Latest / Wired To Hunt Podcast / Ep. 744: What Daniel Boone and the Long Hunters Can Teach Modern Day Deer Hunters with Clay Newcomb

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Ep. 744: What Daniel Boone and the Long Hunters Can Teach Modern Day Deer Hunters with Clay Newcomb · Wired To Hunt Podcast

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
0:04
Speaker 1: the whitetail woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile
0:09
Speaker 1: hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light
0:13
Speaker 1: Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your.
0:17
Speaker 2: Host, Mark Kenyon, Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast.
0:22
Speaker 2: This week on the show, I am joined by Clay
0:24
Speaker 2: Newcombe to discuss the long hunters of the eighteenth century,
0:28
Speaker 2: such as Daniel Boone and what we modern day deer
0:31
Speaker 2: hunters can learn from them. All right, welcome to the
0:41
Speaker 2: Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light
0:45
Speaker 2: in their Camo for Conservation initiative. I think you know
0:49
Speaker 2: this by now, but if not, a portion of every
0:52
Speaker 2: sale of First Light's whitetail cameo pattern it's called Specter
0:56
Speaker 2: portion of every sale of that stuff goes to the
0:58
Speaker 2: National Deer Association to help them do good things for deer,
1:03
Speaker 2: deer hunters, deer habitat. I love it, so thank you
1:06
Speaker 2: First Light. And with that said, today's podcast is a
1:10
Speaker 2: good one. We are looking back in history. We're going
1:14
Speaker 2: to look at our predecessors, the deer hunters that in
1:18
Speaker 2: many ways established a foundation for white tailed deer hunting culture.
1:22
Speaker 2: In America. We're talking on the buddy Clay Newcombe. He
1:26
Speaker 2: recently had a collaboration with Steve Vanella released a new
1:30
Speaker 2: Meat Eater audiobook called The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one
1:36
Speaker 2: through seventeen seventy five. This book, this audiobook is what
1:40
Speaker 2: it is. It details the story of folks like Daniel
1:43
Speaker 2: Boone and how these folks traveled across the first Far West,
1:48
Speaker 2: the first Frontier and developed a livelihood off of hunting
1:53
Speaker 2: for whitetail deer. And so today I want to bring
1:57
Speaker 2: Clay on to talk about that history, toalk a little
2:00
Speaker 2: bit about Boone and the other guys like him that
2:03
Speaker 2: I think we have now romanticized and developed a set
2:07
Speaker 2: of mythologies around these first wilderness hunters that so many
2:11
Speaker 2: of us like to dream about and imagine living their lives.
2:16
Speaker 2: What can we learn from these guys? What can we
2:18
Speaker 2: learn from their hunting exploits. What can someone like Daniel
2:22
Speaker 2: Boone teach us about deer hunting? Also, what can they
2:26
Speaker 2: teach us about how to better enjoy the experience and
2:29
Speaker 2: adventure of hunting? And not only that, what can we
2:31
Speaker 2: learn from these guys and the mistakes that they might
2:35
Speaker 2: have made when it came to overexploiting a resource over
2:39
Speaker 2: exploiting a population of wildlife. There's a lot here to unpack.
2:44
Speaker 2: It's a great audiobook that Clay and Steve just released.
2:47
Speaker 2: I hope you'll check it out. Like I said, it's
2:49
Speaker 2: called The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one through seventeen seventy five.
2:53
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about that and a whole bunch
2:55
Speaker 2: more here on the show with my buddy Clay. I
2:59
Speaker 2: want to give you two quick ups. Number one, we
3:01
Speaker 2: do still have some of our new Wired to Hunt
3:04
Speaker 2: hats over on the med Eater's store. Not wearing one
3:07
Speaker 2: right now, but I showed you guys a couple weeks ago.
3:09
Speaker 2: It's got that really cool white tail illustration on the
3:12
Speaker 2: front says wired to Hunt on the side of the crown,
3:16
Speaker 2: and they're in like a charcoal gray or tan color
3:21
Speaker 2: right now. So going over to the meat Eater's store
3:22
Speaker 2: if you've been wanting one of those, And while you're there,
3:26
Speaker 2: I just saw we do still have a few copies
3:28
Speaker 2: of my book That Wild Country and Epic Journey through
3:32
Speaker 2: the past, present and future of America's public lands, and
3:36
Speaker 2: we've got a few more signed copies of that book
3:39
Speaker 2: available on the store as well, So if you're interested
3:43
Speaker 2: in either of those, you can go to the meat
3:45
Speaker 2: Eater dot com. And if you are not interested in
3:48
Speaker 2: those things, or if you've already got a couple of
3:50
Speaker 2: your own, then just tune in for the rest of
3:53
Speaker 2: my conversation with mister Clay Nukem. All right here with
4:02
Speaker 2: me now is my pal and the one and only
4:05
Speaker 2: mister Clay Nukem. Welcome back to the show. Bude, Hey, Mark,
4:10
Speaker 2: great to be here, man, man, I appreciate you getting
4:13
Speaker 2: up early to do this. I know it's a cold
4:17
Speaker 2: beginning of the day, so thank you.
4:20
Speaker 3: Negative six is about as cold as it gets around here.
4:23
Speaker 3: That's what it is right now.
4:25
Speaker 2: How do arc what do you guys call yourselves? Arkansas? Kansas?
4:29
Speaker 2: That's it. How do our Kansans handle this contemperature?
4:33
Speaker 3: Shut down everything possible and just hunker downy I love it, man.
4:38
Speaker 2: So you're in hibernation mode.
4:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, A lot of the schools have been canceled and
4:43
Speaker 3: even business is closed. But we have we have snow too,
4:47
Speaker 3: and so the you know, we just don't have the
4:49
Speaker 3: infrastructure for snow removal, like a lot of the northern
4:52
Speaker 3: States where you get this kind of stuff all the time.
4:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, you hear these You hear these nightmare stories about
4:57
Speaker 2: like what happens in Texas when they get a little
4:58
Speaker 2: bit of sleep. Is it kind of like that? It really? Yeah?
5:03
Speaker 4: Oh yeah it is.
5:04
Speaker 3: In northwest Arkansas, we're a little bit more used to it,
5:08
Speaker 3: maybe have a little bit more infrastructure. We get snow
5:11
Speaker 3: every year, but not usually extended periods of snow. But uh,
5:17
Speaker 3: I think I think the most unique thing about this
5:20
Speaker 3: is just the temperature, just like very cold temperatures for here.
5:24
Speaker 2: Which is good.
5:25
Speaker 3: I was talking to a farmer the other day and
5:27
Speaker 3: he said, it keeps the keeps everything honest by getting
5:30
Speaker 3: this cold, you know, with warming trends and everything keeps
5:34
Speaker 3: the fire ants out, and that's true, keeps the keeps
5:37
Speaker 3: the riff raff invasives out well.
5:40
Speaker 2: And like we were talking about before we started recording,
5:42
Speaker 2: it's it's kind of nice just to feel those extremes
5:46
Speaker 2: every once in a while and just remember, like, all right,
5:48
Speaker 2: nature is a force. There's something a little bit stronger
5:52
Speaker 2: than us out there and going outside. I was just
5:54
Speaker 2: telling you, I went for run the other day and
5:56
Speaker 2: this stuff and it was like negative twenty five wind chill,
5:59
Speaker 2: and you just have to kind of think, all right,
6:02
Speaker 2: do I have the right clothes on? Am I? How
6:03
Speaker 2: long can I be out there without this getting gnarly?
6:05
Speaker 2: You know, just that kind of little bit of humbling
6:09
Speaker 2: of you in the face of nature.
6:11
Speaker 3: I like, so oh it makes me think of you
6:15
Speaker 3: know what we're about to talk about, the Long Hunters,
6:18
Speaker 3: and even going back to just our human ancestors that
6:22
Speaker 3: really had to take all this stuff in the face.
6:24
Speaker 3: I mean, it's mind boggling to me that people could
6:28
Speaker 3: survive without the modern technologies we have.
6:30
Speaker 2: That truly is Yeah, that's so true. So you perfect
6:35
Speaker 2: segue to what I wanted to pull you on here
6:37
Speaker 2: today to talk about, which is this new book that
6:40
Speaker 2: you collaborated on with mister Steven Ranella, The Long Hunters.
6:47
Speaker 2: But before we get into the book itself, you kinda
6:50
Speaker 2: wrapped up a pseudo long hunt maybe you wouldn't call
6:54
Speaker 2: it that, but a long ish hunt yourself going down
6:56
Speaker 2: the Mississippi River. How long were you guys doing that
6:59
Speaker 2: adventure for?
7:00
Speaker 3: So we set out from Memphis on January the third,
7:06
Speaker 3: and we rode two hundred and fifty miles down the
7:09
Speaker 3: Mississippi River to south of Greenville and hunted and we
7:18
Speaker 3: stayed in the same place for a week. Originally, the
7:20
Speaker 3: idea for the film was that we were going to
7:22
Speaker 3: stop multiple places and hunt here and hunt there, and
7:25
Speaker 3: and we had to reschedule the trip one time because
7:28
Speaker 3: of illness of a crew member, and when we put
7:31
Speaker 3: the hunt back together for the second time, we pretty
7:34
Speaker 3: much just had one place we could hunt. So we
7:38
Speaker 3: rode two hundred and fifty miles down the river to
7:40
Speaker 3: our camp, which was a big modern camp, I mean
7:45
Speaker 3: a nice camp.
7:46
Speaker 2: And no.
7:48
Speaker 3: We did a podcast series back in the summer on
7:50
Speaker 3: the Mississippi River, a four part series, and it was
7:54
Speaker 3: fascinating to me. It was it was I didn't know
7:58
Speaker 3: a lot about the Mississippi really, and honestly, a lot
8:03
Speaker 3: of people don't. I mean even people that live on
8:04
Speaker 3: the banks of it don't. I find most of them
8:08
Speaker 3: don't really know the deeper history of the river. And
8:12
Speaker 3: I set out a year ago to about two years ago, like, man,
8:17
Speaker 3: I need to know about this river. And we did
8:21
Speaker 3: this big research project and podcast and when I did that,
8:25
Speaker 3: I said, I want to go down the Mississippi and
8:27
Speaker 3: kind of the sweet spot for Mississippi wilderness quote unquote
8:33
Speaker 3: is from Memphis to Vicksburg. And I mean truly, aside
8:39
Speaker 3: from river improvements by the Core Channel improvements by the
8:44
Speaker 3: corp of Engineers, the river is not that much different
8:48
Speaker 3: than it would have been visually from what Mark Twain
8:52
Speaker 3: and what Davy Crockett and what all these, you know,
8:55
Speaker 3: like every American hero of old times went down and saw,
9:00
Speaker 3: I mean, the river's pretty wild, and so it was
9:04
Speaker 3: a really unique, unique had some great deer hunting. Mark
9:08
Speaker 3: Holey cow that part of Mississippi's is probably it's got
9:15
Speaker 3: to be some of my favorite deer hunting of all time.
9:18
Speaker 2: And it wasn't. This is the famed Delta deer hunting
9:21
Speaker 2: down there, right, We.
