Ep. 661: So You Want To Be A Mountain Man

of already been hit a couple of times. So it's like either a plumber comes and switches the journals, yeah, or like I get a mirror image of the I don't know.

twenty fifth. Seth got married on June twenty fifth. So when I get up to do the preaching, I get up and say, today will forever mark a day when a man made a terrible mistake.

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

which is part of our Meat Eaters American History. If you remember, we did Meet Eaters of American History Volume one, the Long Hunters seventy sixty three three to seventeen seventy five and a minute. We'll explain why that why those dates. Our new volume is volume So now we have Meetaters of American History Volume two, and we jump to and we'll explain why these dates. We're jumping to the years. Sorry, it's Meetater's American History Volume two, The Mountain Men eighteen

oh six to eighteen forty. We're gonna explain what that means. So when you hear the word frontiersman, what does it mean, when you hear the word mountain men, what does a mountain man actually mean? We're going to talk about what a mountain man actually means that We're going to talk a little bit about the history of these different market hunters, and then we're gonna go into a chapter from this book, this audio original called Hunger and Thirst and it's it's Is it available now?

should talk about two for a minute. Sure is there's a weird wrinkle like everyone's smooth with the North American model of wild They have conservation and in it is this thing about not commodifying wildlife. But then people are like, well, why can you sell deer hides? You can still sell deer hides, Why can you sell beaver meat? Why can you sell skins? Right? Why can you sell taxidermy?

North American model. I feel like it's one of the pillars of the North American model where people debit. Yeah, the scope of it.

So a lot of times when we're doing the show, there's a shitload of people in the room. Right now, there's not crams here, Randalls here because we're doing something a little bit special today. But a reminder some of the people that come in and do the show, you know, we have a whole podcast network, so I sometimes fail to point out how many of the people you know from coming on the show have their own shows that are on our network. So Cal is always in here,

Ryan Callahan old Cal Cal in the Wild. That's a feed, that's a podcast feed host Cal's Weekend Review and the Foundation's podcast with Tony Peterson, So they'll sit within our network under the feed Cal in the Wild. We had a Bear Grace, a bear Grease feed, of course, and on the show you've met and heard from many times Clay and Brent Reeves. So the Bear Grease podcast feed has the Bear Grease Podcast has Bear Grease Render episodes

and This Country Life episodes with Brent Reeves. We have a Wired to Hunt feed, the Wired to Hunt podcast feed, the Eponymous show with Mark Kenyon, Wired to Hunt, and then Foundations with Tony Peterson, and then of course we have God's Country with Dan and Reed. Isabel. I got a big hunt trip plan with Tony Peterson. Oh that whole secret?

which is like I can be. I mean, I'm just like always entertained by glassing, and and so like, there are a couple of days, I mean we hiked up to a ridge and we only moved one hundred yards in the course of the whole day, just behind the tripod, glassing and pointing stuff out and finding I mean not even just deer, but we were watching some coyotes chase some deer. Uh, we're finding ducks, We're finding turkeys and

mountain lines, no mountain lions. We saw some tracks one day, Seth and I went up this crazy I call it a road, but really the roads down there are just sort of bulldozer cuts. Yeah, and uh, there was some fresh tracks we saw. We saw some fresh coups tracks, and as soon as we stopped to look at those, we realized their lion tracks, you know, right alongside them. Then in the no, just in the in the real loose dust, because yeah, everything is dust. I haven't really

brought anything in the house from that hunt. I'm waiting till I can fire up the air compressor and just blow everything out, cause it's just my trip is a different color. My bino harness is a different color. Like everything's covered in that real fine dust that just seeps its way into like zippers and everything you own.

hunting rigs. There's like twelve jacked up pickups with Utah Arizona plates. They're all towing side by sides. Every single person in the little breakfast nook is wearing camoep and they're all like dudes between the age of thirty five and sixty. And then you get into the checkpoint line and the truck in front of you is a hunter and the truck behind you John right for sure, you know I was. And then you go to like some gas station across the border and the whole thing is

basically a staging point for for kus deer hunters. And so that was that was one thing that was a very unexpected wrinkle in It was just like how visible it was. You know, it's like being out in eastern Montana the week before Thanksgiving, so I.

they tell you what you look like. He sends me a picture of the guy, the FBI agent who interviews everybody leading into that meeting with the artist. The sun bitch looks exactly like the picture of DV. Cooper. It was like they described the last guy they.

named William j. Wyman. His plane disappears over Lake Huron while he's flying from Saginaw to kin Ross Air Force Base in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. So I mean that base is still there. There's ken Ross base in the up Guys flying from Saginaw up Lake Huron to kin Ross Upper Peninsula. His plane goes missing on March five, nineteen fifty nine. They conduct a big search, no sign of the plane, never find the plane. He's presumed dead, and they call it off on April eight. This is insane.

I never heard this. On April eight, these lighthouse keepers go out to Spectacle Reef to reopen their lighthouse and find that someone had been living in the lighthouse. There's a note, and the note's explaining it's a note from Wyman in the lighthouse explaining his plane's engine had quit when he's flying at five thousand feet. His engine quit a mile from the lighthouse Wyman's note. This is a quote from Wyman's note. I tried to make it in but could not stretch my glide this far. I landed

in the water. I did not try to land on the ice, and it did not appear to be thick enough. The plane went down within two minutes, but before it did, it floated close enough to an ice floe for me to jump. The ice was now over two inches thick. Another large body of water separated me from the lighthouse, so I waited. Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast and the ice I was on started to move. At the very last moment, one corner of the ice grounded

against the ice packed around the lighthouse. So the letter goes on, but in short Wyman then runs for the lighthouse and makes it there, but he gets a little wet his clothes, froze before he gets into the door of the tower, but in there he finds towels, overshoes, gets warmed up. He finds a radio transmitter in the lighthouse, but can't get it to work. Set up all night, blinking sos with the tower's winter light, manipulating the tower's

winter light. He doubts if rescuers are ever going to find him because he hadn't filed a flight plan, so he freezes his ass off in this lighthouse for two nights. The ice thickens up in his no he explains he's going to try to make the eleven mile track to the nearest land. His no ends, I'm going to take some equipment with me, binocular's coat, hat, blankets, et cetera. I will turn them in to the US Coast Guard

as soon as I get ashore. They kick off a whole other search for Wineman and still today no trace.

over bear baits. And the other thing was a guy is going to his deer hunting cabin and he parks on a steep incline and gets out to open his own gate, and as he's fiddling with his own gate, his truck slides forward and pins him against his own gate, where he then freezes to death.

I turned around, the truck's rolling at me and I barely get back in time to put the brakes on. So whenever we opened gates, now, Sydney has like a multi part checklist of making sure that I've put the truck in part. But he said he has a I believe a relative who died the same way, pinned on his gate, pinned on I believe a mailbox.

leg last night while practicing a fast draw. Butler told deputies his thumb slipped down the hammer, causing the pistol to discharge.

