Ep. 278: Hunting In Chains

I can't remember. I'm not sure, but it's it's great to be here. This is pretty exciting. But it's been a while that we try to get you on. Yeah, it's been a while, I think, Uh, he's all. You probably don't. You probably wrote a bunch of things, different papers and whatnot, a lot of paper. This is the only book. I sort of thought when I finished grad school, I'm gonna write a book every couple of years. And then I taught at a small college and all of

a sudden, life has less time than I thought. And here we are years later and still the same book. Dude. This book is fascinating though. Man, it's called Hunting and Fishing in the New South. Yeah, hunting and fishing in the New South, Black labor and white leisure after the Civil War. And I'll tell you what I uh, we'll get into it in greater detail, but just to kind of tease up before we hit a couple of things

we got to hit. Um. The book covers many things, but one of the things I found most fascinating, and it's kind of betrays the fact. And I hate to admit this to you, like I didn't finish THEMN book. I really meant to, and I was getting along good, and I was I was folding pages and making notes, but then only wanted to check out the book. So it's his vault. But I skimmed around. Maybe collectively we got probably through. I'll give us. I am very like. Well,

I'll tell you if you screw. If you went and explored my text message exchanges, you would find where I sent a picture of that book cover to my brother Matt. I sent a picture of that book cover to a biologist named Robert Abernathy. I sent it to my brother Danny. I don't do that for every book. I appreciate that. I'm right now, I'm just talked into a history of the monk in the Cia, in the Secret Wars and Laos.

I didn't send that book cover to anybody. A might later I like this damn book, but it covers, among many of other things, the hunting practices of slaves. It's like, of course, and you think about like, of course they were engaged in the activity in some areas, I'm sure, but like it never really gave it any thought what

that that aspect of that experience. That's sort of how it was, you know, when I first started the project, because it was it was such a novel topic for some people, you know, their response was, really you want to study that? And the other people said, well that's so mundane. Of course they hunted and fished for food. What's what's the larger significance of that? And I thought, well, that's that's what I'm gonna find out. I guess I

combined both those people. I'm a combination of that makes sense, of course they did. And then like, but i'd have to know more which is the path you went down? And we'll get to but it's not exactly something that they covered off on in your you know, six studies class and then there's the hunting fishing for sure. Well you said, we'll get into it later, but like it seems like it made such a big impact. I think reading reading the book that it maybe should have been covered.

Maybe maybe one of the things that's kind of impressed me over the past twelve years, since the twelve years wow, since the book came out, is that it was there really wasn't much on the topic at the time, and since then quite a bit more has come out. And then other topics that are sort of conceptually similar, sort of odd opics that people would think of as a pretty mundane thing that's actually more revealing, whether it's the history of African American beaches or the history of black barbers.

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

in the organized sense or you just counted off. Uh it's uh, it's a little bit of a funny story, I think because I wasn't. I got into a race here in Bozeman called the bridger Ridge Run, which is in August, and it's twenty miles but it's across the mountains and uh it's uh like the course record is somewhere around three hours, which you know people run like two hour marathons these days, I believe. Um, So anyways, it's a it's an arduous course wrapped the whole day

of marathon up in two hours. Yeah, when you're running like something crazy like four minute miles for twenty six miles in a row. Because when I think of running a marathon, I think just boring. I did it and twice that time took me four hours of running. But uh no, So I U meta fella through some works kind of unrelated work but not work stuff. Um. I

won't get into the details. But I meet a fella and we kind of became friendly and we're like, yeah, we should hang out of the initials are his occupation or B I correct, yes, yeah, um and Barbara not Barbara. We have similarly aged kids. Both happened to be girls, and we're like, man, we could probably hang out. And not a baker. No, not not a baker. He used to live in uh Colorado or I used to live

so you know, we had a lot of connection. Anyways, Uh, a week later after meeting him, I'm running my dog on the little like three mile loop that run all the time near our house, and he pulls by me and then turns around and comes back, and his wife rolls down the window and he's like, hey, what's up. My buddy, Nick was just talking about you, and then we see you running here and uh, you know, we didn't know you were a runner and got home at

home back up, I just got confused. You met the guy, yeah, and you had a lot of shared so you had some shared experiences. And then you're running with your dog later and who runs into you. He his wife and his two kids. So the same guy runs in Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're just driving. They just happened to be driving over

to Paradise Valley, cutting through Trail Creek. I'm with you now, and uh so they turned around and they come just to chat for a little bit and they're like She's like, you know, we're celebrating Nick's forty this weekend, and part of the celebration is, uh, Leftover Salmon happened to be playing on who all here knows that band, but they happen to be playing You never heard of Leftover Salmon, like a jam band from the nineties, but they're still

playing hard in the widespread panic. Exactly. It's a great name, there were Salmon is a perfect jam band name for sure. It's got the blues. That's okay, thank you. I never got into any of that music that I stopped at the dead um. Anyways, they're like part of the celebration this weekend is Nick wanted to run a marathon for his birthday. So tomorrow morning they're gonna run right here from Trail Creek down to the Loch Leven camp site on the Yellowstone Marathon. You want to go, we could

use you. We need some people to pace. And if it was just an open invitation to be like, hey, you can run the marathon, or you could run like ten miles of it, just like calm and have fun. We've got eight stations and T shirts and kids with bells and and there's gonna be like ten. People are so involved. I'm like, yeah, it sounds great. Let me see if I can get some babysitters because I was running solo. So how to drop the kids off the next morning at like six o'clock in the morning at

my brother in law's house. And then I actually started. Didn't they want to spending the night there the night before though? That was my understanding. We were hoping to do that, but it didn't quite come. I thought I called him gonna lie ran that was that was a very good plan. Trust, but verify that's what's called. So white white kids with bells. This this this makes surprise you. I am not a runner, yeah, exactly, just a cheer

and ring bells and yell and whatever. And so I actually started probably half and I caught them half an hour into their run, um because I just they were starting at I forget what it was seven, and I didn't get there untill seven thirty. Sometimes they want to get going earlier. Yeah, And so I basically just drove until I caught up to him and then found the next pull off pulled off. Uh. They gave me a Nick Benson uh birthday marathon t shirt. Threw it on

and we started running. And at that point I didn't like, I was like, I'm just gonna do what I can. Like, I know that I'm capable of twenty I don't know if I'm feeling like I'm gonna pull off twenty six. But at the end, like I said, I started roughly thirty minutes, which is roughly probably at our pace, three miles behind. So at the end of it, I ran

another three and a half miles by myself, just kept going. Yeah, those are the hardest three miles because when you're running in a group, you're chatting, and everybody's you know, well everybody else is now in lounge shares with their shrunning shoes off, you know, dumping water on them. And I'm like, okay, just fill my fill my squeeze bottles back up and give me some more those salt pills. I'll be back in an hour. And so yeah, well, how did you

know who went? Who went and measured it off for you? So another vehicle, Uh, we knew that the dirt road that we had uh run in on from the pavement to the camp site was exactly a mile, so I knew I had roughly three miles to go. So I ran out the dirt and then I just timed myself. I ran seven minutes down the pavement, turned around, ran seven minutes back and then back. So I ran somewhere between probably twenty six and twenty seven miles. I can't tell you exactly. Good job. Yeah, you just in you

need to have a race off between you and Durkin. Yeah, yeah, he is, he is, but I don't. I don't. Yeah, you could beat him in a race. Well, yeah, just because of just a pure age thing. We've talked about it. He's not he's not seeds. He's just conceded ahead of and I've run with him and I'd feel like, do you still want to raise the um? No? So yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun. Made some new friends, some friends that you actually know. Yeah, Jeremy

and our kids, our kids go to school with their kids. Yeah, you know. Interesting his um his truck. He was in his house in a big windstorm came in a giant spruce flattened his truck. I did not hear that. You could have been sitting in there texting or something. Man would have been the India for sure. He told me a great story about how is. I think only like, how old is that boy? His tan the same age as my kid bugled in like multiple bulls form last

year into archery range. Really yeah one to that story. I'm like, kid, I gotta start training my kids. I'm way behind. That's weird because his kid and my kid, uh recently got an English sparrow and uh she his the guy with that you ran, well, no, she ran with you too. Yeah. She cooked up the little breast filets for him and some butter. But you think that would have inspired him to tell me that story. But he never told me that story. The kid didn't either way,

humble young man. Hit everybody with your crraction, okay, um, and then rape phils haircut while you're at him okay, Well yeah, I mean the last time I'll do haircut first last time. Last time. Phils kind of had like a sideways. Yeah, he looked like he looked not quite. I wouldn't go that far, but yeah it looks good, looks good and time for summer and short sides. Yeah,

solid eight point five, I'd say eight point eight. You go, you running like a number three on the sides there, Phil, Well, here, I've got stick straight here and I hate almost every haircut I get. Uh, so this is like this one. Yeah, I don't mean the clip, the clippers. I used to just bring take a number two to my whole head when I was growing up. Um, but now I Yeah, I asked her to go short, shorter on the sides, longer on top. I like, it looks great, Your wife

like it. Yeah, that's all that matters, exactly, Thanks Steve. I'm so jealous why we ask Cram what she thinks about it. I've had hair in eight years. I'm so jealous of these young guys running around debating. Yeah, you still got some though. I can see it growing in there just a little bit. But you could grow the you could grow the rim out long, I could grow the scullet, I suppose if if I wanted to go that. I think that when I get there, I'm probably gonna

do that. Alright, long, that's that long strip. Oh yeah, just nothing up front. And you know what, I've heard that called the Kentucky waterfall. I don't know if that's the official PC term, but I like where the correction came from. Yeah, that's that's really the point of me

telling this. So in the spirit of being precise and accurate. Um. In our previous episode, when we were talking about dear vehicle collisions, I had mentioned a bunch of Wisconsin counties ranking up top in terms of the number of collisions, and one of them I just completely butchered the pronunciation of it's spelled w a u k e s h A, and I pronounced it wa keisha. And I did say

I was probably not saying that correctly. UM. And later I I'm not a huge Instagram user, but on it for for work and such, and so I I saw that I had had a d M. D M Yeah, damn me m hmmm. It was important to that person. Yeah, but I would think the only reason I'm surprised by that is it seems a good way to have your your correction go unnoticed, all right, something like because you're relying on someone like digging through d M. Yeah, this is a real hail Mary. I mean, you know, when

I'm on there, you'll see little notifications. So I paid attention. I paid attention. UM. But I think the moral of the story here is, if you really want your correction to be noted, you should email the meat eater the meteator at the meat eator dot com and put in big capital letters correction. Yeah, actually sorry, it's a meat eater at the Steve people d m me all the time trying to get me to feed ideas to you. They're like, Steve will never see read if if I

write to him. But Phil exactly, well, I mean I don't. I don't get too many uh d M so I will pay attention to those that come through. Um. So, the correct pronunciation was pointed out to me in a lovely note from from a listener who made himself known. So it's NFL linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Joe Shobert. So thanks Joe. Um. He very clearly spelled out how

it should be pronounced walk a shaw. He was like, I grew up, I grew up there, and you pronounce it w a l K dash a H dash dash s h a w So I just I was like, wow, that's so clear, and I butchered it. So man, we should uh we should have Maybe you should reach out to him because we were wanting to get that football

player that likes to eat squirrels. Maybe he likes eat squirrels, but we should have him one and we could do a thing where we test uh if if he know, like well, we could test my NFL knowledge against his outdoor knowledge. Oh boy, I think we've got a lot of NFL. We could like rate mine on a sliding scale of one. Intend, like rate my NFL knowledge on sliding scale one intended and rate his outdoor knowledge on sliding scale. Would be so you get the highest score.