9:21
Speaker 4: Got to yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
9:24
Speaker 3: I mean, so we hunted the first week of January basically,
9:26
Speaker 3: and it was it would have been akin to hunting
9:31
Speaker 3: the last week of November. The rut is really December,
9:36
Speaker 3: mid December through mid January. So I mean we were
9:39
Speaker 3: absolutely seeing bucks chasing bucks locked down with those bucks cruising.
9:45
Speaker 3: I mean, it was really neat and they saw Brenton
9:49
Speaker 3: got a good one. He did, he did, he he
9:53
Speaker 3: killed an ice. You know, we didn't score it, but
9:57
Speaker 3: one hundred and thirty to one hundred and thirty five
9:59
Speaker 3: minutes for sure.
10:01
Speaker 4: And I was bow hunting.
10:03
Speaker 3: If if I'd carried a rifle, which it was legal
10:05
Speaker 3: to carry, I would have killed a real nice buck
10:08
Speaker 3: the first first day I was there. Wow, But the
10:13
Speaker 3: but I was, I loved to bow hunt there. I
10:16
Speaker 3: killed two dos and had the time of my life
10:21
Speaker 3: doing it.
10:21
Speaker 2: You know, that's great. So you spend all this time researching,
10:25
Speaker 2: doing the podcast series, learning about the Mississippi River and
10:28
Speaker 2: the history of that place, and then you got to
10:30
Speaker 2: float down the river and see it all. What was
10:34
Speaker 2: that like like when you go down two hundred and
10:36
Speaker 2: fifty miles down the river through this as close to
10:40
Speaker 2: wilderness as you can get at Corridor were the whole
10:43
Speaker 2: time are you are you able to be in the
10:45
Speaker 2: present or the whole time when you're going on that journey?
10:47
Speaker 2: Are you thinking about this thing you learned about and
10:49
Speaker 2: that thing you learned about and all that?
10:52
Speaker 4: Like?
10:52
Speaker 2: What does that look like for you after getting that context?
10:54
Speaker 4: It was both things.
10:56
Speaker 3: The primary thing, though, and I think the thing that
11:00
Speaker 3: I was after was to just to kind of confront
11:05
Speaker 3: and experience the River, and when you're on the Mississippi River,
11:09
Speaker 3: the primary thing on your mind is being safe. I mean,
11:14
Speaker 3: it's a big, wooly river, and all you hear people
11:17
Speaker 3: talk about that are on it a lot is how
11:21
Speaker 3: dangerous it is and how you just have to be
11:23
Speaker 3: on your toes all the time. I am not an
11:25
Speaker 3: experienced riverman. Brent Reeves is Brent spent twenty six years
11:30
Speaker 3: as a duck guide, partly on the Arkansas River, so
11:35
Speaker 3: he was used to navigating big rivers. He's the only
11:37
Speaker 3: reason that I was confident in taking on the trip.
11:41
Speaker 3: But that being said, I drove the boat probably two
11:44
Speaker 3: hundred of the two hundred and fifty miles. Barge traffic
11:48
Speaker 3: is a big problem.
11:49
Speaker 4: I mean, that's.
11:51
Speaker 3: The biggest challenge, probably because you have these huge, I
11:54
Speaker 3: mean just unbelievably big barges pushing as many as eighty
12:01
Speaker 3: eighty containers down the river create huge wakes. But also
12:05
Speaker 3: you have to stay inside the channel, which is which
12:08
Speaker 3: is marked. But uh So, to answer your question, I
12:12
Speaker 3: think I probably was dealing with the same things that
12:16
Speaker 3: anyone would have at any time. You know, there's a
12:20
Speaker 3: Mark Twain wrote a famous book called The Mississippi river.
12:23
Speaker 3: And and you know, he was a cub pilot, meaning
12:29
Speaker 3: he was second in command of a steamboat going up
12:31
Speaker 3: and down the river for several years. And he has
12:35
Speaker 3: he devoted well I've heard it said in some of
12:38
Speaker 3: America's Greatest pros, but he devoted several chapters to talking
12:43
Speaker 3: about navigating the Mississippi River. And it's just fascinating all
12:48
Speaker 3: the things. And what he had to do was vastly
12:50
Speaker 3: more difficult than what we had to do because of
12:52
Speaker 3: modern technology. So I think I was confronting a fear,
12:58
Speaker 3: you know, overcoming inside of riding down that river.
13:01
Speaker 2: Truly was.
13:03
Speaker 3: But also I was thinking about Davy Crockett was about
13:07
Speaker 3: right here when he crashed a boat just south of Memphis.
13:10
Speaker 3: I was thinking about the flood, the flood pulse.
13:14
Speaker 2: Of the river.
13:14
Speaker 3: Which that's what makes the Mississippi River so unique among
13:17
Speaker 3: rivers in the world is that we have a thousand
13:19
Speaker 3: mile stretch of this category of river in size that
13:23
Speaker 3: there are no dams, which the only river that has
13:28
Speaker 3: that long of a stretch damless stretches the Amazon. All
13:32
Speaker 3: the other big rivers of the world have been dammed,
13:34
Speaker 3: So that creates a natural flood pulse because of the levees,
13:38
Speaker 3: which the eleven hundred miles of levees on the Mississippi
13:43
Speaker 3: River is the greatest civil engineering feet really arguably in
13:48
Speaker 3: American history. And because of those levees, the flood pulse
13:53
Speaker 3: of the river is natural, like it allows the water
13:56
Speaker 3: to rise and that creates an incredible fishery. I mean, yeah,
14:01
Speaker 3: I just could nerd out on it and just loved it.
14:03
Speaker 3: But I'm a terrestrial man, like I'm I'm from the mountains.
14:08
Speaker 3: I'm least comfortable on water, and that's kind of why
14:12
Speaker 3: I wanted to do it. And man, it was no
14:14
Speaker 3: joke doing it in the winter.
14:15
Speaker 2: Holy cow.
14:16
Speaker 3: Originally we were doing it in November and then that
14:18
Speaker 3: part of the world November it's pretty mild, river would
14:22
Speaker 3: be low, temperatures would be you know, probably even getting
14:26
Speaker 3: into the sixties and seventies. We did it in January.
14:30
Speaker 3: It was cold and it rained and it was a
14:35
Speaker 3: lot of fun. Much we did what you.
14:39
Speaker 2: Kind of did here, studying up, researching, exploring the history
14:45
Speaker 2: of the Mississippi and then going and experiencing it. Is
14:49
Speaker 2: kind of analogous to what you've got here with the
14:52
Speaker 2: Long Hunter book, in which someone can read that, listen
14:56
Speaker 2: to this book, experience the history, and then go out
15:00
Speaker 2: in deer hunt themselves. And I'm wondering if in learning
15:06
Speaker 2: the history of our white tail hunting predecessors, if that
15:10
Speaker 2: in some way changes our experience or can change our
15:13
Speaker 2: experience now today as modern day whitetail hunters. That's a
15:18
Speaker 2: question I have. Do you think that is something that happens? Like,
15:21
Speaker 2: how does a historical perspective change our present day experience?
15:26
Speaker 2: Why is this kind of historical perspective maybe important?
15:30
Speaker 3: You nailed it, Mark, when this book was being researched,
15:37
Speaker 3: as the details of what we talked about just kind
15:40
Speaker 3: of unfolded, man, I was like, this book is foundational
15:46
Speaker 3: to every American deer hunter, and you wouldn't think it.
15:49
Speaker 3: I mean, you wouldn't think the guy down the road
15:51
Speaker 3: that deer hunts one weekend the year, and.
15:56
Speaker 4: You know, why would this be relevant to him?
15:58
Speaker 3: How would this be relevant to to some of the.
16:01
Speaker 4: Guys that we know that our.
16:04
Speaker 3: Highly managing land for killing five plus your old white
16:09
Speaker 3: tails with big antlers, every piece of every single piece
16:16
Speaker 3: of the whitetail world that we love today, you can
16:20
Speaker 3: trace back to parts of this story of the American
16:26
Speaker 3: deer skin trade. You know, if an alien came from
16:30
Speaker 3: another planet and showed up on Earth and he saw
16:33
Speaker 3: Mark Kenyon pass up a whatever kind of deer and
16:38
Speaker 3: shoot this other deer with bigger antlers and be thrilled
16:43
Speaker 3: about it, the alien would be like, what, why didn't
16:47
Speaker 3: he just shoot the one that came by first, so
16:49
Speaker 3: he didn't have to sit there for that long. He's
16:50
Speaker 3: after the meat, he's after the hide, he's after you know,
16:53
Speaker 3: his horns literally do nothing. You know that that assignment
16:57
Speaker 3: of cultural value goes goes back deep in history, and
17:02
Speaker 3: that doesn't necessarily go to the deer skin trade, but
17:06
Speaker 3: it spans it.
17:08
Speaker 4: That was a step after the deer skin trade.
17:11
Speaker 3: You know that the deer were initially sought after for
17:14
Speaker 3: their hides because of a global demand. And we talk
17:20
Speaker 3: extensively about that in the book. Where did this demand
17:23
Speaker 3: come from? Who was using deer skins?
17:28
Speaker 4: And so there was this value on the deer.
17:31
Speaker 3: And then later as sport hunting arose, that that value,
17:36
Speaker 3: that legacy of the long hunters, translated into people trying
17:40
Speaker 3: to kill big bucks. You know, we were no longer
17:44
Speaker 3: trying to kill three hundred and fifty deer a year
17:47
Speaker 3: or five hundred deer a year, and it kind of
17:50
Speaker 3: morphed into this this sport hunting where we would culturally
17:56
Speaker 3: value a bigger antler buck. But really the value of
17:59
Speaker 3: that deer really started back during that time.
18:02
Speaker 4: But no, I think it.
18:07
Speaker 2: No.
18:07
Speaker 3: I've heard some great quotes on why history is important, and.
18:14
Speaker 4: History just adds so many dimensions to the present.
18:18
Speaker 3: I mean, you to just show up and do what
18:20
Speaker 3: we do and be a human and not have any
18:22
Speaker 3: understanding of history is really in a way. I mean,
18:25
Speaker 3: I personally feel like it's kind of irresponsible. And I
18:29
Speaker 3: don't say that from like a high, high and lifted
18:32
Speaker 3: up place of thinking that I do.
18:34
Speaker 4: I'm not a trained historian.
18:36
Speaker 3: A lot of the stuff that I'm researching and learning
18:39
Speaker 3: i'm learning for the first time as an adult. I mean,
18:42
Speaker 3: it's not like I just you're just born knowing stuff.
18:45
Speaker 3: But every time I research something like the Mississippi River
18:49
Speaker 3: or this this the long Hunter stuff, I'm like, holy cow,
18:52
Speaker 3: I cannot believe that I didn't know this before. It
18:56
Speaker 3: seems it's Yeah, that's the way it feels to me.
18:59
Speaker 3: It's like this almost seems irresponsible that I didn't know
19:02
Speaker 3: this stuff, and that's what's so fascinating and fun about it.
19:07
Speaker 3: And yeah, the research that was done on this book,
19:12
Speaker 3: it was never before compiled data. I'm not saying that
19:17
Speaker 3: people didn't know this data, but nothing has remotely been
19:21
Speaker 3: put together. Where we were taking all this information, you
19:26
Speaker 3: would have found bits and pieces of this information and
19:29
Speaker 3: uncountable sources. So yeah, it's not like we learned something
19:34
Speaker 3: that was never known. We absolutely put together information that
19:40
Speaker 3: was never compiled together. So in that six hours of
19:43
Speaker 3: The Long Hunter's Book, you'll hear information that you just
19:49
Speaker 3: couldn't find anywhere else, which which is really neat and
19:52
Speaker 3: and you got to give credit to Steve Ranella and
19:55
Speaker 3: Randall Williams.
