain it a little bit, which is not widely known about what was going on in that period. Yeah. So he's, he's, his family moves out to Missouri. And so they get all wrapped up in the guerrilla fighting that's going on in the Kansas, Missouri border. And his brother is shot 27 times. He is, his, his, his brother was serving. He shot pieces. Yeah. Yeah. A vengeance, like a revenge attack. And his, his, his,

brother is serving in a union military unit and some confederates earlier that day had killed some union soldiers and put on their uniforms. And so they marched right up to Cook's brother and he got shot 27 times. And the commanding officer, that unit gave John Cook his brother's hat that's just soaked in blood and full of holes and says, you know, this is what we have left to your brother, bring it to your mom. And so even though Cook himself was like again a youngster he you know he didn't like bear the brunt of the fighting like the civil war profoundly brought an end to his like childhood innocence and then there's guys that served as prisoners of war and guys that uh there's one hide hunter who won the

congressional medal of honor um and there's a you know we have stories of like a guy who is a confederate soldier who is he was at a fort that was went under siege and And like two-thirds of the guys in there with them had died by the time they surrendered. So you can imagine. And then he, that's the guy. He gets taken up to a military prison in the north. At the end of the war walks home to North Carolina. Yeah.

And then heads out. That's a important thing to bring up is Confederate, like, not just union, but union and Confederate soldiers in the years immediately after the war, within a decade after the war, are coming together in hunting outfits in Texas. Yeah. Yeah. And you also, there's a couple interesting stories of brothers, the Clarkson brothers, the eldest of the three, he served in the war.

And then afterwards, they said he grew his hair out long and he went out west and started trapping wolves. And then once the buffalo hunt got underway, he wrote to his other brother. and said, come on out. You got it. And these guys killed, I believe, 20,000 Buffalo during their career as Buffalo hunters. And there's another guy, he writes to his brother, and that guy comes out, and he brings a rifle in a canteen and a compass, and they're all his union issued, like, army, army gear.

So we begin this story in 1865 because the connection to the end of the Civil War is sort of inarguable. Um, but the hunt itself really doesn't get underway until later and until six years later, essentially. Yeah, there's a little device we use in these American history pieces where we like to, we like to bracket, we like to bracket like the years that we're talking about, which is.

No, it's true. Yeah. But what we also do is we also hint at what we bracket it. Okay. So with the, with the long hunters. we say in the title it's meat eaters american history the long hunters 1763 to 1775 1763 being the end of the french and indian war or the seven years war so you get a period of relative peace on the frontier which allows guys to somewhat more safely go into the colonial

frontier to hunt 1775 of course is the year before the american revolution which brings in this very bloodied period on the American frontier when it becomes really hard to hunt. But then, of course, we explain a lot about, like, what happens before 1763. Yeah. And a little bit about what happens after 1775, but the,

but the, the, the era is that with the mountain men, 1806. So that's the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition. However, we explain a little bit about the Louisiana purchase, which is before that. But the Action is like the return of Lewis and Clark and the reports of great quantities of beavers in the American West with the collapse of the market in 1840.

The hide hunter story, we're saying 65. And as we explain, it's because you can't understand the hide hunters without understanding the civil war from a standpoint of firearms, from a standpoint of railroads, from a little bit of politics, okay, and from the standpoint of creating a generation of displaced young men. But the shooting doesn't start till about seven years later. Yeah. The shooting really starts. in 1872 yeah and on the railroad on the railroad note um like the transcontinental railroads are authorized during the civil war and that's tied to politics and questions about um you know like you not keeping california in the union and also the northern uh elected officials

don't no longer have to concede things to the south so it's really a northern project So they authorize the transcontinental railroads. They really don't get construction. They don't make a lot of progress in construction until after the war. But the railroads are important for two reasons. One, the sheer logistics of moving all these buffalo skins off the planes is unimaginable without the railroads in the quantities that they're moving them. Two, a lot of these Civil War veterans got, they sort of cut their teeth as buffalo hunters shooting meat to feed railroad workers. And so they were already making this transition into market hunters before the hide hunt as meat hunters.

Yeah, I'd like to explain one example that, just because it's a name people are going to be familiar with. If you're sitting there now listening to this, if one buffalo hunter, no, I'm not saying a hide hunter, a buffalo hunter, you probably know is Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill Cody never participated in the hide hunt. Buffalo Bill Cody shot 4,000 Buffalo as a meat hunter for the railroad. But then got off on other ventures, got into show business and some high profile guiding. He never made the transition. But other guys like that, like picture you got a guy, like a guy like Bill Cody, Buffalo Bill Cody, kills 4,000 for the meat. this guy has perfected the has perfected the skill yeah so you had these dudes when the

hide market takes off and we explain in great detail why the hide market exploded when the hide market takes off you got guys that are raring to go yeah and they don't they don't need to figure out how to kill buffalo yeah in mass they've had their sort of professional apprenticeship as meat hunters and they're selling meat not only to railroad camps like like you think about all the labor is needed for these infrastructure projects like there's companies that get a contract from the railroad to board and house all of the workers and then those companies are going out and hiring a guy like bill Cody to kill Buffalo and it's like eight a day or something like that um they're also getting contracts to supply meat to forts like there's military forts being

established um across the west to guard the railroad and also to wage war on the truck and so there's civilians who are going out and hunting buffalo to feed the soldiers and then they're also engaging in a more limited scale selling meat to butchers or meat stores in the east restaurants, hotels, whatever as sort of a curiosity. But all these,

there's very much like an intact robust trade in Buffalo products before the hide hunt gets rolling. Yeah, like, if you imagine all of a sudden squirrel brains are worth $10,000 a brain, who's best suited to capitalize on that, explodes that market? Kevin Murphy, Kevin Murphy. So people later, a hundred years later, say, do you know that Kevin Murphy used to just hunt squirrels like for the meat?