Uh walk a shot sounds like something that we should have Clay nucom say, let Clay pronounce it. Yeah, he would do a good job at him. Uh. He likes those kind of arguments too. A couple of I don't know these are crack Yeah, one kind of correction um and one note. So we we covered last week. We we got to talk for quite a while about fish poaching operation at my home state of Michigan, where these boys got caught with like way too many fish in

the freezer. Okay, point there's a couple different points here. One is that so these ones that we're talking about, how in some states, let's say you have a daily bag limit of give me give me something five five. But what so people in the South to try to you don't have wallet try it's a fish. Um. So do you have a daily possession limit of five walleye. No, you have a daily bag limit called daily bag limit

of five wallet. And you might notice in your fishing regulations that it says possession limit of two daily bag limits that meaning in your possession you cannot have more than two daily. You can't have any more than ten walleye. But what varies by state to state, what varies from state to state is whether or not what varies from state to state is whether or not it being cleaned and in your freezer counts like in Alaska, it once

it's processed and at its final place. So it's like it gets to its sort of final resting place and it's processed, it is no longer part of your daily bag limit or the possession limit. I'm sorry, just keeps

screening that up. It's not part of your possession limit. Um. If you're driving home from a fishing trip and you have UH and you're in a you're in this five walleye a day place, you're driving home from a fishing trip and you've got eleven walleye and you're cooler your one walleye over um, But you could get home and put those eleven Walleye and your freezer, and you may or may not be clear, depending on what's going on in your state. I even had I took this question

one time to UH trooper in Alaska. They don't have they don't come game wards of the game law are done by state troopers, UM, who you know, kind of have full breadth of enforcement across all laws. But a trooper is telling me. I was like, what if I have a fish shack and I can process and free stuff at my fish shack, but then I want to

bring it from my fish shack to home. And he said, and he told me that the way they look at it would be that if I've processed it and got it to you know, it's sort of like final form, and I put it in my freezer at my fish shack, I'm that it's not then part of my possession limit, even though I need to do it, even though I need to transport it again to another home. He says, you're cool, Uh, Texas, it turns out same thing. You're fine once it's in your freezer. Michigan, that's not the case,

and uh, and apologies. I have to I have to apologize. A Michigan conservation officer rhote her to say he was pretty disappointed in me for some of my comments about this situation. Uh and and here's where he first off, he goes on to say that that this freezer search, I should probably explain what what it was, right, Yeah, some guys in here on County, Michigan got caught like

way to me, fishing the freezer. And they had eighty five bags eighty five bags like ziply bags of perch and wall i with hundreds and you know, way over the possession limit, laid out like a drug bust. One of the things I said, that is warranted here, As I said, I bet you there was more going on, like like it's not like people just show up randomly doing freezer checks, like I was saying, there's probably something

that led to this. And and this guy doesn't want to be identified, but this guy said that they had been a hundred and twenty fish over their daily limit, which led them to wanting to have a look in the freezer. So there's that. Do we know what kind of fish and wall and panfish which I gathered to me like sies, bluegills, whatnot. So the guy was the guy's disappointed to me for not condemning having over your bag limit, over your possession limit, and I should I

should be clear like that's the case. What I got hung up on. What I got hung up on what I expressed and talked about, was I talked about how common um that practice was and how unaware when I was growing up in that state, how unaware the people I grew up with were about that rule. Just it just wasn't known. I don't think maybe they didn't go out of their way to consider it, but no one. I was never part of a conversation as a kid in Michigan about I can't fish because I already have

ten wall I frozen. It just wasn't a thing. And so I expressed that, Man, when I see that, I just see like everybody I grew up with freezer. Um. I didn't mean that to say that I think that it's good. I just meant to say that it's uh, you know, did I I saw something in that, and he was saying that I didn't clearly articulate that it's simply just not acceptable and that the regulations are there for a reason. Correct. I apologize, that's true, don't break

that law. It's there for a reason, um and not. But and when I looked at that, I just couldn't help but think of my dad's friends and and they're freezer and they're just complete how shocked they would have probably have been to realize that there was that was a thing, that's all. Was that good enough? I also think the way you said and not but it really reveals that you've been married for a while. That was yeah. Yeah, yeah, Like I feel that you got like a little too

mad about that situation with the kids. And I'll still go to dinner all right there, Yeah, there you go. Um, what do you think about that? Just sitting in on that apology? I think it was well done. Yeah, I think it was well done. Did feel it felt very diplomatic. Yeah. What I don't want to do is I don't want to like grovel, but I want to be like, you're right, dude, you're right. Yeah. It was straight up. Okay, it's coming

from the academic. It's true. Don't like you know what it is, Phil, It's that I took for granted, took for granted that people would understand, don't do that, like, don't do that right, don't go like follow your state laws, like just follow the state laws. Yeah, um, I mean you've also never said otherwise, you don't practice otherwise, so I know, but but but but I could see that. Yeah, I wasn't he his thing that I was like making light of it, And I was just more like, wow,

I was telling you before the show. I picked up on the same vibes he was. He was picking up just like it's sort of even though this you just said, this isn't what you were saying. It was sort of like we did that, like not we but you know, I knew people did did this all the time growing up. Yeah, it's it's whatever. That's sort of the vibe I got. Really, Yeah, why don't you flag it? At the time, Phil do your show? Man, you couldn't see I couldn't see what

was going on in your That's right. My eyes are open now though. Oh that was taking you to no idea? What was going on? Man? What else about possession limits? Were were were gonna talk about? Oh? I know, I was gonna talk about, um, just observation. So uh, last night

we fished. We fished for some brook trout and that was the native trout you know growing up in Michigan, speaking of bring full circle to Michigan does a native trout and here in many parts of the West, Like when was all that going on when people are turning

brook trout loose? I think around the turn of the century, you know, it was back and like the mindset was like, hey, more fish than merrier, you know, if they'll live there and put them there, and uh they put They introduced brook trout in a lot of these rivers out here, the same thing they introduced rainbow trout and brown trout.

But brook trout are kind of like more accustomed to these small, fast flowing, kind of nutrient poor, high elevation rivers and the yeah, they compete more aggressively with the native trout here, which is the cutthroat trout um an eastern cutthroat east slope cutthroat trout, Like east of the Content divide, cut throat trout are hurting bad. Um. So there's a lot of rivers where you can't keep a lot of these streams around here in rivers in this district,

like you can't keep cutthroat out of the river. But brook trout, which were introduced on purpose, but now they're frowned. Their presence is frowned upon. You're allowed twenty a day. So you could imagine we talk about the importance of looking at your legs, right, you can imagine a situation where someone would be h up in a stream fishing around, and you need to understand that that one, you can have twenty of that one with a few spots difference

that one none at all. So luckily they're pretty easy to tell a part, that's all. Yeah, Byron was asking about that, or someone was asking about that they're worried about, and I'm like, yeah, you know, you know, just give it a good look. Bring your trout chart. You know what what sort of tackle were you catching him with? Uh? Me personally? Well, yeah, you and the crew that you were with, you take kids, you know, there's just a couple of work people. Because we had like a meeting

and then went into that. Um we had fly poles. My wife want to try to catch one on a fly rod, which she gave up on that, uh, and then I showed her how to huk a worm out there and let it sit and started railing on him. Still water, no beaver ponds still yeah, well that and moving water. But there's a big hole, big deep area behind a beaver up above a beaver dam, and they were in there. It was hot, probably down trying to cool off down there A lot them down in there. Um,

here's an inner us. The thing we're talking about avian raptors killing livestock. Someone must have brought in about this. The New Zealand Kia make his noise, Johnny. You know, I listened to a few on YouTube this morning, and uh, they're pretty similar to a cow elk if you take out like the first continant, I guess instead of just being like a yeah, it's like a kieah yeah yeah, and then you know, depending on what they're saying, it's louder or you know, back and forth. But yeah, we are.

We experienced keys when we were in New Zealand, and we were always told we did a bunch of backpacking and there you instead of beinging Tansey to stay in these huts that are all over the place on this these trail systems. And what's those huts again? I can't remember. Do they have a specific social name. Yeah, they're cool though, Yeah, they're great in American the trash him. Yeah, I think I've told that story about how we were hiking. We had Americans ahead of us, and they were trashing the

cabins ahead of us. Was it was terrible anyways, not all, but a lot of Mary's don't know what to do with the situation, like that it's too good to be true, so screw it up. Uh yeah, free cabin. What's he's done with firewood left behind? There's gotta be a catch a graffiti. But no, the tip that was given to us was like that they will they like shiny objects

and they'll mess with stuff. So when we would leave to go fishing for the day, like don't leave you know, anything out on a deck or somewhere, because they if they can actually get it away, they will just to like mess with it and play with it. But they'll also just sit there and peck at it and mess with it. And you could have, you know, a hole in your backpack or you know, a fly reel completely

ripped apart. And like they said that they will actually get into stuff and just make a mess and whatever. So we were very conscious of tucking away things. But beautiful bird an alpine parrot. I feel like maybe when I was there, I feel like maybe we saw him, but I didn't really it didn't really register with me that it's I mean, this thing looks like a full on parrot, red green, and here he is flying across the snow field up in the mountains, an alpine parrot.

But they'll they'll kill lambs, they'll kill lambs and feet on sheet. Yeah, they like land on the back, this guy said. They they land on the back and then kind of peck through the wool and peck into the back fat, peck into the fat around the the kidneys. And uh, it's it's been a big deal. What a way to go. An alpine parrot backs through to your kidneys. Probably didn't see that coming. Like, no one's gonna believe this much. People ask you, what happened to my kidney?

No one's gonna believe me. Um. They have some interesting classifications in New Zealand. They had the bird had a classification UM at one point in time as naturally uncommon, which is an interesting classification if you think about it. That's a good one, like you would have you know, it would be applied to um all right, you see it apply to wolverines, right like, just naturally uncommon. Never

were many, aren't many? But then they bumped it in two, they bumped it to uh nationally endangered but like naturally uncommon as a way of describing certain species, and the sheep rejoice. Yeah, yeah, it's a good bad day for Kia's good day for sheep. I want to cover off on one last cist. We kind of officially put this to rest, but then the guy wrote in, like, off, I find that if you say like, okay, we're not talking about I just have to say that's a common

story on this podcast. Okay, we're never talking about this again. Because then someone just wrote in but people, Yeah, I think a guy out here like they're not talking about anymore. And then he'll be like, oh yeah, wait to hear about my daughter's sister. And then and then they send

in pictures, so we're talking about these sisters. I was talking about this create like that my brother had a girlfriendnamed the Tower of Power and she had his sister moving and head teeth in it, and it's this whole thing. So this guy, he doesn't want to say who he is. He doesn't want to humiliate his daughter, which I respect. His daughter had to go and have one of these dermoid sisters removed from her abdomen, he sent in a picture of it to back it up. Goodness, sixteen pounder,

a sixteen pounder. The doctor's hands are holding it and it's as though he's holding a deer fawn, but it's not spotted or brown. That's hard to look at, sixteen pounder. Yeah, to look at now, if you'd have done an unboxing video of that sixteen pounder where they open it up and see what's in there, teeth and jaws and whatnot, that would have gotten that little filter they put on there that says sensitive content, you would be the first to like and subscribe that. I'd like unfollowed the wild

Turkey Dock and just follow that side. I was gonna say no more. Nature is metal. Every day he digs a little deeper into that cest and just makes an Instagram channel out of it. I would be enraptured. Someone who wants, and I do profile to really blow up it should be. Yeah, it's really I'm sure that exists already. You have that removed and you just lost sixteen pounds. Man, I almost want to know a little more backstory, Like you think something like that must have been messing with

her health. Oh, he doesn't really lay out he just kind of gets to the cold, hard facts. But there's got it. Yeah, I mean just gotta be like it can't be like, oh wow, I didn't know. I was gonna say, what's what's the timeframe on how quickly do these things grow? Before they finally made the call. Okay, let's let's get rid of this thing. You know what, We'll never know, folks, We're not gonna talk about it anymore.

Great points to you know what, when we have next time we have Adam Lazar on, maybe he could do like a quick final word on dermoid SIPs man. I was not I was not expecting pictures of giant sis this morning. Have you seen this picture? I just looked at it. It's I'm pretty pros if you don't. If you showed me that picture, I would and you said, like, what are you looking at? I would say it must be a someone had a baby and they put the baby back in the placenta and took a picture of it. Yeah,

it looks like a fetus. Sure I wish I could do that. Can you do that? Philm We're like like a like a wow, sure, no, that's more. I completely understand why why you don't want to talk about this again, but that it keeps coming up. Oh, because this is great. Oh no, it's it's a it's a it's titillating. Yeah, it's classic train wreck. What's this, Scott speaking of titillating, let's talking about hunting fishing in the New South, Oh transition. So hit me with hit us with what the book,

Hit us with the book. I mean, it's funny that it's such an old book that we're here talking about it. Yeah, part I don't know about it until. I think. Part of that has to do with, you know, like I said at you know, at the beginning, you know, started teaching at a small private college, and all of a sudden, all the time I thought I was gonna be spending researching and writing, it's just time I spent teaching and

doing administrative work and things like that. But part of it is I didn't know my ass from my elbow when I when I published the book, and I didn't really know how to you know, how to promote it. And the mistake I made at the time, I think, was to you know, ship it out to people academics who were studying these topics. To be honest with you, It never occurred to me to try to connect directly with the hunting and fishing community. It just never go on.