Reservation in northern Montana. Most places, if you were going to go shoot a buffalo, you wouldn't be able to submit them for Boone and Crockett Club because it wouldn't be regarded as a fair chase hunt. Like even if you shoot, like if you shoot a high fence deer, Boone and Krackett won't accept a high fence deer. Yeah, there's all kinds of rules to Boone and Crockett club. There's all kinds of rules that go above and beyond the what's legal right. They have their own added requirements.

For instance, if you're radio hunting using radio communications, Boone and Crockett won't accept your score even if you're allowed to radio hunt where you're radio hunting. So they've opened up there as a way to applaud the work that the Fort Pret tribes have done on creating a wild, free range bison herd on their reservation and using a sustainable management plan. They've had the animals since nineteen ninety nine, since nineteen ninety nine. They got him from Yellowstone National Park.

I actually met Robbie who runs that program. But anyways, if you were to draw a fort Pack bison tag and kill a big bowl, you could have a bull submitted into Boone and Crockett. Boone and Crocket's going to start accepting it as a fair chase hunt.

to be more bison more. I'd like to find ways to reduce conflict with landowners and create more areas for them to be more wild bison. And I do it, like in my mind, I'm like, it's like I'm doing it, like I think that, Like as a hunter, I'm all for it. And my buddy's like, but hunters just don't see those animals that way. Hunters are gonna you know, hunters are gonna go, uh, they're gonna draw blood over elk,

but they just don't feel that way about buffalo. And I'm like, but they should, yeah, and someday they might.

it did in my mind. But man, it was super cool. It's like, if I could do that every year, I would. But yeah, it's funny. There just aren't that many opportunities, no, and the opportunities that do exist are so varied in sort of nature and how they play out and where you're doing it and what happens and who's there. But yeah, it's tough to it's tough to sort of picture what a buffalo hunt's like and picture yourself hunting buffalo. But yeah,

it's interesting. I wish more people were fired up about it.

what is now Kentucky continent. Year so like the in the seventeen sixties, So seventeen sixty three is sort of how we periodized it, the end of the Anglo Cherokee Wars in seventeen sixty one. But essentially these were like cash poor farmers who were basically producing enough crops to

support themselves and didn't really produce a surplus. And so one way that they could actually make cash to buy the things they needed was to supply white tailed deerskins to basically a leather market in Europe, primarily in Europe. And so guys like Daniel Boone and these groups Casper

Mansker and and it's in the Henry Skaggs. You know, they're these kind of like remote clan based settlements and they would get together groups of like thirty or forty guys cross over the mountains on horseback and white tail deer hunt for up to a year or more than a year. And Boone famously spent like two years across the mountains on a long hunt. But you know, they're going over into territory where they're not supposed to be,

and they're shooting deer by the hundreds. I mean, they're accumulating thousands of deer skin pelts, thousands of deer skins in the course of a hunt and hauling them all back on horseback and then selling them off. And that's sort of the cash economy of western Virginia and western North Carolina during that period was largely based on white tailed deer skins. So these are market hunters, they're rural people.

They didn't leave behind a lot of records. A lot of times what you hear about them is sort of based on what was written, you know, a couple decades later when people are writing down stories about the early settlers in this county or that county, and they say, like, when he was a young man, he was a long hunter.

But it's sort of this fleeting moment of our history of market hunting where yeah, hunting deer across the Appalachian Mountains was, uh, the way you could make a fair bit of money as someone without a lot of means who basically and you also have to have a little bit of gerr in you too to go out and do that. You know, it's a dangerous proposition. Yeah, a

lot of gumption, but yeah, that's the long hunters, I think. Uh. And then the end of the long hunting era really is brought about, uh, with the onset of hostilities in the in out the lead up to the American Revolution, because the frontier becomes a very violent place and it becomes exceedingly dangerous to grab a couple dozen guys and go out on your own for a year at a time and sort of no man's land when there's a lot of hostilities going on between tribes that had aligned

themselves with Great Britain, and you know, you're a colonial land hungry, colonial Westerner, you're kind of the bad guy. So that's that's sort of what brings an end to it. There's still some Long Hunters, but a lot of them are either called into military service, or they stay home to protect their household, or they're just too scared to go west.

that I found to be very interesting. Randall's talking about these sort of if you picture he's talking about these years that it will lead up to the American Revolution, And when you hear about like revolutionary fervor and the building of the like American patriotic movement, you're thinking of like, you know, Boston and the Boston Tea part already and the establishment of the the Mini Men and Paul Revere right and Thomas Paine writing Common Sense, and all these

people who are sort of yearning for liberty and imagining this country that would get free of England, and you sort of want to extend that sentiment out to those frontier settlements, like to to Boon's clan, and these other clans that live way out on the frontier. That is not really how they're feeling. These are, by and large like groups of people who I mean, they've they've been born colonists, you know. There many of them are US

born colonists. But they're they're much more aligned in their own little frontier world than they are tied to any sense of like the brewing sense of America. But man, they cannot escape, like they do not escape the war. Yeah, because like Randall mentioned that when they're going off into the first fart what we call the first far West, when they're going off over the Appalachians to hunt deer, Randall said, they're not supposed to be there. They're not

supposed to be there for two things. There's one that's kind of obvious. Now. They're not supposed to be there because there's Native American tribes who claim the land and and some like protect it violently protected. But what Randall's

referring to is under own their own colonial law. The British don't want their American subjects going over there and causing trouble with tribes, so they're always like Britain is always trying to like deal with the tribes and try to like find a sort of I don't know, man, like a sort of some kind of static agreement.

odds and they each have mercenary forces. Like if if you've paid attention, if you ever paid attention to what was going on, and if you're looked at like what was going on? And portions of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, where we would have these proxy wars, right, Like the US wasn't supposed to be operating in Cambodian Laos, so we would align with indigenous

groups in Cambodian Laos to like fight the communists. So we allied with the Mong, like I think, there's like Montinee forces we allied with, and we would arm them and give them direction and they would like kind of do our bidding. So in the American frontier, it was always this really complex thing because there was tribes aligned

with the French and they would attack English colonists. And then later you had, later as the war did get going and stop this stop the sort of long hunting era, you had tribes aligned with the British who would come and attack American settlements.

restraining force preventing them from gobbling up more land and more land. So I think like, in addition to working as proxies, there's also an understanding among Native people that, like, this war is for control of North America, and it's part of this longer, much longer struggle for indigenous autonomy.