People don't realize this. And, yeah, everybody knows them as the squirrel brain hunter. it's it's so funny because they like like the clarkson's the the who i mentioned earlier the three brothers i mean he a lot of them will come out west not really knowing what they're doing and then they get a job cutting wood to supply firewood to a military base or cutting wood to supply firewood to a railroad camp and then they realize another one of the guys cutting wood has sort of a side gig shooting buffalo and then they realize oh i could do that and then they realize if i got a wagon of my own to haul this meat, I could just kill Buffalo all the time. And so there's like

a series of years leading up to the hide hunt where there's sort of this professional class developing. And there's still like a huge rush of outsiders once the hide hunt gets out of way. But like there's very much like a well developed expertise around killing Buffalo, like especially in Kansas where it where it gets ripping. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground long distances and miles of crown. land that aren't always easy to navigate that's why onex hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in canada now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots whether you're chasing elk in the mountain spotting mule deer in the coolies or looking for big woods white tails onex gives you the tools to plan smart and hunt harder. You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time

GPS tracking, and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big Country demands better intel. Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre-order right now. Meat-eaters American history, the hide hunters, 1865 to 1883, tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink

of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And, like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry,

we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre-order Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks, and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 4th. We should touch real quick on this idea that we talked about with the long hunters, that oftentimes a long hunting expedition would be people related, strong familial connection, coming out of a specific settlement, oftentimes like in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, but coming out of these small agrarian settlements, loosely connected individuals, and they become like a, like a, they launch a long hunting. expedition could be 40 guys it could be five guys the mountain men you have this thing with uh it's just all these many uprooted displaced young men sort of randomly thrown together it's not a family enterprise um with the hide hunters you do get a little bit back into a there is some family stuff yeah but we bring up this term it's a it's a beautiful term and i'm surprised i'd never

heard it before it's so great we get into this thing called siphon I don't know where you picked. Randall introduced this word to me. Siphon migration. Where a person will, a person will move out west, start doing well in the Buffalo Hyde trade. And then he functions as a sort of siphoned and starts pulling people out with him. It's like, come on out.

You guys got to get in on this. Yeah. So like cousins, brothers, whatever, get on the train or ride. And they're coming out of Ohio, Illinois, Virginia, whatever it is. and they're being drawn out by someone in their social network, someone in their family, they're being drawn out to get in on the bonanza. You also have these organizations that they've called an outfit who are coming together oftentimes like under specific job titles.

It's a hierarchical structure. The mountain men would work for these giant, what at the time would have been like corporations. They had financiers. They're like VC-backed corporations hired the mountain men. There's no corporate structure with the hide hunters. It's like whoever has the money to buy the equipment is the top of the hierarchy. And they'll be that usually that guy is the shooter. But then he has like specific roles with specific for specific skill sets.

You have a shooter. You have a skinner. Maybe you have two skinners. You have a camp cook. And these are like assigned roles. And you can climb through the hierarchy. Yeah. But it's like it's like a, it's a job description.

It's a skill and you can go apply that skill. I could be, I'm going to go cook for Randall's outfit. I'm going to get sick of that. And the next year, I'm going to go and sign a similar deal and get a job cooking for Phil's outfit. Yeah. And it's the, the, I'm forgetting the name of the historian, but he talks about this idea of crew culture where you develop, like an industry develops. this sort of well-recognized blueprint for how a crew works

and if you make it through a season with one crew you can pretty seamlessly hop onto the other crew and you think about this as like guys in relatively dangerous professions you know if you think about like logging like wildfire crews or commercial fishermen um it's often people sort of in dangerous jobs there's high turnover and there's like some hazing involved and once you but once you know the lingo

and once you have your own sort of set of tools like you can you can bounce around and so so these buffalo hunting outfits are really small scale outfits maybe four or five guys some you know 12 15 i think they're in rare instances there's some crews of 20 but they all have very well-defined jobs and there's a well-defined sort of order of operations in terms of how you kill the buffalo, how you skin them, how you process them, and everybody's doing it the same. And what's sort of this circle back one bit, when you're talking about all the money in the, in the fur business being tied up in like the corporations that are hiring the trappers, the big money in the Buffalo hunt story is with

