00:00:05 Speaker 1: When I was young, men bragged on how hard they work. Well, we've got the point. Now people brag on how hard they don't work. You would never meet an old mountain person who bragged on being lazy. 00:00:18 Speaker 2: Perhaps there are a lot of ways in which to tell a dog story, the story of a breed. We could talk about specific legendary hounds and their exploits, or tell stories about the trades of the breed, or nerd out about breeding strategy and dog lineages. But to me, the most interesting thing about the American plot hound is how it's been interwoven into the lives of the Appalachian people. This is part two in our series on these brindled bear dogs. Developed in isolation, deep in the Great Smoky Mountains. The plot breed was tailor made for the rugged landscape, its people, and its bears. I'm fascinated with the folks who've dedicated big blocks of their life to this bear hound. They're called plot men and women, and if you cut them, they bleed brindle. And in the very niche hound world, some rise to the top as leaders and might even be considered plot royalty. One such man, as the late Barry Tarlton of Greenville, Tennessee. His life will give us a much bigger vista than just dogs, but a rare, authentic peak into Appalachia, its culture, its people, and its ways in a fortuitous twist. It will be told to us in part first person through an archival interview of Barry, but mainly through the collective voices of his grandson and great grandson, Tracy and Ben Jones. Barry started the Houston Valley Strain of plots. He's in the Plot Hall of Fame, the Tennessee Bear Hunters Hall of Fame, and was a legendary law man who took up a badge and gun in the name of family honor decades chasing down and busting moonshiners in East Tennessee. The stories are as wild as the mountains themselves. You're about to see that plot. Hounds are just part of the plot. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. 00:02:16 Speaker 1: He said I had to take revenge, and he said I could either do it legally or illegally his exact words, and he said, I decided to do it legally. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land, presented by FHF gear, American made, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place. As we explore, I'm in Greenville, Tennessee, at the home of Tracy Jones. He's sitting on the left side of a beige love seat with his iPhone in his hand, looking over my right shoulder. Out of a sliding glass door. Across a pasture, I can see a grand view of weather worn mountains like mute time capsules. They've witnessed the progression of mankind, but speak narry and intelligible word. Tracy lives fifty miles northwest as the crow flies from the Plot Genesis Center in Haywood County, North Carolina. Tracy is a pastor, a farmer. He loves racking horses, but he's a generational plot man, and he came by it honest. Between here and the hills, about one hundred and fifty yards behind the house, I can see a line of dog houses and a pack of dark brindle bear hounds. Tracy is calling his mother and aunt to ask about the car bombing. 00:04:16 Speaker 3: I'm eavesdropping. 00:04:18 Speaker 1: Are you there, hey? Mom Y? I was asking Aunt Sandy about the story about the house, the car being blowed up at the house. She said she thought it was in fifty seven. 00:04:28 Speaker 4: Yeah, he was. 00:04:29 Speaker 5: Sandy was just a baby. She's still little. Daddy was still, you know, warming her bottle, so she was little. 00:04:35 Speaker 1: How old were you, Well, I had be five, I guess five years old. What time of night did it happen? 00:04:42 Speaker 5: Oh, it must have been early three or four o'clock because Daddy was warming on Sandy's bottle, and then he was gonna get ready to go to work, and the dogs was barking, and he was gonna go out there, and mom and said, let them dogs bark and kick that young's bottle. And then we heard. 00:04:57 Speaker 1: The explosion, didn't shake the house, thinking. 00:05:03 Speaker 5: I had damage to my hearing for a while. Yeah, that was praid you would and I thought I would to because I was sleeping on the couch rip beside of them drop beside the car, and Grandpa come running across the road saying, I knew that stove would blow up. 00:05:20 Speaker 3: Now I remember that. 00:05:25 Speaker 2: I told you this story was bigger than plot hounds. But somewhere deep in the marrow of it will find them. Barry Tarlton was born in nineteen twenty three and passed away on June fifth, twenty twelve, at the age of eighty four. Those were Berry's two daughters, Jane and Sandy, telling the story about the car bombing, among many other things. Barry was elected constable, a law enforcement position in the mid nineteen fifties, and served for twenty four years. He had a personal vendetta against the illegal moonshine trade in his community. Here's some context from his grandson Tracy on why his family was attacked. 00:06:15 Speaker 1: Not every moonshine i was a murderer. I mean, it's to make that straight. Some of them were just old boys that wanted to make some money. But some of them are really mean. I mean kill you mean, just like drug Not every drug dealer is a murderer, but some are. And they hated him. So one night they snuck into his house. He had a dog there that run loose in the yard. They killed it. Then they packed his car with dynamite and blew the car up beside the house, just to try to send him a message out. I actually think they tried to blow the house up with the car, but they just didn't get the job done. Ye know. There's a funny twist of that story too, because my great grandparents lived across the road from him, and Papa had just got a new ol stove. 