Ep. 777: So You Want to Be a Hide Hunter

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast

Ep. 777: So You Want to Be a Hide Hunter

Host: Steven Rinella
Guests: Randall M., Phil (and brief contributions from the MeatEater Crew)
Date: October 13, 2025

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Overview

This episode dives deep into a pivotal and controversial era of American history: the age of the buffalo hide hunters (1865–1883). Using the release of their new audiobook "MeatEater’s American History: The Hide Hunters" as a launching point, Steven Rinella and Randall M. break down the economic, technological, and personal dimensions of the hide hunting industry, exploring how post-Civil War America launched countless men—even former Union and Confederate soldiers—into the business of hunting buffalo for profit. The conversation ranges from humorous asides and pop culture tangents to serious historical reflection, peppered with notable stories, wild facts, and candid grappling with the moral legacy of market hunting on the American ecosystem.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene: Banter, Projects, and New MeatEater Content

• Opening banter (01:05–07:00): Lighthearted discussion about Phil's theater roles (“A Christmas Carol”), live tour ideas like "Interviews with a Black Bear," and a humorous brainstorming session on integrating holiday and hunting themes.
• Product tie-in: Introduction of the new MeatEater American History audiobook “The Hide Hunters, 1865–1883” (39:21).
• Tangential discussions: Mink fur in fake eyelashes, archaic sayings ("to a T"), and quirky stories involving buffalo fat ("depuyer") and caviar birthmark jokes.

"If you could interview any animal in the world, I would interview a black bear about, like, what he's up to, what he was thinking... Like, I could see why you might take a sip [of gear oil], but then... you kept eating it." – Steven Rinella, (07:41)

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Defining “Market Hunting” Eras in America (31:00–41:00)

1. The Long Hunters (1763–1775)

• Frontier market hunting based on familial expedition groups from western North Carolina and Virginia.
  • Primarily focused on whitetail deer for skins traded as leather, especially to Britain.
  • Emphasis on long durations ("long ass hunt").
  • Noted for poor written records due to illiteracy.

2. The Mountain Men (~1806–1840)

• Beaver trapping in the Rockies post-Lewis & Clark.
  • Organized by corporations, not tied by kin but by employment contracts.
  • Trappers like Jim Bridger ("employment agreement," 41:19) who signed up via newspaper ads.
  • Industry collapsed with the rise of silk top hats and beaver extirpation.

3. The Hide Hunters (1865–1883)

• Focus of this episode/audiobook: Commercial buffalo killing for untanned hides (flint hides).
  • “Hide hunters” used systematic slaughter for leather—a shift from “robe” trade done artisanally by Native women.
  • Marked by absence of American “heroes”; instead, this era is synonymous with the near-extinction of the buffalo.

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Why No “Buffalo Hunter” Heroes? (46:00–50:00)

• Public perception: Unlike Daniel Boone (long hunter) or Jim Bridger (mountain man), buffalo hide hunters achieved only infamy—no hero status.

• Reason: Their explicit association with the near extinction of the buffalo meant their legacy was irredeemably villainized:

  “When you get into the buffalo hidehunters...they virtually eliminate—kill about 15 million buffalo—until there’s less than 1,000 left...that crime has been pinned on them.” – Steven Rinella, (48:14)

• Historical self-justification: As old men, many attempted to reframe their actions as contributions to “taming the frontier” (57:00–58:36), but their public reputation never recovered.

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Connecting the Civil War & Frontier Chaos (64:08–87:18)

• Demographic disruption: Many hide hunters were Civil War veterans (both Union and Confederate) or otherwise traumatized/displaced by war.

• Scale of devastation: 700,000 combat deaths, entire cohorts wiped out in towns, 8% of white men aged 13–43 killed, large numbers disabled.

• Career trajectory: Hide hunting seen as a “last resort” or pragmatic means of survival for war-ravaged young men.

  “You have literally destroyed huge swaths of the country and people needed something to go do...a big impetus...is I feel that coming and saying all the hidehunters were these sadistic people hell bent on destroying American wildlife—it’s not accurate.” – Steven Rinella, (86:00)

• Economic drivers: Railroads, layoffs, and the economic Panic of the 1870s compounded this mass movement west.

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How the Hide Hunt Worked: Organization, Markets, and Methods (79:04–101:30)

• Crew culture: Small, hierarchical outfits (shooters, skinners, cooks), easily transferable roles across “outfits.”
• Siphon Migration: One relative’s success in the hide trade often “siphoned” in family and friends from back East.
• Market structure: Unlike corporate-backed mountain men, hide hunting crews worked independently; buyers, not companies, ran the market.
• Scale of harvest: Native women tanned ~10 hides/year; hide hunters regularly killed 30–40 buffalo per day.

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Industrial Demand: The Leather “Boom” & Technological Context (110:15–116:21)

• Exploding demand for leather belts in factories (pre-electricity) drove the market for buffalo hides (timing belts, factory drive belts).
• Mythbusting: There was no single revolutionary tanning “discovery”; rather, gradual technological improvements and railroad access enabled the mass exploitation of buffalo hides.

  "Buffalo leather just happened to sort of fall into the chute at the right time." – Randall M., (115:54)

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Morality, Memory, and the Legacy of the Hide Hunt (123:08–126:39)

• Waste and efficiency: Hide hunters DID waste huge volumes of meat—but also sold large amounts, wherever markets existed.
• Hardscrabble life: Hunters were not “lazy” but opportunistic, harvesting even rotten hair for mattress stuffing (the “mop”).
• Notable individuals:
  • Elijah Cox, a formerly enslaved Black man and Army veteran, became a shooter through years of work as a cook and skinner (90:23–91:30).
  • Some hide hunters rose to later fame: Bat Masterson, Pat Garrett, and possibly Wyatt Earp all spent time hide hunting before gaining notoriety in other fields.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “These were often people that had—NOT just little opportunity—no opportunity. And though we weren’t using this term at the time about trauma, being shell shocked...people coming out of horrific circumstances with absolutely no promise of employment.”
  —Steven Rinella, (86:22)

• “When you see mountain men from a historical standpoint, it's something very specific.… They’re not after the skin, they’re after the hair, which is…an interesting twist when you think about, like the fur trade in general.”
  —Randall M., (38:01)

• “There was a little device we use in these American history pieces where we like to bracket…the years that we’re talking about, which is—no, it’s true.”
  —Steven Rinella, on how each audiobook installment is anchored in specific eras, (69:44)

• On shifting self-justification:

  "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.…But as old men…they’d say, 'we were part of the American story…what we were really trying to do was open up the west for white settlement'."
  —Randall M., (57:01)

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Significant Segments & Timestamps

• 01:05–07:00 — Light banter, crew introductions, upcoming MeatEater projects
• 14:59–15:26; 26:30–29:05 — Historical trivia and humorous tangents ("the whole nine yards", caviar jokes)
• 31:00–41:00 — Definition and differentiation of Long Hunters, Mountain Men, Hide Hunters eras
• 47:22–50:07 — Why there are no “hide hunter heroes”
• 64:08–87:18 — The link between Civil War trauma and the rise of buffalo hide hunting
• 79:04–83:57 — The mechanics and migration patterns of hide hunter “outfits”
• 110:15–116:21 — Factory belt drives and the industrial appetite for leather
• 123:08–126:39 — Realities of waste, opportunism, and the daily grind of hide hunting

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Tone and Style

• Authentic, irreverent, and rich in historical details.
• Balances comic anecdotes ("Marilyn Monroe" caviar joke, 20:14–21:13) and pop culture with deep, thoughtful exploration of American history and its ecological legacy.
• Speakers frequently question each other’s assumptions, inject historical myth-busting, and challenge both popular and academic simplifications of this era.
• No ad or sponsor segments included in this summary.