these companies that are sort of in the import, export business. They're traffic. in furs and leather and other goods but they're just sort of they're in kansas city um sort of these big hubs on the eastern side of the plains and they are moving these skins by the thousands to tanneries in the east they're sort of brokers like middlemen and they actually are sending flyers out onto the planes explaining to guys how to skin how to how to how to care for your skins, how to like, like what the process is, what they want. And then essentially all you need is a wagon, which is still a big investment and a rifle. And you go out and kill all the buffalo you can. And then a fur buyer or a hide buyer, I should say, moves, either either you go to town

and sell your hides to them at the town and they're sort of a field agent for one of these big brokers or they are even traveling around in the field to different camps and hauling the hauling the hides away buying them directly in camps so the the hunters themselves and their crews are sort of these autonomous units on the periphery and then there's there's a real network of buyers that sort of vacuum and funnel all this stuff up to places like kansas city uh we were when we worked on this we were struggling to be like how do you describe the chaos of the civil war to understand how it's spinning people out

like people know how horrible it is so in World War II we lost about 250,000 Americans in Vietnam we lost 57,000 Americans and the Civil War we lost this is combatants and when our population

was considerably lower yeah between the two armies comprised of you know of Americans um 700,000 dead combatants

in many communities you took away an entire in many communities you the war carried away entire generations of men you in communities you went and you you eliminated people say 17 to 28 or so i mean you like you had it be where that town

lost that bracket of individuals it that that war killed off 8% of the white men aged between 13 and 43 remember said we lost 57 000 in u.s soldiers of vietnam 50,000, 50,000 civilians died in the Civil War. 60,000 people lost arms and legs in the Civil War. So by beginning this story in the Civil War, it's like you have literally destroyed huge swaths of the country. And people needed something to go do. And the reason I bring this out, and kind of the reason we focus on this, well, The main reason we focus on this is because it's like it's the truth and it's how things happen.

But a big part of the, a big impetus in like explaining the situation is I feel that coming and saying, oh, the hide hunters were these sadistic people hell bent on destroying American wildlife. It's just, it's not accurate. I think that some of them I'm not think some of them were aware of the destruction they were doing some of them in the moment articulated an acute awareness

of the destruction they were doing but there's more to the story than just to be that these were like sadistic money grubbing executioners of wildlife yeah like these were often people that had like not just like little

opportunity, no opportunity. And though we weren't using this term at the time about trauma, being shell-shocked, whatever, people coming out of horrific circumstances with absolutely no promise of employment. Yeah. And I think, too, like a lot of them were refugees. Like when we think about the Great Depression and we think about like the, you know, the grapes of wrath. like people heading out looking for work like hitting the road looking for work like that's the

situation on the ground in 1865 and um there's something like 200,000 people in the south lost their homes so they are you know not only or maybe their farms had been burned like their crops had been burned like they're they're unmoored from what their lives had been like prior to this and um like we mentioned you know there's a there's a clear opportunity in the buffalo market and then the other the other side of that is like the 1870s were a time of serious economic upheaval and there's all sorts of financial panics and um business is failing people getting laid off unemployed and so you you find these in these accounts like somebody's explaining why they became a buffalo hunter and they're like well the grasshoppers ate my crops

and I had to feed my family, so I became a buffalo hunter. There's another story that a bunch of butchers from St. Louis had shown up on the planes looking to cut Buffalo because they all lost their jobs in a financial crisis, right? And so, like, even after the Civil War, the country's on very rocky footing, and it's very, it's overwhelmingly clear from the stories that these people left behind that there's there's obviously some like hunger for adventure and frontier life and all that but it's so overwhelmingly clear that these are people who are um desperate another thing that's kicking out people on to the frontier is the the the progress of the railroads viewed in hindsight the progress of the

railroads was was was stunningly fast but at times there'd be pauses um the northern pacific railroad paused in bismar north dakota like just shut down so you'd bring out all these workers and create this job opportunity and now and then money would dry up yeah things that happened and all of a sudden it's just like but we're done yep and so here you have people on the frontier who just had the the the rug pulled out and they can't get a bus ticket home yeah and so that you like you were sort of like dumping people just like displacing dumped people out on the planes on the American frontier and a lot of these guys if you look at how they creep into it like Randall said I mean they're doing like pretty lowly work like cutting firewood and then trying

to haul firewood and sell it to a military fort no one's getting rich cutting firewood but that that is putting them in position to be queued up to participate in the hide hunt yeah one one story that is probably worth mentioning is a guy named Elijah Cox who's actually a freed slave and he he served in the Buffalo soldiers, the cavalry

the all black cavalry unit and he gets discharged and he's discharged in Texas I believe he's born in Michigan so he gets discharged in Texas at some point fighting the Apaches and he doesn't have anything

else to do so he becomes a cook for a buffalo hunting outfit and then after a couple seasons of serving as a cook he becomes a skinner and and after a couple seasons of serving as a skinner one of the hunters in the outfit like breaks his leg or something and so Elijah Cox gets to be a shooter and so it's one of these sort of strange stories of like he spent a he spent many years involved in the trade worked his way up had no it was not a plan that he had right it's just circumstances where he found himself and um and ultimately i think he killed some 700 buffalo during his time to how many got and i think that when he when he got cut loose from the military if i remember right and it's in we we explained it in here um i think he got caught loose from the military from an injury yeah yeah