West in terms of like an American history terms. You're thinking of the Rocky Mountain West at the time the West at the time of the colonial period, the wild West was Kentucky. The wild West was basically south of the Ohio River, south of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was like that was kind of the first what we call the first far West, and many of the same sort of attitudes play out about it. Right,

It was like the land of Promise. It started out where hunters started kind of like poking holes into it and finding ways in it because they were hunting. And then they're coming back and saying, hey, that place is pretty sweet. There's a lot of money you made there. And so following the tracks of the hunters you have settlers and people trying to establish towns. And then we repeat that same thing in the Rockies when we end

the Long Hunters. The way we kind of mainly explained that what these Long Hunters were is we do much of it through the lens of one individual, Daniel Boone. The name Daniel more than any other name in the book. You hear the name Daniel Boone because he's come to in many ways exemplify the period, the period, and exemplify the Long Hunters. And A and was esteemed in his own time as a hunter Boone. As Kentucky filled up, Boone got very bitter about America, and he got very

bitter about Kentucky. Boone had made a lot of land claims and had like bought land from guys that didn't actually own it and made claims, and then other people made claims on top of his claims, and at a point he would have been on paper extraordinarily wealthy with land holdings. But he gets into the legal battle after legal battle after legal battle, where it's like, well, sure you bought it from so and so, but so and so didn't really own it, right, Like so and so

bought it under some dubious stuff. Congress undid the purchase. So yeah, you bought it, but you bought it from a guy that didn't have it. I don't know what to tell you about your money, but the land's not yours. And or he marked areas and then he didn't file it, which is.

he's never going back to Kentucky. And one of the things we talked about in Long Hunters is you have this idea of that there's this historian that even said, or a commentator maybe you remember who it was, who said, not only is Daniel Boone, he says he's a Kentucky emotion, Oh yeah, but he says that he's an honorary founding father. He's become, in the American imagination, an honorary founding father. But Boone one of his final acts as an American

is to be like, I'm done with America. Yeah, done with Kentucky, done with America. I'm going to live under the Spanish crown.

kind of set it up like he's like Moses. It's like he's like a Moses figure bringing his people to the Promised Land, you know, Like going through the Cumberland Gap is like the Red Sea being parted, right, And Boone became very celebrated like this, like a leader of men, you know, and he was, but he's like kind of in it for himself, in it for his family, not

did not identify as an American patriot. But I'm kind of getting to the main thing is Boone winds up in Missouri and then completely out of his own control, he winds up back in THEE rids up back in the US, simply because before he dies, the US buys does the Louisiana purchase, and thereby takes possession of Boone's new place in Missouri.

a slave toward the end of his life. But before he gets too terribly old, he hooks up with some guys and does or doesn't go up the Missouri all the way to the Rockies. People are still like, it's really not known. He definitely would go up the Missouri to hunt. Some people think he made it all the way to the up the Yellowstone River. Perhaps. The historian Ted Franklin Blue has written about what is the evidence that he did? What is the evidence that he didn't?

But like Boone, the Long Hunter could have been like a very early version of a mountain man or not. Yeah, when you looked into it, what did you what did you wind up feeling about it?

the gun here a little bit. But one of the interesting things that I found in the research for the new book is that as Boone is an old man living in I believe Saint Charles, Missouri, sort of in the Saint Louis area, one of his neighbors.

hunters are. So there's an interesting way that American history flows, and we're trying to like kind of follow this line of American history where you'll see we have these bracketed chunks of dates and they're imperfect, but we say eighteen seventeen sixty three to seventeen seventy five, meaning there's a big frontier war, you know, a big war between colonists and tribes on the frontier, and it's just way too hostile for long hunters to go hunt to the west.

The war dies down, it gets like you're like you it'd be like, hey, you can go over there and not die. And they hit it real hard. Probably yeah, well they let them die. You have less of a chance you're gonna die if you go on the first Far West and then all of a sudden war blows up again. It's just it's like suicide to go hunt the first Far West. And so the era ends, and the primary thing they're after is they're after deer skins.

When I say, it's imperfect because they're also trapping a lot of beaver and they're trapping otter because they only want the deer skins in the off season. You want thin deer skins, not winter skins. So they would they would hunt deer, and then at some point beaver furs had come prime and they would trap beaver and otter and some other fur bears. But they're mainly after deer skins.

When we pick up this next big commodity push, this next big market hunting push, is when you get into the strictly the beaver trade and we talk about the mountain in which we're going to talk about the mountain Men. When you go through all the mountain Man stories, they are fixated on beaver skins. They do some odter, for sure, but they are not also hunting deer. They are not hunting deer hides. They're eating all kinds of stuff, but they're very, very focused on beaver.

like Larpenteur, Charles Larpentntuer got is trader. It's like they're doing some traffic in beaver hides, but there's a there's an emerging market for buffalo, and they're engaging with tribes to get buffalo. They'll still talk about beaver, but they're into buffalo and then if you drift a little while later and you drift up into the eighteen seventies, it's just all buffalo like, that's it. It's the buffalo trade. So we're going to do one where we explore the

buffalo trade. And it's funny because when we do that, we're gonna have this segue where these like beaver where the like the American West and the beaver trade in the West kind of transitions into a buffalo industry.

this market. Is like tribal hunters great planes. Tribes would go and kill buffalo in the winter time and they would they would tan the hides and sell a completely tanned, ready to go hide, and that was the robe trade. The robe trade eventually moves to the hide trade, where you're just selling dried skins, tacked out, dried from any season,

didn't matter. We're going to explore that whole thing. But I'm just kind of setting up the way that I guess the point I'm trying to make is when we're looking at like this history of market hunting in the West and all these different things they're after, we're trying to bracket it. But like I said, it's imperfect bracketing because these things bleed into each other. Daniel Boone was a beaver trapper in Kentucky and a deer skin hunter.

A guy like Jim Bridger was a beaver trapper in Wolming, Montana, Colorado, Idaho. Whatever became a robe trader right It's not like one generation of these people dies and a new generation starts up at like it switches. But what we're doing is we're trying to look at the most with hunters and trappers, kind of like what are the most sought after commodities

and when do these commodity markets peak? And so with that, Randall talk about why explain why we wound up when we kicked it around, Why we decided the eighteen oh six to eighteen forty was the Mountain Man era, because someone might go like, well, they were trapped beaver before that, they trapped beaver after yeah.

And so so really the beginning of our story is the Louisiana purchase and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, the core of Discovery, sent by Jefferson to explore a water route to the Pacific and among the different sort of economic opportunities and commodities that they're taking note of in their journals as they make this you know, unimaginable journey to the Posi I can back is there, they're noting that there's a lot of beaver and at the time,

beaver is a very valuable commodity. Beaver fur used to make felt. And so by the time they're on their way back to Missouri, the Lewis and Clark expedition, they have a hunter with them named John Colter, who was recruited specifically for this UH mission. And as they're on their way back to Saint Louis, the expedition encounters two trappers and traders who are headed up the Missouri and they want to check out some of the stuff that Lewis and Clark and the gang had just been through.