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Conclusion

This episode acts as both a sneak preview and a passionate deep dive into "MeatEater’s American History: The Hide Hunters." It traces the evolution of America’s frontier hunting—from kin-based, legendary expeditions to the industrial-scale slaughter that nearly ended the buffalo. With candid historical analysis and a refusal to offer simplistic morality tales, Rinella and crew present the hide hunters not as cardboard villains, but as complex products of their time—traumatized, opportunistic, and sometimes desperate men who both shaped and were shaped by the making of modern America.

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Further Exploration

For those interested in more detail:

• Listen to the full “MeatEater’s American History” audiobook series: Long Hunters, Mountain Men, and the new Hide Hunters (release date: October 14, 2025).
• Related reading: "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" by Steven Rinella

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Transcript

[Steven Rinella]

This is an iHeart podcast. 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@first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E dot com. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Randall M.]

The Meat Eater podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

No compromise.

[Steven Rinella]

Gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out@first light.com. that's F I R-S-T L I T E dot com. I got two things of major interest. Well, three things if you count Phil. Phil printed off the script of Christmas. What do they call that?

[Phil]

A Christmas carol.

[Steven Rinella]

Christmas carol. He printed the script off. He's been highlighting his lines.

[Phil]

Who are you playing?

[Steven Rinella]

Cratchit.

[Phil]

Cratchit?

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

God. Seems like you'd play Cratchit.

[Phil]

Robert Cratchit. It was only a matter of time.

[Steven Rinella]

They didn't try to get you for Scrooge?

[Phil]

Surprisingly not, no. I think maybe a few more years. Wait till I get in the 40s.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that was a joke. I don't think he'd be a Scrooge. You know what I could picture you being?

[Phil]

Know, what's that?

[Steven Rinella]

You know what he might be good at? You know the guy that, like the.

[Phil]

The.

[Steven Rinella]

That He's. He's like the. The nephew. And he's trying to get him. He's trying to get Scrooge fired up about Christmas.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But then, like, Scrooge catches him. Goofing on him. They.

[Phil]

They tried to get me to play Fred two years ago.

[Steven Rinella]

You know your first name basis.

[Phil]

Yeah, that's right.

[Steven Rinella]

His name's Fred.

[Phil]

His name's Fred.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. First name base.

[Randall M.]

You wanted. You wanted more of a role.

[Steven Rinella]

No, I was.

[Phil]

I was doing a different place and it's just. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Feels out there. God, what is. What is one of Cratchit's big lines?

[Phil]

Oh, he doesn't have a. A lot of big lines.

[Steven Rinella]

He's.

[Phil]

He's just kind of like the anchor for, like, you know, kind of the moral. The moral anchor? Yeah. That's the Word.

[Steven Rinella]

God bless us. Phil won't be able to do that.

[Phil]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Probably the worst part about your. What you got coming up, if I had to say. Let me hear it.

[Phil]

I'm just. I. I would just like to say I love how involved and interested you are in this whole process.

[Steven Rinella]

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. But what. Like, we will be there. So I just want to make sure when I get there, I know what's going on.

[Phil]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

So I can whisper. 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.

[Phil]

I'll spill all the details, burn bridges along the way.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But what might be challenging to you is because you have your own kids.

[Phil]

I do. One of them's in the play with me, Steve.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, Tiny. Is he Tiny Timmy?

[Phil]

He's playing my son. No, he's the middle child. There's an older daughter of. Cratchit's a middle boy, and then Tiny Tim, he's playing the middle boy.

[Steven Rinella]

What I was gonna say could be a problem for you.

[Phil]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Phil]

That's kind of Cratchit's big scene is that he's got. He's got to kind of break down over the. The death of Tiny Tim in one of the scenes. That's the.

[Randall M.]

Oh, I forgot that he died.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, you don't see him die.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Phil]

Thank you. Yes. Randall's.

[Randall M.]

Randall's not nearly enough to play Tiny Tim.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. My little boy. You know how Matthew's on crutches for six months? Oh, yeah.

[Phil]

Were you making a bunch of Tiny Tim?

[Steven Rinella]

Well, he's a real child. He's a very agreeable young man. Very agreeable. So we. While he was on crutches, that was his nickname because he makes sense.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He's so Agreeable. Yeah, just a cheery little fella. Oh, now, you know he's not disgruntled.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

That's beautiful.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Well, keep us posted. Maybe. Maybe, Randall, maybe you and your wife would like to go with us.

[Randall M.]

I'd love to. I. I don't go to the theater enough.

[Steven Rinella]

You don't take in much theater. Well, I take in one play.

[Randall M.]

I went to Christmas Carol.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

I went to Phil. I went to Phil's last production and it was lovely. And I was. I was seated right behind J.K. simmons. Famous Montana J.K. simmons. And he loved it.

[Steven Rinella]

He did.

[Randall M.]

Every time Phil made a joke, I looked at J.K. simmons and he was just.

[Steven Rinella]

And. Yeah, but you know what? I don't think. I'm not knocking on Phil.

[Phil]

Yeah, you are. That's okay.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

I think he just.

[Phil]

That might be part of it, but.

[Randall M.]

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?

[Steven Rinella]

So, like little date night. Well, it's gonna 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 they'll be my children.

[Randall M.]

That sounds like a normal outing for us. Yeah, because often we don't bring children to anything.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, because it wouldn't work for us. Like they're. She's gonna make them go. Yeah, they won't, you know. Sure, sure. Don't tell Phil. They're not gonna.

[Randall M.]

They're probably not gonna wanna.

[Phil]

I was 11 year old once as well. It's okay.

[Steven Rinella]

They're not gonna wanna go, but they'll be down there.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Phil]

I think it's brilliant. Yeah.

[Randall M.]

We can have Ghosts of hunting season past. Hunting season present. Hunting season future.

[Phil]

Well, you know, now this is gonna air, Randall, and if this doesn't happen, there's gonna be some disappointed fans in.

[Randall M.]

The audience, so will have to be equally good or better. I don't. I don't imagine. I mean, this is a great idea. I'm just going to say that. But whatever. Whatever. Replaces it or supplants it will be better.

[Steven Rinella]

So Clay's planning on having Brent Reeves fry bluegills on stage every night.

[Randall M.]

I know. I like that, but.

[Steven Rinella]

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, fire marsh. They're going to have, like, the fire.

[Phil]

Department down there, and they're going to say, our. Our very expensive and thick curtains are going to smell like fish for the next three months.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Or you don't bring it up and see what happens.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know. You know what's going to tickle Phil's fancy? He's going to get jealous.

[Randall M.]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

We. 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.

[Phil]

And who's the black bear?

[Steven Rinella]

I haven't cast it yet.

[Phil]

Is there going to be a whole. There's going to be callbacks. Do some scene tests.

[Steven Rinella]

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. 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.

[Randall M.]

Is the. Is. Yeah. Is the 20th trash can curiosity or is it just. You can't break the habit?

[Phil]

You know, you throw out black bears as an example. Steve. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Great interview.

[Phil]

Interview with a turkey. Interview with a dove.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like, if you interviewed a black bear. If you could interview, like, a black bear that finds, like, Clay Newcomb's bait barrel.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. And then he slowly put, like, It'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?

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All of a sudden. And he's like, here's a barrel.

[Randall M.]

He's like, you know, things hadn't really been going well for me lately, and I thought maybe my luck had finally changed.

[Steven Rinella]

And, like. Yeah. And, you know, all of a sudden, there's, like, a platform up in a tree, like, but, like, does this stuff, you know.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Register.