he was he was like medically discharged yeah yeah so here he is he just On the frontier. Yeah, with no network, like nothing to fall back on. Later when he was asked about it, you know, we were talking about earlier, we were talking about the way people justify it and the way they kind of like maybe misremember their motivations. Later when he was asked about it, his reply was basically like, all I know is I had plenty to eat and I always had money.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was during the, that was. So what's interesting about that is like during. the Great Depression, you know, there's all these like oral history projects. And so he was interviewed at the tail end of the Great Depression. He's still alive and he's lived through the Great Depression. And he's thinking about the Buffalo days. He's like, I don't know. It's pretty good. A lot of meat. Yeah. I, I, I, what I said earlier, Contradite, he was, he was born to

escape slaves. So he was born in Michigan. His parents were both escaped slaves from the South. Yeah, the, the Buffalo soldiers play into the story a little bit. And we get into much greater detail in the project but the the that term you hear that term often like even the what's the name bob the barley reference um i believe it was the camanchi or apache i'm not i can't remember who likened the hair mm-hmm oh they they likened the hair of these black american cavalry members they likened the hair to the wool of a buffalo so they were a buffalo soldier. Man, it became like a proud

identity for a lot of these guys after the Civil War like they're out west, they're serving in the Army and yeah, it's like a really fascinating eventually they come up to Yellowstone they're in Montana and they and they're having mix-ups

like they're oftentimes during this little period that happened down in Texas Buffalo hide hunters are joining groups of of Buffalo soldiers fighting against Comanche. Yeah. Yeah, the situation, maybe we should get into this, like the, the phases of the hunt.

Yeah, the three phases. Because it starts in Kansas, really, uh, along the tracks of, of the railroads. The Topeka, Santa Fe in particular, Dodge City is like a big hub. Um, and then the slaughter sort of goes on until there aren't any Buffalo in Kansas anymore. and the hide hunters push into texas and texas um it becomes a much like at first they're so far away from any hub of settlement that they're still hauling the hauling the hides back up to dodge city um but they're bumping into comanches and and there's a real recognition on the part of the comanches and other their their allies that um the hide hunters are killing off their economic lifeblood

And so it becomes sort of a very bloody theater for the hide hunt, where hide hunters sometimes are serving as sort of like proxy fighters for the U.S. Army and the Army is serving as sort of proxy fighters for the Buffalo hunters. And then at some point, they kill all the Buffalo in Texas, and they roll up to Montana. And then Montana, it's sort of a mop-up job. And in a couple of years, the herds, the northern plains are basically blinked out that's a it's an interesting point about um the indigenous americans that when we get into the deer skin trade like in our long hunter piece

we focus on we focus really heavily on these euro american these white long hunters but that the deerskin trade was really built by native hunters before these guys like boon and people started going into that area there had been long a colonial trade trade in deer skins and in the early days of that trade, those deer skins were being harvested by Native Americans and bought in and exported. With the beaver skin trade, there were some tribes wanted nothing to do with the beaver skin trade. Other tribes jumped in pretty heavily. The flyheads were famous for having engaged in the beaver skin tribe trade. The blackfeet, some historians like to point out how the blackfeet sat it out, but

there's other accounts of the Blackfeet engaging pretty heavily and trading to the north, but they did it. The mountain men would often overwinter with tribes. A lot of mountain men were very tightly associated, like Jim Bridge was very tightly associated with the Shoshonee. Right. So there's this big Native American element of people in the trade, of people traveling with the practitioners. You get into the hide hunters and you don't find.

Yeah, like there's no cultural exchange, there's no sort of shared interests, there's no allies. No. As we get into, we had a whole chapter that kind of sets up this thing. There was, we're talking about when we talk about hide hunters, there was a thing called what we call the robe hunt or the robe trade. There was a commercial Native American trade, which was small scale and very artisan for tanned buffalo. robes that were used as an as insulation like if you were on a wagon you could be in Boston riding in a wagon on a cold day and you have a lap blanket that is a winter killed buffalo from the northern plains you could be in the military and be issued a sleeping

bag on a polar expedition that could be a winter killed indian tanned buffalo robe from the northern plains so indians would shoot buffalo at the right time of year and the right right location, the women would tan it into a finished good, and that finished good was sold. But that was, that was small. And there's, there's bottlenecks on, there's natural constraints on the scale of that trade because of the seasonality, and especially because of that labor part. Yeah, like a woman could tan 10 a year. Yeah, a woman, in addition to serving her family, preparing hides to clothe her family,

working on hides to make a tent, she might be able to put out 10 robes a year. A hide hunter that's just hunting for skin, not tanned goods, be just hunting and selling skin. A hide hunter, they would get into long periods where they are killing

30 and 40 a day. There is examples of killing way more than that. We get into some of these extraordinary kills, but routinely, like, Like in good conditions, they're waking up every day and killing 30 to 40. And a woman in a Native American family on the Great Plains might be able to produce 10 robes. And annually. And like we said, the hide hunters are only drying the skins out.