So Field and Stream didn't do a little letter to the editor about it or yeah, and then you know the press, you know, they basically they didn't say this, but I think the implication was, Okay, you know, first time academic, you know, publishing academic. Uh, you know, we do support and promotional work and lots and lots of aggressive stuff for people that are established, so good luck

with that. I didn't know what I was doing, and by then I was focused on teaching more and just sort of did some local events and didn't worry about it. But yeah, I mean, in hindsight, I wish I had been a lot more aggressive with getting it out there. Is most your work as a historian, you focused on sports, yea,

you know they allowed you to do that. Well that that that's kind of that's kind of an interesting, you know, backstory of how I stumbled into the topic because when I was finishing college, I thought I was gonna gonna go to graduate school and and you know, I didn't know much about the profession of history and some of these you know, novel topics that I thought would be great. People haven't written on this, of course they had, you know, I thought, okay, it would be kind of fresh to

study sports. No, it's not fresh to study sports. Plenty of people study sports, and plenty of people historians who focus on sports. Yeah, exactly, and and I didn't realize that. And uh, for a lot of more traditional academics, you know, studying sports is and it's a little frowned on. It's seen as frivolous or you know, academics can be elitist, you know, d bags sometimes. Yeah, amazingly not me though, of course I don't want to lean into that. Um,

I don't want to lean into this too. I don't know why I just said that we have all kinds of academics on. But I guess we just filter filter all the bad ones. I don't know. You know, do you talk to an academic and think he's just not right? Did he's a d bag? Rin? Um? No, I don't think we've I haven't had that experience yet for this podcast. But everybody seems to have a story that they heard about an academic elitist or the act community being elitist

in person. Absolutely, but like for this podcast, I think we just we just have a kind of a good But it's one of those things that yeah, but it is one of those things that everybody's like, oh, yeah, those pretentious But then I just the more I think about it, it hasn't been my finding. I was recently saying, I don't know if I said it here, but if there's one story Americans like, it's a story about a

celebrity who was an asshole. And if there's another story, they like, it's about a celebrity who did something really nice. But in that order, they prefer one about like, Oh, I met him and he was horrible. He was yelling at a waiter. But then the other one would be, oh, when he gave the kid twenty dollars. Like people love those stories, you know, and people love a good story

about a bad academic. Yeah, And you know, it makes me wonder when when you went around the room and said, I don't know that I've come across a love of academics who are d bags. It reminded me the old expression that that if you don't know who the office asshole is, it's probably you. So so maybe hey, you know what, I uh just pardon me for one second, because you might already know this. But when I was reading the other day I was reading, I went down

this kind of like research. I had to research something, and that let me to wonder about something else, and that let me to wonder about something else. Um, I'll tell you a quick what I was doing. I was reading about, you know, the guy we bought a lask Off, the one of the roman Offs. This is Alexander to

the second. The Russians are like, we bought a lask Off film his kid in eighteen seventy two for his twenty second birthday, came out and hunted buffalo with Buffalo Bill Cody and Custer went on a hunting trip and then Buffalo Bill Cody get that like shortly after got a Congressional Medal of Honor in the Indian Wars. It was then rescinded and then given back to him. But that got me reading about, uh, why they sold us

Alaska in the first place. And you know that It's like how when you learn about that, you learn about the Seward's folly, Seward's ice box. That that because like Seward was the guy on the US and did the purchase and you always hear that people that he was ridiculed and lampooned for buying Alaska, and people like to point out like and look, no right, but uh, this his story was saying that is one of like the undying myths in American history was that it was ridiculed

and lampooned. And he went and looked at newspaper editorials. He found like fifty newspaper editorials about the purchase, forty nine were overwhelmingly positive. Public opinion was overwhelmingly positive. But some guy throughout like the Seward's ice box thing, and people latched onto it, and he said, you can't kill

the myth that Americans. You can't kill the myth that somehow Americans didn't want Alaska like they wanted it bad, and the Rooski's sold it to us because they were in a fight with They were always worn with Britain, and they knew that with the British presence in Canada that the next time they got to fight, they'd lose Alaska anyways, and so they just wanted to dump it on us because we'd be able to hang onto it and they didn't want to have to deal with that.

So anyways, hunting, fishing in the New South. So you were interested in sports. Yeah, I thought I was gonna study sports, and when I went to grad school this sort of uh sports. Another guy wants to do baseball, and I have interesting idea. I'm sure you do, but baseball? Come on, you know, can you can you help us understand if you're gonna do sports as a historian, what does that mean? Like like, you know, like baseball, like

what aspect of it? Right? Well, you know, it's it's really about the kind of the social and cultural implications. What larger connections you know, can you draw? Basically For me, I always tell people that, you know, we try to think of what historians do is as a mirror, you know, So what kind of refracting mirror can you get to to demonstrate you know, larger social truths, you know, by

one specific topic. And you know, I think the academics have a tendency to be really elitist and they think, you know, I've actually heard academics say this at conferences. I I when I did a panel on my book a number of years ago, somebody said, I don't know, I just I just don't get the topic. I mean, it's interesting because a lot of people hunt. But just because a whole bunch of people are really into something,

that doesn't mean it's worthy of study. And I said, well, I think you need to think about what you just said. You know, if if if a whole bunch of people are into something, it's by definition worthy of study. And who are you know? And historians are famous for sort of declaring certain topics acceptable and unacceptable. You back up the president of diplomats, kings, popes, generals, that's what we study.

You know, if you just said, let's study the environment, let's study women, let's study sports, they would have said, why, you know, what's the point of that, Just because everybody in the world loves this stuff, and you know, and what the funny thing is And this is maybe off topic, but one of the complaints I have about the discipline of history is when people indulge that like, well, okay, sports, okay,

it's popular, but let's let's study something more important. What that does is it removes historians further and further away from the lived experiences of real people and makes them less relevant. And then people wonder, you know, why people don't read books anymore? You know, so it's sort of like, in my mind, it's embrace the things that are popular. If they're popular, that means they're culturally resonant, and it matters.

So part of the reason, like a lot of people like you know, kind of have you know, didn't exactly cruise through grad school. It got to be kind of a drag after a while finishing the dissertation. But one of the things that kept me going every time I run across someone who would say, oh god, you're hunting and fishing, I'd be like, all right, let's let's finish this thing. Sure, just to show I'm gonna steal the argument you just made for when I retired, I write

a book, anti Shakespeare book. I'm gonna kind of adapt that argument from my anti Shakespeare book. That sounds removing people from things they can even like removing kids at an early age, introducing them to the idea of reading things they'll never understand. Yeah, and you know, and and relate to you use the best example, I think too,

because I hear this all the time. You know, people bring up Shakespeare and they'll say, well, what most people don't understand that the voice they would use and they say, but no, yeah, exactly, I've heard enough time. Not that it doesn't come naturally to me obviously, but but I can fake it. I can fake me anti bag um. What most people would say, at least the kind of arrogant academics as they would say, well, what you need to understand end is that Shakespeare was was consumed by

the masses. It was art for the average person back then. That that that means it would have been great for them. Exactly was it was great for the average people back then? And and what I tell him is what we do this is we don't do that exactly. So it's like you're saying we should study Shakespeare because the average person really connected with that at the time. Well, my thought would then be, what does the average person connect with now?

And let's study that. You know. So, I mean I like Shakespeare, don't get me wrong, but but I don't think the idea holes that. You know, the sort of division between high and low culture always sort of ticked me off as as an historian. So because if you're if you're not studying history to study people, what what the heck are you doing for? But you don't, you don't, Uh, there's not like a movement of like populous historians are

there there, Yeah, there actually is. Um. Actually, part of the reason I have a kind of the outlook on history that I do is I went to grad school at the University of Pittsburgh, and uh, there's a there's a movement in in in the discipline of history that's been going on now for the past thirty or forty years called history from Below, and it's it's emphasizing you know, working class people and uh, cultural traditions and political movements

that start from the bottom as opposed to from the top, and looking at history not from that old perspective of kings, princess generals, but but the average person. Marcus Reddicker and a few other professors that I had when I was at PIT were proponents of that, and that's sort of where I come from. I try to, you know, try to not be one of those academics that's studying something that's completely esoteric or you know, completely irrelevant to people's lives.

Although people would tell me that for them, maybe this topics irrelevant, but it's definitely not, you know, high culture. Is what I'm trying, is what I'm sure to avoid or at least an exclusionary high culture. So how did you how did you tell us how you hit on

the idea eventually as you as you explored the sports landscape. Well, I I knew I wanted to stick to sports because it was just something I was really into and I and I really rejected that idea that because sports is so popular that it must not be worthy of study. That seem backwards to me. But I did recognize that I gotta I gotta shift gears a little bit. And I took a seminar on slavery, and I had the idea of maybe i'll, you know, I'll do a research

paper on slaves and sports. And the professor teaching the class said, well, the best place to go there are the Works Progress Administration slave interviews. You know, in the in the thirties, twenties and thirties, there was a part of the you know, the h Worst Progress Administration w p A. Uh they sent uh interviewers all over the country to interview former slaves before they passed away because they were pretty old by then. And UH, he said, you know, reading knows is going to be your best

bet if there's mentions of slaves and sports. I thought, maybe i'd find stuff about boxing, you know, so when you start looking at the slavery, you were still looking at sport, looking at what I don't know, like I guess the definition of sports? Yeah, games? Yeah, how how did does the slave system you know allow for that? And you know, I had been kind of really interested

into certain certain stories there. For example, there was a slave boxer named Tom Mullineux who actually was was sent overseas to England by his master, and he actually fought the British champion uh in a in a very publicized knot match in England that nobody in the States paid attention to it all, you know, so there was some interesting He was owned by a person, Yeah he was. He was an enslaved boxer, and it wasn't you know,

all that common, but it did exist. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna find all kind of interesting stuff like that, and I found there wasn't any of that. It was occasional, brief, little snippets. But what impressed me was Tom MuLinux. I think it's m O L y n e a u X, and he was that we had I want to spend too much time, Max, That's something we could go find out. But you go to a place where there's no slavery, like slavers abolished, you think he would get there. He

just walk out the door. Well that's it, you know, it's it's I've heard that argument before and this is way more than you want. But um, when England, uh you know, passed a series of laws after what was called the Somerset case in in the early nineteenth century, the argument that the courts used was that English air is too free for a slave to breathe. And there were slaves that were set freed when they were brought to mainland England by their master, because the judge would rule, hey,

there's no slavery in England, all the possessions we own. Yeah, but you know, but then once they abolished slavery, they were setting slaves free that that arrived on British soil fairly regularly, uh In in that time period didn't seem to happen that way. For Tom Molino, though, it is a little different. Situation is bizarre, man, and and it actually it actually kind of now I think about it sets up the kind of the kind of argument of

the book a little bit. Because um, a lot of people found it strange that a boxer like this guy is gonna gonna make a celebrity out of his slave boxer, travel with him, let him fight people, fight white men. How how that doesn't seem like it would fit with

the slave system. But the critical thing I think that that helps get going with the books argument is that so much of how white observers are gonna look at the sporting activities and for that matter of subsistence activities of slaves and then freed people of color, is what is there kind of orientation toward me as the master? You know, so you certainly would never want to, Hey, look there's a there's a slave and he's over there beating the hell out of that white guy. Somebody shoot him.

That's awful that can happen. But yet the same thing is going to happen in a boxing ring because the owner of Tom Mullin, who was going to say, well, since he's my slave, he's an extension of me. That means I have the best boxer in the world. I have that status. So sort of more independent assertive activities by slaves, if they're done for the benefit of the master, we're seeing as pretty okay. Who won the bout when he went and fought in England. Uh, of course, I'm

in a blank on that. I think the English champions name was Tom crib cr I B B and I think crib one, I think, But I also think now that I think I think there was a there was a return match. I'm not sure if it was in the US or if it was there. Yeah, it's it's it's a cool area of expertise. Yeah, it's a cool topic. Yeah. So so I started reading all these these slave interviews and our former slave interviews, and it was you know, there's several thousand of them, and it was kind of

fun to read them. And and uh, I was stunned by how often hunting and fishing came up. And I brought that up to some professors at PIT and you know, some of them were like, Okay, that might be might be an interesting thing to study, and others were like, well, of course, it's a mundane daily activity. Who cares. There's

probably no larger significance there. Uh So the more I read, though, the more I kept thinking, you know, when they when they write about these things or talk about it in these interviews, they're not just saying Uh, wow, this is great. I could feed my family, which which is huge you don't of itself, that's a huge thing, you know for a slave. If a master is trying to reduce food costs and you know, feeding slaves on the cheap, which

most of them did. You know, slaves were often malnourished, and it was you know, it's not a not a

good scene in that regard. Um. So you know, you could, um, you know see a lot of slaves hunting and fishing, but they didn't just talk about the nutritional value or you know, or the food or even the income from selling you know, extra Through some market activities, I started to run across more and more little mentions of you know, little things like uh, you know I felt free or you know, I felt like I was more of a man. And those kind of mentions made me think, now there's

something more here. It's not just about food. There's there's there's this story of independence. You know. You know, if you're oft in the woods and uh you know you're you're hunting small game, um, you may or may not

be doing something the master wants you to do. And if you're doing something he doesn't want you to do, well, then that's you know, defying the system, and that's significant if you're feeding yourself and your family when the master is trying to keep you, you know, slightly mound work, so you're more dependent upon upon him than then you're pushing back against the system. UM. I think what what did it for me was I was reading um a published uh diary from from a former slave named Charles Ball.