[Randall M.]

Or like a black bear that finds his way into a convenience store and he's caught on the closed circuit.

[Steven Rinella]

Television yeah, yeah. Did you know you were at risk?

[Phil]

So is this. Is this a bear that is. Is. Is post mortem, like, like it's a bear.

[Steven Rinella]

No, no, no, no. That's why, like, his. It's gonna be a bear to his. Like, his body gets arrow. I don. Yeah.

[Phil]

Got to iron out the details.

[Steven Rinella]

Not going to, like, bring a bear back from the dead. You could do.

[Randall M.]

You could do a repetitive series. Anytime a black bear's in the news, you just have the bear. God, I can't catch a break, Honestly. My family's so embarrassed.

[Steven Rinella]

Here, here's the other thing. That'll. How did I. What did I say? There's three things of interest.

[Phil]

Doesn't matter.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I just got off the phone.

[Randall M.]

Great producer.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm trying to. Here's. I'm going to. 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I just got. I just did. I pre. My pre. Interview. Hold that up real nice. What Randall's holding is a wild mink pelt. Did you know?

[Randall M.]

How's that, Phil?

[Phil]

It's looking shiny.

[Randall M.]

Should I bring.

[Steven Rinella]

It does look shiny.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

My God. Does that look like a nice eyelash? I don't like that look. Just a fake eyelash look.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Not my style, but, you know, it's popular.

[Randall M.]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

It'll probably fade.

[Randall M.]

I feel like. I feel like it came into popularity. I feel like.

[Steven Rinella]

But it already went.

[Randall M.]

I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, it's way popular. Like.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

In 20 years, if you're dressing up for Halloween and you're dressing up as a 20, 25 person for Halloween, you're gonna glue on big fake eyelashes.

[Randall M.]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

And people would be like, oh, I remember that. But yeah, Mink.

[Randall M.]

It is striking.

[Steven Rinella]

And I was wondering, is that like enough to drive up the mink market? But then man, think about how many eyelashes are hiding in that thing right there.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, it's nothing but tiny little.

[Steven Rinella]

You could do the whole town. You could give every woman in town new eyelashes. With this mink.

[Randall M.]

We should try to make. We should take a sliver, like a. A dental floss size sliver off the side of that and try to make a set of fake eyelashes for someone in the.

[Steven Rinella]

Great idea.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What they do when they're testing. I don't want to blow the interview. I'm going to give this last little tidbit away against my better judgment. When they're testing a shipment. Guess, guess what the test is. Did I already tell you what the test is?

[Randall M.]

You did and I like it.

[Steven Rinella]

Take a cigarette lighter.

[Randall M.]

Does it smell like hair?

[Steven Rinella]

If it smells like burning hair, it'll either smell like burning petroleum base or it'll be like, oh, that's burnt hair. Yeah, that is a mink.

[Randall M.]

That's great.

[Steven Rinella]

Fake eyelashes 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. It's not known. We're not knowing if these mink are American caught mink or European wild mink. Third thing of interest. You pull up the photo fill.

[Phil]

Let's do it.

[Steven Rinella]

This is of tremendous interest. You got your thing handy? I do. Randall and I just did a. The. 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 depuy. The Depuy. French. If you imagine like, like picture that you pull the hide off a deer because more people have done that than pulled the hide off a 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 back strap. But these are in this picture we're holding up. These are like giant slabs of fat removed from over the back strap and hump of a buffalo. And working on the latest installation of meat eaters American history, The Hide Hunters 1865-1883. We ran across this passage which. Which. Which Dr. Randall will share with you.

[Randall M.]

Another important article of food, the equal of which is not to Be had except from the buffalo, is depoyer or. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes, we made it. We made a whole video about making it. We followed those instructions. Why do people say to the table, I don't know. We follow him to the great question. You want to know why the whole nine yards? You know what that means? No, it's like the. In a P. Is it. Was that. What was that like Spitfire P38 airplane in World War II? Is it a P38?

[Randall M.]

A P38 is a Thunderbolt, I believe.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, well, you know the Nate Mason.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Big army guy. He was telling me that that. That belt, that machine belt, the ammo belt, 27ft long. So to give them the whole nine yards is to give him 27ft of ammo out of that aircraft.

[Randall M.]

Gotcha.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I don't know why people follow stuff to the T. We followed it to the T. And I'm not gonna tell you what happened. You know how I teased the mink thing, whether I'm not telling the secrets. I'm not telling the secrets of what happened with our depui.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

This project is sitting with Seth Morris right now, who's editing.

[Randall M.]

I had a crisis of. Of confidence in my answer. The P38 is the Lightning. Just correcting myself circling back there.

[Steven Rinella]

And I didn't fact check Nate Mason on that, but he takes a lot of pride in being able to offer up little things like that.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. Now that I. I feel like I have heard that somewhere.

[Steven Rinella]

Takes a lot of pride in 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Here's an interesting one. Now we're gonna get. We're gonna talk a whole bunch more about buffalo because we're talking about the. The Hidehunter era.

[Phil]

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 candidate is that it's a shortened version of to a tittle. The word tittle refers to those tiny little additions you have to make when writing letters like a. Like dotting an I or a J or crossing a T. Hmm.

[Steven Rinella]

Hmm. That sounds like something Bob Cratchit did say.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, to the tittle.

[Steven Rinella]

To the tittle. Tidy Tim.

[Randall M.]

But sir, it's Christmas. Is that a Bob Cratchit line?

[Phil]

Yes, it is, actually. He does. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

God blesses the biggest goose in all of London. Here's a really good one that a guy sent in. We haven't done one of these in a while. First, this guy starts off by saying he. He's rarely heard. Our team points to me passed up an opportunity to discuss, argue about semantics. So check this out. This. This cannot stand. 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. Okay. 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?

[Randall M.]

Creeping quietly through the woods.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Randall M.]

Slowly, Slowly, slowly shooting a deer before it sees you.

[Steven Rinella]

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 Fish and Game to say, what's up with how you could. Like, why, why, why are you saying, like, you can only hunt this method?

[Randall M.]

Can I? You mean you can't stand.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Who in the world.

[Randall M.]

I would have just called it Quiet.

[Steven Rinella]

I'd call it no Dog Time.

[Randall M.]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Be good song. No, I call it no Dog Time. Like, you know what I'm saying?

[Randall M.]

Song. Or is it like an upbeat pop song?

[Steven Rinella]

No, it's like a country party song.

[Phil]

Yeah, parties.

[Randall M.]

It's a party.

[Phil]

It's like a Morgan Wallen.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a honky tonk party song, dude. No Dog time.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 need a dog on it because I'd be curious.

[Randall M.]

That's good.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, the other day I was with.

[Phil]

Already halfway through the lyrics.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Here. Oh, man, I hate to even get into this. I get into this. I was with Dan and Reed Isabelle. Okay. From God's country podcast. And we're eating this. We're in this restaurant and they got like paddlefish eggs, paddlefish caviar. And I'm eating mine and I get a little bit of that caviar on my upper lip, like, and it's like Marilyn Monroe's birthmark.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Dan Isbell goes, Marilyn Monroe.

[Randall M.]

That's good.

[Steven Rinella]

But then there was like, I. Everyone at the table detected a pause before he like, did like a gotcha.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And the debate was, did he know or did it only occur that he was going off the birthmark and said Marilyn? Because Marilyn Monroe has a famous birthmark. Did he know before the delivery? The row connection. So we wanted to get the security camera footage from within the restaurant to.

[Randall M.]

See if, like, when the twinkle in his eye.