And then they're being tanned on an industrial scale in the east. There's sort of a bottomless appetite for buffalo skins. And there's really a bottomless appetite for leather at this time because the leather making industry, the tanning industry, has grown and consolidated and mechanized and made all these improvements in sort of process to the point that like it's basically like a big gaping maw and as many hides as you can shovel into it, it can handle it and it can find markets for them. So the tanning industry is just absorbing this on a scale that like native communities could not have during the robe trade era. Yeah, they're being tanned where you have a native woman tanning a buffalo hide with hand tools on the ground, using a buffalo's brain, okay, or a concoction of liver and brain to soften it. When the hide hunters get going, their skins are being tanned in railroad-fed tanneries,

in buildings that are 300 yards long by companies that own. There's one company we talk about that owns 25,000 acres of timberland in Pennsylvania because they want Tamarack and Hemlock. They own 25,000 acres of timberland to produce bark to make tannic acid.

And this is a place, like if you've heard the term a company town where the company owns the store the company owns the houses you go there you work for the factory you go live in a house owned by the factory and you buy your groceries from the factory like this is a company town in in uh rural pennsylvania that has nine story buildings where they're drying buffalo hides and they're tanning them these huge vats they have rows of hundreds of vats and uh yeah like it's almost it's it's sort of startling when you see photos and these tanneries continue to operate even after the buffalo it was like when the buffalo hide trade was going on they switched all over to tanning a majority of their business was buffalo skins and then afterwards they simply switched back over to cattle skins yeah that's a really one of the more fascinating points um like a discovery that that i had in working on this oftentimes when we go into these projects like we're going to it with some level of pre-awareness about the details and we'll be able to like randall and i can sit and we can kind of map out based on what we already know we can kind of map out how the story plays out and we might come up with like we need to find out this or we need to learn why this is the way it is but we come in with like some level of familiarity i um and i kind of understand how i came to think this now

I had thought from previous research. In fact, oh, you know what I was going to mention? This story, like, I wrote a book, I think it came out, and so, I think it was 2008. In 2008, I published a book, American Buffalo in Search of a Lost icon, and it tells the story of the species from, you know, the Pleistocene. It tells the story of the species from the Ice Age up and into the story. the future. It's this whole overview of the animal. There's a part of a chapter where I talk about the hide hunters. So if you ever seen like an exploded diagram or you're looking at like a piece of machinery and then there's like a little arrow pointing to a part of the machinery and on

the next page is an exploded diagram of that little component, this is an exploded diagram of what is perhaps the most interesting part about that story where this is taking that little that couple pages about the hide hunters in american buffalo and blowing it out to something as long as the american buffalo um so there's if you've read that and i know many of you have if you read that uh there's like a little bits of overlapping stuff but this is like a greatly this focuses on the most important stretch of a couple decades in that story and tells a very detailed accounting of something that I briefly gloss over in the book. But in that work, I had come to this thing and you'll see it repeated.

Like, I know where I got it. This idea that there was a invention, okay, or a revolutionary new process that all of a sudden made it so, Buffalo leather was like the greatest leather of all time. Okay, you'll see this, that they came up with new tanning methods, and all of a sudden, Lordy, Lordy, you could make this great elastic belting out of Buffalo Hyde, and Buffalo Hyde was this super special leather. And that's not entirely wrong, but it's not quite right. You'll see that in every single thing. Yeah. Almost every single thing you read on the subject.

As even like people writing in the 1890s, like William Temple. Hornaday like they they they're saying there's this eureka moment where all of a sudden there's value in buffalo leather and it goes it's like a boom and a bust um and that's just sort of accepted as fact and i'd never read an explanation of what that was and i really wanted to find that for this project and we we talked about this a lot like we got to find that we got to have that in there, our audience is interested in tanning and working with skins and all this stuff. Like, if there's one thing we need to have, it's that. It just, it doesn't really exist.

Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots whether you're chasing elk in the mountains spotting mule deer in the coolies or looking

for big woods white tails onex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder you'll still get fully functional offline maps precise weather conditions real-time GPS tracking and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big Country Demands Better Intel. Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre-order right now.

Meat Eaters American History, the Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters. who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true story. of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors

that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. pre-order meat eaters American history the hide hunters 1865 to 1883 wherever you get your audiobooks and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14

you know it'd be maybe perhaps a better way of thinking about what actually happened what's that wood that everybody uses on their decking now it's like that composite wood it's like chipped up it's like chipped up wood with with with uh resins and adhesives i don't know like the fake wood okay never mind that particle board plywood yeah plywood sure everybody knows plywood all right let's say you get you got a mill and they make they produce plywood and because of where they're at what trees they have available they're producing tons of plywood let's say with white pine and they developed this strategy

and they can use white pine and they're making this really nice plywood and they're selling plywood like hotcakes and all of a sudden someone says hey man you know how we're paying $5 per unit of wood on white pine

do you know that we can get ponderosa pine for three bucks and so they go to their engineers hey what happens when you use ponderosa pine and the engineers go oh you know it turns out if you if you add a little more resin it's the same thing man like plywood's plywood we could definitely use that ponderosa pine uh in fact if it's three bucks and not five bucks we'll take as much of that ponderosa pine as

we can get our hands on yeah and they keep making plywood and people keep buying plywood and a lot of these people that are buying it they wouldn't know white pine from ponderosa pine if they saw it But it's the product they want, and they're buying it. And then sometime down the road, some guy goes, ah, you know what? The ponderosa pine, they caught it all down. It's gone. Back to white pine. I guess let's just keep running that white pine.