I'm forgetting where he would I want to say Georgia, but that might not be right. Um. But he had this long entry in his in his memoirs because he toured, you know, after after emancipation, he toward the country and you know, did a lot of speaking about yeah, which which was fairly common I'm not fairly common, but I mean there's a handful of pretty well known former slaves who traveled the country and uh, you know, first as abolitionists and then later as you know, kind of reformers

after emancipation. But Charles Ball wrote about um, the first time he got a shotgun because it was you know, it was it was prohibited, and he just happened to meet someone who had an old, rusty shotgun and he had a hiding place and he thought I'll get this, and he quietly stashed it away and began to hunt. And he talked about the first time he went out and hunted with with this old shotgun that he found. And I remember the quote because it struck me so much.

It was short quote too, that helped. But he said, but he said, I now began to live well and to feel myself, at least in some measure, an independent man. And that really struck stuck, stuck with me. And I thought, well, if that kind of attitude is there, if it was seen as as by slaves as in some ways guaranteeing independence, while at the same time it was seen as a thing from the master's point of view that benefited his operation,

like it's sort of had both sides to it. I was really curious how that would shake out after emancipation, you know, basically, like you know, you know, if I if I'm a slave owner and I can uh you know, oh, you want to go hunt and and and make your extra game for your family, go ahead. Look what a wonderful, awesome, benevolent master I am. I'm saving money on food provisions, and you know this is great? What what could go wrong? Right?

But then from the slaves point of view, it's like, yeah, I'm feeding myself in a way that you don't intend. I'm sneaking off a lot of times to check traps or hunt when I'm not supposed to, or you know, go fish when I'm not supposed to, uh, engage in market activities that are usually not permitted for slaves. So for me, it's going to be more about asserting my

my independence, my mobility, my liberty. Um So there's this really deep tradition of sort of different purposes, you know, sort of you know, you want to go back to the very you know, the older European part of the story. It's you know, it's no different than you know, the poor peasant hunting the king the king's deer, you know, kind of same thing, you know, dear for uh, you know, for a king, this is a it's a it's a

it's a thing to be granted as a privilege. It's it's a way to control, it's a way to to uh, you know, show your standing in society. And as long as my slaves are doing it in such a way that doesn't mess me up, I am totally fine with it. You know, I I I'll cultivate that image. I'll tell my friends, I have the best huntsman, I have the best dogs, I have the best equipment, because it's an extension me as a master, because that was an important

thing in the minds of elite Southerners back then. Can you real quick hit on the word antebellum? Sure, Um, just I want to. I want to establish like sort of the you know, the timeline a little bit, sure what the basic definition of the word just means before the war. Um, But when we think about the Antebellum period in the US, we we sort of think about sort of the period between the Constitution and the Civil War. That's sort of the Antebellum period. And more specifically, I

would say even once we get into the early nineteenth century. Um, that's usually what his stories mean when they say Antebellum. Yeah, it's come. It's like, uh, that Antebellum period, Like that Antebellum became like the Antebellum Yeah, capital all the cultural images and all that. Yeah. Because your book spends a chapter or so on the Antebellum period, and then it spends a lot of time on the hell's the what's the opposite of antibe them. Uh, we'll post bellum. I

guess that's a little clunkier. People don't use post bellum is usually post emancipation is kind of people say in these circles. So, uh, explain like what hunting and fishing would have looked like m for slaves, Like what what kind of activities there? Not what it would look like, but what were they actually doing? How are they getting game? Well?

The kind of the key point I think for both slaves that engage in these activities and then and then free persons after emancipation is that it's it's a story of what's effective and what can I do so that you know, there's very little concern for like, well, we got to use the proper sporting methods and we've got to make sure we you know, we we can't hunt with fire, that would be wrong. Now it's like whatever worked, whatever we could do, because what mattered was the food.

What matters was game to sell if they were able to do that. So really it was you know, anything, you know, any method, any animal that they could get. Um. What I think what's interesting about about that question in the Antebellum period is because slaves were often limited in

terms of what they could go after. You know, for example, you're not if you're if you're a slave, and even if you have permission, you're probably not going to go out and start shooting a bunch of deer because local planters gonna say, hey, what the heck are you doing. That's not for you, you know. Uh. So they developed a pretty good reliance on small game, and that was a matter of practical necessity. They were abundant, easy, they could set simple traps. You know, they could go out

when they had free time on the weekends. Yeah, and and do Yeah. Slave dogs were everywhere. It was. It was it was just the you know part of the scene you know, on on plantations in the South and huge part of of of getting extra food. And you could, uh, you know, embrace every method imaginable. You know. In some states, slaves could hunt with firearms if they had written permission from the master and if the master purchased a bond basically like okay, you want to have a slave with

a gun to be an official huntsman for the plantation. Uh. We have a state law that says you've got to pay a thousand dollar churity. So if something happens if that slave does something with that gun that they're not supposed to, you gotta pay us a thousand dollars. In other words, how secure are you that your slave can be trusted with this gun? So it's there that's anti to a stuff right there. Well, I mean you can imagine, you know, you can imagine the the concern about slaves

with firearms. It was just it was just not That's why. That's one thing that surprising about the book is, Um, I would assume like, well, of course not. Then you mentioned cases where people that a slave would be allowed would have, you know, the resource provided and be able allowed to go into the woods and hunt. Yeah, which brings up all these which just brings up all these

practical questions. Um, And I know it's kind of beyond the scope of what you did, but uh, how hard like how you couldn't just go into the woods and then disbanded. I mean, you're separated by hundreds of miles of territory. It's just it's just hard to imagine someone kind of fluidly moving out of supervision into supervision going out at night to hunt. Right, You're you're not supervised, You're not but then it's just it's just impossible and practical.

I mean, you have a family probably, so you'd be abandoning your family to take off um and all kinds of other obstacles, but just kind of you almost wish you could look back and see sort of the parameters of it. You know, was going two miles away, Like, no way, I can go two miles away. You can go down to the river bottom. But yeah, it's it's hard to imagine sort of epic excursions, the limited time that slaves had, you know, because you know, if you're in you know, say you know parts of the South

where they're growing tobacco or cotton um. You know, these are what they call the gang system. These are just huge groups of slaves in the field, work by an overseer, you know, working for when the sun comes up until when the sun goes down. There's not a lot of time or energy, you know for these kind of activities. You know, Sunday's you know, you had to give slaves

Sunday off because you know, good Christians. Uh so, uh, Sundays would be a day you could do it if you had young kids that that weren't working out in the field yet. They could certainly go out there and fish and you know, trap small game and things like that. But a lot of it depended upon where you were.

You know, if you were a slave in like South Carolina, for example, and you're on what they called the task system, where you know, rice cultivation and some other crops, tended to rather than just say, get as many slaves as you can, put them out in the field and work them with an overseer, there's too many individual small tasks that need to be done in say rice cultivation, so instead you would just make a list of all the work that needed to be done, give individual slaves individual tasks,

and then tell them as soon as you're finished, you're done for the day. So then slaves in those parts of the South had motivation finished the task system, yeah, and you were Then you then became a specialist at a task well not necessarily a specialist, but you were basically told on a daily basis, like not like a this is your deal for the year. Now, it's like, make a daily list, here's what I want you to do. As soon as you're done, you can go do your

own thing. Um. Of course, the catch was that was a system where you know, if I could have the time to go off and hunt or fish or do whatever on my own time. Uh, the system was built to put in some pretty severe punishments if I stepped out a line. So in in the gang system, there was less time for these activities. They still did them, but there was less time. And then in the task

and there's a lot more time. But slaves are limited by not wanting to push it too much because the you know, the task system had the most brutal punishments of any you know, slavery system in the US. Anyway, Yeah, in the book, you have so many quotes from interviews, right, so like slaves recounting experiences, newspaper articles, a lot of editorials, letters to the editor, opinion pieces. There's some magazines that just come up again and again and again and again,

these old sporting magazines. Yeah, Forest and Stream and you know, Spirit of the Time and then cartoons and other things. But you do get, uh, you kind of get a sense of the things people did would be uh, and talking about that not having guns would be that they would hunt with hounds and tree possums and raccoons. And then you need to go get the thing you can't shoot it down, so you'd climb up and get it. And then it just certain like practices. Uh. I was

surprised by that. You catch a possum and bring it back live, you know, and how they cut a stick to hold its tail and you kind of like walk around like bring it home like a you know, like ready to go like a live creature. And then netting, fish, netting, running lines. Yeah, I mean I've come across any method you could think of. They clearly talked about trapping, but you know, different people talk about trapping. All they used to poison stream to you know, get as many fish

at once as they could and fish with dynamite. Slaves couldn't do that because you know, you have a hard time getting dynamite. But uh, you know, it's it's one of those things that points to one of the real kind of divisions, points of division uh in in you know, kind of the hunting and fishing, you know, kind of the discussions of emerging conservation. You know, it comes along

in the nineteen centuries. Um. You know, poor people, whether they're slaves or you know whoever that are independent beyond slaves, you know, they don't care about you know, I'm going going to use the best weapons and the and the most pure sporting methods, and I'm going to make sure that all the codes are now. They want they want to catch as much as they can. They want that freezer full of you know, eighty bags of Walleye or whatever it is, right, so you know that, you know,

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

people do. And uh. But what's interesting and the good question that kind of got me thinking about it, you know, for the dissertation and then eventually the book was okay, so they're not too critical of these activities now, but what happens when the boards reset with emancipation. You know, you know, I'm okay with a slave having a gun as long as I can think of them as an extension of me, or I'm okay with them going off on their own and hunting and fishing because it benefits

my operation. I don't mind that they have these skills. And you know, people starting are starting to think of African American sportsmen as among the very best in the region. I'm okay with that. Because of slavery, what I really wondered was is that going to switch, Is that gonna is that going to remain consistent, or is there going to be a mental shift on the part of elite

white Southerners. And then on from the slave perspective, I was really curious if if emancipation would mean well, these are the extra things we had to do because the system of slavery wouldn't allow us to take care of ourselves. Otherwise, will they still indulge those traditions as much as they to participate still? Yeah, So I was really curious how

things would shake out, you know, after emancipation. And that's and then, as I mentioned to Current the other day, um yeah, I was prepared to write a dissertation on just the question of slavery and hunting and fishing, and then somebody wrote another book about it, and I cursed a little bit and then set my sights on the post emancipation periods. I hate it, almost asked, because we're talking about your book. Oh no, it's a great book. And he's a great guy. Actually, so the books called

Bathed in Blood. It's a great title. It's called Bathe and Blood, Hunting and Mastering in the Old South, And it got even Nick Proctor really interesting. And his deals deals with with slavery hunting and not the Yeah, yeah, it ends, it ends, uh, you know, with with slavery still around. Well, let's let's jump do mancipatient and I'll I'll set up another thing that it's very obvious. It's very obvious, but I just hadn't given it much thought.

Would be that after the war and after Lincoln emancipation UM, there was still demand for cotton, there was still demand for rice, right, so people don't need to resource. I never thought about just the simple practical thing of what do you do now that you need to attract labors? And the tension that that set up, Yeah, that was that was you know, in the late eighteen sixties. That was like kind of the like the question, and they called it the labor question right right to the point,

what do we do now? And you know we we we need to find a way to make sure that we have enough labor. Federal government was intensely interested in that. And of course, I don't don't want to sound like a liberal that says anti government things. I'm not supposed to do that right as a liberal, but um, federal government can screwed this up. Right after emancipation, they were thinking, Okay, we need work. You know, we need cotton. We need the Southern economy to get going again, which makes sense.