[Steven Rinella]

I felt the twinkle was like delayed. Like, he goes like Marilyn Monroe. And then. And then does. Haha.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But he's like, no, I knew all along. That's why I said it.

[Phil]

I don't buy it.

[Randall M.]

I don't buy it.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, I'm. I'm dubious.

[Phil]

I mean, I'm still impressed. Oh, I'm.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, totally.

[Randall M.]

That's great.

[Steven Rinella]

What was I talking about?

[Randall M.]

Her dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Dogs.

[Randall M.]

You don't mean to dog on the. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Why would I talk about the row?

[Randall M.]

Well, you did one of those.

[Steven Rinella]

You said. I just did one.

[Randall M.]

You said, I don't mean to dog.

[Steven Rinella]

That's what it was. Yeah, that's what it was.

[Randall M.]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

So Marilyn Monroe, now 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.

[Randall M.]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

South Carolina. There are many left. Which I've makes me a little bit sad. And I said, hey, I'm going to still hunt. Like, people said like, how'd you get that buck? And I said, oh. I was like, style. Still hunting. Would they be like, huh, he was hunting without dogs or would they be.

[Randall M.]

Like, he was actually still hunting?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you know, I'm saying, yeah, like.

[Randall M.]

If it's a universal convention in states that have dog hunting, that still hunting is hunting without dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Or do even dog guys look at the rags and they're like, what?

[Randall M.]

Yeah, they could have pretty much picked any other descriptor there and it would have caused less confusion.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, a lot of people have no idea how much money they spend each month. Like, ask yourself this. Do you know how many subscriptions you're currently paying for? What about how much you spend on takeout or delivery? It's probably more than you think. But there is an app designed to help you manage your money better. Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money shows you all your expenses in one place, including subscriptions you forgot about. If you see a subscription you no longer want, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com Meater today, that's RocketMoney.com Meater RocketMoney.com Meater our crew at Me.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Eater has centuries worth of collective experience procuring and preparing meat. Hunting, butchering, preserving, cooking it for ourselves and our families. I've chased it from one end of.

[Steven Rinella]

The world to the other.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Grilling caribou steaks in the Arctic, butchering elk in the high country of the Rockies, drying fish in the headwaters of the Amazon. The main thing I've learned is that there's nothing better than knowing where your meat comes from.

[Steven Rinella]

So when we set out to make.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Jerky and sticks with our own recipes perfected on wild game, I wanted to start with the American buffalo, an iconic North American native that's fed this continent for thousands of years. These are recipes I use in my own kitchen. Not meant to mimic what's already out there. They're meant to showcase everything I've learned about good meat from the wilds or from the ranch. This ain't your typical phony gas station jerky. It's American buffalo done right, and it's just the beginning. Meat eater snacks from folks who know meat.

[Steven Rinella]

Here's another quick one. This is Good Thing came in. An obscure question Steve may be uniquely equipped to answer. And I gotta tell you right off the bat, I'm gonna let you down, buddy, 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. Are like a. Like a. A tribe. It wouldn't be that, but like a tribe of native Alaskans. And they. And. And these native Alaskans, the Koyukon people are centered around the Koyukuk river, which flows into the Yukon River. Sidney Huntington is a. Is a Koyukon man. And Shadows on the Koyukuk is like his story of growing up on the river. It's. It's a phenomenal book. In the book, there's this passage, and I. 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 Koi Kak, a big part of the book is that this boy and his. His siblings, like, their. Their mom dies and they just. They're just like, left out in this cabin. It's a true story. That's a big part of his life stories is 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. The. The night his mom died. Supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. White fish have a hard, grisly part in their gut that looks if it. As if it has tentacles all over it, which is. Which is a favored delicacy of Koyukon Indians. Mom fried and ate this part. He says that whitefish got 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, grisly part in the white fish'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. I don't think. I wasn't there, but I remember reading it. I. I don't think that that's what his mom died from when she bit her tongue. Wouldn't it be that she, she had a seizure, possibly bit her tongue in half.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. Although you don't know what triggered that?

[Steven Rinella]

No.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, I, I, I did my, I.

[Steven Rinella]

Always felt, I felt it was coincidence.

[Randall M.]

I did my own five minutes of googling and, and I found the part of the stomach that looks like that. And I.

[Steven Rinella]

A lot of fish have it and.

[Randall M.]

I found, I actually found a cookbook of, of like traditional.

[Steven Rinella]

How many minutes it take you to do all this?

[Randall M.]

Oh, five to ten.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure. Not lying.

[Randall M.]

Pretty good with computers.

[Steven Rinella]

Five. It just doubled ten. You notice that film?

[Randall M.]

Well, I thought you were.

[Steven Rinella]

I started to call him out and it jumped.

[Randall M.]

I thought you were so impressed by the depth of my research that I thought 5 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Go on, just try to do it without, without bragging.

[Randall M.]

I actually found.

[Steven Rinella]

Can you do it without bragging? Sure.

[Randall M.]

Sure. There exists available online to any Internet researcher a book of traditional koyukon recipes. And there's pages and pages about how to prep whitefish.

[Steven Rinella]

And there's a couple hours going through that.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, I scanned through it. I scanned through it poorly because I'm not bragging. I scanned through it. I scan through it haphazardly and poor.

[Phil]

Specifically neg yourself now.

[Randall M.]

But I, I was unable to find anything. Surely a more talented researcher could have found the answer. But I was unable.

[Steven Rinella]

But you found the recipe.

[Randall M.]

I did, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

No, I couldn't find anything like that. But I couldn't have found anything anyway just because of how bad I am and that stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

So it doesn't really say. It doesn't mean.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, no, I think someone else should probably back. Back me up.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

I don't even know why we're trusting a single thing you say.

[Randall M.]

Surely I missed it on the first time.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I always read that and it. Look again, I can't recommend that book enough. Have you read that book?

[Randall M.]

A long time ago.

[Steven Rinella]

I read that and wondered about that. I, I just feel like it's like I would hate. I would never want to argue with the brother, but, But I think something else happened.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, there's just like, it's hard to make a one to one connection there.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Think about when you get real sick from eating like, your mind will kind of find culprits.

[Randall M.]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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, some room temp, air dried ham and avocado and bread. I got deathly ill. It wasn't avocado.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, sure. And you're looking at this crazy octopus.

[Randall M.]

Tentacle when you're a kid.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. You're looking at that and you're like, good Lord. And then like, you know, heaven forbid, like your mod dies the next day. Like, it's got to be that stomach.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. She said she wasn't feeling well. It probably could have not mattered what she had for dinner.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. All right, so we're going to talk about. 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 Long Hunters. We did one of these episodes on Daniel Boone, the Long Hunters. We did one of these episodes on the Mountain Men, so Jim Bridger, John Colter and the Mountain Men. And we're gonna do one right now on sort of the era that the. The, 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?

[Randall M.]

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 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 sort of bigger shifts in the larger national story. Like the Mountain man aligns with the Louisiana Purchase and the opening up of the Rocky Mountain West. The Long Hunter era, which is in the late 1760s, early 1770s, that aligns with this window of opportunity between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, broadly speaking. But, but in each of these instances, there are 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, as like the, 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 were they acquiring it? Who are 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 Boone is the most well known of those. These are guys largely coming out of western North Carolina, western Virginia, and they're going across the Appalachian mountains to shoot white tailed deer for their skin, which is used in leather goods primarily manufactured in Britain, breeches, but all sorts of other. And breeches are like knee length pants, like the goofy things you see on paintings of old guys with big white wigs.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. When you see it, if you see like an old guy or like, or Napoleon or someone, he's got like some white pants, some tighty, some tight fit and white pants buttons on the front.