That's a great metaphor. It was good while it lasted. Yeah. And it was like, that's a better way of thinking about leather consumption because they were being like, Asiatic water buffalo? Sure. Yeah. Cattle from South America.

sure the united states in texas sure buffalo hides why not yeah like there's there's the united states is importing leather anywhere it can or hides from anywhere it can like sourcing hides and all of a sudden uh with the railroads they can access however many million hides are just sort of walking around out there on the planes and it can be sucked into this this preexisting you know uh network and there's some truth to the idea that there's technological advances like they're the the industry as a whole is getting better and better at working with big heavy hides. There's some there's there's there's some changes in method where they're they're using hot water like a they're they're liming them and then doing a hot water bath and there's actually a guy who calls that the

buffalo method but it's not it wasn't invented for buffalo it's just sort of like a gradual improvement and processes over time that happen to align with their ability to ship Buffalo hides by the hundreds and thousands every year. Yeah, the challenge is

anybody that's skinned a deer knows that the belly, right? The belly is real thin. Yeah. The hides much thicker on the other side of the backbone. You know, the inside of the legs is real thin. The hides real thick up on the neck, whatever. The challenge is how do you produce a

uniform how do you produce the biggest piece of uniform product you can and so they're doing all this stuff like they're like they're they're they're like imagine basically that you're sanding it down well and i think we should just before that i mean we're talking we i don't think we've mentioned yet belting no we have top of where all this like why yeah yeah the country had always used leather the number one thing we want to leather for shoes yeah like let shoes were leather tack horse equipment harness equipment all that stuff was made out of leather but then all the sudden they need belting which is like if you picture if you picture a timing belt on your snow machine or whatever in your car like a belt is simply something that at the most basic level takes

movement from one place and transfers that movement to something else right so one thing spins the belt spins through it and the other side spins. Is that? Yeah. Does that make sense? And so if you imagine like a very early factory, it's all gears and cogs, either made out of wood or metal and you're taking power from a stream, like you've got a water wheel and a stream and the wheel's turning and that's turning a big shaft, it's turning a gear

that's turning another shaft until it gets to wherever you're doing the work with that power, whether it's like a grinding mill or you know you could power a saw with that you could power any sorts of other like mechanical tools with that power but it all has to be transmitted through one thing moves another thing moves another thing moves another thing moves because they can't just zap it down a wire yeah like in the age of electricity and so the leather belt replaces this older system of shafts and coughs and and wheels and things like that and it's revolutionary

because you can spread power out across a factory floor in all types of different directions and you can spread it out to different machines or whatever and this is something that's invented in America the leather belt drive and then it's sort of perfected during the Civil War

as like there's this increase in wartime manufacturing and so that coincides again with the railroads reach the the planes the buffalo can be shipped east the tanning factories are ready to absorb the buffalo and there's this I mean we're talking about miles and miles and miles of belting in a factory

yeah there's a photo from after the Buffalo Hyatt era and again they used that leather when it was available but the wiping out the buffalo didn't wipe out leather so there's a photo from a Ford plant yeah the lathing operation for like the drive shafts at a Ford

plant. Yeah. And the caption on the photo points out that what you're looking at is 50 miles. It's just a picture a bunch of people in a factory all dressed in black and white. That's a joke. A bunch people at a factory. I'll talk it like this.

Standing at equipment. And over their heads is nothing but belting. Yeah. Because somewhere is a big steam engine running and they're transmitting power to all these lades and it says you're looking at 50 miles of leather belting but some of this leather belting is 10 feet wide yeah yeah and and and that's so if you picture an old like if you ever seen a drawing of an old factory there's all these people working at machines

in neat little rows and uh overhead there's a bunch of stuff and there's lines coming down to their machines. And it almost looks like a puppet theater, right? And so essentially the way that before the age of electricity, the way that this worked is you had a steam engine and that's turning a huge belt. And that's called the prime mover of the factory. Like the steam engine begins moving things. And then that belt moves these long shafts that are suspended in parallel rows above the factory floor. Those shafts then are linked together by belts. so that when one turns, they all turn. So you have the prime mover, and that's moving a big belt that turns one of these shafts,

and then that shaft is turning all the other shafts. And then each individual machine is connected to those moving shafts on the ceiling by more belts. And if you're going to do something at a machine, you essentially have like a clutch, like in your car. Because the whole thing is moving continuously, like the things above you're moving continuously. So if you're all of a sudden, I need to, you know, use. my saw or my hammer or my mill or whatever it is, you have like a foot pedal that sort of clutches that timing belt onto your machine and now your machine's running. And to stop it, you disengage it from the belt again with that clutch. And that power is always cranked. And they're even running