We know that former slaves don't want to work, uh for their former masters, and we know that former masters. You know, I don't really want to do this either, but we have to get the Southern economy going. So what the federal government mandated during the reconstruction period was that, uh, look, former slaves, you will go back to work, and former masters you will pay cash. That's just all there is

to it. They're free, you're gonna pay them their wage workers now, so you're gonna work and you're gonna pay cash. And both of them want to go. When you say that, people didn't want to go work for their former master. Do you mean like specifically for their former master or do you mean for former masters? Well? Both, Like some people were like, um, I'm done my days of laboring, you know, for you were over. And some people just

hit the road and split and that was that. And other people it was more like, hey, you know now that I'm free, and I you know, I want to stay here. It's home. And many people did. But you know, the guy that owned me was a real tough piece of work. I don't want to work for him, so I ability I'm gonna go somewhere else and find someone else to work with. So you started to see this kind of mobility and people criss crossing parts of the South.

Did you just just curious? Did you counter cases where a slave was emancipated and then turned around and the masters like all right, I give up and then like puts them on payroll and they stay in work for the same place. Yeah, not that happened quite a bit. Man. That when it strange strange experience, it's a very strange experience, and it's easy to use that that fact to sort of,

I think run off in the wrong direction. I've heard people say like, oh, well then there must have been a lot of slaves who were finally they love their master. It's like, well, no, it's like you live in in southern Mississippi, you know, you know, migrating to the north, which you know, a huge percentage of the black population does later. But in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seven, this is where we live. This is where home and family is, you know, this is this is where I'm at.

So you know, I've got to just make the best I can and if my best option is I'm gonna go back to work for the same guy, you know, then I will. But the problem was with that, with that contract system that forced by the federal government is uh, former slavelwers didn't have any money because of the war just you know, wrecked the South, and then former slaves by and large would rather not be forced to go back to work for the same people that they wanted.

They wanted more freedom. So that contract system kind of limped along for a few years with everybody hating it. The established like a minimum wage equivalent. Yeah, I don't I don't know much about that, but I know the individual states did that because there were you know, the South was divided into military districts. Yeah, there was sort of a kind of a general thought about that and to get to get to get back to the to

the hunting and fishing question. Um, the sort of the solution that emerged to this contract problem was the sharecropping system,

right people. You know, people always talk about how bad share cropping wasn't it was, And you could argue that it wrecked the Southern economy by the ninet fifties, But at the time it came out, it was a great compromise, Like, oh, so I don't have to work when you say, and I can pull my wife out of the field if I want to, and I control what I grow and when I grow it, and I can sell it, and

I can keep a lot of the money. Great, and then the master's like, oh so I'll give you the tools and you can work the land and you give me a cut of it. Okay, that sounds fine, that's a good description. But just like very quickly hit like what sharecropping is. So basically behind sharecropping is you know, so if I'm a landowner and I don't have the capital to pay wages to workers, what I can do is I can say Okay, look, I'm gonna break my

my my farm up into ten different parcels. I'm going to sign a contract with ten different families and they'll work those parts of my acreage and uh in exchange for a share of the crop. So you know, whether it was you know, a quarter or a third or whatever the individual contract was, so like the landowner gets a third. It depended. Usually usually it was it was

the landowner, um. And the idea was, I'm gonna front you all the tools, equipment, livestock, whatever you need, and then at the end of the season, sell the crop, pay me back out of the profits. I keep my proceeds, Your keep your proceeds. Everybody's happy. And former slaves thought, well, that sounds great because what I'll do is I'll save money up a year to year and then eventually I'll buy my own land. And then you know, American dream um and about of of former slaves managed to acquire

their own land, which is not a great percentage. The problem is, uh, that's a good system. When it's a good year, prices are high, there's no bowlwevil um, you know, there's no drought, you know whatever. But years where there's bad prices, bad weather, bad crop yield for some reason, Uh, you're not gonna make enough money even to pay back what you owe. So you wind up seeing this kind of cycle of perpetual debt and it winds up being

a disastrous economic system. But for everybody involved, landowners weren't getting rich. Now, landowners saw you know, really really valuable land, especially the really the real story here is the the international cotton market. You know, you start to see cotton from India and a few other places come on the market in the late nineteenth century, and prices just go on the toilet, and pretty soon the economy the South isn't is in shambles. But we still see, you know,

former slave owners that don't want to pay wages. They just I'm not acknowledging this. I don't want to pay money to these these guys. This isn't right, this isn't the way it used to be. And then former slaves, uh still wanted that freedom. So even though the system was inefficient, from the former slaves point of view, beat the hell out of slavery. And then from the former master's point of at least you weren't shelling out, you know,

hard cash to your laborers. So it was a share was a system that was supposed to be a really good thing for the South, but it didn't work out that way. And then they in your book you described this this thing that becomes like a very articulated problem. Um, and there's magazine articles written about how to deal with the problem. But people start landowners start pointing fingers at things, conditions, behaviors,

activities that are enabling people to not come work. Yeah, and among these is this propensity for like going out and shooting your own food. Like that's a problem because if they weren't doing that, then they'd be more obligated

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

is a real problem. You're like, hey, if this guy can can feed himself and his family without working, for me, what kind of leverage does that give me? So I need I need more control. And uh, it's also eventually going to provide a pretty handy kind of cover for convincing reluctant Southerners to embrace conservation laws. We're not really going after you, we're going after former slaves because they're

the ones that we're concerned about. So, you know it also and this is maybe too much at once here. But the other thing that that's that's really interesting to me about that that transition, immediate transition from slavery to freedom is um, you know, slaves, you know, reliance on small game, on whatever method worked on you know, uh effective you know, hunting and fishing. Uh. That was understood at the time by white observers like, yeah, well they're slaves.

They they're they're limited in what they can do and that's the stuff they hunt and you know, they make the most of it. And then some of those same observers when they're writing in the post emancipation period, it's no longer well slaves privileged practical sport methods. It's all Africans. They're just by design they're incapable of appreciating the finer sporting traditions of the elites, so they do small game and they don't understand sporting methods and honor and things

like that. So it becomes a handy way of kind of hanging some racial stereotypes. The thought is, it was at the time. If former slaves have complete freedom to just feed themselves, you know, however they want to, not only does that hurt our ability to control labor. But the interesting thing is, if I've got a really fantastic slave plantation huntsman, I can tell my friends about this guy, I can brag about it. I know we're gonna have great supplies of meat, and it's just gonna be a

really good thing for the plantation. But I don't want to acknowledge this guy's sporting prowess after emancipation. It's like, after emancipation, here's a guy whose abilities threatened my operation, someone whose skill flies in the face of the emerging idea that white sportsmen are the best an African sportsman. African American sportsmen are a level lower. So if you want to maintain the sort of white supremacy that's sort of emerging as the Jim Crow period, you know, begins,

to deepen um. All of a sudden, the same activities that for some people weren't that really big of a problem, they're a big problem now because not only does it does it you know, the master slave relationship is gone because of because of emancipation and the methods that we used to celebrate slaves using, we are now seeing as as dangerous to the supply of game, which is eventually gonna be really bad for tourism because once the Southern

economy goes down in the late eighteen eighties and nineties, tourism becomes their big they're big source of revenue. So there's what was sort of a quaint feature of the Antebellum period, Oh, loyal slaves out in the woods hunting because I allow it. After emancipation, independent people out in the woods making a living away from me, hunting in ways that I don't think are appropriate, and that could

even be dangerous because you know, because of firearms. You know, I was just gonna ask I add a question related to that and just if you can explain it with that, because it was cool to write like before during Antimellon period, right to have like a slave, that was a great huntsman and you you talk about how when people would come in from other places, how that was part of the whole experience to go hunt in the South, which to be to hunt. But you but but it would

include these black slaves. Did that Did that same feeling continue after emancipation, like for for just a general like hunting tourism industry. So it was like a double conundrum at that point, right, because they still wanted them for that, but again they didn't they would maybe have to start paying them or or do you get my question? I do,

And it's a good one. So that the double conundrum issue, it's it's a really tricky one because you know, think about it from the point of view of a slave owner and you know, so you've got uh slaves working for you that are engaging in all of these activities, and you have no problem with it, right maybe you know some in some cases they did. They were masters who didn't want their slaves to hunt because they're not too much independence. I want them dependent on me. I

don't want them out running around. But if you were a slave owner who said, um nah, I can't trust my slaves to go out and hunt and fish, somebody might say, why can't you trust your slaves? Are you a crappy slave owner? I mean, if you were a good master, you'd be able to let them do these things and it would be to your benefit. So there was almost this sense of you know, they're an extension of me, so it's okay, but that that that connection

is broken by emancipation. And the interesting thing is it becomes more important after emancipation, is what I discovered because um, in the minds of saying northern tourists, you know, the Antebellum period doesn't really become the Antabellum period until you know, later in the nineteenth century when we start to get that sort of gone with the wind rose colored glasses, romantic notion of what the South used to be, and

that was really appealing to northern visitors. You know, countries industrializing, changing rapidly. You know what's what's traditional in the country, Well, the Annabellum South, quaint plantations, women in fancy dresses, you know, all all those images exactly know, and part and parcel of that memory for a lot of Americans was the presence of people of color. So what what landowners in the South started to realize you know, after the Civil War, is the land is not very good in some spots

here for plantation agriculture anymore. But we've got all these Northerners that want to come down here and consume the old South or at least yeah, they want to hunt, they wanna you know, they want to get out there and feel and feel like a Southerner of old. And from the white perspective back then, what better way to feel like a Southerner of old than to have black laborers attending you, just like white masters did before emancipation.

So it was almost like recreating that scene, and it really became, you know, away for white Southerners who were especially former slaves, to to kind of convince themselves, Okay, the world is still right, it's still us here, we're still served by people of color, just like the old days. Um so, so they were just like at that point, did they become hired like help because it was post emancipation. Yeah, when when you started and then get and can on the on the heels of that can answer like what

did it look like then? Did the African Americans like work as guides or were they like cooks or like how did it how what did that little scene look like when someone from the north came down to to Shoever, Well, that really started kind of in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, and uh, you started to see the kind of the trickle of of visitors to the south that we're interested in going there specifically for sporting reasons. Uh, really turns into a flood. It's just a huge number

of people start going there. And the reason that is is because as the farmland, especially rice, rice was one of the crops that was just becoming really difficult. Uh, and then coastal cotton was also becoming a tough sell. Um. So it hits some of these landowners. I bet we could sell our land to a developer who wants to, you know, make a tourist retreat out of this, or I could even run it myself as a as a

as a sporting operation. And what they found is when these visitors started to come down, they expected black labors. That was the way to complete the scene. And so basically you name it. I mean you would have people of color on plantations to serve as cooks, guides, you know,

kind of basic laborers. People carry the tents, people to carry the guns, people that manage the dogs right up into you know, the larger outfits would have, you know, choruses and performers of color that could entertain their guests while they were there. So it's almost like blackness was a big part of the scene. And I came across hundreds and hundreds of references and national sporting magazines that are basically like, oh man, you've got to go down

to Mississippi. It's like eight thirty down there. It's amazing. So you can really see the racism and the sort of racial attitudes alive and well. And that was something else that surprised me when I switched to the post emancipation period. I didn't realize how much race would be discussed in national public Incredible. It's one of these that

blew my mind about it. And like, if you're listening to us talking about this, you got to understand that when you go read the book, it's not like he's it's not like Scott the author is drawing wild conclusions. I mean, it's all it's documented. It's like all laid out quote for quote for quote, like what people said, how things were advertised, how they described your experiences, what

the articles wrote about it is amazing. Um, it's funny you you wouldn't now, you wouldn't be able to read out loud newspaper articles because they used a certain language.

It was just talked about blatantly, like you always kind of can't believe what you're reading when you read some people's attitudes total the human beings that they decided was fit to write in a letter to the editor, to the hunting and fishing bag and just say insane like not even you shouldn't call the saning, just say blatantly, like blatant, horrific racist stuff in a letter to the editor, pointing the finger at certain individuals who don't conform to

whatever kind of hunting and fishing standards ahead. Another thing, and you actually bring this up, is people struggling with to just the pro wess of some former slaves who are who are They would admit like this guy's the best hunter ever, which which is okay to say in the Annabellum period. Yeah, or anyway, just got like, oh man, this guy is really something to watch in the woods and always knows where the game is. But at the

end of the day, he's a black guy. Yeah, you know, it was like there's like they just come out and like kind of like balance it out. They want to like there's a there's an element of praise and then there's an element of like context. Yeah, and then I you see people just struggle with it. Yeah, my my, so real quick. There's there's two two little episodes. I'll mention. One is on the first thing you mentioned about these

letters to the editors of sporting magazines. There was a really well known uh sportsman in the nineteenth century named Emerson Huff. I think it's pronounced tough for how I'm not sure which one, but he's from Chicago, and he wrote pretty frequently to to Forest and Stream and Uh. He was writing about his thoughts on the very best place to go to to hunt and he said, you know, for my money, you got to go to the South. And he talked about the game and the conditions and

the sort of the technical stuff. But then he said, and you know the best thing about it is there are all these former slaves, he said, negroes, with all his negroes, and they're great, and my god, they're incredible servants because that's you know, that's their their history and uh, it's this the best. You go down there and they do whatever you say, and it's just the most amazing experience. You feel so served and you feel like a king.