19:57
Speaker 4: You know, it was Steve's Steve was the it was
20:01
Speaker 4: his idea.
20:03
Speaker 3: Basically, most of historical hunting practices were covered by historians
20:10
Speaker 3: and academics that were not hunters, and so they didn't
20:13
Speaker 3: they often did not answer the questions that you and
20:16
Speaker 3: I would have. And we learned about a boon on
20:19
Speaker 3: a long hunt and how he processed deer, and where
20:22
Speaker 3: he hunted and why he hunted, and what he was
20:25
Speaker 3: looking for and what the deer we're eating and so
20:28
Speaker 3: there's you know, you know what I'm talking about. But
20:30
Speaker 3: if you read academic literature, it's like you're reading something
20:34
Speaker 3: that yeat has the it has details, it has important stuff,
20:37
Speaker 3: but it is not from someone that is asking the
20:42
Speaker 3: right questions for people like us. And so that's what
20:45
Speaker 3: Steve wanted to do, is he said, Hey, let's answer
20:48
Speaker 3: the questions that we've we're all interested in and make
20:55
Speaker 3: a book like that. So the Angle was coming from
20:57
Speaker 3: a different place, and and it wasn't necessarily built four Hunters.
21:02
Speaker 3: Anybody could could listen to it and be entertained. It's
21:06
Speaker 3: not per se made four Hunters, but that was the
21:10
Speaker 3: mentalities to go deeper into it.
21:24
Speaker 2: So for someone who doesn't have the who hasn't listened
21:28
Speaker 2: to the book yet, let's just lay out a very
21:31
Speaker 2: cliff notes explanation here of just who we're talking about
21:34
Speaker 2: here in the first place. So give me your cliff
21:37
Speaker 2: notes on who the Long Hunters were, and then what
21:41
Speaker 2: this experience that they would go out and have would
21:45
Speaker 2: look like, just to give us like a starting point
21:47
Speaker 2: for a few of these conversations.
21:49
Speaker 3: So the name the Long Hunters was pulled from the
21:53
Speaker 3: literature and in this back in their day, they were
21:58
Speaker 3: called just by a few people, often, as history does,
22:01
Speaker 3: just kind of tag onto somebody the name long hunters.
22:04
Speaker 3: So and the long Hunt described men people groups that
22:11
Speaker 3: went into the woods and stayed for extending periods of time.
22:17
Speaker 3: The most famous long Hunt was Boon's two year long
22:20
Speaker 3: Hunt into Kentucky, when he stayed for two years away
22:23
Speaker 3: from home in Kentucky. The book is titled The Long
22:28
Speaker 3: Hunters seventeen six sixty one to seventeen seventy five. There
22:32
Speaker 3: was basically a fourteen year period that was the heyday
22:37
Speaker 3: of what would become America's story of the Long Hunters.
22:42
Speaker 3: They weren't Americans at that time. There was no America.
22:45
Speaker 3: It was the British Colonies. And the British Colonies were
22:48
Speaker 3: divided by a geopolitical border of the Appalachian Mountains. So
22:53
Speaker 3: there's the third imagine. The thirteen colonies on the East
22:56
Speaker 3: coast and then the Appalachian Mountains, which created a border
23:00
Speaker 3: beyond the Appalachian Mountains was not America. It was not
23:03
Speaker 3: the British Colonies. It was owned by Native American tribes.
23:07
Speaker 3: It was owned by the Shawnese and all the tribes
23:11
Speaker 3: in different places. But It was also claimed by the French, Spanish,
23:16
Speaker 3: and the long hunters were people that were not trying
23:20
Speaker 3: to seek glory. They were not trying to become the
23:26
Speaker 3: legendary forefathers of modern American hunters. They were guys destitute
23:34
Speaker 3: trying to make a living. And the global deer skin trade,
23:40
Speaker 3: which was primarily based out of England, there was a
23:44
Speaker 3: high demand for deer skin. And everybody knows I got
23:48
Speaker 3: a pair of deer skin gloves right here on my desk.
23:51
Speaker 3: Deer skin is incredibly supple and thin and makes incredible
24:00
Speaker 3: garments like cow leather would be as much thicker, tougher,
24:04
Speaker 3: and you know, you don't see that many people wearing
24:07
Speaker 3: cow leather like as an on skin garment. But the
24:12
Speaker 3: deer skin was compared to the denim. It was the
24:17
Speaker 3: denim of the seventeen hundreds. It was used that often.
24:21
Speaker 3: This global demand. It was also it was just like
24:23
Speaker 3: the perfect storm. During that time, there was also bovine
24:27
Speaker 3: disease that had struck down in Europe and there was
24:31
Speaker 3: a leather shortage, and so they were trying to find
24:34
Speaker 3: ways to extract resource from the colonies. They had these colonies,
24:37
Speaker 3: and you know what way can we extract resource man
24:41
Speaker 3: the deer skin trade. And prior to that, as early
24:44
Speaker 3: as the early seventeen hundreds, the French and the English
24:49
Speaker 3: were employing Native American tribes heavily in deer skin. So
24:55
Speaker 3: by the time our you know, the what would become
25:00
Speaker 3: this mythological group of we see them as Americans. We
25:03
Speaker 3: see Boone and Casper Mansker and Simon Kent, Simon Kenton,
25:07
Speaker 3: all these guys as Americans. By the time they showed up,
25:11
Speaker 3: Native Americans had been trading deer skins for seventy years.
25:19
Speaker 3: But these guys would, out of destitute financial situations, would
25:26
Speaker 3: trespass into primarily Kentucky, but western eastern Tennessee Ohio, and
25:35
Speaker 3: they would go on long hunts and gather deer skins
25:40
Speaker 3: for a season. And when they would when they would
25:44
Speaker 3: gather enough bounty, they would bring the hides back across
25:47
Speaker 3: the Appalachian Mountains, often often through the Cumberland Gap. The
25:50
Speaker 3: most some of the most famous long hunts started and
25:54
Speaker 3: ended at the Cumberland Gap. People going through it, going
25:58
Speaker 3: on long hunts, coming back over and selling their hides.
26:02
Speaker 3: And it's easy to see why they could do it
26:05
Speaker 3: when you understand the finances of it, they could make
26:08
Speaker 3: a hefty.
26:09
Speaker 4: Living in three or four months.
26:11
Speaker 3: So these guys that had no money, no land, no
26:17
Speaker 3: way to make a living. They weren't shopkeepers, they weren't manufacturers,
26:21
Speaker 3: they weren't they had no profession per se. They could
26:26
Speaker 3: go and I would equate it to they could in
26:29
Speaker 3: three or four months make eighty or ninety thousand dollars,
26:33
Speaker 3: which they didn't make that much, but in today's world
26:36
Speaker 3: like they could make a pretty good living. And so
26:39
Speaker 3: they were willing to risk everything to do that. And
26:43
Speaker 3: so they trespassed into land they weren't supposed to be.
26:47
Speaker 3: They were often killed, got in skirmishes with Native Americans,
26:52
Speaker 3: had their stuff stolen. I mean some of the most
26:57
Speaker 3: the wildest stories are a boone and many many others.
27:03
Speaker 3: But you know, they would have worked a whole winter,
27:06
Speaker 3: and you know, you just to get all these hides,
27:09
Speaker 3: and then on their way back, you know, Native Americans
27:12
Speaker 3: show up, take all their hides, and all their work
27:16
Speaker 3: is just at their back to zero.
27:19
Speaker 2: You know.
27:19
Speaker 3: But they were the ones trespassing in the first place.
27:22
Speaker 3: So we made it real clear about that that it's
27:26
Speaker 3: we have mythologized these guys into heroes, But I mean,
27:29
Speaker 3: really they were kind of just normal dudes. Now, what
27:33
Speaker 3: what I can respect and marvel at is the physical
27:37
Speaker 3: hardships that they endured and then truly what they would
27:41
Speaker 3: have known. It'd be interesting to put a Daniel Boone
27:45
Speaker 3: in Michigan with you Mark today and just be like, hey, Daniel,
27:50
Speaker 3: go see if you can kill a big buck?
27:52
Speaker 2: You know?
27:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, would he be able to? I
27:56
Speaker 4: don't know.
27:57
Speaker 3: I mean I know he would certainly, but would you
28:00
Speaker 3: with what you know about deer movement and and and
28:04
Speaker 3: how to look at the land and you know, but
28:09
Speaker 3: certainly these guys for what they were after, for what
28:12
Speaker 3: they were doing, they would have been as skilled as
28:17
Speaker 3: anybody on the earth at doing their job.
28:21
Speaker 1: You know.
28:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so is Daniel Boone. Still, you correct me
28:29
Speaker 2: if I'm wrong, But I think it's fair to say
28:31
Speaker 2: that Daniel Boone would be your favorite character within this era.
28:35
Speaker 2: Maybe it seems like you've talked about in your podcast series,
28:38
Speaker 2: he was the one that maybe stood out above all else.
28:41
Speaker 2: But if I'm wrong on that, correct me. But my
28:44
Speaker 2: follow up to that is, if that's true, who is
28:48
Speaker 2: one other long Hunter from this era other than Boone?
28:53
Speaker 2: That the rest of us should know because we all
28:55
Speaker 2: know Boone, we all know Crockett. Who's someone else that
28:58
Speaker 2: you guys talk about in this book that really deserves
29:01
Speaker 2: some recognition.
29:02
Speaker 3: Well, Boone is maybe the most fascinating part of this
29:07
Speaker 3: And in Steve's section, I think he did a really
29:10
Speaker 3: good job of describing We've got no choice but to
29:14
Speaker 3: love Boone because in the book Steve described it as
29:19
Speaker 3: he said, imagine a stage and it's black, and a
29:25
Speaker 3: spotlight shut suddenly turns on, and the spotlight is illuminating Boone.
29:32
Speaker 3: But the stage is full of people. It's full of
29:36
Speaker 3: people potentially of equal exploits, of equal skill, with equal
29:41
Speaker 3: stories and lives. But the one that we can see
29:44
Speaker 3: is Boone. And as the spotlight fades out from its epicenter,
29:51
Speaker 3: you can see you can see part of the guy
29:54
Speaker 3: that's standing next to him, you can see the guy
29:56
Speaker 3: next to him fairly well. With the guy next to
29:58
Speaker 3: that guy you can hardly see, and it fades into blackness,
30:01
Speaker 3: like that's Boone.
30:02
Speaker 4: For whatever reason, we just know so much about Boone.
30:06
Speaker 3: It was it had to do with him getting famous
30:08
Speaker 3: at just the right time, and we know exponentially more
30:14
Speaker 3: about Boone than any other long Hunter. But uh, Casper
30:20
Speaker 3: Mansker is probably is a guy we talk a lot
30:23
Speaker 3: about in the book. And it's kind of wild, how
30:28
Speaker 3: I mean, we know a lot about the guy, but
30:31
Speaker 3: not even remotely what we know about Boone. And it
30:36
Speaker 3: Steve did a good job of talking, kind of leveling
30:40
Speaker 3: the plan field and saying, we know about Boone. It's
30:42
Speaker 3: hard to think this book isn't about Boone, but he
30:46
Speaker 3: that there were countless others that were that were like him.