primary belts into other buildings. Yeah, to other buildings. And if you think about it like today, if you have a big manufacturing operation, every place you need an outlet or an extension cord before electricity, that all has to be connected physically by moving things. Like if you want to move whatever, a rock crusher, it has to be connected by moving parts to moving parts to moving parts to the steam engine or whatever is generating your power there. So like when we think about the expansion of the industrial economy, like in the 1870s, 80s, 90s, it's all predicated on the ability of belts to connect machines to steam engines. And so that's like it's it's it's almost this bottomless demand for leather. And buffalo leather does lend itself well to this because of its inherent

properties. But as Steve pointed out like the Ford is still using leather belts in the 1920s and they're not taking them from Buffalo. Like you could have you know it's not like if we hadn't had Buffalo leather we couldn't build these factories Buffalo leather just happened to sort of fall into the shoot at the right time what kind of feeds this idea of some specific thing triggering it is this there's this

there is a story that comes out of the Kansas plains and it's very well documented and it's a really interesting narrative of how this played out is a tannery has a desire to experiment

with some buffalo skins. So they call like a broker, a guy that deals in buffalo meat and other things out in Kansas. And they're like, hey, we'd like to get 500 hides to mess with. He's not a hunter. He goes to one of these railroad meat hunters

and says to a railroad meat hunter, hey, can you get me the 500 hives? So here's a guy. He takes the order and needs to find someone to fulfill the order. he contracts a guy of meat hunter to fulfill his order for 500. The meat hunter shoots, I think, 551. Turns the 500 into the guy that bought him for him,

but he's got this extra 50 to burn. Sends the extra 50 to a brother in Boston. New York. Sorry, New York. But the buyer who then sold. Sends the other 50 to a brother who then's like, well, I'll go try to find someone that wants them. he sells them to a tannery

so now you have two tanneries that are sitting on something there's a tannery sitting on about 500 there's a tannery sitting on about 50 both of these tanneries mess around with the hides and both come back and say we'd like a lot

give me all you got we'd like a lot and that starts it it is a very distinct like beginning Yeah, that brother That's the beginning That brother in New York As soon as he sells him

And the company says we want 2,000 more And probably more after that He just gets on a train to Kansas And he finds his brother In Dodge City He said This is just the business now

It's game on Yeah Yeah It's game on And it caught It happened so fast That it caught meat hunters By surprise

There's hide hunters That there's hide hunters that talk about That there's hide hunters That like Remember the day They got the news. Yeah. Like the day they got the news where people are like, no, no, no, no, no.

It's the hides, dummy. Yeah, there's a guy. There's a guy who's out shooting meat and he's complaining to some other hunters that it's too hot out because all of his meat spoiling before he could sell it. And they look at him and they're like, why are you still hunting for meat? You could just. Screw to me. Take the hides off and bring him to here and he'll buy everyone he can bring him. And he's like dumbfounded.

he because he's still out there trying to cure hams and stuff on the planes and and sort of his the world has moved past that uh another one this kind of this is the last part of this that um we're getting to right now uh there is if you if you study this area that this if you study this era on like a superficial level um you'll always find find out about all the waste and without wanting to without wanting to do a sort of revisionist history you know let me better explain what I'm saying

the the hide hunters wasted enormous quantities of meat but there's more to the story okay you could picture someone coming to this depending on their motivation you could picture someone coming to this and saying like it's all a lie they didn't waste all that meat they sold a lot of meat like they sold a lot of meat and as we got into this we're like let me tell you two things that are real true man they sold a lot of meat but man they wasted a lot a lot lot more yeah you could get into like we get into all the numbers on this you can get into what seems like staggering quantities of sold meat when you get

into the tonnages like the counts on tongues the barrels of tongues the train loads of meat right the vast quantities of smoked hands and they talk about it a lot and you'd look and be like my God. These got you were resourceful. Train cars full of meat. Yeah. Right. And you could spend this whole narrative about all this meat.

Mm-hmm. Or you could start going like, okay, let's start trying to do a little math. Let's do a little math. Like here's a guy and these guys had meticulous records because they're getting receipts when they sell this stuff. Like the receipts are out there. Be like, you know, a receipt to Bob, but it's like what Bob got. Right. For his cow hides, for his bull hides, for his kips or calf hides, for his meat, and like how many pounds of meat and what per, you know, it's like, these are, like, we are very much, like, we talk with long hunters.

The lot of the information about the long hunters is because a historian later went and talked to their grand kid. Yeah. And he's like, no, I swear grandpa said that he got $2 for his deer hides or whatever, you know. And that becomes like the historic record. Some dude's recollection about what his dad told him or his grandpa told him. here it's like there's too much material there's tons of material so you can get into these staggering quantities of meat that really does but then you get into like let's look at it as percentages you know and when you start looking at certain outfits and this is just the outfits that did

sell me plenty of outfits didn't sell meat when you get into the outfits that did sell meat and you start looking at their numbers it's like man dude they sold a lot of meat but like it seems like about 99% What's wasted? Like, be like, okay, so they're selling about six pounds. Yeah. They're selling maybe like, if you look at his whole hide hall and then you look at his meat receipts, you're like, okay, he's selling about six pounds per animal.