00:06:59 Speaker 6: You know. 00:06:59 Speaker 1: They went from would Oh and it drove my Grandpa Shipley was ticked about it because you said that fancy thing will blow up and killian's all. So the night that the moonshine car, the car was blown up with the moonshiners, Grandpa Shipley run out in the highway with his long handle underwear on, screaming, I told you that old Stow would blow up kill y'all. 00:07:20 Speaker 3: He is like the new technology. 00:07:23 Speaker 1: Wow. 00:07:25 Speaker 2: They hated Barry because he was relentless in his pursuit when he caught them. He was just and he was extremely good at his job. The men who bombed Barry's car were caught when somebody snitched on them, but the bomber was killed before he ever went to trial. That's all we know. This was a dangerous place, and it's a rare thing in the bear grease world. When we're talking about someone who's no longer on this earth that we actually get to hear from them firsthand. But luckily for us, in early twenty twelve, just months for Barry's passing, Bob Plot Yes, our friend author and plot descendant, Bob came to interview the old bear Hunter, though only a shell of what he once was. Tracy filmed the interview with his grandfather. This is the voice of Barry Tarleton. Tracy had prodded him on why he got into law enforcement. It was deeply personal. 00:08:27 Speaker 1: Got started. 00:08:28 Speaker 7: How's your brothers get Oh yeah, I had two brothers get killed one jare Well. 00:08:32 Speaker 6: One of them got killed. 00:08:34 Speaker 7: The guy shifted up behind him because through and he hadn't got killed. Lads in the house, so you know something keep sitting in chair and just yeah, shutting around faced shown. So that's what got me started law Ladies, Well, back that time, we had a lot of killing. It in Neked Mountains. It just shivered every year. If you want to get somebody, I just. 00:09:01 Speaker 6: Get heard of. 00:09:04 Speaker 2: Two of Barry's six brothers got killed in relation to alcohol. He said there was a lot of killing in the mountains and quote, he just got tired of it, no flash, no fluff. It was just that simple to the old mountain man. Here's Tracy expounding more on his grandfather's brothers being murdered. 00:09:26 Speaker 1: I know you're fascinated by the subject and have had on your podcast, and I don't want to go into it very much, but the moonshine deal was a big part of that. You know, there's been a revival of like some kind of romantic type notion of moonshine that wasn't true among the mountain people today. It's, you know, a bill board in Gatlinburg and something you do when you come to Tennessee to visit. But when you hear people like my grandfather and others talk about it, it just wrecked homes, wrecked lives, destroyed people. My grandfather had a couple of brothers that were murdered in reference to alcohol liquor. 00:10:05 Speaker 3: They were moonshining. 00:10:07 Speaker 1: No. The one brother went to the home of some people, and the family story is vague, but it involved alcohol to some extent, and the brother got his head blowed off the shotgun. The other brother was found up here in the creek with his throat cut. They just cut his throat, left him laying in the creek. Alcohol was involved with that. And then one of my grandfathers would have been his nephews. He was fifteen years old, was given bad liquor and slipped back to the house, went into his went to bed, and he drowned that night in his own vomit. So our experience with alcohol was like the rest of Appalachia. The liquor business was a very small fraction of people who involved themselves with that, and the bulk of Appalachian people hated it. But that's not what you would believe today based on you know, the billboards and the stories and all that that go with it. 00:11:06 Speaker 2: That's some interesting insight from Tracy. Let's keep going into this story. So Barry Tarleton, your grandfather, both his brothers were killed, murdered, murdered because of alcohol related incidents here in the mountains. 00:11:22 Speaker 3: And then what did he do. 00:11:24 Speaker 1: Well, His words to me were this, he said, I had to take. 00:11:28 Speaker 3: Revenge, revenge. He used the word revenge. 00:11:31 Speaker 1: He used the word revenge. He said I had to take revenge. And he said I could either do it legally or illegally his exact words. And he said, I decided to do it legally, so he ran for constable and spent decades hunting the moonshiners down and send them to prison. And they hated him. See it wasn't over untaxed liquor. My grandpa or anybals don't care no more for reverneurs and tax money than anybody else. A lot of people think, well, that's just a government thing that just hated those poor mountain people because they had untaxed liquor. That's not Papall's motive. He could have cared less about the taxes paid on it. To him, it was destroying his community. It was a dangerous place to live, but Patpaull cleaned the place up and he was viewed as a hero in the community. 00:12:23 Speaker 2: Barry Tarlton was an undisputed hero in Green County, Tennessee, or at least with the people who weren't making moonshine. To this day, I'd say, if you ask a long time local in Greenville if they knew of Barry, they will and they all say the same thing. And hey, don't forget this story is about plotthounds. 