30:52
Speaker 3: We just like have two or three sentences about that.
30:56
Speaker 3: You know, you see you start putting the dots together
30:59
Speaker 3: and you see their names mentioned here and here and
31:02
Speaker 3: here and here, But there's just very little. But I
31:07
Speaker 3: would say, uh, Casper Mansker, Simon Kenton, Uh, the Walling Brothers,
31:17
Speaker 3: there were there were many others, and we talked about
31:18
Speaker 3: those guys in the book.
31:20
Speaker 2: Is there anything about Mansker that stands out that makes
31:23
Speaker 2: him interesting? There's one story I remember here in the
31:27
Speaker 2: beginning of the book that was just an an interesting
31:29
Speaker 2: one about him crossing paths with Boone. But uh, but
31:33
Speaker 2: why do you bring up Mansker? What about him was
31:37
Speaker 2: of interest to you?
31:39
Speaker 4: You know, Mark, I told you this you're you're, you're,
31:42
Speaker 4: you're pinning me down here.
31:44
Speaker 3: Uh, it's been a while since i've you know, these
31:48
Speaker 3: books come out and then you, uh, you kind of
31:51
Speaker 3: forget about them.
31:53
Speaker 4: And and I.
31:53
Speaker 3: Actually was a little too fearful to listen to the
31:57
Speaker 3: audio book after we recorded.
31:59
Speaker 2: It turned out, good man, you should listen.
32:02
Speaker 4: You're catching me with my with my you know, well.
32:05
Speaker 2: Let me tell you my favorite story then about man.
32:08
Speaker 4: That's what Mark, Why don't you tell me your favorite.
32:10
Speaker 2: Story about I just liked this story about he was
32:15
Speaker 2: he was out there on a long hunt himself, somewhere
32:17
Speaker 2: in Kentucky, I guess it was. And he had been
32:21
Speaker 2: on a hunt and he was out there stalking a
32:25
Speaker 2: critter or searching for a deer, I'm sure, and he
32:28
Speaker 2: heard this sound, this strange sound that did not make
32:31
Speaker 2: sense to him. He couldn't he couldn't put a finger
32:35
Speaker 2: on what the sing was he was hearing because it
32:36
Speaker 2: was so outside of the norm of what he would
32:38
Speaker 2: typically hear when he's out here hunting. And so he
32:40
Speaker 2: starts approaching the sound, and the closer and closer he gets,
32:43
Speaker 2: he realizes it's it's a human. And then he realizes
32:46
Speaker 2: it's someone singing, and he gets out through the brush
32:50
Speaker 2: and then there's someone lying down on his back, singing
32:53
Speaker 2: out loud. And the person lying on his back singing
32:56
Speaker 2: out loud in the middle of the Kentucky Wilderness is
32:58
Speaker 2: Daniel Boone. I mean, what an interesting uh colliding of
33:03
Speaker 2: the world's.
33:04
Speaker 3: There, Kay Bark, your favorite story about Casper Mansker is
33:08
Speaker 3: ultimately about Boone?
33:10
Speaker 2: That is that illustrates your original point perfectly.
33:15
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of there's a lot
33:20
Speaker 3: of that story. There's a lot of speculation about Uh.
33:26
Speaker 3: Robert Morgan, the one of Boone's, my favorite Boone biographer,
33:32
Speaker 3: he thinks this is just him analyzing what he's learned
33:35
Speaker 3: about Boone and knowing what he knows about the frontier
33:38
Speaker 3: and the wilderness. He thinks that Boone knew those guys
33:42
Speaker 3: were there and was kind of putting on a show
33:46
Speaker 3: in a way. That's what That's what Robert Morgan thinks.
33:50
Speaker 3: I don't necessarily buy it, but Morgan says, you know,
33:55
Speaker 3: in the in the Kentucky Wilderness, when you were trying
33:58
Speaker 3: to be as incognito as possible, you know, you didn't
34:00
Speaker 3: have fires during the day because you didn't want a
34:02
Speaker 3: pillar or smoke going up and the Shawnees seeing that
34:05
Speaker 3: you were trespassing on their land.
34:07
Speaker 4: You know, why would he be so careless as.
34:11
Speaker 3: To be yelling and screaming in the wilderness?
34:16
Speaker 4: And he Boone.
34:19
Speaker 3: Morgan also felt like Boone was kind of a showman
34:22
Speaker 3: in a way, not in a negative way, but he
34:27
Speaker 3: knew how to portray the image of Daniel Boone that
34:32
Speaker 3: was beneficial to his legacy, which I don't necessarily.
34:38
Speaker 4: I think it's speculative, but.
34:42
Speaker 3: I think the man probably was just lonely, and what
34:47
Speaker 3: we know of Boone, he was a charismatic fellow love life,
34:52
Speaker 3: and he had been in the wilderness alone for so long.
34:55
Speaker 4: I think he was just singing.
34:57
Speaker 2: For all that not the wrong with that, you know.
35:02
Speaker 2: You mentioned how something that makes this book unique compared
35:05
Speaker 2: to anything else about the Long Hunters in the past
35:08
Speaker 2: is that it's asking the questions that someone like us
35:13
Speaker 2: who is particularly interested in the hunting side of things
35:16
Speaker 2: would be asking of these guys. And so I love
35:19
Speaker 2: the fact that you guys actually cover in the story,
35:21
Speaker 2: You actually talk about how these guys hunted in detail
35:26
Speaker 2: as you dove into this clay. Both this project and
35:30
Speaker 2: your project about Crockett or Boon. Is there anything that
35:35
Speaker 2: you learned about how these guys hunted that we as
35:40
Speaker 2: modern deer hunters today could benefit from if we were
35:44
Speaker 2: to be a little bit more like them in this
35:46
Speaker 2: way or that way or something. Is there something we
35:48
Speaker 2: can learn tactically from Boone or Mansker or Crockett that
35:53
Speaker 2: would help us as deer hunters today. Is there anything
35:55
Speaker 2: that comes to mind?
35:58
Speaker 3: You know, they did a lot of still hunting, you know,
36:01
Speaker 3: slowly moving through the woods. I think they you know,
36:05
Speaker 3: they never hunted out of tree stands. They they set
36:10
Speaker 3: salt licks. I'm certain that Boone we never heard. I
36:16
Speaker 3: don't know that there's any documentation of this, but you
36:20
Speaker 3: just know it had to happen. You know, a still hunt,
36:24
Speaker 3: you would have to start out from your camp.
36:26
Speaker 4: You wouldn't have.
36:29
Speaker 3: He wouldn't have been traveling for hours in the dark
36:32
Speaker 3: before daylight to get to a spot. Most likely most
36:35
Speaker 3: likely probably started right at daylight and hunted out from
36:37
Speaker 3: his camp and maybe had a specific local to a
36:40
Speaker 3: specific place. But you know that he would have been
36:44
Speaker 3: looking for sign and that he probably would have waited
36:49
Speaker 3: in some you know, actually just set and waited in
36:54
Speaker 3: places for long periods of time. But the details of
36:58
Speaker 3: how they hunted I felt like was pretty low because
37:03
Speaker 3: the people that were recording these things often weren't real
37:06
Speaker 3: serious hunters. But yeah, I would have been interesting to
37:09
Speaker 3: talk to Boone. I can't say that. That's the one
37:11
Speaker 3: part of their story that to me is kind of vague.
37:16
Speaker 3: Now we basically know that they just they slipped through
37:19
Speaker 3: and hunted, and when they would shoot a deer, they
37:21
Speaker 3: would hang it up in a tree mark where it
37:24
Speaker 3: was and they would just continue to hunt and kill
37:30
Speaker 3: as many deer as they could in a single day,
37:32
Speaker 3: which could be as many as twenty and then they
37:36
Speaker 3: would come back through and take the hide off of
37:40
Speaker 3: the deer and most often leave all the meat. They
37:44
Speaker 3: would take the meat they needed to eat, but there
37:47
Speaker 3: was an incredible amount of waste they would but they
37:51
Speaker 3: would take the take the deer hides and preserve them,
37:56
Speaker 3: keep them in a cash at their camp. And so, no,
38:02
Speaker 3: you don't hear them talking about sign You don't hear
38:06
Speaker 3: the long hunters talking about antler size. You you hear
38:11
Speaker 3: occasionally guys talk about you know, mass crop causing animals
38:19
Speaker 3: to be concentrated. Did you hear anything in there mark
38:25
Speaker 3: that that are you tipping?
38:29
Speaker 4: Did you hear anything question about you?
38:31
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think the one thing that one thing that
38:34
Speaker 2: stood up to me was their emphasis on salt licks
38:37
Speaker 2: and and right there's like an historical use of a
38:42
Speaker 2: resource by wildlife and we shouldn't be surprised by this.
38:45
Speaker 2: I don't think, you know the fact that hunters two hundred,
38:48
Speaker 2: three hundred years ago would have keyed in on the
38:49
Speaker 2: same kinds of things that we're looking for today, which
38:51
Speaker 2: is what's the thing that the deer want to come
38:54
Speaker 2: back to time and time again and then and then
38:56
Speaker 2: key it on that. So I thought that was very
38:57
Speaker 2: interesting that there's a story in there, multiple stories about how,
39:01
Speaker 2: you know, these long hunters knew where these salt looks were,
39:04
Speaker 2: they would go back to them time and time again.
39:07
Speaker 2: And there were sign of other hunters doing the same thing.
39:09
Speaker 2: So there's a story about I can't remember who it was,
39:11
Speaker 2: but you know there's mansker and a group came back
39:14
Speaker 2: to assault like they'd hunted the year pright previous, and
39:17
Speaker 2: then they saw a sign that some other hunting party
39:19
Speaker 2: had been there and wiped out the deer heard that
39:21
Speaker 2: had been using that salt lick, and there's a different
39:24
Speaker 2: salt lick that I think that they had found Clovis
39:27
Speaker 2: points in so sign of hunters from thousands of years
39:31
Speaker 2: ago hunting at these salt licks and so and now
39:35
Speaker 2: today in twenty twenty four, I'm sure there are people
39:38
Speaker 2: where it's legal hunting artificial salt licks, and if there
39:42
Speaker 2: are any natural ones out there, I'm sure you would
39:44
Speaker 2: find deer still utilizing them today. So it's interesting that
39:49
Speaker 2: some things stay the same despite the technology we have now,
39:53
Speaker 2: despite the knowledge base we have now, there are some
39:58
Speaker 2: core things when it comes to understanding wildlife habits that
40:02
Speaker 2: Boone was keening on, that folks fourteen thousand years were
40:06
Speaker 2: king in on, and that we can ken now today.
40:10
Speaker 2: That's interesting to me.
40:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, there was a multiple unique stories. But
40:28
Speaker 3: there was a story of a guy that went to
40:30
Speaker 3: a salt lick, a known salt lick, and was tucked
40:34
Speaker 3: in behind a tree, maybe even in a hollow tree
40:39
Speaker 3: close to the salt lick, and a group in a
40:43
Speaker 3: Native American hunter, Shawneese, came in and he watched them
40:48
Speaker 3: set up to hunt the salt lik just like him.