And then he wrapped up his editorial by saying, um, you know, if I could have one of the fondest wishes of my heart fulfilled, and I'm quoting somehow the quotes in my head, if I could have one of the fondest wishes of my heart fulfilled, I would expert export four thirds of Chicago negroes. And I wouldn't send them to Liberia either. In other words, I'd love to set them back down to the South where they still

know about white supremacy and hierarchy and in servitude. And that sort of praising of of the old South was really common in sporting publications nationally. Was a huge part of the draw. And they're they're hu Kail and Deer, right. Quail and Deer were two were two of the big ones. Black Bear in the Deep South was a big one. But that was you know, that was a big money you know, usually the the the elite elites were the

ones who went on big excursions for Black Bear. But uh, yeah, Quail and and deer were sort of the big ones explain the gun rights issue back then, because um, the Second Amendment was well understood, but man was not applied uniformly, No, not at all, and that's what they really want, you know, really one of the one of the big you know, one of the big sticking points, you know, as you could imagine, because when you start to get you know,

there's just this big tension that emerges right after emancipation in the South. So we started to see the emergence of this really popular resort tourism based on on hunting and fishing, particularly hunting in the South, and that's making a lot of money for this for Southern landowners and Southern you know, proprietors, and that really kind of put certain demands on them. One is to make sure there's an available supply of black labor to satisfy, you know,

the image the public wants. The other thing is we've got to protect this play game because if if this kind of tourism is going to be where our livelihood comes from for the foreseeable future, we've got to protect it.

So Southern Southern started talking about the need for conservation laws and the need for you know, state licensing or bag limits or you know, restrictions on guns, things like that, and most average Southerners, especially non elites, were like, hell, no, no way, we want no part of this, and there was massive resistance to it. So conservation in the South

lags behind really the whole rest of the country. You're saying, so just make sure poor like poor white Southerners were not hip to game regulations being handed down from elite plantation operators. No, not at all, because you know, really the you know, removing race from the equation. For a second, when when hunting sort of arrives in the colonial period, uh, and not everyone hunted. I mean it was you know,

everyone did it because it was a practical thing. But when elite Southerners, when plantation owners began to hunt, they were not shy or elusive at all about saying, we're doing this because aristocrats hunt. So we're gonna hunt fox, and we're gonna hunt stags, and we're gonna pretend like we're just old school European privileged nobles. That's how they set it up. And poor Southerners knew that, and they

were deeply suspicious of any attempt to regulate. Uh, access to our methods for acquiring game, because they thought it was just old school, these elite guys trying to control things, so we don't get our fair share. So when the process, you know, in the early twentieth century, then becomes Okay, these pan the ass poor whites are existing these conservation laws. They just don't get it, why it's valuable and why it's necessary. So okay, fine, what can we do to

convince them? Hey, everyone, here's the race car. Let's let's put this right in front of your face. You know, hey, if you want to control the black population, make sure they're in their place. Make sure they're not owning guns they shouldn't have. Make sure they're not killing all the big game that we want to kill. We need these conservations. We're not coming after you, we promise. So it was sort of using that how is that actually how is

that actually articulated? Well, it's interesting, so articulated or enforced or it's it's rarely, if ever articulated in the law. And that's one of the interesting things about the whole post war period. Uh, you know, as Jim Crow becomes um, you know, more and more powerful, you know, for example, by nine you know, African Americans are largely disfranchised across the South. Hardly any black people are voting because of the new state constitutions. But those new state constitutions don't

say black people can't vote. They say you can't vote if your grandfather couldn't vote, or you have to pay a ten dollar poll text to vote, or a bunch of measures designed to keep black people from voting. And the same thing with the conservation laws. You're not going to see. Um, you know, you have to pay ten dollars to UH to buy an instate hunting permit now so we can keep people of color and check it

basically just says ten dollar. You know, in state licensing with South Carolina nineteen o six or whatever past a ten dollar licensing fee. And I'm sorry it was a dollar for a dollar for residents, ten dollars for non residents. That's what it was. And they didn't mention race at

all in the law. But it would be a simple matter of Okay, you gotta go buy your permit, and then a white person shows up to buy the permit and they gotta worry about it, or or they're out in the woods and uh, they come across a person of color doesn't have a permit, Well, I'm gonna find them, poor white guy or whatever. So it's sort of the

enforcement where that the flexibility was there. But then it's funny because that might be the case and in terms of how it's codified, like how it's actually spelled out the law. But then, as you demonstrate in your book with Just With again, people in their own voices giving their own perspectives. At the same time, it's being articulated in public opinion very differently, very explicitly. Yeah, absolutely, and like they're explicit, like what the people are explicit about

what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah, when you know the rules they draft aren't explicit, but you look at like the people pushing for it, and they make no bones about it what they want to see happen. You know. South Carolina is a good example. I'm drawing. I want to say it was Richardson was his last name, anyway, he was he was chief game warden for South Carolina. This is really early twentieth century and basically he's on

a pr campaign. He's traveling across the state speaking at farmers clubs and sportsmen organizations talking about this new licensing system and some of these new laws. And even though the law itself doesn't say it, you don't find those

descriptions and any kind of official government application. But I have some transcripts that I quote in the book from some of those speeches he gives, and he explicitly says, you know, look, we want to get guns out of the hands of former slaves, and these kind of laws is kind of the only way we can do it that looks remotely constitutional. So help us out here, folks,

we gotta play the game. It was really obvious when it was spoken, because you know, and the reason they didn't bother putting it and they didn't want to put it in the laws is the sort of big picture fear that hung over all Southerners back then as Jim Crow was emerging, is that the federal government would come back. You know, when reconstruction ended, in military rule ended, and this you know, the North pulled out of the South and states were given control back of their individual operations.

You know that the the Senatement was basically, Okay, let's let's find a comfortable level of control that we can assert over people of color in a way that doesn't risk the federal government getting back involved in we don't want them in the civil rights business. And it worked right because the federal government sends troops, you know, in the South with a civil war, and they withdraw in

eighteen seventy seven. Federal troops don't go to the South to enforce black civil rights again until nineteen fifty five with Central High School and Little Rock when they integrated. Uh So they were trying to to get what they wanted without being too overt about it. At the local level, they were just you know what this is about, please support this, and even that it was a tough sell. I mean it was. I thought about doing another book

on just the conservation movement in the South. You still will, but um, that's kind That's where my next question goes, because there's a thing I feel like you don't not that you don't get it right, but I feel like you you didn't like accentuated enough. And and he already told you I didn't read it in its entirety, but did a thorough like you know, so maybe you'll just prove me. Hopefully it'll just prove me that I'm wrong.

Is it the same conversations though, or when you get into the early the same conversations even outside of say that better, the same conversations about certain hunting practices, the same conversations about commercial market hunting, the same conversations about bag limits, the same conversations about netting game are all happening in the North, where there is not a master slave history. Right, But it's simply people like Roosevelt. And sure,

you know, I'm not aware of it. There's no doubt it exists that Roosevelt probably had as someone to lie when he was alive, probably had racist sentiments like I'm sure there's probably books written about it. But he was from a hunting perspective, and there here's a celebrated conservation

figure from a hunting perspective. He's like, if we're going to continue to hunt into the future, if it's gonna be a thing, then we need to put up real serious guardrails, and we're gonna introduce all kinds of stuff, licenses, seasons, ban on commercial sale of wild game, right, and really clamped down or would kiss the whole thing about it. So I don't know, like, and maybe maybe you can

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

to the general public. Yeah, you make that and again you make that case clear just through letting people say say their own thing, like you put down here's what's said, here's what said, here's what said, Like you lay that out. Um, the more of Asia was there, but it's just like I look, I'm like, man, but the exact same things were elsewhere, but they just weren't selling it that way. Well, it's interesting. It's interesting you say that though, because and

interesting full disclosure. I'll just you know, just to get it down. I don't want this to be a freezer full of fish issue. I am a big fan of a conservation model. I think the conservation system that we developed in that period is one of the great achievements of the American system really is I really believe that. Um, this is side trip, but I mean, like, if I got to choose between a conservation model and a wallet off and nobody can touch at model, conservation models better

just in my mind. Um, But what's interesting when you look at how conservation was sold in other parts of the country, there was a racial angle to it, but it wasn't African Americans. You know. I've read articles, you know, complaining about the need for tougher laws in the West, and they're talking about Native Americans that are abusing things and they're the reason we have to pass this. Yeah.

In New York, Realy had episode with a mong hunter and I talked to him about, Um, just the conversations I've had with people where it's like, well, you know who kills all the game? It's among guys. Yeah, it was. It was it was European immigrants in New York State right up in the cat Skills. You know. I was like, oh, these immigrants are gone in all the game down and so it seemed like it was just people that were

poorer than you. Um, we're by death if they're poorer than you, by definition, they're more likely to be game poachers. Someone probably someone certainly thought you were a poacher, and then you thought the next guy down the line, he was the poacher. It was very class based. Oh yeah, and and that that is what what struck me initially, you know, leaving race out out of the equation for

a second. When I first started reading all these sporting publications so intensely, I was amazed at the obvious class dimensions at work here and tension in the individual sporting put even like in Forest and Stream that was written about a lot like who does this thing really serve? If this is this about America and democracy and open access, in which case, hey, rich guy, you shouldn't always get

the system you want. And then the elites would say, hey, if you want to preserve this system, you know, for future generations, we've got to start being more strict about this. And some of the people on the on the lower class end of things were like, na, we're just not going to buy that. And it seems like in different parts of the country they needed the little extra nudge from from the boogeyman. Right, if you're afraid of you live in the West, and Native Americans and your big nuisance.

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

in the South, the main scapegoat. Uh, it was African Americans, especially because they had they had two argumentative tracks they could take with people that were you know, let's say I'm I'm a poor, poor white and I'm just not buying into this this licensing system. I could say, look, you know, they would say to me intern like, look, one, this is about control. We're trying to keep guns out of the hands of people of color, keep them working for us. And on the other hand, this is about

protecting our new tourist economy. We have got to protect this because the region will collapse if we don't preserve this. So it was sort of a kind of a double whammy, and there was a reason to make sure that as much as possible. If African Americans are going to have a big place in the southern sporting field, it's got to be in a subordinate place, working for us, not independent.

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

a problem. You don't want to area where the double standard I think uh came through real clear as you spend a little bit of time talking about. I think it was kind of more in the immediate post warriors do you'd have people who go out the swamps and basically set up camp encampment's families camped just living off the land. Man, you can imagine it'd be easy to romanticize that right. Often a swamp living off the land. But man, folks are not like that. Yeah. That was like, Holy,

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

do what they do. But then you hear these descriptions of these like massive hunting parties. I can't think of a guy's name, but the guy was a CEO of DuPont. He bought an island off of South Carolina just for the point the purpose of hunting, and you know, he would bring these giant retinues down there with them and they would head off, you know, head off into the woods and the black laborers would be carrying you know,

everything you can know that you don't know that retinue. Yeah, so's it's a fancy word for like the your your your posse. Yeah, you're you're your entourage. That's the retinue. They would have called it a retinue because that was the fancy makes me sound like an aristocratic term they wanted to use. The more guys that are with me, the more people carrying my stuff, the more my hunting camp looks like my house, the more that means you know,

I've made it. So it's sort of that, you know, sett it yourself up as an aristocrat kind of thing that visitors were so drawn to back then. Um, what what are there? I mean, there's a ton of miss because it's a big book, But are there where you're from where you're sitting right now? Are there questions you wish I'd ask you to explain various aspects of this book? Well, yeah, I think I think one that there's a couple of things that that I think would be good to talk about.