[Randall M.]

Might be buckskin, like a little button fly flap.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, could be American buckskin.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. And so, yeah, these are essentially poor farmers living on the frontier. And it's an economy where they don't have ready access for cash, but one thing. 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 whitetail deer skin. So after the French and Indian War, when it's a little bit safer to go across the Appalachian Mountains, they start going over to Kentucky, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Long ass hunt.

[Randall M.]

Long ass hunt, that refers to the duration of their trips. And these are sort of smaller groups. Oftentimes it's like family members, neighbors, and they, they organize Their expeditions along these lines of kinship and sort of clan, you know, and it's. 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 long hunters.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. That's a. That's a. Interesting thing that we compare through all these, is these, like, what are the. The groups. The group dynamics. And you made it. You made a point with the long hunters. When you're reading about long hunter expeditions, it's tons of brother in laws.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Tons of cousins. Tons. You know, I mean, brothers, father in laws.

[Randall M.]

Brother in laws. This guy married this guy's sister.

[Steven Rinella]

Exactly. And he's like, sort of like these familial, very neighborly clans.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But it could be as many as 40 people.

[Randall M.]

And they're. And one of the big differences, too, between the long hunters and some of the later volumes, the individuals we look at in the later volumes is they don't leave behind a lot of records. They're. They're rural people. They're largely illiterate. 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. 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, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. Okay, recap. Mountain men. Like, when you hear the word mountain men, it's. It's an abused term.

[Randall M.]

It is, it is.

[Steven Rinella]

It means like. Yeah. It's not like an old hermit that lives up in the mountains.

[Randall M.]

And there's like.

[Steven Rinella]

When you see mountain men from a historical standpoint, it's something very specific. Yeah.

[Randall M.]

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 who went west after the return of Lewis and Clark. So it'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 also getting their furs to market. But they're. 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, which is. And hair not attached to the skin, which is sort of a. An interesting twist when you think about, like the fur trade in general.

[Steven Rinella]

It's like when you're making mink eyelashes.

[Randall M.]

Like mink eyelashes. Exactly. I was curious when we were talking about that if they're keeping. No, if they're just gluing them in place on something, they're just plucking them.

[Steven Rinella]

There's no way to put.

[Randall M.]

I think it'd be cool if you.

[Steven Rinella]

Had the leather on there. You had all the. Yeah, but the under fur. Oh, you know what we failed to mention?

[Randall M.]

What's that?

[Steven Rinella]

Meat Eaters, American History, the hide hunters. So volume three.

[Randall M.]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Is out now.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Little tease.

[Steven Rinella]

But then the actual thing is how many?

[Randall M.]

Close up to seven.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

With all the trimmings.

[Steven Rinella]

With all the trimming, shilling and a pence is out now. Seven hours.

[Randall M.]

Anywhere you get your audiobooks.

[Steven Rinella]

Anywhere you get your audiobooks. Okay.

[Randall M.]

See, a Mountain man is. Is a 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 these expeditions, because they're going across the continent and there's a ton of logistics involved, 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 the fact that these, these trappers, a lot of them just see an ad in a newspaper. It's like, do you want to go west and trap beaver for two 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, guys like Jim Bridger were sort of, you know, he's, he's 18 years old and he's doesn't have a lot of. 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 and signs.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, signs an employment agreement.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the funniest thing you think about when 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 those guys start out, it's like it's a job.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it has a pay scale and you commit.

[Randall M.]

It's financial security.

[Steven Rinella]

There's not like an HR office. But I mean it's like a job though, right?

[Randall M.]

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 mention this one really famous advertisement where they're seeking 100 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 following up on them to become a trapper. 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 beaver felt market. There's a bunch of different reasons for that, but the silk top hat becomes the preferred fashion. And essentially the beaver trade sort of vanishes. And in 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 rendevu. Where. Which is like the big commercial exchange that sort of keeps this whole world turning when.

[Steven Rinella]

When Randall's talking about for hats. Like if you imagine Honest Abe Lincoln. So Honest Abe Lincoln is running around in 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 Honest Abe was wearing. Was by Civil War was wearing a silk hat.

[Randall M.]

I think it was a silk hat.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Same cut. Like those crazy looking hats. Yeah, you keep like a house cat up inside there.

[Randall M.]

But seems like a very inefficient.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, just an insane.

[Randall M.]

Like when you're wearing a backpack and it catches on everything over your head and you just oh, I'm wearing my backpack.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

You know, I would imagine that a guy with a top hat would have a similar issue.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's like a guy trying to wear a cowboy hat on an airplane.

[Randall M.]

Especially a tall Guy like Abe Lincoln better have high door. Door openings.

[Steven Rinella]

Where are we at? Yeah, we talk about that.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Which moves us into the hide hunter era. Okay, here's one of the funny things about working on these series of all these. These American commercial hunter, market hunter periods. For the first couple volumes, we did the long hunters, 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 than 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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, Some kind of frontiersman.

[Randall M.]

He lived in the woods.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. But if I said, can you explain to 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 pioneer, this pioneering figure, but they're not clear on what he was doing. He's known for. People have an understanding that he was a sort of explorer settler, which he was, but not necessarily intentionally being like, he wasn't like. Like he wasn't a promoter. 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 a 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 stand as these American icons. They're American heroes. Now that we're moving into the hidehunter era, and when we say the hidehunters, what we're talking about is buffalo hunters. But there's a long history of being buffalo hunters. When we talk about the hidehunters, what we're talking about is 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. 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 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. That rhymes. Well, if I left the S off.

[Phil]

It would have put it in the dog song.

[Steven Rinella]

There's no heroes. Like, there's no mythologized figure. And you can ask yourself, 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. 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.

[Randall M.]

And a lot of people probably don't even know there was a crime.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. They probably don't know that those things happened.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But when you get into the buffalo hidehunters, who, as we'll explain the years, who, 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.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. The way. The best way I've heard that that distinction explained is 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 ceased to have an ecological landscape.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And we understand that these buffalo hunters did that. And it's. 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He gets saved by an old mountain man because they're heroes. And they.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day and this year let's focus some attention on thanking the therapists who have made an impact on people's lives. So thank you therapists. Better Help Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 10 plus years of experience. An industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.commeater that's Better Help hp.commeater 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, 1865-1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction. And 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 1865-1883. Wherever you get your audiobooks and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14th. Randall and I were going to touch on this today. I'm just going to touch on now. I think we're going to touch on this today.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Here's the thing about. To keep in mind about this hidehunter thing and we're going to talk about why the years. Well, you know, talk about. Let's do why the years now, because I want to talk about the way in which this era.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 Sand County Almanac. Right. They lived to see the presidency of an individual, Theodore Roosevelt, who was like an adversary of the market hunters.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. Wanted them eliminated.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So they were like living a period of sort of watching their peers, watching their contemporaries come to condemn them. You know, I mean, you were making that point, but I mean. Yeah, 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, we tell that story in the book. A lot of them get to be old men and they're bitter.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They're bitter about how they've been disparaged in their own lifetimes for what they did.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. And in some ways, I mean, there, there are other parallels I could, I could draw, but they're in there 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, you know, 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 think or are explaining their actions in a way that's like part of a broader national story of quote, unquote, progress. But as old men.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Randall M.]

Living, living now. Living in the 1920s, 1930s, or even just back in, in like during the Roosevelt 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 a side issue. What we were really trying to do was open up the west for white settlement.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, they get terribly sentimental, too. This isn't, this isn't a direct quote, but it would be. You'll get this kind of sentiment from them as old men. Like when I look and see children coming out of Sunday school.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

In the Texas Panhandle, running into the arms of their waiting mothers.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I think, by God, I did the right thing.