40:52
Speaker 3: They didn't know he was there, and he just hunkered
40:55
Speaker 3: down and stayed there and basically watched them hunt until
41:00
Speaker 3: they left. And you know, if they would have discovered him,
41:03
Speaker 3: most likely they would have. It wouldn't have been good
41:05
Speaker 3: for him. They talked about how the salt lakes were
41:09
Speaker 3: the it was the meeting place of wildlife, but it
41:12
Speaker 3: was also the meeting place of people because that's where
41:17
Speaker 3: people were after the animals.
41:18
Speaker 4: It was the most concentration.
41:20
Speaker 3: You know, when you think about the Eastern Distiguous forest,
41:26
Speaker 3: just for the sake of the I mean, we know
41:29
Speaker 3: it wasn't fully canopied. We know there was grassland, savannahs,
41:35
Speaker 3: and it wasn't one hundred percent canopy big forest, but
41:43
Speaker 3: for the sake of this thought, it was way more
41:46
Speaker 3: forest than there is today today. We use topographic features
41:51
Speaker 3: where we use vegetative features to hunt deer. We use funnels,
41:54
Speaker 3: strips of funnels, between fields, between ag fields, between subdivision whatever.
42:01
Speaker 3: They wouldn't have had near the features that we would
42:05
Speaker 3: have today, the vegetative features to hunt deer. And so
42:09
Speaker 3: they would have been looking for ways to key in
42:11
Speaker 3: on where are the deer, And they were congregating at
42:14
Speaker 3: these salt licks and you know the yeah, there are
42:19
Speaker 3: some huge salt licks naturally, and and you know, I
42:23
Speaker 3: mean they're still there today. It's still salty, but they're
42:26
Speaker 3: not wilderness, so there's not animals using them, but big
42:29
Speaker 3: bone lick. And they had all these salt licks named
42:33
Speaker 3: and bison would use it, elk would use it, deer
42:36
Speaker 3: would use it. Everything would use the salt lick. And yeah,
42:40
Speaker 3: that was sitting. The lick was a it was a
42:43
Speaker 3: big way to hunt.
42:44
Speaker 4: You know.
42:45
Speaker 3: It would have man, it would have been so interesting
42:48
Speaker 3: if Boone had been interviewed by a modern sport deer hunter,
42:54
Speaker 3: we would know an entirely different collection of information from him.
42:58
Speaker 3: I mean, I would have been like, man, you think
43:00
Speaker 3: the best time to kill a deer is? You know,
43:03
Speaker 3: and he'd number seventh, he'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I
43:06
Speaker 3: mean I or time of day? You know, would he
43:09
Speaker 3: would he have had this idea that you have to
43:13
Speaker 3: hunt morning and evening and midday, and that great. You know,
43:17
Speaker 3: part of that is an artifact of just living in
43:22
Speaker 3: the modern world. You know, we we get a couple
43:26
Speaker 3: hours in the morning to hunt and then we go
43:28
Speaker 3: go about and do our day or go to work
43:30
Speaker 3: or whatever.
43:32
Speaker 2: You know.
43:32
Speaker 3: Would he have been like, you know, I never really
43:34
Speaker 3: thought of it, but you know, I killed deer all
43:37
Speaker 3: day long, and these would have been primarily unpressured deer.
43:42
Speaker 3: Not It would have been interesting to see how they
43:46
Speaker 3: would have acted back in. Would they have been just
43:48
Speaker 3: like our white tail today that would have been hyper spooky,
43:53
Speaker 3: or or could you get into pockets of deer that
43:55
Speaker 3: just hadn't seen people in so long that they were
43:58
Speaker 3: tolerant or maybe be less tolerant of people. You know,
44:02
Speaker 3: I would ask him about, uh, when would you kill deer?
44:07
Speaker 3: I would ask him about shot placement. It been like
44:10
Speaker 3: he's not listened to the Wired to Hunt podcast. He's
44:13
Speaker 3: not listened to you know, all these people. He might
44:16
Speaker 3: have been like, man, I shoot him right in the head, head,
44:20
Speaker 3: shoot every one of them.
44:21
Speaker 4: And it's like, really, why not shoot him through the lungs?
44:24
Speaker 3: Oh man, that's for that's for the.
44:27
Speaker 4: The sissies, you know.
44:29
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know what, I don't know. He
44:31
Speaker 3: probably would have had some very very surprising things. And
44:35
Speaker 3: Mark Mark Kenyon, the other thing I know that would
44:38
Speaker 3: have surprised us is he would not have been into
44:41
Speaker 3: synk control at all.
44:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, am I right right?
44:46
Speaker 2: Your one is that right, and he certainly killed deer
44:49
Speaker 2: despite it, So you can do it. You can do it.
44:54
Speaker 2: Play the wind, the wind, that's right, that's right. You know,
44:59
Speaker 2: we talked about this, you and I when we were
45:00
Speaker 2: down in Arkansas together a few years ago when it
45:03
Speaker 2: came down to hunt with you just kind of talking
45:05
Speaker 2: about this whole idea of the long hunt and a
45:10
Speaker 2: hunt being more just than heading out to a tree
45:13
Speaker 2: and shooting something, but instead a larger experience that's that's
45:17
Speaker 2: days on end that involves, you know, not just the
45:21
Speaker 2: taking of game, but it involves the navigation, the exploration,
45:26
Speaker 2: the surviving out there, all that kind of stuff. And
45:30
Speaker 2: it seems like this era in stories of people like
45:34
Speaker 2: Boone fascinate people in part because of that, because of
45:38
Speaker 2: this experience out there. And I'm curious if your thoughts
45:47
Speaker 2: or if your fascination has changed it all or been
45:51
Speaker 2: colored at all by this latest project, by this new
45:55
Speaker 2: deep dive you've done, or after having done all the
45:58
Speaker 2: work on the Bear Grease podcast about these things. You know,
46:02
Speaker 2: what are your thoughts on this now, on this way
46:04
Speaker 2: of living? Do you want to do more of this
46:06
Speaker 2: kind of thing yourself? Is there something that we as
46:09
Speaker 2: deer hunters now today could benefit from if we took
46:13
Speaker 2: more of a long hunter type philosophy into the woods
46:17
Speaker 2: with us on occasion. This is a lot to throw
46:19
Speaker 2: at you, but.
46:20
Speaker 3: You know, it's a fair it's a fair question. I
46:23
Speaker 3: think the older I get, I I since a coming
46:29
Speaker 3: change that you know, when I was in my there
46:33
Speaker 3: was there have probably been a heyday in my bow
46:39
Speaker 3: hunting career when my goal was just to kill as
46:42
Speaker 3: many deer as I legally could. And that's what I
46:46
Speaker 3: enjoyed and and and that has not diminished. I still
46:50
Speaker 3: just enjoy killing deer, eating deer in whatever way I'm
46:55
Speaker 3: doing that. If I'm just going out for a couple
46:57
Speaker 3: hours in the evening here close to home, or if
46:59
Speaker 3: I'm traveling in some exotic place that's a managed property, like,
47:05
Speaker 3: I still enjoy that.
47:06
Speaker 4: But the older I get, there's a bigger.
47:09
Speaker 3: Space in my need to not just go and extract resource,
47:15
Speaker 3: but to experience a wild place, to experience it. And
47:20
Speaker 3: sometimes I think as modern deer hunters, we don't do that.
47:24
Speaker 3: We we kind of extract. We we we've we've made
47:28
Speaker 3: a we've made a challenge out of extraction, you know,
47:35
Speaker 3: technical extraction of a resource from a landscape.
47:39
Speaker 4: And that's that's fun.
47:40
Speaker 3: Like I'm not you understand, that's I'm in that boat
47:43
Speaker 3: and love it, absolutely love it. The older I get,
47:46
Speaker 3: the bigger the space of me becomes that I want
47:49
Speaker 3: to experience wildness. I want to challenge myself as a woodsman,
47:56
Speaker 3: even though I'm not a bushcraft guy. Like I don't
47:58
Speaker 3: I don't want to wear buckskins. I don't care about
48:01
Speaker 3: starting fires with flint. I think it's cool, That's not
48:04
Speaker 3: what I'm talking about. But like, for instance, this year,
48:08
Speaker 3: well the only buck I killed this year I killed
48:12
Speaker 3: on on really a mini long hunt Mark in Arkansas.
48:17
Speaker 3: Packed my mule, me and my buddy most shepherd who's
48:20
Speaker 3: kind of a kindred spirit of mine, buddy of mine.
48:24
Speaker 3: We went in and planned to stay. We had as
48:29
Speaker 3: we could have stayed as many as five days, and
48:32
Speaker 3: went back into a spot that it's hard to get
48:34
Speaker 3: to camped and hunted out from our camp, and.
48:40
Speaker 4: Oh it was.
48:42
Speaker 3: You know, in the moment, it's one of those things
48:44
Speaker 3: that you're like, what what are we doing? I could
48:46
Speaker 3: have driven to Missouri and bought an over the countertag
48:49
Speaker 3: and like walked in somewhere and probably killed a deer already,
48:55
Speaker 3: but it was it was an incredible adventure, really was.
49:00
Speaker 3: And now I've already lost some track of your original question.
49:07
Speaker 2: Well it was you're you're onto it, which was just
49:10
Speaker 2: you know, is there value or have you found any
49:13
Speaker 2: increased interest in going into a hunt more in the
49:19
Speaker 2: style of the long hunter, So so exactly what you said,
49:22
Speaker 2: rather than now, they did go into it with extraction
49:24
Speaker 2: as their goal, but their goal required a longer experience.
49:29
Speaker 2: We're kind of role playing a little bit, I guess
49:32
Speaker 2: you could say, to get that kind of experience. So
49:35
Speaker 2: having a bigger experience, having a an experience, it's more
49:39
Speaker 2: about It's it's less about can I kill a big deer?
49:42
Speaker 2: More about can I go something? Can I go somewhere
49:45
Speaker 2: I'm interested in, can I learn something new? Can I
49:47
Speaker 2: stretch myself as an outdoors and then can I immerse
49:49
Speaker 2: myself in this place and everything it has to offer?
49:53
Speaker 2: And that's what it sounds like you've been doing more
49:56
Speaker 2: and more, and I can relate to that too. I've
49:58
Speaker 2: had a desire to to focus more on those hunting
50:03
Speaker 2: adjacent things versus just like do I kill the thing
50:07
Speaker 2: I want? It's becoming more and more important for me
50:09
Speaker 2: to did I have the experience I want in the
50:12
Speaker 2: kind of place I want with the people I care about.
50:15
Speaker 2: That's becoming more important to me, And I wonder if
50:18
Speaker 2: that's a little something we can take from these stories.
50:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive, because you know,
50:26
Speaker 3: you get the idea that, oh, well, these guys are
50:29
Speaker 3: just You might hear what I'm saying and say, oh,
50:31
Speaker 3: Clay's just likes camping and probably doesn't kill very many deer.
50:35
Speaker 4: I mean, now, I'm to me, the.
50:40
Speaker 3: I'm looking for a specific deer taken out of the
50:44
Speaker 3: place that I want to be, and that will be
50:49
Speaker 3: one of the most well. I mean, even the deer
50:51
Speaker 3: I killed this year wasn't a big deer, but that's
50:54
Speaker 3: a really valuable deer. But to go in and be
50:58
Speaker 3: a successful hunter, I mean, to me, going on a
51:00
Speaker 3: hunt like I'm talking about, not killing a deer is
51:03
Speaker 3: not a success.