And so John Coulter seeks to end his term of service with the expedition because he wants to join these guys and head back up river to the you know, quote unquote untouched trap in country that they'd seen near the Three Forks of the Missouri outside of present day Bozeman, Montana.

same thing, you can go. And everyone agrees, I won't ask to leave it, and thereby they let culteru go. If everybody everyone had to promise, they wouldn't ask to.

calling him the first mountain Man. And obviously, like anybody could you know, someone could make any number of arguments pointing to other figures. This is like one of the choices you make when you're telling a story, is where

do you start? Where do you end? But I think culture, symbolically, especially as associated as he is with the Lewis and Clark expedition, the opening up of the Upper Missouri River, the Upper Missouri region, and his exploration of the Northern Rockies, like culture is as good as anybody for sort of the honor of the first mountain man.

Greenland is effectively yours to conduct business on. It's yours. Yeah, we're going to control competition to you right for a time, and it's like you have the license to conduct business. So Hudson Bay Company was a company, but it held the like charter from the Crown to exploit the resource.

had ever really seen before. So they have this network of forts extending to the west through the Great Lakes, and what's happening at these is Native people are the ones supplying the furs and then their trade, the Hudson's Bay Company is trading with Native people for manufactured goods and commodities from Europe. And so the Hudson's Bay Company is this huge logistical like octopus reaching into Western Canada and bringing huge quantities of furs to the east for shipment onto Britain.

this whole thing. I mean not there's exceptions, but jenerally, this whole thing is run in canoes.

the Louisiana Purchase happens. The United States claims ownership to all these lands west of the miss Sippy River, and people who want to capitalize on the beaver firs there begin to imagine like their own domestic counterpart to the Hudson's Bay Company, and they don't really They sort of just try to reproduce this model, and it doesn't work the same on the Great Plains and in the Rockies as it did up in Canada.

their LifeWay to become beaver trappers. At this point in time, a lot of the people that they're encountering are equestrian buffalo hunting people, and they have a system that works for them, and it's just not compatible with breaking up into small little bands of beaver hunters and hitting every creek and river in the neighborhood and bring them all back to these trading posts.

knees to catch these beavers. So it's just like not, you know, the American interests are not as readily able to establish productive trade with the tribes encounter as the Hudson's Bay Company has been.

them sheep eaters high mountain people. And when they's the mountain men, the trappers explain to him that, you know, they were after this giant road and they were kind of like, oh shit, we ate all those yeah, And then he pointed out that they actually burned the hair off and when they get them.

other thing is is Coulters. Colter maybe may or may not have been the first European to go through Yelsow National Park, which is called Coulter's Hell. Of these two famous things, it's kind of like one happens like really as a mountain man, and one happens in a pre mountain era, because when Colter did his big megahike a midwinter oftentimes solo megahike through the Tetons, through the Absorca's like all over damn place to Yelso National Park. He's

trying to establish this Hudson Bay thing. They go up and they build a fort where the Big Corn River flows into the Yellowstone right around there, and they need to go find tribes who want to trap beaver in trade. So that big loop Coulter does is trying to talk tribes into becoming beaver trappers.

back to Saint Louis. And so that leads to the invention of the rendezvous, which is a logistical invention whereby every summer there's a fixed location and all these trappers spread acrowd spread across hundreds of miles come together and trade the furs that've accumulated for what they need.

and all that. And then once a year they bring their accumulated harvest to this gathering that's like a huge encampment, trading them to the fur companies who come out in caravans with supplies, and then the caravan brings the furs back to market. So this rendezvous is kind of the like the beating heart of the mountain man era. And the first real rendezvous is like in eighteen twenty five, and the last real rendezvous is in eighteen forty, and so that's the end the bookends of like the Rocky

Mountain rendezvous system. So that's where you get to circle us all the way back around. That's how we get to the end date of eighteen oh forty. So eighteen oh six to eighteen forty, and yeah, there's certainly beaver trappers after eighteen forty some of these guys go out to.

of American backwoodsman. Part of that is that self sufficiency, Like well, we talked about that Hudson Bay model where you have these big river systems and you have hired canoers, and you have people that live in forts and they grow crops. They might hire hunters. They're supplied with food, right, so you come in in the summer. They get all you bring in, all the flour and sugar and coffee. And if you work out a fort for the Hudson Bay Company, you might not really need to leave the fort.

And they're fed by Hudson Bay Company. The employees are what's so crazy about the mountainin thing is when they finally hit on this system that works for him, they just say, you boys are gonna have to figure it out. Yeah, and you'll have trappers, You'll have mountain men that'll do three, four, five years and it's it is a diet of wild meat, no support, no structures, no cabins, no support with food whatsoever.

They have one chance to resupply, and they have a horse and a pack horse, yeah, or maybe a couple of pack animals, one chance to resupply, one chance to g any news from the outside world, and then they're just figuring it out.

someone tells you, oh. And a lot of times too, they're encountering tribes who might point them in the direction of a place they might want to go, or point out to them that they might not want to go to this other place where they're thinking of going because they're going to get killed if they go there. So it's a very it's.

throw in and become like trappers. Some tribes just absolutely resist them, like the most classic not the most classic, but so like if there was a primary enemy to the mountain mentos the Blackfeet, the Blackfeet never got comfortable with the mountain men trapping beaver on their land. There were other tribes where it was a little more touch and go, like things of the crow is a little more touch and go, but it is very like a very complex part of it. If you look at some

of these expeditions, they seem like rolling gunfights. Yeah, they're gonna shootouts all the time, but they're often in shootouts where they're with members from one tribe and they're fighting with the tribe's ancestral enemies, or just trappers are fighting with a tribe, or just trappers are fighting with a faction of a tribe, But then there's other factions of the same tribe that they're not in conflict with. At the same time, they're adopting Native mannerisms, adopting Native dress,

marrying Native women, adopting Native religion. At the same time, they're using ways of describing Native Americans, which is like highly derogatory. But then you look like they grow their hair long, they have feathers in their hair, they decorate their horses, they marry Native women, they learn native languages.

not giving people the benefit of the doubt. Then the other hand, you want to go, oh, they were like these rapacious marauders, but what complicates that vision is all the contradictory material about how well they interwove with some tribes.

relationships and power struggles with one another. And it's a very dynamic period of time in Native history because of the instruction of firearms and horse culture has only been there for you know, one hundred and fifty years maybe, and there's trade goods coming down, like firearms coming down

from the north from Hudson's Bay Company. And so if you're a tribe like the Blackfeet, and you see American traders and trappers developing good relationships or at least trading material goods with your historic rivals, like all of a sudden, these interlopers are a threat to you. And so the Mountain Men are pretty insignificant in the relative numbers, but like what they represent in terms of upsetting the status

quo in Native America is pretty significant. And so I think like part of what we do in that chapter is to explain the underlying dynamics that shape day to day encounters between a mountain man who runs into a band of Shoshone hunters or who runs into a band of Blackfeet hunters or whatever else, because it varies widely,

and it also depends on the individuals involved. You know, there are some individuals within tribes who are much more hostile to white incursion, and there are some individuals and those same tribes who are perhaps more accommodating. And so it's just like you never really know what you're going to get.

eighteen seventies. But they made a pack and the nets per stay true to it. They're like, we're friendly with the Americans, and they held that for a long time. The only Indians Lewis and Clark killed Blackfeet yep, and Blackfeet did not have a friendly packed with the Americans.