[Randall M.]

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 at the time. They did that because they thought it was something worth celebrating. They said what they did in that way, 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. Made the hidehunters seem even more villainous.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Randall M.]

And so, like, you almost have to go back to 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. In sort of the public opinion.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we, we. Well, I'm just gonna 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 buffalo. Okay. Who lives to. Who lives through the Korean War.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He. He lives to see. We mentioned. He lives to see, like, Playboy magazine being published. Yeah.

[Randall M.]

He lived to be 104 years old.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

The first Burger King opened before he died, and the first nuclear submarine launched before he died.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

But he, you know, he listened to the President on the radio. 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 is like, well, why did you go to Dodge City? Why did you go back? And she goes, oh, there was a motorcycle race. We're going to watch a motorcycle race.

[Steven Rinella]

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. This certain. These certain hidehunters who lived through the buffalo slaughter and became. They kind of stayed. Like, they kind of wanted to continue to defend themselves. And we talk about that. There's no hidehunter 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 hidehunters. Wyatt Earp. There. There's like, historians, a little bit question, like how into hide hunting, Wyatt Earp was he. He was hidehunter adjacent. Maybe did some hide hunting. Wyatt Earp did some hide hunting. I'll tell you who absolutely was a Hyatt hunter. Pat Garrett, the man who killed Billy the Kid. We recently had.

[Randall M.]

Brian Burroughs.

[Steven Rinella]

Brian. Yeah. Brian Burrows on no Burrow Bro thing of William Burroughs. Well, I know that's what. That's what screwed me up.

[Randall M.]

I always do that.

[Steven Rinella]

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 that. The last person Billy the Kid addressed, he said kean Ace 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, ken Ace, 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 hidehunters. But no one knows John Poe and Pat Garrett as buffalo hidehunters.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, they're former buffalo hidehunters at the time.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Bat Masterson, gunfighter, becomes a sports writer. Mm. 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.

[Randall M.]

They shed that. They shed that identity and became new people.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Some became like dudes that were presidents of banks.

[Randall M.]

A lot of them got killed in bars and in card games.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Many, like, many divide. Died violently. And that's another thing about, like, the legacy of the hidehunters is you'll find people say, oh, the hidehunters were nothing but horse thieving scoundrels.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And you're like, both those things are true. They were some horse stealing scoundrels.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And some became candy salesmen. Like, they became all things.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah. Elliot. Elliot west, in that passage, he makes a point that, like, the hide hunters 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, they have these. They weren't born to be hide hunters.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes.

[Randall M.]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And Boone was born to be a hunter. Right.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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, it's Better to say, yeah, they stepped out of the American Civil War.

[Randall M.]

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 formal 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. Frank Mayer, the guy who lived to see Burger King and Playboy magazine, he was a 13 year old drummer boy.

[Steven Rinella]

I wonder if you ever read Playboy while eating Burger King.

[Randall M.]

I think he, in a Corvette at 104, he. I hope he was doing all that stuff. It's doubtful though.

[Steven Rinella]

Z baby, I'm gonna take my Corvette down, pick up the April issue, get a burger, get a Whopper.

[Phil]

Just, just for the articles, of course.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah. Well that was back when, when you really could read some good stuff in there.

[Phil]

You know, we used to be a country.

[Randall M.]

So 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 were 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.

[Steven Rinella]

No, we haven't mentioned Cook yet. But, 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.

[Randall M.]

But 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 on the Kansas, Missouri border. And his brother is shot 27 times. He, his, his, his brother was serving.

[Steven Rinella]

He shot to pieces like a revenge attack.

[Randall M.]

And 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, and he got shot 27 times. And the commanding officer of 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, 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. There's one Hyde hunter who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. 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 like two thirds of the guys in there with them had died by the time they surrendered. So you can imagine.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then heads out. That's 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.

[Randall M.]

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 brothers and said, come on out.

[Steven Rinella]

You got it.

[Randall M.]

And these guys killed, I believe, 20,000 buffalo during their careers as buffalo hunters. And there's another guy, he writes to his brother, and that guy comes out and he brings a rifle and a canteen and a compass, and they're all his Union issued, like, army gear. So we begin this story in 1865 because the connection to the end of the Civil War is sort of inarguable. But the hunt itself really doesn't get underway until later. Until six years later, essentially.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. There's a little device we use in these American history pieces where we like to bracket. We like to bracket like the years that we're talking about, which is. No, it's true.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But what we also do is we also hint at what we bracketed. Okay. So with the, with the long hunters, we say in the title, it's Meat Eaters American History. The Long Hunters, 1763-1775. 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 rep. 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And a little bit about what happens after 1775. But the. But the. But 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 Hidehunter story, we're saying 65. And as we explain, it's because you can't understand the hidehunters without understanding the Civil War from a standpoint of firearms, from a standpoint of railroads.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

From a little bit of politics. Okay. And from the standpoint of creating a generation of displaced young men. Mm. But the shooting doesn't start till about seven years later.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The shooting really starts in 1872.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. And on the railroad. On. On the railroad. Note, like, the transcontinental railroads are authorized during the Civil War, and that's tied to politics and questions about, you know, like, United, keeping California in the Union. And also, the northern 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 plains is unimaginable without the railroads in the quantities that they're moving them to. 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're. They were already making this transition into market hunters before the Hyde hunt. As meat hunters.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I'd like to explain one. 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 hidehunter. 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 the show, 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So you had these dudes when. When the Hyde market takes off. And we explain in great detail why the Hyde market exploded. When the Hyde market takes off, you got guys that are raring to go.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. And they don't, they don't need to figure out how to kill buffalo. Yeah, 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. They're also getting contracts to supply meat to forts. Like there's military forts being established across the west to guard the railroad and also to wage war on the tribes. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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, explos that market?

[Randall M.]

Kevin Murphy.

[Steven Rinella]

Kevin Murphy. So people later, 100 years later saying, you know that Kevin Murphy used to just hunt squirrels, like for the meat. People don't realize this. And yeah, everybody knows him as the squirrel brain hunter.

[Randall M.]

It's so funny because they like the Clarksons, who I mentioned earlier, the three brothers. I mean, 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 underway. But like there's very much like a well developed expertise around killing buffalo. Like especially in Kansas where it, where it gets ripping.

[Steven Rinella]

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 1865-1883 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 1865-1883. Wherever you get your audio books. And you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14th. We should touch real quick on this. This idea that we talk 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. It could be 40 guys, it could be five guys. The mountain men you have this thing with. It's just all these many uprooted, displaced young men sort of randomly thrown together. It's not a family enterprise. With the hidehunters you do get a little bit back into a. There is some family stuff.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 it. Randall introduced this word to Me siphon migration, where a person will, a person will move out west, start doing well in the Buffalo High trade. And then, and then he functions as a sort of siphon and starts pulling people out with him.

[Randall M.]

Like, come on out. You guys got to get in on this.

[Steven Rinella]

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 hidehunters. It's like whoever has the money to buy the equipment is the top of the hierarchy.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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, 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.

[Randall M.]

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, if you make it through a season with one crew, you can pretty seamlessly hop onto the other crew. And we think about this as like guys in relatively dangerous professions. You know, if you think about like logging, like wildfire crews or commercial fishermen, 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. To 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. They're trafficking in. In furs and leather and other goods, but they're just sort of. They're in Kansas City, 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 care for your skins, how to 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 camp. So the hunters themselves and their crews are sort of these autonomous units on the periphery. And then there's. There's a real net, a hierarchical network of buyers that sort of vacuum and funnel all this stuff up to places like Kansas City.