51:04
Speaker 4: I struggle with.
51:06
Speaker 3: Being like we, oh, I'm just here for the experience. No,
51:09
Speaker 3: I'm here to kill a deer. And but so I
51:13
Speaker 3: think you can combine the two and it's just what
51:17
Speaker 3: you're interested in. I mean, I think hearing other people
51:20
Speaker 3: talk sometimes shapes what shapes us and makes us interested. Like,
51:26
Speaker 3: for instance, I think the reason long before I knew
51:29
Speaker 3: anything so to speak, or anything of detail about Daniel Boone,
51:34
Speaker 3: my buddy James Lawrence was essentially doing long hunts back
51:40
Speaker 3: in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and he had no
51:45
Speaker 3: concept of history. His idea, the way he hunted and
51:50
Speaker 3: what he did was so similar to the long hunters
51:53
Speaker 3: it's unreal. And he came by it honest, he wouldn't
51:58
Speaker 3: have known anything about history, but literally they were that
52:03
Speaker 3: close to that era that that's just the way he hunted.
52:06
Speaker 3: I mean he took he took horses back into wilderness
52:10
Speaker 3: and would just hunt solo as long as he could.
52:14
Speaker 3: Never climbed a tree, still hunted, never wore camo never.
52:19
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, shock pouch deer back to his
52:23
Speaker 3: to his horse. I mean, nobody told him that was cool.
52:27
Speaker 3: He just thought that's the way you're supposed to hunt.
52:29
Speaker 3: And and now when I see Boone and learn about
52:32
Speaker 3: the long hunters, I'm like, James, like, you learned this
52:37
Speaker 3: from them. You may not know you learned it from them,
52:39
Speaker 3: but you did, you know, I mean, it was just
52:42
Speaker 3: passed down yeah, so, and that's that's romantic to me.
52:47
Speaker 3: So that's as much as I'm influenced by Boone, I'm
52:50
Speaker 3: influenced by people like James Lawrence and uh. I just
52:55
Speaker 3: have a lot of respect for those guys. Again, I
52:58
Speaker 3: love hunting the way that we in modern times. I
53:01
Speaker 3: mean no doubt. I mean this where I was hunting
53:04
Speaker 3: in Mississippi was a pretty modern hunt really, But I
53:08
Speaker 3: also just have something for the for the hard way.
53:13
Speaker 2: All Right, here's something that I'm challenged by. You talked
53:19
Speaker 2: about how how this whole idea of this kind of hunting,
53:22
Speaker 2: of this era, of these people, we've kind of romanticized it, right,
53:25
Speaker 2: You just said that you've kind of felt that way,
53:27
Speaker 2: and I think a lot of us do. Right. We
53:29
Speaker 2: look back on it, and it seems we glorify it,
53:34
Speaker 2: we romanticize it. It seems fascinating to us for so
53:37
Speaker 2: many reasons. I Mean, there's there's countless stories and American
53:43
Speaker 2: folk heroes from this area, right, but these folks were
53:50
Speaker 2: the perpetrators of maybe one of the most catastrophic crimes
53:54
Speaker 2: against wildlife in the history of the world. When you
53:56
Speaker 2: look at the market hunters, both with deer and buffalo
54:00
Speaker 2: and so many other species across North America were nearly
54:04
Speaker 2: wiped off the face of the earth by this group
54:09
Speaker 2: of folks trying to make ends meet. We almost lost
54:14
Speaker 2: white tail deer, we almost lost buffalo, We almost lost
54:16
Speaker 2: so many critters. So how do you or how do
54:22
Speaker 2: we square that? And that we have canonized, we have
54:27
Speaker 2: made heroes of people who almost wiped out the wildlife
54:32
Speaker 2: that we care so much about today, who did something
54:35
Speaker 2: that if it was done today, we would look at
54:37
Speaker 2: them as the worst crooks in town. We would look
54:40
Speaker 2: at them as like the people burning down the house
54:43
Speaker 2: that we live in. But now we look at them
54:46
Speaker 2: today as heroes. How do you make sense of that?
54:49
Speaker 2: How do you square that?
54:53
Speaker 3: That's a well stated question mark and an accurate one
54:59
Speaker 3: in that these guys were we're we're a part of
55:05
Speaker 3: a vast squander of of of wildlife resource. And I
55:11
Speaker 3: think the short answer is that luckily at the end
55:19
Speaker 3: wildlife one like if today there were no deer, if
55:23
Speaker 3: literally white tailed deer were hunting to extinction or we
55:26
Speaker 3: only could go see them in zoos, I think are
55:30
Speaker 3: we would not be talking about the long hunters in
55:33
Speaker 3: the way that we do.
55:35
Speaker 4: Absolutely not.
55:37
Speaker 3: If if there were no bison, we would be talking
55:41
Speaker 3: about these people different. But just the way the cards
55:45
Speaker 3: came out, we do have them. And in a way
55:51
Speaker 3: you can trace back the saving of American wildlife to
55:58
Speaker 3: these guys, like if yeah, I look at it as
56:00
Speaker 3: just one big, one story. I look at it as
56:03
Speaker 3: one big story because of a market value. There was
56:10
Speaker 3: cultural value assigned to hunting wildlife that was the original
56:15
Speaker 3: value of its that was worth money. You could feed
56:18
Speaker 3: your family, you could put shoes on your children's feet,
56:22
Speaker 3: and that deer had value and you sought after it
56:25
Speaker 3: because you could access the resource of it. That happened
56:29
Speaker 3: so much that there was an incredible wanton slaughter of
56:35
Speaker 3: wildlife in America for you know, one hundred and fifty years.
56:39
Speaker 4: True story.
56:41
Speaker 3: But because of that value that was initially kind of
56:46
Speaker 3: a maybe not so righteous value that translated into the
56:53
Speaker 3: same people, the hunters being the ones who.
56:56
Speaker 4: Who saw that value.
56:57
Speaker 3: Roosevelt, all these guys in the late eighteen hundreds that
57:02
Speaker 3: started the boone Crocket Club that that consciously decided we
57:08
Speaker 3: are going to shift the value system away from commercial
57:12
Speaker 3: market hunting onto you know, adding value to older age animals.
57:18
Speaker 3: We're not going to take away hunting access. We're going
57:21
Speaker 3: to keep hunting access in the hands of the people
57:24
Speaker 3: so that they'll have vested interest in this resource. And
57:28
Speaker 3: we're going to save wildlife by you know this strategic
57:33
Speaker 3: strategic hunting and then and then later it would be
57:36
Speaker 3: habitat funded through hunting. And it all goes back to
57:40
Speaker 3: a man wanting a deer, a man wanting a bison,
57:46
Speaker 3: and though the motivation was out of control, it was
57:51
Speaker 3: untethered back in those days, that original desire. You know
57:56
Speaker 3: that Io Wilson has a book called Biophilia, which is
58:01
Speaker 3: he believes that there's an innate thing inside of man
58:05
Speaker 3: that loves animals, and you know, the love of that
58:11
Speaker 3: animal comes from a lot of different places, but almost
58:14
Speaker 3: exclusively so we can exploit them as a resource for us.
58:18
Speaker 3: And so that's a that's a not a great picture.
58:22
Speaker 3: But yeah, we have to condemn these guys for the
58:26
Speaker 3: for the want and waste that they that they inflicted
58:30
Speaker 3: on America. But there were different scales of it, just
58:32
Speaker 3: like today. I mean, there were people who were shooting
58:35
Speaker 3: bison out of train car windows just to watch them fall. Yeah,
58:39
Speaker 3: you know, there were also planes tribes that were killing
58:44
Speaker 3: bison kind of in traditional ways and contributing to the market, uh,
58:49
Speaker 3: the commercial market.
58:51
Speaker 2: There were there.
58:52
Speaker 3: Were egregious, egregious wildlife crimes by today's standards, and even then,
59:00
Speaker 3: even then, there were there were people that were like, man,
59:03
Speaker 3: this is bad. One of my favorite books of all
59:06
Speaker 3: time is this Wild Sports Book by Frederick Gershtacker, who
59:12
Speaker 3: was in Arkansas between eighteen thirty seven and eighteen forty two.
59:16
Speaker 3: German guy came over here. All through this book he says,
59:19
Speaker 3: Holy cal these Americans are wasteful. They just kill everything.
59:26
Speaker 3: And he did too though he was right there with
59:29
Speaker 3: him market hunting and interesting.
59:32
Speaker 4: So it's yeah, it's it's a tough spot.
59:37
Speaker 3: But if you kind of view it as one big picture,
59:41
Speaker 3: and you can't, I mean, historical revision is so tough.
59:45
Speaker 3: I'd have been right there with a mark. I mean,
59:47
Speaker 3: there's no way that I could say that. I would
59:50
Speaker 3: have been like, well, you know what, boys, we should
59:52
Speaker 3: probably just kill one or two deer each every year
59:56
Speaker 3: and say.
59:57
Speaker 2: There was a certain ignorance to their situations, right. I
1:00:01
Speaker 2: don't think anyone out there realized the impact that they
1:00:05
Speaker 2: were having. They did not realize the finite nature of
1:00:08
Speaker 2: the resource to the degree that it was. And I
1:00:11
Speaker 2: think a lot of people for a long time thought
1:00:13
Speaker 2: these were infinite resources that you know, there was no
1:00:16
Speaker 2: end to it. And so that doesn't necessarily excuse them,
1:00:20
Speaker 2: but to your point, it does. It's hard to, you know,
1:00:24
Speaker 2: judge someone by our standards and knowledge today when they
1:00:27
Speaker 2: did not have the luxury of that knowledge and context.
1:00:32
Speaker 2: Then yeah. So so yeah, it's it's a tricky thing
1:00:36
Speaker 2: to try to make sense of though. Now when you
1:00:48
Speaker 2: look back on that era of market hunting and the
1:00:53
Speaker 2: crash of wildlife populations and then you know what happened after,
1:00:58
Speaker 2: what's the lesson that you take from that? What's the
1:01:01
Speaker 2: lesson we can take from that?
1:01:08
Speaker 3: I think it's stay humble, because history is gonna judge
1:01:13
Speaker 3: you for what you're doing today that you're fully convinced
1:01:17
Speaker 3: is right and ethical and good. And we will look
1:01:23
Speaker 3: back on stuff we're doing today with wildlife and go,
1:01:27
Speaker 3: holy cow, how did how was Mark Kenyon a part
1:01:31
Speaker 3: of that? I mean, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen,
1:01:36
Speaker 3: and so to me, it's just stay humble, you know.
1:01:41
Speaker 3: I mean, like you think of all the challenges that
1:01:44
Speaker 3: we have in wildlife today, you know, chronic wasting disease.
1:01:50
Speaker 3: There may come something that in the future that we
1:01:55
Speaker 3: realize we've been doing so wrong inside of it. That
1:01:59
Speaker 3: would be so evident that unless someone was really paying
1:02:02
Speaker 3: attention seventy years from now, they would just think, man,
1:02:05
Speaker 3: those guys were so reckless, just reckless. But here we are,
1:02:11
Speaker 3: sitting here today with all the information of the best science,
1:02:14
Speaker 3: and we're kind of like Goleia, we don't really know
1:02:17
Speaker 3: exactly what to do. We have some ideas, you know.