So even then, like this guy like Culter, who is part of the Lewis and Clark expedition in our first Mountain man, like he has some exposure to how complex relationships were, right, there's not like a pan tribal I guess the thing people try to picture is that there's like a sort of pan tribal attitude to euro Americans or a pan tribal attitude to the mountain men. It was not. It was allegiances and hostilities and those things that change all the time.

that is just as complicated as any you know, relationship between royal families in France, or you know, you think about Europe and you think about all this palace intrigue and rivaling factions, and you know, these relationships that go back hundreds of years, and how all this factors into

the decisions that are made on the ground. And like that's the same environment that the mountain men are walking into, but they're ignorant to all of that, and so it's really hard to just simplify and say mountain men did this, Native people did this, or there's no like real model of relations that can be simplified between the mountain men and the and the people they encounter.

a good guest. So it's like, whatever you might assume about how Matin men and Native people interacted, it's probably a lot more. It's a lot messier than you think.

share chapter six out of twelve chapters. But the way it rolls is we talk about mountain man country, meaning, uh, there's an introduction, and then that introduces the mountain man there, and then we talk about mountain man country meaning since we narrowly define what a mountain man is, we define where the mountain man was. Right. What why at a certain point north you weren't a mountain man. Why at

a certain point east you weren't a mountain man. Why at a certain point west you weren't a mountain man. And why at a certain point south you weren't a mountain man. I'll give a clue to one. You go much for it her south? There ain't no beavers, not many. I have two clues. You go north, and you got problems with the British. We explained all that. We explained the start of the mountain man era in a chapter

called up the Missouri. We explained kind of who the mountain men were, like, like what kind of dude became a mountain man. It's mixed a lot of orphans and surprising number of people who are escaping indentured servitude is kind of a theme.

goes into that. There's a thing we run into working on these projects where there's some things that are so mundane that no one there's some things that are perceived to be so mundane that no one explains it. Like picture one hundred years from now, someone trying to figure out how we flost. Yeah, or and you'd be like, well, I see it says he flost. Well did he start

like with his molars? Well, I don't know, just as he f lost Like there's not a really like like the right people weren't writing it down.

these guys are on their phones all the time. That person probably has no idea what he's looking at when someone's on their phone. And so a lot of the more detailed accounts we get of like setting traps and trapping operations, they're written by outside observers who find this fascinating, but they don't know what they're looking at necessarily.

does it used for? How does it? Basically this is everything of like how does it get from a tra rappers hands, how does it get turned into a product, and how does that product flow through time and space? Tricks of the trade is just all the crazy shit they knew how to do and how they knew how to do it, amputations, whatever like stuff they had to know and where they got it from. Chapter ten is about what happens in the wintertime, they would spend months

just stuck in places. There would spend months stuck in valleys. Every ten days is about death. We pull that name from. There was a historian what was.

Like there's a historian who's published article in the journal put out by the Museum of the Mountain Man, where he has cataloged every reference to every mountain man dying and cause of death date, what we know about him, what happened, And so he has like quantitative findings about what killed mountain men and when and why and so when you look at something like that, it's it's tougher to believe sort of the anecdotal like Stanley Vestal argument.

But there's no question that a lot of them died.

So to get the complete thing, Meetater's of American History, The Mountain Men, eighteen oh six to eighteen forty dropping now.

the end. We haven't figured it out yet, but it'll probably wrap of March eighteen eighty two, and that era.

you don't want to completely romanticize these figures. You know, you want to understand them, why they're actually doing what they're doing, and and and what the consequences of that were.

But also it's not interesting if you write a book about how bad the buffalo hunters are, so so you know, especially in that volume, it's kind of a tricky line to toe of like you're not going to write a book condemning the buffalo hunters for the bad things that they obviously did, but you're also not going to write a book celebrating how many buffalo they killed. So it's kind of a yeah, it's a it's a it's a trickier subject, I think in our contemporary perspective.

famous mountain man movie of all time, Jeremiah Johnson. You'll have to pardon me as a return to it again, this time to the final conversation of the film, which is the saddest and loneliest one hundred and twenty seconds in the history of American cinema. In it, we find Johnson in the high country pondering with a surprise visitor what month of the year it might be. He's cooking

a rabbit on a spit. While nitpicky viewers might note that no wild rabbit on earth would tear as tenderly as that one when cooked in such a fashion, you have to give credit to the filmmakers for capturing the breadth of the diet of the mountain men. By this point in the movie, Jeremiah Johnson has dined on grizzly bear meat, attempted to dine on cutthroat trout, eating elk, eating buffalo, and eating beaver, which he refers to as

proper food. One thing that Jeremiah Johnson never eats in the film is the mountain man delicacy known as budant, which was described in real life by the British explorer and writer George Ruxton, who witnessed a memorable scene during his Western travels in the mid eighteen hundreds. Ruxton had been all over the world by this point in his life. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty seven. He'd served in combat in Europe, hunted with indigenous people in northern Canada,

and journeyed into the heart of the African continent. But of all those places, none captured his imagination like the rocky Mountain West, and no figure fascinated him more than the American mountain man. At one point in his travels, Roxie and washed as two trappers sat on a dirty saddle blanket with a long coil of budan between them. Now, if you've traveled much in Louisiana, you might have encountered budan, a type of sausage built on a base of hog, liver,

and rice. But mountain Man budan was different. They would take the intestine of a buffalo and invert it. Ruxton notes that it would often be partially cleaned, but that this step is quote not thought indispensable. They then fill it with diced buffalo meat, liver, kidneys, whatever, and brown it over the ember of the fire, like a crude sausage. So these two trappers are sitting across from each other on a filthy saddle blanket between them, quote, like the

coil of a huge snake. Ruxtan writes, Since one of these budans, and they are eating it from opposite ends, So that quote, the serpent on the saddlecloth was dwindling from an anaconda to a modern sized rattlesnake. The two guys start hurrying to try to eat more of the bu dan than the other before they run out of intestine. Such were the culinary exploits of the mountain men. For them,