[Steven Rinella]

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. In World War II, we lost about 250,000Americans. In Vietnam, we lost 57,000Americans. In the Civil War, we lost. This is combatants.

[Randall M.]

And when our population was considerably lower.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Between the two armies comprised of, you know, of Americans. 700,000 dead combatants. In many communities, you took away an entire. In many communities, you, You. The war carried away entire generations of men.

[Randall M.]

You. You.

[Steven Rinella]

In communities, you went. 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. That war killed off 8% of the white men aged between 13 and 43 remember said, we lost 57,000 in US 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 up and that 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 all the hidehunters were these sadistic people hell bent on destroying American wildlife. It, it's not accurate. I think that some of them 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. And, 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, 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 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.

[Steven Rinella]

And.

[Randall M.]

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 businesses failing, people getting laid off, unemployed. And so 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'd all lost their jobs in a financial crisis.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Randall M.]

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 obviously some, like, hunger for adventure and frontier life and all that, but it's so overwhelmingly clear that these are people who are desperate.

[Steven Rinella]

Another thing that's kicking out people onto the frontier is the progress of the railroads. Viewed in hindsight, the progress of the railroads was stunningly fast. But at times, there'd be pauses. The Northern Pacific Railroad paused in Bismarck, 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Things would happen. And all of a sudden it's just like, but we're done.

[Randall M.]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

And so here you have people on the frontier who just had the, the, the, the rug pulled out and they.

[Randall M.]

Can'T get a bus ticket home.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And so that you'd like, you were sort of like, dumping people, just like displacing dumped people out on the plains, out 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.

[Randall M.]

One story that is probably worth mentioning is there's a guy named Elijah Cox who's actually a freed slave, and 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 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 many years involved in the trade, worked his way up, had no, it was not a plan that he had.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Randall M.]

It's just circumstances where he found himself. And ultimately, I think he killed some 700 buffaloes.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. He had an estimate of how many he 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 explain it in here. I think he got caught loose from the military from an injury.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah. He was, he was like medically discharged. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So here he is, he's just on the frontier.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. With no network, like, like nothing to fall back on.

[Steven Rinella]

Later, when he was asked about it, you know, we're talking about earlier, we were talking about the way people justify it and the way they kind of like maybe misre, 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.

[Randall M.]

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 and he's like, I don't know, it's pretty, pretty good.

[Steven Rinella]

A lot of meat.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, I, I, what I said earlier contradict. He was, he was born to escaped slaves. He was born in Michigan. His parents were both escaped slaves from the South.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. The buffalo soldiers play into this story a little bit and we get into much greater detail in the project. But the, that term, you hear that term often, like even the. What's his name? Bob, the Bob Marley reference, I believe it was the Comanche or Apache. I'm not, I can't remember who likened the hair of, they likened the hair of these black American cavalry members. They likened the hair to the wool of a buffalo. So they would say they were a buffalo soldier, man.

[Randall M.]

It became like a, a proud identity for a lot of these guys after the Civil War. Like they're, they're out west, they're serving in the army and, and yeah, it's like a really fascinating. Eventually they come up to Yellowstone, they're.

[Steven Rinella]

In Montana and they, and they're having mix ups like that. They're oftentimes during this little period that happened down in Texas, buffalo hide hunters are joining groups of buffalo soldiers fighting against Comanche.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah. The situation. Maybe we should get into this like the, the phases of the hunt. Yeah, the three phase, because it starts in Kansas really along the tracks of, of the railroads. The Topeka, Santa Fe in particular. Dodge City is like a big hub. And then the slaughter sort of goes on until there Aren't any buffalo in Kansas anymore. And they, the hidehunters push into Texas. And Texas 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, but they're bumping into Comanches. And there's a real recognition on the part of the Comanches and other their allies that the hidehunters are killing off their economic lifeblood. And so it becomes sort of a very bloody theater for the, for the hide hunt where Hyatt 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, 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 of the northern plains are basically blinked out.

[Steven Rinella]

It's an interesting point about 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 Boone and people started going into that area. There had been long a colonial 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 trademark. Other tribes jumped in pretty heavily. Like the Flatheads were famous for having engaged in the beaver skin tribe trade. The, 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, they did it. The mountain men would often overwinter with tribes. A lot of mountain men were very tightly, like Jim Bridger was very tightly associated with the Shoshone. 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, like there's no cultural exchange. There's no sort of shared interests, there's no allies.

[Steven Rinella]

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 winner. 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 in the right location. The women would tan it into a finished good and that finished good was sold, but that was, that was small.

[Randall M.]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 in, 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 annually.

[Randall M.]

And like we said, the hidehunters 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. 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 they 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 rogue trade era.

[Steven Rinella]

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 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. 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 rural Pennsylvania that has nine story buildings where they're drying buffalo hides and they're tanning them in these huge vats. They have rows of hundreds of vats. And 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a really one of the more fascinating points, like a discovery that I had in working on this. Oftentimes when we go into these projects, like we're going to do 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, 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 future. It's this whole overview of the animal. There's a part of a chapter where I talk about the hide hunters. So have you ever seen like an exploded diagram where 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 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, that couple pages about the Hidehunters in American buffalo and blowing it out to something as long as the American buffalo. So there's. If you've read that, and I know many of you have, if you read that, there's, like, 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 news tanning methods, and all of a sudden, lordy, lordy, you could make this great elastic belting out of buffalo hide. And buffalo hide was this super special leather. And that's not entirely wrong, but it's not quite right.

[Randall M.]

You'll see that in every single thing. Yeah, almost every single thing you read on the subject as even. Even, like people writing in the 1890s, like William Temple Hornaday, like, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Mm.

[Randall M.]

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 gotta find that. We gotta have that in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Our.

[Randall M.]

Our audience is interested in tanning and working with skins and all this stuff. Like, if there's one thing we. We need to have, it's that it just. It doesn't really exist.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Our crew at Meat Eater has centuries worth of collective experience procuring and preparing meat, hunting, butchering, preserving, cooking it for ourselves and our families. I've chased it from one end of.

[Steven Rinella]

The world to the other.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Grilling caribou steaks in the Arctic, butchering elk in the high country of the Rockies, drying fish in the headwaters of the Amazon. The main thing I've learned is that there's nothing better than knowing where your meat comes from.

[Steven Rinella]

So when we set out to make.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Jerky and sticks with our own recipes perfected on wild game, I wanted to start with the American buffalo, an iconic North American native that's fed this continent for thousands of years. These are recipes I use in my own kitchen, not meant to mimic what's Already out there. They're meant to showcase everything I've learned about good meat from the wilds or from the ranch. This ain't your typical phony gas station jerky. It's American buffalo done right, and it's just the beginning. Meat eater snacks from folks who know meat.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, it'd be a maybe, perhaps a better way of thinking about what actually happened. What's that wood that everybody uses under decking now? It's like that composite wood. It's like, chipped up. It's like chipped up wood with it. With. With resins and adhesives.

[Randall M.]

I don't know, like the fake wood.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, never mind that. Particle board. Plywood.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. Plywood, sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Everybody knows plywood. All right, let's say 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. 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then 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 cut it all down. It's gone back to white, I guess. Let's just keep running that white pine. That's great. It was good while it lasted. Yeah. I mean, it was like, that's a better way of thinking about leather consumption because they were being like, Asiatic water buffalo. Sure.

[Randall M.]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Cattle from South America.

[Randall M.]

Sure. The United States importing Texas? Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Buffalo hides. Why not?

[Randall M.]

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, with the railroads they can access however many million hides are just sort of walking around out there on the plains and it can be sucked into this pre existing.