1:02:22
Speaker 3: To me, that's the biggest thing is it's just stay humble.
1:02:30
Speaker 3: I mean, our motivations of humans change so much.
1:02:34
Speaker 4: I mean.
1:02:37
Speaker 3: It's hard to picture what should the earth persist that
1:02:40
Speaker 3: in one hundred and fifty years they would say about
1:02:43
Speaker 3: this generation, you know, when it comes to how we
1:02:46
Speaker 3: manage wildlife, and yeah, perhaps will be the heroes, or
1:02:54
Speaker 3: perhaps will be We're a part of some big moved
1:03:00
Speaker 3: movement that we can't even see right now.
1:03:02
Speaker 2: You know, I guess that's usually the case, right You
1:03:04
Speaker 2: don't know, you don't know what history book you're in
1:03:07
Speaker 2: in the moment. They'll be writing those stories fifty years
1:03:11
Speaker 2: from now or one hundred years from now that's a
1:03:14
Speaker 2: very interesting thing to ponder. So there have been there
1:03:18
Speaker 2: have been some renewed calls to put a price on
1:03:23
Speaker 2: wildlife again, specifically meet There have been some calls for
1:03:29
Speaker 2: the fact, not the fact, but there have been some
1:03:31
Speaker 2: calls for a need to have a market hunt again,
1:03:34
Speaker 2: in particular for white tailed deer in some places where
1:03:39
Speaker 2: not enough deer being killed or where there are issues
1:03:42
Speaker 2: with disease and calls to try to reduce the population,
1:03:47
Speaker 2: and folks saying, man, if we don't incentivize people to
1:03:50
Speaker 2: do it, it's not going to get done. And so
1:03:53
Speaker 2: some folks have said, hey, we should do that again.
1:03:55
Speaker 2: We should allow people to sell the excess meat or something.
1:03:58
Speaker 2: We have to incentivize it somehow. When you hear that,
1:04:02
Speaker 2: knowing what you know, having researched and studied the history
1:04:06
Speaker 2: of market hunting, what is your take on that, if
1:04:09
Speaker 2: you have any ad all, does that? Does that seem
1:04:11
Speaker 2: reasonable to you? Does that worry you? What do you think?
1:04:14
Speaker 3: It's actually the first I've heard of a call for
1:04:18
Speaker 3: that mark, So I haven't heard that. Is that a
1:04:22
Speaker 3: legitimate thing? Like people they're people that have power that
1:04:25
Speaker 3: are saying this, or just the internet crowd.
1:04:29
Speaker 2: There are I wouldn't say people with real, real power yet,
1:04:31
Speaker 2: Like I'm not talking government officials pitching it, but there
1:04:34
Speaker 2: are folks within our community and folks within the wildlife
1:04:38
Speaker 2: management community who have talked about that. It's like, Hey,
1:04:41
Speaker 2: do we need to go back down that road.
1:04:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough one.
1:04:49
Speaker 3: I mean, I incentivizing killing deer is uh, it's something
1:04:58
Speaker 3: we've got to do in some places, you know, and
1:05:02
Speaker 3: considering that the deer meat is so healthy, it's such
1:05:07
Speaker 3: a clean meat, it's honestly what the world is after
1:05:11
Speaker 3: in a lot of ways. I just got some venison
1:05:13
Speaker 3: sticks from Hawaii from wild killed access there in Hawaii.
1:05:18
Speaker 4: Did you get any of those?
1:05:19
Speaker 2: Mark? I think I'm supposed to be getting some, but
1:05:21
Speaker 2: I haven't got them yet.
1:05:22
Speaker 3: And my kids immediately saw the labeling and said one
1:05:27
Speaker 3: hundred percent wild venison. Like what's up, Dad? Like, they're
1:05:31
Speaker 3: like North American Mallive Wildlife Conservation. You can't sell wildlife.
1:05:35
Speaker 3: And you know, we kind of quickly found out where
1:05:37
Speaker 3: they're access teer which are invasive. So somehow they're regulating
1:05:41
Speaker 3: killing them and USDA processing them and selling them.
1:05:48
Speaker 4: I don't know.
1:05:48
Speaker 3: I really don't have an answer, Mark, I don't I mean, yeah,
1:05:51
Speaker 3: it would kind of be. It would It would definitely
1:05:55
Speaker 3: go against the grain, probably like in the seventies when
1:05:59
Speaker 3: they're in the eighties and nineties when they start encouraging
1:06:02
Speaker 3: us to kill dose and all our grandpas were like.
1:06:05
Speaker 4: We're never going to kill a doe deer.
1:06:08
Speaker 3: That's you know, we're gonna shoot Spike bucks every you know,
1:06:11
Speaker 3: we'll shoot everyone with C but no does. And now
1:06:15
Speaker 3: we realize how wrong that was. I don't know, man,
1:06:20
Speaker 3: I don't know. It would have to be highly regulated.
1:06:22
Speaker 3: I mean, there's probably a way you could do it,
1:06:24
Speaker 3: Like if if you could say, everybody in the state
1:06:28
Speaker 3: of Missouri can legally sell seven doe deer at this
1:06:35
Speaker 3: USDA processor Dot DA DA DA DA and get seventy
1:06:39
Speaker 3: five dollars per year, so you could make an extra
1:06:42
Speaker 3: you know, five hundred dollars a year.
1:06:45
Speaker 4: I don't know.
1:06:45
Speaker 3: People would exploit it, people with I mean, yeah, there'd
1:06:49
Speaker 3: be people that'd be making a living off of it
1:06:51
Speaker 3: and taking everybody's I mean, there would just be It
1:06:54
Speaker 3: would just be so hard to regulate. But then again,
1:06:58
Speaker 3: if deer numbers get so high places and disease is
1:07:01
Speaker 3: a problem. It's like, would it be better to do
1:07:04
Speaker 3: that or to hire government assassins that go in and
1:07:08
Speaker 3: kill deer, or the ridiculousness of your contraceptives. You know,
1:07:12
Speaker 3: where these people are going in and tranquilizing to your
1:07:15
Speaker 3: that's just unreal.
1:07:17
Speaker 4: So I don't know. That may be conversations that we
1:07:21
Speaker 4: have in the future.
1:07:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know either, and I haven't you know,
1:07:26
Speaker 2: gone deep down that road of inquiry yet. But it's
1:07:29
Speaker 2: something you start hearing tossed around, and it's it's it's
1:07:34
Speaker 2: a worrisome thing, like there's that slippery slope worry looking
1:07:37
Speaker 2: back on what happened last time. But who knows, Like
1:07:42
Speaker 2: you said, you break up a great point. All of
1:07:44
Speaker 2: these things will be judged by future generations. We don't
1:07:48
Speaker 2: really know the right answer right now. We don't know
1:07:51
Speaker 2: what they're going to say. But all you can do
1:07:54
Speaker 2: is make the best decision with the best information you
1:07:56
Speaker 2: have at hand and in a good, good set of intentions,
1:08:00
Speaker 2: and let the chips fall where they are, you.
1:08:03
Speaker 3: Know, I think the biggest thing that we that we
1:08:07
Speaker 3: will give to future generations is modern hunting, and all
1:08:16
Speaker 3: the criticism that it takes even from the inside, we
1:08:22
Speaker 3: are adding monetary value to wild places and preservation of
1:08:28
Speaker 3: wild places. I'm even talking about I'm primarily even talking
1:08:31
Speaker 3: about private land like I was on the Mississippi River,
1:08:35
Speaker 3: and the land inside the levees of the Mississippi River
1:08:39
Speaker 3: is incredibly valuable. I mean, probably some of the most
1:08:43
Speaker 3: valuable ground in America. And it has that kind of
1:08:49
Speaker 3: wild value, which there's a thousand ways to look at that.
1:08:53
Speaker 3: Some could view that as an atrocity because access is
1:08:57
Speaker 3: not something you can get inside the levees of the
1:09:00
Speaker 3: Missippi River. I mean it's closed down, tight private land.
1:09:04
Speaker 3: And but the way I look at it is that
1:09:08
Speaker 3: land at one time was owned by primarily owned by
1:09:12
Speaker 3: timber companies who were managing that land solely for the
1:09:16
Speaker 3: for timber and making money. Today a lot of that
1:09:20
Speaker 3: timber company land has now gone into private hands and
1:09:24
Speaker 3: is now being heavily managed for wildlife, and it's so
1:09:31
Speaker 3: valuable because of its hunting recreational hunting value, that land
1:09:36
Speaker 3: will probably never go back into the hands of timber companies.
1:09:39
Speaker 3: And not that timber companies are the villain, but I'm
1:09:42
Speaker 3: making a point that land being managed exclusively for wildlife
1:09:48
Speaker 3: is perhaps better than land being exclusively managed for financial
1:09:53
Speaker 3: gains of the forestry industry, which I'm pro cut them down.
1:09:58
Speaker 3: I'm pro prologing. You know, you hear what I'm saying.
1:10:01
Speaker 3: But we're we're adding value to keeping wild places intact
1:10:08
Speaker 3: because of recreational hunting.
1:10:10
Speaker 4: I mean, because.
1:10:13
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, there's there's land all around me
1:10:15
Speaker 3: right now, farms that are being bought, subdivided, divided up
1:10:20
Speaker 3: into five acre plots. You know, our buddy Matt Cook,
1:10:26
Speaker 3: just a friend of ours at Meat Eater, he bought
1:10:29
Speaker 3: a golf course up in Michigan and turned it into
1:10:33
Speaker 3: a just turn it back into a place to hunt.
1:10:38
Speaker 3: You know, that's an extreme version of it. Most of
1:10:42
Speaker 3: us can't do that. But we can make decisions to
1:10:46
Speaker 3: buy a piece of property and not fragment it on
1:10:49
Speaker 3: purpose just for financial gain.
1:10:51
Speaker 2: You know.
1:10:52
Speaker 3: So anyway, I think that's the one thing that we'll
1:10:55
Speaker 3: look back on and be proud of.
1:10:58
Speaker 2: I think you're a hundred percent right, And it is
1:11:01
Speaker 2: not a small it is not a trivial thing either,
1:11:04
Speaker 2: the impact that has. So there was a study that
1:11:08
Speaker 2: came on a few years ago that quantified how land
1:11:14
Speaker 2: is what for what use is land is owned or
1:11:18
Speaker 2: least And the study found that about three hundred and
1:11:22
Speaker 2: fifty six million acres of land across the United States
1:11:26
Speaker 2: of America is primarily owned or least for hunting. That's
1:11:30
Speaker 2: just for hunting. Four hundred and forty million acres were
1:11:33
Speaker 2: for wildlife related recreation. Three hundred and fifty six of
1:11:37
Speaker 2: those were for hunting. So that is that's about half
1:11:42
Speaker 2: the sum total that America has a public land. So
1:11:44
Speaker 2: we have it. So we have six hundred and forty
1:11:46
Speaker 2: some million acres of federal public land. We've got another
1:11:49
Speaker 2: three hundred and fifty six million acres of private land
1:11:52
Speaker 2: now managed for hunting and wildlife. That is a huge
1:11:55
Speaker 2: sum yeah of wildlife habitat that is being protected in
1:11:59
Speaker 2: mana for critters that you know, if we didn't have that,
1:12:03
Speaker 2: you know, there aren't as much as I love hiking
1:12:06
Speaker 2: or backpacking or whatever like, there aren't a pile of
1:12:09
Speaker 2: people who loved a mountain bike who are buying thousands
1:12:12
Speaker 2: of acres of land to manage to help wildlife. That's
1:12:16
Speaker 2: a thing that we are community is doing and is
1:12:20
Speaker 2: keeping a lot of species on the ground and here
1:12:22
Speaker 2: because of it. So yeah, that's a big deal.