food was more than just sustenance. It was a source of pleasure, a badge of honor, and a currency of camaraderie in a world where survival often hinged on the strength of one's stomach. But as one historian observed, the mountain man would often spend one month quote luxuriating in the wealth of buffalo meat, and the next quote reduced to the very brink of starvation. They got wild fruits

when and where they could. Wild plums and service berries were favorites of Western travelers, but they lived a mostly carnivorous existence. They had a saying, meat's meat, which demonstrates a certain gastronomic open mindedness, the fact that its meat matters more than what kind of meat it is. But that doesn't mean they didn't appreciate the idiosyncratic qualities of each Rufus Sage, an American journalists who traveled west to document the culture of the mountain men, shared a sentiment

of the era on the qualities of prairie dogs. Quote the flesh of these animals is tender and quite palatable, and their oil is superior in fineness and absence from all grosser ingredients. As we know, the mountain men were living year round in the wilderness. They're staying mobile, enabling them to move from stream to stream in search of fresh beaver sign and they're limited in what they can

carry with them in terms of supplies. So the difference between life and death was what sort of food they could pull from the land around them. Hunting, of course, offered the most practical solution to this challenge, and the mountain men were legendary for their ability to put away

vast quantities of the meat they killed. William H. Ashley, who you'll remember was one of the partners behind the expedition that led to the creation of the rendezvous system in the first place, claim that quote nothing is actually necessary for the support of men in the wilderness than a plentiful supply of good fresh meat. It is all that our mountaineers ever require, or even seem to wish.

Ashley drove the point home with additional clarity. Quote the circumstance of the uninterrupted health of these people, who generally eat unreasonable quantities of meat at their meals, proves it to be the most wholesome and best adapted food to

the constitution of man. In the different concerns which I have had in the Indian country, where not less than one hundred men have been annually employed for the last four years and subsists all together upon meat, I have not known at any time a single instance of bilious

fever among them. That means a fever with nausea and vomiting, like the flu or any other disease prevalent in the settled parts of our country, except a few instances, and but very few of slight fevers produced by colds or rheumatic affections contracted while in the discharge of guard duty on cold and inclement nights. Of course, Ashley's observation about a lack of infectious disease is likely attributed as much to a lack of outside contact as it was to diet.

The mountain men lived in quarantine bubbles to borrow a phrase from the COVID nineteen pandemic, But it wasn't just these white trappers who believed in the supremacy of living off wild game. The planes tribes had long recognized the power of eating meat, and even looked down upon tribes

who practiced agriculture or relied on white man's food. Again and again in the historic record you find accounts from white Easterners coming to the West and experiencing a new vitality when adopting the strict diet of wild meat that

supported Native American nomadic hunters. A few decades after the close of the Mountain Men era, when sickly malnourished veterans of the Civil War were coming west to try to expel Indians from their buffalo hunting grounds, they encountered in their enemies a level of strength and physical endurance that they could overcome only through advanced firepower and superior numbers. One on one, a white soldier fed on beans and salt pork en hardened bread riddled with larva was little

match for a Native combatant raised on buffalo meat. In Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which is, in my opinion, the best thing that ever has been, or likely ever will be, written, about General Custer's humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The author describes an unk Papa Sioux warrior named Gall, who played a central role in that fight. Gall happened to have

his portrait taken in the infancy of photography. Conall writes, quote, Gall was a man of such explosive strength that he fairly cracks the photographer's glass. Every plate reveals a leader of prodigious psychic and physical energy. Full length photos make him look squat with short, bent legs and a torso the size of a beer keg. Twelve years after the

Great Fight, he stepped on a scale. He weighed two hundred and sixty pounds at the Little Big Horn, with white stripes painted on his arms and a hatchet in one thick hand, and the fullness of manhood. He must have galloped through Custer's desperate troopers like a wolf through a flock of sheep. How's that for a buffalo meat testimonial? And when it came to the preferences of the mountain men,

buffalo was top choice. With their wooly hides, massive hump and sharply curved horns, these creatures roamed the great plains and inner mountain valleys of the rockies in herds numbering in the thousands. At the beginning of the mountain Man era, the total population was perhaps as high as thirty million. The animals were seemingly everywhere in mountain Man country, so much so that their absence, rather than presents, would be noted in journals, unless, of course, they were two present.

Then you'll encounter mentions of an annoying abundance. One traveler wrote, quote, during our progress, we were obliged to keep men in advance to frighten the buffaloes in our path. That day, the author mentioned his party killed one hundred and ten buffalo, saving only the tongues and hump ribs. I could fill this whole chapter with nothing but accounts of people trying to describe the immensity of the herds, and I wouldn't

be able to fit them all in. Here's just one about a herd of unfathomable size trying to cross a river. There was quote such a dense and continuous column that it formed a temporary dam, causing the current to quote rise and rush over their backs. The roaring and rushing sound of one of these vast herds crossing a river may sometimes in a still night be heard for miles.

In my own book about the animals American Buffalo, in Search of a Lost Icon, I described the immensities through witness accounts of mass buffalo drownings that occurred as a result of these chaotic river crossings. In May seventeen ninety five, a man counted seven thousand, six hundred and thirty that drowned en Mass in Saskatchewan. In eighteen twenty nine, another man in Saskatchewan counted ten thousand dead in the river.

In the early eighteen thirties, a traveler along the Missouri River found multiple sleughs holding eighteen hundred or more drowned carcasses. Another traveler watched thousands of carcasses drift by in a river in a continuous line, where the stench was so bad he couldn't eat dinner. The Indians he traveled with told him every spring was about the same. Given the sheer abundance of these animals at the time, there aren't a lot of mountain man stories about wild and daring

buffalo hunts. For the most part, they rode up on them, or did a short down wind sneak on them and shot them through the lungs. Of the rifle slug. There just wasn't much to it. Hunting buffalo was often more of a grocery run than anything else. The mountain men butchered buffalo in what was known as the Indian manner, which wasn't terribly dissimilar to what's known as the gutlass method among big game hunters today, positioning the animal on its belly with the knees folded and legs propped out

on either side. To hold the body upright. They'd cock the neck around sideways so it looked like the animal was watching its back trail. This stabilized the animal from rolling in that direction. You could wedge a rock or an old buffalo skull opposite the head to prop it up on the other side. It's hard to generalize about what the mountain men would and wouldn't use from a buffalo carcass once they got started, because it depended a little bit on personal taste and depended a lot on

how hard up for food they were. They got picky when resources were abundant. One observer described how men were quote rendered dainty by profusion and would cook only the choicest pieces. So in relatively normal times, when a buffalo was meant to provide a knight's meal for a small band of trappers who weren't worried about what they'd eat tomorrow. Here's what might happen. They'd open up the animal's hide

with a cut along the spine. Then they'd peel the hide back on either side, exposing the backstraps, and also a sometimes two inch thick layer of fat along each side of the hump that they would call the depui. This layer of fat was a favorite cut of the mountain men and native people alike. Beneath the fat were the hump ribs, the protrusions of muscle on either side of a buffalo's spine just behind its head. Removing the hump ribs required the use of a hatchet or tomahawk.

The Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg described using a buffalo's legs as a mallet to bust off the hump ribs, and he pointed out that the hump ribs were the only bones he'd typically remove from the kill site. Same with the mountain men, who'd often satisfy themselves with just this cut alone, plus maybe the tongue removed through the triangle

of soft hide underneath the animal's lower jaw. If more meat was kneeded, or if buffalo were scarce, they would de bone the front and rear quarters as well and bundle it all up, maybe twenty large pieces or so inside folded sacks made from the buffalo's hide. Depending a mood and taste and need, they might also remove the fleece a word for additional layers of fat found beneath the hide. They'd take the femurs and shin bones to be roasted in coals before smacking them open with a

rock or hatchet to get out the marrow. They'd crack the skull open with a hatchet and eat the brains raw. They'd drink the blood. They might mimic the planes tribes and drink the mother's milk from ripened mammaries. They'd squeeze the contents of the gall bladder over the liver and eat it raw as well. Sometimes they just drank the gall straight, as one account suggests quote a man could get quite a glow if he took it straight on

an empty stomach. The mountain men did not travel with an assortment of cast iron pots and pans and wire grates, which would have been too heavy and cumbersome. Instead, they had a minimalist kit. They demonstrated a fondness for spit roasting meat, often skewing great hunks of buffalo on a green stick and slow cooking it over the glowing embers of a campfire. Out on the prayer, where firewood was

hard to find, Buffalo dung served as a substitute. A common technique would be to alternate chunks of fat with chunks of lean meat on a sharpened stick, which would then either be held over the fire or pushed into

the ground next to it. In other instances, a big hunk of meat would simply be placed in the coals of a fire directly the mountain man Osbourne Russell described a camp keeper rolling out a quote ponderous mass of bull beef meaning meat from a male buffalo, from a smoldering fire pit, and then smacking it with a club to knock the ashes off of it. Each whack with the club made the chunk of meat fly in the

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

it like bread and cheese. In another instance, George Ruxton observed several men quote retreating from the campfire to enjoy solo their half cooked morsels. Trappers also made jerky and pemmican to preserve their harvests against spoilage. To make jerky or jerk, thin strips of meat cut along the grain would be hung on racks of cottonwood branches or willow stems. Sun Wind and a slow fire underneath the racks would dry out these lean strips into a product that kept

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

buffalo bladders, and then mixed together at meal time. One account mentioned that pemmican was quote used throughout the country as familiarly as we use bread in the civilized world. Of course, buffalo was rarely the only thing on the mountain man's menu. Elk was probably the second most commonly eaten meat after buffalo, Either that or, depending on the area, bighorn sheep they ate, mule de or two and bears both black and grizzly, and pronghorn or antelope. Mountain lion

meat or painter meat was especially prized. There were far far more big horn sheep on the landscape back then, before huge numbers of the animals were killed off by a strain of pneumonia introduced to the West by domesticated

sheep from Europe. Places that now hold decent herds of elk used to hold tremendous herds of big horns osbourne and russell were called sitting atop a mountain where quote and I could scarcely be cast in any direction around, or above or below without seeing fat sheep gazing at us with anxious curiosity, or lazily feeding among the rocks and scrubby pines. Numerous accounts compare the meat of bighorn or mountain sheep as they were known to mutton. Frequently.

Stories about killing sheep remark on the difficulty of getting a shot at and recovering these animals. William H. Ashley observed that quote they were so wild, and the country so rugged, we found it impossible to approach them. Likewise, the artist George Catlan observed that bighorn sheep had a tendency to make themselves quote secure from their enemies, to whom the sides and slopes of these bluffs around which they fearlessly bound are nearly inaccessible. Pursuing these creatures was

quote attended with great danger. Osborne and Russell wrote, especially in the winter season, when the rocks and precipices are covered with snow and ice, these efforts were worth the rewards. However, Washington Irving noted that the quote gormands of the camp pronounced big horns to have the flo of excellent mutton, while another count states that sheep were known as quote the game part excellence of the Rocky Mountains, which takes

precedence in a commescible point of view. George Ruxton declared it to be a choice supply of meat, certainly the best I had eaten in the mountains. One winter, Osborne Russell and some fifteen of his fellow mountain men attempted to stay as long as they could at a place they called Mutton Hill, forty miles southeast of Fort Hall in southeast Idaho. There they lived on big horn sheep until heavy snows drove the trappers out of the area

in February. Another time, in eighteen thirty nine, Russell and some other mountain men attempted to overwinter at Fort Hall, where they figured they could live off buffalo meat. When they got tired of dried buffalo, instead of going lower to seek milder weather, they actually push higher into the mountains to the head of the south fork of the Snake River, and quote spent the remainder of the winter killing and eating mountain sheep. While Ruxton preferred big horn,

he was cool with pronghorn as well. The animal, he wrote, quote affords the hunter a sweet and nutritious meat, when that of nearly every other description of game from the poorness and scarcity of the grass during the winter, is barely eatable. Among those barely eatable critters, according to Ruxton, were elk killed midwinter. Quote. The meat of the elk is strong flavored, and more like poor bull than venison. It is only eatable when the animal is fat and

in good condition. At other times it is strong, tasted and stringy. The three elk Jedediah Smith killed in mid June of eighteen twenty eight were probably in great shape, as he recorded that quote, men could be seen in every part of the camp with meat raw and half roasted in their hands, devouring it with the greatest alacrity. Bear meat, both black and grizzly, was well regarded. According to Rufus Sage, bear meat quote to be tender and good,

should be boiled at least ten hours. Sage recounted an episode when a bear was drawn into camp by the smell of fresh buffalo meat. After several of the men shot and wounded it, the bear charged and spooked off their horses, while the trappers climbed trees for safety until one managed to kill the bear with a pistol shot to the head. They then butchered there quote greasy victim, and enjoyed a ample feast of bear's liver, heart and

kidneys basted with fat. Then they filled a large kettle with its fleece and ribs, which they boiled overnight and enjoyed the following day. Osbourne Russell described the preparation of a stew made from two fat grizzly bears. Kettles filled with bear meat and fat were hung over a fire, and the group appointed one of the old trappers to determine when it was done. Having not had much to eat for the past few days, Russell noted that quote, I thought with my comrades that it took longer to

cook than any meal I ever saw prepared. Beaver carcasses, being as central to a mountain man's existence as grease to a short order cook, trappers had their preferred ways of dealing with them. The mountain man's passion for beaver tail is well documented. When you pierce a beaver tail on a skewer and let it roast next to a fire, the blackish scaly skinned bubbles and peels away to reveal

a tailbone encased and gristle in fat. That's not unlike someone might leave behind on their plate after enjoying a steak during lean times of eating poor or thin game meat, that fat would have been heavenly. As one account described it, the beaver tail was quote considered even a greater dainty than the tongue or the marrow bone of a buffalo.