[Steven Rinella]

Network.

[Randall M.]

And there's some truth to the idea that there's technological advances, like the industry as a whole is getting better and better at working with big heavy hides. There's some changes in method where they're, they're using hot water, like 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 in processes over time that happened to align with the. Their ability to ship buffalo hides by the hundreds and thousands every year.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. The challenge is if anybody that skinned a deer knows that the belly. Right. The belly's real thin.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The hide's much thicker on either side of the backbone. You know, the inside of the legs is real thin. The hide's 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.

[Randall M.]

Well, I think we should just before that, I mean, we're talking, we. I don't think we've mentioned yet belting.

[Steven Rinella]

No, we haven't talked about where all this, like why.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The country had always used leather. The number one thing. We wanted leather for shoes.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like let. Shoes were leather, tack horse equipment, harness equipment, all that stuff was made out of leather. But then all of a sudden they.

[Randall M.]

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, is that makes sense. And so if you imagine like a very early factory, it's all, it's all gears and cogs, either made out of wood or metal. And you're taking power from a stream, like a. Like you've got a water wheel and a stream and the wheels 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

Like in the age of electricity. And so the leather belt replaces this older system of shafts and cogs 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 plains, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The lathing operation for, like, the drive shafts at a Ford plant.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 as a joke. A bunch of people at a factory.

[Randall M.]

All talking like this.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh? Standing at equipment. And over their heads is nothing but belting.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because somewhere is a big steam engine running, and they're transmitting power to all these lathes. And it says, you're looking at 50 miles of leather belting. But some of this leather belting is 10ft wide.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah. 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 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 are moving continuously. So if you're. All of a sudden, I need to 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.

[Steven Rinella]

And that power's always cranking. And they're even running primary belts into other buildings.

[Randall M.]

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. Your power there. So, like, when we think about the expansion of. 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.

[Phil]

It's.

[Randall M.]

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. 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 have built these factories. Buffalo leather just happened to sort of fall into the chute at the right time.

[Steven Rinella]

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? Hi. So here's a guy. He takes the order. He needs to find someone to fulfill the order. He contracts a guy, a 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.

[Randall M.]

New York.

[Steven Rinella]

Sorry, New York. But the buyer who then sold it.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 some. 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.

[Randall M.]

Give me all you got.

[Steven Rinella]

We'd like a lot. And that starts it. That is. It is a very distinct, like, beginning.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, that brother.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the beginning.

[Randall M.]

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. He finds his brother in Dodge City and said, this is just the business now.

[Steven Rinella]

It's game on.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's game on. And it caught. It happened so fast that it caught meat hunters by surprise. There's hide hunters that talk about. There's hide hunters that, like, remember the day they heard. They got the news. Yeah, like the day they got the news where people like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's the hides, dummy.

[Randall M.]

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?

[Steven Rinella]

You could just screw the meat, take.

[Randall M.]

The hides off and bring him to here, and I'll buy everyone he can bring him.

[Steven Rinella]

And he.

[Randall M.]

He's, like, dumbfounded.

[Steven Rinella]

He.

[Randall M.]

Because he's still out there trying to cure hams and stuff on the plains and sort of the world has moved past that.

[Steven Rinella]

Another one. This kind of. This is the last part of this that we'll get into right now there is. If you. If you study this area to this. If you study this era on, like, a superficial level, you'll always 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 motivations. You could picture someone coming to this and saying, like, it's all a lie. They didn't waste all that meat.

[Randall M.]

They sold a lot of meat.

[Steven Rinella]

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, lot more. You could get into. 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 hams.

[Randall M.]

And they talk about it a lot.

[Steven Rinella]

And you'd look and be like, my God, these grains were resourceful train cars full of meat. Yeah, right. And you could spin this whole narrative about all this meat, 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. They're getting receipts when they sell this stuff. Like, the receipts are out there. Be like, you know, receipt to Bob. And it's like, what Bob got, like, right for his cowhides, 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 long. A lot of the information about the long hunters is because a historian later went and talked to their grandkid.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 meat. 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 £6. 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.

[Randall M.]

But it, but at the same time, at six pounds an animal, he's selling 10,000, 20,000 pounds of meat in a year.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall M.]

So it's just like, it's a real.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Randall M.]

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 that they needed or, 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, it's a real complicated explanation of it all.

[Steven Rinella]

But yeah, here's a, here's an interesting piece of. This is kind of show like the, the hardscrabble nature, but also the kind of persnickety quality of these individuals when it comes to like a penny pinching, kind of miserly quality to like the economics. There was a product that came from the buffalo 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. Like, 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 like we have a term when the hair starts to slip, like, fix your picture. You're walking along 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 hair on that thing. What happens when you grab a handful of that hair and pull.

[Randall M.]

Comes right out.

[Steven Rinella]

Comes right. It's called the hair is slipping.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So in the hide trade, even today, the worst thing. Talk to your taxidermist. 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. It's rotten. Like if you go to your tax nervous with a bear rug or a deer cape and he grabs 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 it. When they skin the carcass, they'd stop behind the ears. So a buffalo hide that went to the market is missing. It's missing its face. It's cut off behind the ears. They would wait till the carcass is rotted 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.

[Randall M.]

When they're good and rotten.

[Steven Rinella]

Meaning if what. 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. It's really hard to look at their lives and point out places where you're lazy.

[Randall M.]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, this wasn't like a laziness thing. It was a. It was just businessman. It was business. It was business.

[Randall M.]

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 in hail storms, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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 Is 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.

[Randall M.]

And he walks, walks away.

[Steven Rinella]

Other guys, other hide hunters, they go missing. This is a kind of. We give a handful of these. 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.

[Randall M.]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And Bob is in bad shape.

[Randall M.]

It turns out that when you shoot buffalo by the dozens, you make some bad shots and you end up encountering some angry buffalo.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. And Bob is badly bruised. Yeah. Anyhow. Meat eaters American history. The Hide Hunters, 1865-1883. 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 him? You're like, well, I'm not going to tell. Does he die in the end? Not gonna tell. Well, oh, you could do this.

[Randall M.]

Did the buffalo die in the end?

[Steven Rinella]

Yes. But what year? Not telling. Not telling. I let out to my. I'm a huge fury road and furiosa fan. I let out to my daughter early on in furiosa that her boyfriend doesn't make it through to the end. She was very upset with me for letting that leak. So hope you're not watching that one.

[Randall M.]

Keep.

[Steven Rinella]

Leave that out. Phil, thanks for joining Meters. American history, of course. Go back the long hunters, then check out the mountain men and then dig into the new one available now. The Hyde Hunters, 1865-1883. 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 next. But wait and see. When it happens. We will tell you about it. Thank you very much for listening.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Our crew at meat eater has centuries worth of collective experience procuring and preparing meat. Hunting, butchering, preserving, cooking it for ourselves and our families. I've chased it from one end of.

[Steven Rinella]

The world to the other.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Grilling caribou steaks in the arctic, butchering elk in the high country of the Rockies, drying fish in the headwaters of the Amazon. The main thing I've learned is that there's nothing better than knowing where your meat comes from.

[Steven Rinella]

So when we set out to make.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Jerky and sticks with our own recipes perfected on wild game, I wanted to start with the American buffalo, an iconic North American native that's fed this continent for thousands of years. These are recipes I use in my own kitchen, not meant to mimic what's already out there. They're meant to showcase everything I've learned about good meat from the wilds or from the ranch. This ain't your typical phony gas station jerky. It's American buffalo done right.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's just the beginning.

[MeatEater Crew Narrator]

Meat eater snacks from folks who know meat.

[Steven Rinella]

This is an I Heart podcast.