But at the same time, at six pounds an animal, he's selling 10,000, 20,000 pounds. of meat in a year. Yeah. So it's just like, it's a real roller coaster because you go into like, ah, they wasted all the meat. Then you get into this like, holy cow, they sold a lot of meat. And you're like, wait a minute, they wasted a lot of meat. But again, it's like the reason they did this is to make money.

And so wherever they could squeeze a little extra profit or a little extra revenue to get the stuff they needed or tuck a little money like away for a slow season, like if they could if they could haul some meat to a to a railroad pretty easily they did it you know if they're hunting in super remote areas they're not trading in meat but like if you can get an extra couple bucks off an animal by by curing its hams and hump and stuff like they did that and so there's it's a real complicated explanation of it all but yeah here's a here's a interesting piece of this is kind of show like the the hard scrabble nature but also the

um a kind of persnickety quality of these individuals when it comes to uh or like a penny pinching kind of miserly quality to like the economics there was a product that came from the buffalo

um that was a stuffing of mattress stuffing material and it was if you picture the forehead on a buffalo was called the mop okay that had value and it was used to stuff mattresses stuff upholstery it was hard to get out

hard to pull out they didn't want the mop skin they just wanted the hair and bags so these hide hunters like you couldn't pull it but if anyone has dealt with animals a lot you know that we have a term when the hair starts to slip like picture you're walking along in the bank of a river and you see a deer and he's like you know dead on the side of the river

drown in the river and wash down and you go grab a handful of the hair on that thing what happens when you grab a handful of that hair and pull comes right out comes right it's called the hair is slipping yeah so in the hide trade even today the worst thing talk to your tax dermis if you're bringing in a deer cape if you're trying to sell a skunk hide it doesn't matter hair slippage means too late mm-hmm it's rotten like if you go to your tax nervous with a bear rug or a deer cape and he grabbed the tuft of that hair and pulls and half the hair in his hand comes free just you messed up yeah it's slipping it's no good they would at times when there's nothing else to do they would wait till all these like when they skin the carcasses we

explain how they skin them when they skin the carcass they'd stop behind the ears so a buffalo hide went to the market is missing it's missing its face it's cut off behind the ears they would wait till the carcasses rotten enough that the hair would start to slip and then they would go back out

into the field and pull mops and stuff it into sacks when they're good and rotten meaning

if where there's money to be made they were there to make the money it's just at times it's like it just

it wasn't efficient but you could it's really hard to look at their lives and point out places where you're lazy yeah like this wasn't like a laziness thing it was a it was just

business man it was business it was business yeah and on top of that not to not to get into more details but there's all kinds of wild stories in this just like the weird you know

people getting charged by Buffalo people getting pounded and hail storm people getting killed, people finding bodies, people doing really weird stuff, people eating weird stuff, people playing pranks on each other. Dying weird ways. Dying in weird ways.

We got a guy, we have a big section about all the people killed by buffaloes that they wounded. We're working on an animation project. Anyways, there's a guy who shoots a buffalo, gets up to it, it's still alive, pulls out his pistol

to finish it off. As he pulls out his pistol, the buffalo jumps up and starts coming for him. He really quickly tries to mount his horse to get away, and in mounting it's, because he's got his pistol out now and it's cocked, in mounting his horse, he has a negligent discharge and

shoots his own horse. So now the horse takes off wounded. The buffalo is wounded chasing the horse, and then both the horse and the buffalo die. And he walks, walks away. Other guys, other hide hunters, they go missing.

This is a kind of, we give a handful of these stories that play out very similarly. Bob is off hunting. Bob don't come home at night. In the morning, you go looking for Bob, and lo and behold, there's a dead Buffalo laying there, and there's a dead Bob laying next to it. yeah and bob is in bad shape it turns out that when you shoot buffalo by the dozens you make some bad shots and you end up encountering some angry buffalo yep and bob is badly bruised yeah anyhow uh meat eaters american history the hide hunters 1865 to 1883 we never explained

1883 so you know when you hear an interview with an author and they don't want to tell the end where you're in the end you're like so did they catch them we're like well i'm not going to tell does he die in the end not going to tell well oh you can do this do the buffalo die in the end yes but what year not telling not telling um i led out to my uh I'm a huge Fury Road and Furiosa fan. I led out to my daughter early on and Furiosa that her boyfriend doesn't make it through to the end. She was very upset with me for letting that leak. So I hope you're not watching that one.

Can you leave that out, Phil? Thanks for joining. Me, there's American history. Of course, go back, uh, the long hunters, then check out the mountain men. And then, uh, dig into the new one available now, the hide hunters. 1865 to 1883 we were going to talk about what's next or we're going to talk about how we're trying to decide what's next but um wait and see when it happens we will tell you about it thank you very much for listening Oh, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo.

Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 carbon powered by Intel Core Ultra processors. So you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. Real haunts rarely go as planned. That's where First Lights Navigator hoodie earns its place. Our crews have run it from September climbs to cold front. sits. It manages tempts, stays quiet and close encounters, and wicks moisture on the uphill push. One layer that adapts without hesitation no matter the pursuit, the navigator, delivers versatility in any situation. Shop now at firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com.

This is an I-Hart podcast.