We get another picture of what hungry mountain men were forced to eat from the trapper James O. Paddy, who was born in Kentucky and worked the beaver streams of the Southwest in the late eighteen twenties. He was a fellow I mentioned earlier who cleaned up while trapping on the lower Colorado River, catching thirty six beavers and forty sets.

At one point while traveling through some tough country, Paddy and his party got caught for four and a half days without anything to eat, except for a small jack rabbit caught by his dog. It didn't go far. When split among seven men, Patty noted that we were all reluctant to begin to partake of the horse flesh, but they apparently got over whatever uneasiness they felt. Unfortunately, they found that quote the actual thing without bread or salt

was as bad as the anticipation of it. Later, Patty's men would kill and eat a raven, which he described as a nauseous bird with unsavory flesh, a buzzard which was disagreeable, and finally, after a bit of heartbreak, a dog. The men drew lots like drawing straws to decide who would be responsible for killing their canine companion. But Paddy noted that the meat was sweet, nutritive, and strengthening rufus sage, couldn't in good conscience hide his affinity for dog meat.

Quote justice impels me to say, the flesh of a fat Indian dog, suitably cooked, is not inferior to fresh pork, And by placing side by side select parts of the two, it would be no easy task, even for a good judge to tell the difference whether they liked it or not.

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

before us, filled with this delicate preparation. A dog feast is the greatest compliment a Dakota can offer to his guest, and, knowing that to refuse eating would be an affront, we attacked the little dog and devoured him before the eyes of his unconscious parent. But let's return to the subject of starvation. Patty's account of eating ravens and buzzards opens a window into how bad things could get, even though

we know they could get way worse. Anyone wanting to explore the incremental steps of desperation taken by starving folks might look to the infamous story of the Donner Party, which is fair game and in a out of the mountain Men because Jim Bridger himself provided them with some poor advice on their root selection, and doing so he

helped them along toward their agonizing ordeal. When stranded and snow bound high in the Sierra Nevadas of California, there the party is forced to eat the starved oxen that were supposed to pull their wagons. They use the ox hides to cover their makeshift shelters, but soon they're boiling and eating dried strips of the ox hide roofs. Then they're eating one another. First they're scavenging the carcasses of the already deceased, but before long they're hurrying one another

long to death with the help of a bullet. If dead mountain men could talk, no doubt they'd have better, which is to say, worse stories to tell. But the mountain man Jedediah Smith, who is no stranger to horrible experiences observed that starving men prefer to keep quiet. According to Smith quote, men suffering from hunger never talk much, but rather bare their sorrows in moody silence, which is

more preferable to fruitless complaints. One time, a group of mountain men traveling along a tributary of the San Juan River in present day Colorado was caught without food and tried roasting some cactus in a fire. They must have chosen one of the several poisonous varieties on the landscape. A few hours later, the men felt weak and then

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

scarcely inferior to beef. Now this is something that you'll see again and again in accounts from this period a hungry party killing and eating their horses and mules, but not everyone gave such rave reviews to the flesh of their domesticated animals. Charles Larpentur described eating the liver and ribs of an old mare shot by one of his comrades as quote, needing a great deal of seasoning to

make it palatable. The liver had been thrown into the coals, and quote turned so very black that at first I thought it was impossible to eat any But Larpentur was a generous food critic. He was starving another time and went three days without food. That's when he quote thought of a dried buffalo sinew, which I had in my bullet pouch to men moccasins. I pulled it out out and cut it in two, offering my hunter, meaning his companion,

a part of it, which he refused. So without asking a second time, I demolished the sinew, which I found excellent, except that it was too small. In desperate moments like these, the mountain men were liable to devour anything they came across that resembled food, whether they had any right to

it or not. Joseph Walker, a Tennessee born trapper who worked out of Taos, New Mexico, and later made his way to the Green River Country, recalled stumbling upon a small Native village in the Great Basin region today's Nevada, whose occupants fled at the site of a party of

white men. The mountain men were in rough shape, having been out of food for several days, and they were delighted to discover among the abandoned lodges several bags made of animal skins filled with quote what appeared to be fish, dried and pounded. They stole the bags and ate hartily that night around the campfire. In the morning, they were startled to find that the bags had in fact been

filled with insect larvae. In another instant, several trappers, among them Richard Lacy Wooden known as Uncle Dick, were traveling along the Colorado River in eighteen thirty eight when they approached a Yuma village in hopes of securing something to eat. A few of the men brought back to the rest of the party what they assumed to be bred, but noted that it had a very unfamiliar taste. Upon closer examination, the biscuits were in fact cakes made of crushed red ants,

mashed together and dried in the sun. Starvation was not the only danger that lurked in the wilderness. There was also the ever present threat of thirst, which is far worse than hunger. When traveling across the prairie on the way back to Missouri, Rufus Sage and his men ran out of water, still fifteen miles away from the nearest river, under the high July sun. He found it to be maddening. Quote. I can endure hunger for many days in succession without

experiencing any very painful sensations. I can lie down and forget it in the sweet unconsciousness of sleep, or feast my imagination upon the rich spread tables of dreams. But not so with thirst. It cannot be forgotten sleeping or waking. It will make itself known and felt. It will part your tongue and burn your throat. Despite your utmost endeavors to thrust it from memory. The mountain men did have tricks to get through it. They'd drink the blood of

freshly killed game, or even their own piss or. They'd chew the roots of Oregon grape, which were said to have medicinal properties that could stave off the worst effects of dehydration when offered the heart of a dead bison. One man wrote that quote immediately as it touched my lips, my burning thirst got the better of my abhorrence. I plunged my head into the reeking ventricles and drank until forced to stop for breath. But you still just had

to press on. That's what Nathaniel Wyis Rendezvous Bound Expedition did in eighteen thirty four. When they went for several days without water in Wyoming, it was miserable. Their tongues were swollen, and their lips were cracked and bleeding from the relentless sun. According to our source, a man by the name of Richardson was quote masticating a leaden bullet to excite the salivary glands. Finally, they took a mangled

buffalo and tipped it on its side. One of the men stuck his knife into the air animal's distended belly and was rewarded with a gush of quote green and gelatinous juices mingled with the half digested contents of its stomach. Gagging, the thirst crazed men half heartedly strained the liquid into a tin pan. Hoping to remove the worst of the impurities.

And then, with trembling hands, they raised the dripping pan to their lips and drank deep, quote with the satisfaction of a man taking his wine after dinner, a desperate act of survival in a land that knew little mercy.