So one is, um, what was you know, the pot Why? What I didn't mention yet was the was the positives? Right, So we're talking about, you know, the concerns that landowners had or the conservation has had, or you know, white Southerners in general had, and why they wanted to kind

of restrict these practices. But on the other side of the equation is um the benefit, right, So it isn't like it's just I'm forced to work mission because you have some amazing stories of people getting established in business and stuff, and yeah, there's a there's a big benefit. So um. For one thing, it's it's a rare thing during the Jim Crow period for a person of color to have sort of a public way to demonstrate I'm

better at something than a white person. And that was a no, no, can you tell people specifically what Jim Crow means? Sure? So Jim Crow is sort of the shorthand for segregation. Uh, these sort of both formal and informal laws and practices that popped up starting in the eighteen nineties that sort of governed black and white social interactions. And it was if you don't know much about the

Jim Crow system, it's it's pretty mind blowing. Um. You know, you know the big picture stuff, you know, like you know, uh, you know, whites only water fountains and things like that that we think of most commonly. But then you know chain gangs and you know, lots and lots of strange social rules. You know, black person can't work at a shoe store that caters to white customers, because you don't

want black people to work with white people's feet. Um, you know black barbers, you know generally uh would uh would have white customers, but the reverse usually wouldn't be true. Usually you have to have good to old black barber if if you were a black person. Yeah, and all that stuff segregated. So Jim Crow was basically just a way of making sure that everybody was was kept in their proper place. Was that a guy's name Jim Crow

was was a minstrel performers. His name was Charles. His name Daddy Rice was that might be Charles Daddy ricen't remember. Daddy Rice was a famous minstrel performer in the twenties and eighteen thirties, and he became world famous, traveled the world by blacking his face in his hands, putting on rags, and then performing in ways that whites would have recognized as stereotypically slave. So he's a white guy, Yeah, white guy performing in hand. Yeah. That was the character's name,

Jim Crow. And you know there's books published about this character, Jim Crow. It becomes this hugely popular thing, and then the interesting thing is that that's yes, somehow that I'm kind of like, I don't know, I was like Paul Fitition politicians from the time. You know, the basic idea is, um, you know, these this Jim Crow character is kind of based on the idea that people of color are childlike, stupid, uncivilized.

I mean, it's very negative, very racist. You know that this this character and it fits what white audiences wanted to believe about people of color. Uh So it's kind of a character designed to show, uh, you know, this is what what we're dealing with here, folks. It sort of became an easy shorthand in the eight nineties. Well these laws designed to keep black people where they belong, let's call him Jim Crow laws. So that's sort of

organically how it evolved. Yeah, and then you were going to get into and there was a handful of things you have in there of people that um, maybe established a fishing business, and then it became out of that like owned multiple vessels, bought land, established businesses, like people who had like real success stories. Yeah, there's great that came out of hunting and fishing that went on to be have generational impact. Yeah. I'll take about whole Collier

in a minute. That that's my my my favorite individual person from the book, but my individual favorite story. It's not very long, but I just love this one. And this is the kind of freedom you could have with um, the kind of weird relationships that emerged in the post emancipation period, right Like, on the one hand, you know that your guides, your laborers are really amazing at this, but acknowledging that it's going to sort of threaten the white on top sort of white supremacy model that we

have by then in the South. So there's this great story it came across where a guy from uh I think he's from Philadelphia, is out on a duck hunter, a quail hunt whatever it was, with with one black guide and they're they're, you know, scaring up birds and birds. You know, he's scared up alright, birds flushed, thank you? And uh, I know words like retinue, not words like flushed. Uh So birds are scared up. White guy jumps up, takes a shot, misses, the guide stands up, shoots it

and says, good shot. They scare up another bird. The white guy misses. The guy's a great shot, sir. And then that went on. That went on the whole day, and then they're walking home and uh, the the guy was was talking about how how piste off this white guy was walking in front of him the whole time, knowing that he didn't do a very good job with those birds, and only imagining how pleased the guide must have been, thinking like, yeah, we both know that I'm

better at this than you. But I can play the game if I have to. So I really like that one example because it was just a nice little leg I can. I can dig you a little bit in the way that I couldn't before, you know. But the one that the one that stands out, and it's just it's just one of the great stories of all time. And I'm not the first person to talk about Whole

call Here. There's been a book written about him, and some children's books actually, but Whole call Here is I think, what I would say, the most famous sportsman in the South, probably of all time, unless he counts someone like Daniel Boone or you know some of those, some of those folks. But um, the whole Collier was a slave in Mississippi and his stories just absolutely incredible. Um before before he

was he was a famous hunting guide. Um, he was a slave in Mississippi, and his master was nicknamed Colonel Howell Hines. And when the Hines family, you know, goes off to war, when the Civil War starts, they took whole collier with him as a servant. And he wound up working as a scout for whatever army outfit that his that his that his master belonged to, scouting against the Northern Army, against the Northern Army. And he yeah, and he is officially recognized by the Daughters of the

Confederacy as a Confederate veteran. I mean, it's it's really interesting. And he continued after they and and that's the whole when you take a whole collier above and beyond the call of duty, he was he was loyal servant, and then he was a loyal soldier. And then when the war ended, he went to work on the Hines plantation as a sporting guide and was was so good that he's one of these ridiculous figures that you hear about his sporting uh prowess, and you think, really, did you

really kill five hundred bears? That seems like a lot, you know, So he they're all these legends about him, and the reason he becomes so well known is because when Um the Roosevelt Hunts, as they were known, Roosevelt had these huge, two huge hunting excursions in the South and almost like nineteen o three, almost like nineteen o seven, when he contacted uh, some of his buddies down in the South, Hey, I want to do a really big, elaborate hunt. Put it together for me. They did what

what we've talked about before. They got some guys that knew the best places to go, and they said, Okay, who's going to assemble the army of African Americans that we need to provide the setting the president needs and they tapped whole Callier to head the hunt. So he was he was the guy in charge of both of those Roosevelt hunts, and that the space ciphic story that makes him so famous is um apparently for four or five days this was one hunt was in the Louisian

Cane Brakes and one was in the Yazoo Delta. I can't recall which one was which, but the first of the two, apparently whole Collier. They didn't have a lot of luck finding the bear because Roosevelt had dreamed of a Southern black bear forever, he said. So Collier apparently had gone off to do some scouting to see if

they could switch locations. While he was gone, apparently some of the other guys had captured a black bear, which was weirdly common back then because people would capture bears and then they would use it for bear baiting, the grossest sport ever. We just get sick dogs on a bear and then bet on how many dogs it would take, you know, to kill it. Um. So they captured this black bear so Roosevelt could kill it, and Whole Collier got back to camp and he said, whoa you you

can't this is a chained up animal. You can't shoot this. It's not sporting. And Roosevelt was, yeah, that's that's that's a great idea. That's not sporting. I'm not going to do it. So Rosebolt ordered that they released the Teddy bear, and that's the Teddy Bear incident. So it was it was Whole Collier that apparently told Roosevelt that he shouldn't

kill the bear. So the cartoon of Teddy's Bear, uh comes from from Whole Collier that and then he sent he sent Collier some kind of heard at times, but I never knew that the guy that involved it was was I had that story. Uh well, yeah, you know, I never knew any I never knew anybody involved him

besides Roosevelt. Right, yeah, well, you know, I guess what in the future if you come across kind of stories from from this time period, Um, you know, how often did they really go into discussions of the guys, whether they're white or black? Right? Usually just the guys, we're the ones that we talk about. And then you're not going to talk about your labors that much, especially if

if there are people of color and um. In the aftermath of this hunt, Roosevelt was so grateful that he fired because later in the honey got his black Bear, and he was so grateful that he sent whole Collier a I can't remember the exact model, but I got a brand new Winchester rifle and that Collier used that for the rest of his life because it was the rifle the Roosevelt. It's probably that way. Wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, that sounds about right. It was like, that's Roosevelt's rifle Winchester.

Where uh, if I if I'm not mistaken. I think it's in I think it's in a in a historical society somewhere in Mississippi. I thought I may have read somewhere that they have that I like to fire a couple of cracks of that gun man. But it's it's pretty amazing, and it brought him to some to some national prominence. And when, uh, there was a little bit

of a blowback on Roosevelt. He was publicly praising this guy he sent him this rifle, uh, and some people were like, what's the president doing hanging out with this black guy? What? What? This isn't right? A lot of people in the South were kind of angry about this, and it just didn't visually match what they thought the president United States should be doing. And editorials appeared in southern newspapers after that and they were like, look, you understand,

this guy was the best slave ever. This guy was a soldier for us. He's the best, He's the perfect servant. If anybody deserved to be talked about by the president, it's whole Collier. So the question that got me thinking was, Okay, did Roosevelt ever weigh in on it anymore? Basically, he would just kind of he didn't. I don't think rose he were palsering and he does. He basically would just say like, look, this is just one of the best sports when I ever saw. But he he's like engaged

in that conversation. That just the one line here from Wikipedia about how badass he was. He killed more than three thousand bears during his lifetime, more than those this is the real hum more than those taken by Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone combined. So his fake his fake number was better than Boone and Crockett, his fake number Wickuldee.

It does have things wrong sometimes, but you know, for me, it's it's the extraordinary question is about whole Collier undeniably an amazing sportsman, even if his numbers are you know, wildly exaggerated, prominent, famous for his day, fairly wealthy, fairly well known. There's not a whole lot of African Americans sportsman who becomes celebrities in that time period. He did it. So it's a great thing, and what a great way for him to uh support his family and you know,

and carve out a niche. But then I also wondered, like, but what's the cost of that you know, if your whole collier, you basically have to position yourself as the quintessential servant. And for a lot of white Southerners, you know, you know, they would look at that relationship and they would see a whole collier and they would see see that that's alive, and well, the old master slave thing, it's alive, and well it's like the way it should be.

So for a lot of Southerners, they really looked at the sporting field, you know, not just the way of preserving the sporting tradition, but to preserve the racial tradition. You know, where else can you find that pure I'm always going to have people of color around me serving me. Now that emancipation is here, we're still going to find it in the sporting field. So it was a way of kind of resurrecting that old South and keeping it alive.

So on the one hand, if if you're that that sporting guy who can make fun of of of the white guy, yeah that's a good thing, and I'm sure that's pretty satisfying. But isn't it interesting that basically you you you find a niche for yourself in an occupation that demands subservience and that must have been tough. That

must have been a real double edged sword. Now that Yan he's brought Boone into it, did you read about or just consider writing about Boone's relationship with his old slave, like when Boo got old and he was going blind. He I don't want to hate to use them. I don't know. They were like people around them describe them

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

I should check that out. Yeah, Boone would hunt in his later years, Boone would like that's who he hung out with. I mean he could have hung out with Virtue. I mean he was famous in his time. That's who we hung with. Yeah, I mean go on these trips, you know, And I could be totally misremembering this. Didn't he take that guy with him to the Alamo? Boone going to the Alamo. Sorry, I thought you mentioned Crockett. I'm sorry, because Croc had brought a bunch of pals

of his that were hunting buddies. They didn't stay. Yeah, but those two get those who get tangled up a lot. But yeah, he died, and he died in Missouri. Um. And one more question for you. Have you ever spent time reading about the slave that Lewis and Clark brought with him. No, I've not done that either, but I would like to. It's you know, it's it's it's a fascinating freedom afterwards. Yeah, so they got like they got like whatever our guys on payroll, they got the ones,

they got like one dude who's not just weird. It's one of the things that's that's so tough to to tease out in these stories. You know, like you mentioned, you mentioned Boone and his slave, and I don't know this story, but what I what I can probably say with some certainty is that we've based our our view of that relationship pretty much from white sources, because that's

probably all we have. So what's interesting about when you when you read about these these uh you know, these master servant relationships in the post war sporting field, you never get or rarely get the laborer's perspective. It's almost always the white guys. Know what that guys? Yeah, So like how he comprehended his relationship with this like very very famous person. Yeah, like what is what is? Uh? What does that guy say when he walks away? Right? If?

Oh they're they're best friends? There, what a great relationship. Maybe he saw a little differently, you know, don't know the same thing with York, the Lewis and Clark slave. Um, and maybe with him, I mean know by that in that circle, you were in a world where you know,

they were celebrated. I haven't read into it. Maybe there are accounts from him, you know, Lewis and Clark would point out that, Um, the Native Americans definitely recognized him as different, you know, and uh many were quite attracted to him. Didn't like the white group but like that skin, you know, I would single him out. But yeah, and then they emancipated him afterwards. But no, to hear his take on I mean, is his take on it? Um, would it have been, Yeah, it was cool that you

know they freed me. It would just take a ben on it, come on, man, like I didn't have the No one asked me to sign up, and and and there's the single biggest challenge of studying a topic like this its sources. You know, So what do people of color think about this topic? Okay? Well, I've got letters to forest and stream, you know, and sporting publications and agricultural journals, and people of color aren't contributing to those,

so I'm getting the white perspective. Okay, Well, I'll read the interviews with former slaves that were done, you know, during the w p A interviews. Well, the most of the interviewers were white, so we don't know to what extent people were being as candid as they might. So

you're always trying to tease out that other perspective. And that's really been, you know, one of the big weaknesses that historians always wanting to focus on the elite story that I mentioned at the beginning in that time period didn't even bother trying to figure out what what the poorer folks were thinking in that story. So it kind of fell the later generations of his storians and think, Okay, where can we tease out? How can we find what

people were actually thinking? About this. Can we look at you know, court transcripts or interviews with former slaves, or how can we use a white source that talks about hunting and fishing in a way that you can sort of reveal, you know, some kind like that that story of the guy talking about his friend who was being you know, outshot by by the labor right. Um, the guy was never going to tell that story, but his buddy, to make fun of him, quotes that story and Forest

and Stream. So I was able to get a little bit of that story. But it's hard to find that seems like quite the magazine. It was cool, it was very and I gotta tell you, Um, I get pretty easily distracted because I getting pretty enthusiastic about stuff and I pick up a nineteenth century copy of Forest and Stream. What I should be doing is flipping through it and seeing if I can find mention of ray and then

I'm reading them all. So I've read so many issues of Force and Stream over here because it's just fun. I love looking at the ads. Williams could have a good conversation. Yeah, yeah, we had a We got a friend who he came on the show before. We'll have to find out what the hell episode? This was very early in the infancy of this this year show. Um, he looked at what did you look at a hundred years?