1:12:26
Speaker 3: I think in the future, in our kids' lives and
1:12:30
Speaker 3: our grandchildren's lives, one of the most finite resources will
1:12:36
Speaker 3: be wild places, just places without roads, places without fragmentation,
1:12:41
Speaker 3: large tracts of land, and you can't get those back,
1:12:45
Speaker 3: I mean in the foreseeable future, and I mean unless
1:12:48
Speaker 3: our whole civilization just falls and becomes ruins and you know,
1:12:52
Speaker 3: people a thousand years from now dig up our houses
1:12:55
Speaker 3: from the ground. I mean, you don't get back where
1:13:00
Speaker 3: a Walmart goes in. You don't get back where a
1:13:03
Speaker 3: subdivision goes in. I haven't told the world this yet, Mark,
1:13:08
Speaker 3: but we'll release it on the Wired to Hunt podcast.
1:13:11
Speaker 3: We're gonna do a series on American wilderness. I've been
1:13:14
Speaker 3: working for pretty long time on a series on American
1:13:19
Speaker 3: wilderness and wilderness like with a capital W regulated wilderness,
1:13:25
Speaker 3: but also the idea of wilderness and how as Americans
1:13:30
Speaker 3: we view that very different from anywhere in the world.
1:13:34
Speaker 3: And as I've researched, and most of the information is
1:13:40
Speaker 3: not coming from hunters. I mean, there's a lot of
1:13:42
Speaker 3: people that are invested in wilderness, but as I read it,
1:13:46
Speaker 3: I'm like, hey, do y'all realize that, like we're the
1:13:49
Speaker 3: ones who are probably doing more, especially in private lands,
1:13:55
Speaker 3: for keeping keeping tracks of land intact and adding value
1:14:01
Speaker 3: to to just raw land, probably more than anybody. And
1:14:05
Speaker 3: it's it's going to be a really interesting.
1:14:08
Speaker 2: But yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
1:14:12
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:14:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, the history of our wilderness preservation system and all
1:14:18
Speaker 2: that's fascinating stuff. Did a lot of research into that.
1:14:22
Speaker 5: You're an expert, You're an expert on it to a degree,
1:14:25
Speaker 5: and uh, and yeah, it was very very interesting, and
1:14:28
Speaker 5: I agree with you that I think these last places
1:14:32
Speaker 5: that we have that are relatively.
1:14:34
Speaker 2: Wild are about as rare of a resource as you
1:14:38
Speaker 2: can find today. So I'm all for protecting them. And uh.
1:14:42
Speaker 2: And there's very interesting things between the capital W designation
1:14:47
Speaker 2: and then the concept and philosophy of wilderness and what
1:14:51
Speaker 2: all that means to to us as a people, to
1:14:55
Speaker 2: us as hunters, to us to managing resources. I mean,
1:14:59
Speaker 2: there's you've got a lot of fought out of there
1:15:01
Speaker 2: for podcast series. I'm sure it's gonna be great. Yeah.
1:15:04
Speaker 2: Have you read the book Wilderness in the American Mind?
1:15:07
Speaker 2: I think it's called.
1:15:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, Man, I got it sitting right over here. It
1:15:12
Speaker 3: one of my one of my favorite books.
1:15:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, phenomenal, that phenomenal.
1:15:18
Speaker 3: Hey, I need to interview you for this podcast for real? Yeah, yeah, deal,
1:15:27
Speaker 3: for real.
1:15:28
Speaker 4: I want to I want to talk to you.
1:15:29
Speaker 3: I've got I've got a great I've already done several
1:15:34
Speaker 3: interviews in the Very Interesting People.
1:15:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, along those lines, so Wilderness in the American
1:15:42
Speaker 2: Mind by Roderick Frasier Nash, I think is the author.
1:15:47
Speaker 2: That's a recommendation I'll give folks. But now I'm gonna
1:15:49
Speaker 2: throw back at you on this topic of long hunters
1:15:53
Speaker 2: and this era that you guys explored in your book.
1:15:56
Speaker 2: Are there any other books or documentaries or or any
1:16:00
Speaker 2: other kind of resource you would recommend to folks if
1:16:02
Speaker 2: they want to dive into this world more?
1:16:04
Speaker 4: Well, anybody that's been hovering around.
1:16:09
Speaker 3: Bear Grease at all or even meat Eater with with
1:16:12
Speaker 3: Steve's stuff. You know, the book Boone by Robert Robert
1:16:16
Speaker 3: Morgan is really good.
1:16:19
Speaker 4: There's a book.
1:16:25
Speaker 3: There's a book called My Father by Nathan Boone, which
1:16:29
Speaker 3: is Boone's youngest son, who was interviewed when he was
1:16:33
Speaker 3: seventy years old, thirty years after Boone's death, and it's
1:16:38
Speaker 3: it's some of the best insight that we have into Boone,
1:16:40
Speaker 3: And again Boone is the primary character that we understand
1:16:44
Speaker 3: the Long Hunters from. So that's an incredible book. Yeah,
1:16:50
Speaker 3: Unfortunately it's all these Boone books.
1:16:51
Speaker 2: Man.
1:16:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, there, there's there's there's a lot, there's Uh.
1:16:58
Speaker 4: Robert eckertz Ah, the world's.
1:17:03
Speaker 3: Going to be mad at me for not knowing the
1:17:05
Speaker 3: name of his book. I actually didn't like it. But
1:17:08
Speaker 3: The Frontiersman, I believe it's called The Frontiersman. I started
1:17:11
Speaker 3: and couldn't finish it. People probably be very angry at
1:17:15
Speaker 3: me for saying that. But that's a very famous book
1:17:18
Speaker 3: about the era of the Long Hunters. Ted Franklin Blow
1:17:24
Speaker 3: has a lot of work on the Long Hunters. A
1:17:27
Speaker 3: lot of the stuff that we research that we got
1:17:31
Speaker 3: came from different articles and papers that he wrote. But
1:17:39
Speaker 3: I still got to go with Robert Morgan's Boone talks
1:17:43
Speaker 3: a lot about the Long Hunters.
1:17:45
Speaker 2: Awesome. Last question for you. If someone is listening to
1:17:51
Speaker 2: this today, obviously they should go out and pick up
1:17:55
Speaker 2: a copy download a copy of The Long Hunters book
1:17:58
Speaker 2: to listen to. But if they want to listen to
1:17:59
Speaker 2: some Bear Grease episodes, either about this world or about
1:18:04
Speaker 2: anything else you're working on out Could you recommend like
1:18:06
Speaker 2: one or two Bear Grease episodes that folks should go
1:18:09
Speaker 2: listen to if they haven't already.
1:18:11
Speaker 3: Well, I'll have to bring up the current episode that
1:18:16
Speaker 3: came out on January the tenth, which is called the
1:18:22
Speaker 3: Donnie Baker Story Nightmare. That's the title, and that's part one,
1:18:29
Speaker 3: and it is about the illegal killing of a two
1:18:34
Speaker 3: hundred and four inch buck on the Fort Leonardwood Military
1:18:37
Speaker 3: base in central Missouri in two thousand and nine. Fascinating
1:18:42
Speaker 3: story and the most unique thing about it, Mark is
1:18:46
Speaker 3: that we interviewed the guy who did it. We didn't
1:18:50
Speaker 3: interview game wardens, we didn't interview landowners, we didn't interview
1:18:56
Speaker 3: people in the community. We interviewed the man who commit
1:19:00
Speaker 3: the crime, which was pretty unique. And it's really it's
1:19:07
Speaker 3: a story about the illegally, the illegal killing of this buck,
1:19:10
Speaker 3: but really it's a human story more than more than anything,
1:19:15
Speaker 3: just about what this guy, the kind of the mentality
1:19:17
Speaker 3: this guy had and what he went through, and just
1:19:21
Speaker 3: what it was like killing this deer, trying to hide it,
1:19:24
Speaker 3: lying about it, and I don't know. It was one
1:19:28
Speaker 3: of the hardest podcasts I've done because the guy, the
1:19:32
Speaker 3: guy's forty years old. His name is Donnie Baker. I mean,
1:19:34
Speaker 3: it's not a secret, and.
1:19:38
Speaker 4: It was.
1:19:38
Speaker 3: It was a challenge because a lot of times when
1:19:40
Speaker 3: you're dealing with people that are deceased, I don't know,
1:19:44
Speaker 3: you just feel a little bit more liberty to say
1:19:46
Speaker 3: what you think or And in this case, I was
1:19:50
Speaker 3: very concerned about like crushing this guy.
1:19:54
Speaker 2: Honestly, Yeah, with the ramifications of the story out there. Yea.
1:19:59
Speaker 3: Even when when he agreed to tell the story, I
1:20:02
Speaker 3: was like, man, let's talk about this. You sure you
1:20:05
Speaker 3: want to do this? And I think it influenced the
1:20:08
Speaker 3: way I told the story in a way, in a
1:20:10
Speaker 3: good way. But it's a fascinating story. So the Donnie
1:20:15
Speaker 3: Baker Story, it's a two part series. The second part
1:20:18
Speaker 3: comes out. I don't know when this podcast that we're
1:20:22
Speaker 3: making right now is going to come out, Mark, but
1:20:24
Speaker 3: it comes out like January twentieth something. The second part
1:20:29
Speaker 3: comes out. But it's it's really cool. And then you know,
1:20:33
Speaker 3: our boon series was good. Whole Collier, Mississippi River.
1:20:39
Speaker 4: Ah. I love mal Mark.
1:20:42
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, it's good stuff. Man. My son Everett still
1:20:46
Speaker 2: special requests Clay Newcombe talking about Daniel Boone. Every once
1:20:50
Speaker 2: in a while, I'll be driving, let's listen to Clay
1:20:53
Speaker 2: talking about Boone. Not again, not again ever, please, So
1:21:00
Speaker 2: up the good work man. You're doing great. I love
1:21:02
Speaker 2: the things that you're putting out there into the world.
1:21:04
Speaker 2: I appreciate you, and thank you for coming on and
1:21:07
Speaker 2: doing this.
1:21:08
Speaker 4: Thanks Mark, really appreciate it. Thank you.
1:21:12
Speaker 2: All right, and that's a wrap. Thank you for tuning in.
1:21:15
Speaker 2: Hope you enjoyed this conversation, as I always do when
1:21:18
Speaker 2: me and Clay get together. Good guy does great work,
1:21:22
Speaker 2: and you know this. This latest audiobook is another great
1:21:25
Speaker 2: example of that, so I hope you'll check it out
1:21:28
Speaker 2: with that in mind. And with that said, thanks for
1:21:31
Speaker 2: being here. Appreciate you being a part of this community.
1:21:33
Speaker 2: Thanks for tuning in, and until next time, stay wired
1:21:39
Speaker 2: to Hunt.