It was It was not quite I want to say it was like post World War two, I think is where he picked it up, right, And I can't remember if Ray was one of them, but he reviewed attitude towards gun rights, attitude towards the environment, attitude, a handful of things just in a couple of publications over a hundred years. The evolution like basically the evolution of the American sportsman's mind, opinions, interests, perception, as captured in a

hundred years of these and mostly through the editorials. Right, but you got to cover interesting things, man. That um that we talked about the show is when freezers became a thing that changed ship Like when you know whatever people are hunting in the forties or whatever. I can't remember what it happened, but you don't have freezer. You didn't know the whole idea of like shooting a deer and putting your freezer all year wasn't a thing. This

wasn't a thing. Then all of a sudden it became like everybody had a freezer and just changed the whole conversation about game. Oh that's it. That that makes me want to dive back into something because right, how many times you heard that? But like, no, it's like, wasn't the case. You haven't there's nothing to do with it. You got it and you had to find gave it away, and everybody ate it and that was it. You know.

The big the big thing for for elite sportsman, especially on these you know, these big excursions, lots of visitors, lots of money. They're the really prominent ones where they would have toither the retinue. Right, so one of these big hunts. Uh, the kind of standard move for these elites was they would get every single thing that they captured,

that they caught. They would divvy up some of it among their guides and laborers, and then the rest they would just have a big old party and give away to people in the area to show they're sort of aristocratic, uh, you know whatever they call it, their their their generosity. I wonder how that changed with the freezer, because I would imagine giving it away if you're not gonna eat it, because someone's gonna say, oh my god, did you see what Mr John he was eating what he caught. Is

he having hard times? What's going on here? Because that was sort of thing. I don't have to eat what I catch, I give it away. I wonder if once freezers were around, I think, hey, throw that in the freezer. Let's not give that away. Yeah. I go read Randall's dissertation. That sounds really interesting. Yeah, I wish Yeah, you'll find it go way back. We know now there's like a lack of diversity right in the in the hunting general, hunting and fishing crowd in this country. And obviously it

stems from what we've just been talking about. So can you kind of put that in perspective? Well, yeah, and I guess would. I would have to say I didn't get explicitly too much into this in the book because I sort of kind of shut it off around thet um but I think there's there's there's a lot there. Um. You know. I was actually talking to Jonathan Wilkins about

this not too long ago. The sort of stereotype, uh, you know that you know, people of color, you know, don't like the outdoors or don't swim, or you know, don't hunt as often as white. It's predominantly a white thing. Um. And you touched on that, you know, in that blog that you posted a few weeks ago. The diversity can

be an issue sometimes in the contemporary scene. Yeah, and I always I always attributed it or imagined it being like a demographics issue that after the war, so many people came in the industrial to work in the industrialized North. That's one of these surprises of me how prevalent hunting

and fishing were at the time. Yeah. Absolutely, And the way I would look at it is, um, you know, there's this very deep and rich sporting tradition in the black community, slaves, free blacks, you know, and we intensifies after emancipation because of sporting tourism. So it's it's a big part of black life, especially in the rural South. But then we can look at at restrictions on sporting

practices in the South. They're used the same way that other gym crow laws are used, you know, they're really trying to regulate black behavior. So by the time we get to you know, nine nineteen ten, the black population in the South was like, look, you know, lynch ings, Jim Crow laws, voting restrictions, hunting and fishing, restrictions. It is all part of a big story that's you know, really making the South less hospitable place. So the Great

Migration begins and then um the northern cities. And I think, I think probably the thing that helps people remember just how connected African American population was to hunting and fishing in the South, which we think of you hunting and fishing is a rural thing, right for most people. Well, in eighteen ninety, African Americans were demographically the most southern

and rural population in the United States. But then the migration period starts between a nineteen hundred and nineteen fifty, and today African Americans are demographically the most northern and urban population. But if you back up far enough, it's a rural population in the South historically relying on these forms of land and wildlife use to get by. It gets harder for them to do that. And I gotta believe it's on the list of factors that influenced the

Great Migration. So I feel like there was a there was a sort of a separate, a forced separation, you know. I don't, I don't know if you back up a hundred and twenty years, I don't think you could hold the the idea that people of color don't use the natural environment as much as whites, that that was just that was kind of separated they were they were that was taken from them, and not only did they use it, but they were sounds like renowned as possibly being the

best ones at using it. Yeah, I mean there's there's a real tradition there. And uh, I think if we remember that, Uh you made the point in the blog, right, the idea that you know, the question of what's the way forward, uh, bringing new people into this sporting community, or or preserving the traditions of those who already do it. Well for the people who are saying, you know, let's

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

about it. So there there is a question of you know, participation in outdoor activities hunting and fishing among diverse populations needs to be encouraged. It does bring up interesting just the idea about tradition, you know, depends how far back you want to delve back. Yeah, absolutely, And you know, and and I've I've talked to a lot of people over the years that I've met, you know, just not in the context of my work, but I've just met them.

And and oh, you do hunting and fishing. Oh yeah, my family used to be really big into that and you know, not so much. Now, where'd your family come from? So we migrated from Mississippi. You know. I'm like, well, that's that's that's con that's consistent with the story. Yeah. I regard myself as um having like a deep family tradition and hunting. But my ancestors came from Sicily, Western Europe. Like probably not deep. I mean by deep, I mean

my grandfather. Do you know if those ancestors that were in Europe hunted? No, we have no one has any idea who they were. Right, Well, no, that's not true. On the Sicilians. We do the Ronella's we do. I don't know that they didn't hunt the damner didn't when they got here. So I'm saying, like deep tradition for me is that my maternal and paternal grandfather, you know, one of whom I met and hung out with. So

that's how deep that is. Well, you know, in a sense, I would argue is that there's a different kind of depth there. There there's an historical depth to those kind of connections because what I've what I've learned over the years from reading different books about hunting coming out of the European tradition is a lot of people like even like these maligned you know, European immigrants that go to

New York State and are accused of being game hogs. Um, you know, you're an immigrant that comes from most of Europe. They've got a long history of really restrictive game laws, a game system that is flat out gives all the privileges and rights to the landed aristocrats. You can explore that through like elements of that through the robin Hood narrative. Yeah, exactly. It's a tremendous source of conflict. And when people migrate to the US and they're like, whoa, we can just

do this, This is amazing. So there's this sort of instant tradition like look, I am allowed to do this, now, this is fan What a land of opportunity when I can actually freely hunt and fish without having to worry

about the rich guy always gets first crack. So I think that a lot of sort of the more recent sporting even you know, even if you are you're the first generation to pick it up, you're kind of continuing that tradition of something that demonstrates independence that's common across you know, white, black, rich, poor when people do these things historically, they think this is about sufficiency. Independence, individual competence for many people feels like an American birthright exactly.

And that was gonna be my closing thought, and you're just you know, saying it way better than I could.

But it was just like reading the book has given me a completely new and better, stronger appreciation for hunting and fishing is like a means to freedom because if they if like these slaves didn't have that, like you know, just imagine, you know, I mean, we don't know what the outcome would have been, right, But like with hunting and fishing, it like immediately gave them a means to be like, oh, even though we're free, even though you still hold you know, some power overs because when you

have to survive and we need to work and we feed. But because they had hunting and fishing, they were allowed to be freer. Yeah, before you came in, you and I were just having a quick chat and he kind of pointed out use these words, but he pointed out the ways in which it's a it's like a celebration in some ways of celebration hunting and fishing. Yeah. Yeah, I think so, because you know, I guess the person.

I let's circle back to Charles Ball, right, the guy who had to quote about feeling like an independent man. You know, he's a slave and this kind of powerful idea of competence, which we sort of lost. We don't really dig that these days. But the nineteenth century model of competence was I'm independent, I own my own land, I can feed myself in my family, and I'm beholden to no one. I'm debt free. Like so that was

like the goal. You're a competent you know, American. I'm still big into competency, but I don't describe it though, h yeah, it's not a tern where you use much anymore. It's a great it's a great idea to fix stuff. And so there's this notion of being a competent citizen, and it was really understood back then is that was really a white thing, or at least that was the white view, like competence. A slave is not going to

have that right their own. They're literally there. They can't have honor because they're owned by somebody else, and they're not going to independent. They don't feed their family. I do. So that just wasn't a thing that I that I, as as an owner, thought that was for them. But then you're Charles Ball and you're like, you know what, you own me, You own my family, You control what I do, you control my days. But you know what,

I am the best sportsman you have. I go off on my own time and earned game and income from my family that you don't want me to have, and I do it anyway, and I demonstrate skill that you say shouldn't be demonstrated by people of color. And in the sort of limited world of options of a slave, that's a that's those are a couple of extended middle fingers to the master, and in and of itself, that's worth something. I think. All right, Scott Guiltner with we're

gonna hit it again, Culver Stockton College. That's it. It's not Missouri, it is Canton, Missouri. What were you saying. I thought you were saying, what about Illinois? You I live right across the river in Quincy, Illinois. Canton is on one side of the river, and Quincy still down the street on the home of the guy that was flying the and Nola gay when it dropped the Yeah, Paul Tibots, Yeah, he was born in His mother, Nola Gayo was was born and raised in Quincy. His mom

was a Nola gay Yeah. That's why the plane's name that you have to do his own plane, Yeah, named it after his mom. And it dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I think Hiroshima. What happened to that guy? I have no idea. I do know that about oh, geez, thirty

years ago or so. One of the one of the historians in town told me that, uh, there was a push to name an elementary school after him, and then some people were like, I don't know, atomic bomb elementary school, and they eventually shelved the plan, but getting name of school after him and they were afraid. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, m hm, a doubt, you know. I mean the guy had was doing a job. He's yeah, did his job? Did it? Well, we'll talk about that

once some more time. That's a tough one. No, it's not tough. I mean for some people to tell one for some people's tough one. All right, y'all, thank you, thanks, yeah, thank you all so much. Great book. Everybody should read this book. I appreciate and uh, yeah it is Uh, I'll just mentioned this a shameless plug if you don't mind. Uh, you can grab this on Amazon. Um. It is currently out of stock, but I check this morning and it's listed as restocked on June, so that's not too bad.

So yeah, as usually when you win, there's a book and low supply and then all of a sudden you see it selling for big amounts of money. Have you seen it go for a lot of money? And sometimes uh, because it's like there's like not many for sale, and some guys like I'll tell you what I'll do. Yeah, yeah, and uh and uh, two things to any of you out there that may listen to this. If any of you paid that amount of money for my book, I have two thoughts, one thank you and two out of

your mind? What were you thinking? Let me hit you with a quick book story. So, uh, there's a book I'm a great admirer of by a guy named Duncan Gil Chris. It's called Hunt High not like Baked but Hunt the High Country, and um, I love the book and he was a very accomplished alpine hunter. And I always talked about this book, but the book was out of print, and eventually I realized that someone run off with my copy. So I go online and then there's some guys selling it for a hunter bucks or seventy

five bucks. I'm like, that's ridiculous, you know if I wanted it back, So I buy the book. The book shows up in my house with a sticky note on the cover and it says, dude, you're the reason I bought this book. Yeah, then you had to give me that copy of that book, which I now proudly owned. I'm glad to know that it's a hundred dollar copy of that book because I had loaned out to you a like a like a first edition. Jack O'Connor that you had given away. So now I'm the owner of

your hunter A card h High. Oh yeah, you're not getting it back. Forgot about that. That's the way it's supposed to be, right, they say. They say that books shouldn't have owners, just readers just pass them around. I don't abide by that. I like other stuff you said, Scott. Thanks, thanks,