00:12:43 Speaker 3: We'll get there. 00:12:47 Speaker 2: Tracy and I were on a drive down a gravel road. We pulled over when we saw a lady that he knew. I'm nervous to put the mic in her face. Tracy tries to explain to her that I'm interested in Barry Tarleton. Tracy's never heard this story before. 00:13:05 Speaker 1: He was interested in the customable work he did and chasing the moonshiners and stuff. 00:13:13 Speaker 3: She just said, he caught my daddy a few times. 00:13:17 Speaker 2: Can I record you telling this story? 00:13:20 Speaker 3: I won't, I won't, I won't. Yeah, tell me the story. Tell me again. So Barry caught your dad? Is that what you said? 00:13:26 Speaker 8: Daddy had gone over to wards over here and got some moonshine and they put it in a sack of corn and put it in the back of Daddy's car. Well, Berry's apparently seen him come out of there, and he pulled him over, and he dumped all that corn out and got that moonshine, took Daddy to jail, and mama didn't know how to drive, but Barry didn't know that, so he figured since she was a woman, she knew how to drive, so he said, take the car and take the kids and going home. That's what she. 00:13:51 Speaker 2: Did, and he took your dad to jail. We continue on our drive. But a few minutes later we pull over to talk to Tracy cousin Scottie. We asked him about Barry. I stick the mic again out the window to a fellow who had no idea we were coming. Tracy had never heard this story either. 00:14:12 Speaker 3: Well, it's kind of awkward just driving up in somebody yard and putting the mike in their face. But what would what would Barry's reputation have been in this community? Law man? Yeah, he was a law man. 00:14:26 Speaker 4: When I was young, me and my cousin used to ride bicycles on the road. We've been down there riding the bicycles and. 00:14:33 Speaker 3: Here a gunshots. 00:14:35 Speaker 4: Here come Borie chasing somebody. 00:14:37 Speaker 7: They're shooting back and forth. 00:14:38 Speaker 4: Me and him had to get off the bicycles and getting the ditch line, keep getting shot. 00:14:43 Speaker 8: Is that right? 00:14:44 Speaker 3: You remember a gunfight? Oh yeah, they're going on by shooting and one another. 00:14:48 Speaker 4: That didn't help, but they didn't didn't stop right there. 00:14:51 Speaker 3: But well, he finally would know. Did you ever learn what the story was? He called them moonshiners. 00:14:57 Speaker 4: Moonshiners, moonshiner that's what he's mostly done. This areas chase moonshiners. He is a good man. 00:15:05 Speaker 7: He is. 00:15:05 Speaker 4: He is a deacon in our church. Okay, that's how good a man he was. 00:15:11 Speaker 2: In the audio we have of Barry, he talks some about his law enforcement, but not much. The stories are short and to the point. It's doubtful that this is the one that Scotty witnessed. But here's Barry telling a story about shooting the back glass out of a moonshiner's car. 00:15:29 Speaker 7: I know today I was driving up metal here one Sunday evening. Uh huh, and I've seen you slew the whiskey can tell you. 00:15:36 Speaker 6: And I was made. 00:15:37 Speaker 7: He go to congress. 00:15:41 Speaker 6: He was shot. I did a shot back. 00:15:46 Speaker 7: Right on lef throat Darren Frond coaching or eisas playing clothes and went down. 00:15:50 Speaker 6: And he says, I talked the man he care somebody shout his last ye me so tasmania back in there. 00:16:02 Speaker 7: I should rast it. 00:16:06 Speaker 2: When the guy pulled over, he didn't know that Barry was the one who'd shot his glass out. The point of these stories is how common shootouts were, and Barry wasn't one to embellish his story. 00:16:17 Speaker 3: But here's another. It's short but shocking. 00:16:21 Speaker 2: He starts off by saying they tried to bushwhack me one time. 00:16:26 Speaker 7: They tried to push one time, Tommy garn there's some side of the car. I'd be allowed to the other side of the shot. That's in York Caroline day line. 00:16:42 Speaker 2: He just said they bush whacked him and shot his car with the Tommy gun on the Tennessee North Carolina state line. Barry rolls out of the passenger side and begins to fire back with his shotgun. He closes the story with a chuckle, saying it was over in just a little bit. I'm telling you, Hollywood would have a hard time keeping up with the untold and true stories of Barry. In East Tennessee, he once busted a thousand gallon whiskey steel, which was on the front page of the Greenville newspaper. The bust also led Barry to solving a murder case. One of the young Moonshiners had killed a man by knocking him in the head with a pair of pliers for seventy eight cents and hid the man's body in the woods. Barry got the truth out of him and found the body. This stuff is wild, and don't forget that. This is the story about plot hounds. So don't get too enamored with all these wild stories because we're just getting started. This is some serious bear gree stuff, man. But I want to learn how Barry, as constable was able to go out and take down the moonshine trade in his community. 00:17:54 Speaker 3: Here's Tracy. 00:17:57 Speaker 1: So what did he do? 00:17:58 Speaker 3: How would he a constable go about breaking up some of these systems. 00:18:03 Speaker 1: Well, it's basically two things that just happened over and over again. One is he would find out where steel was at. He would go in at night and sometimes catch him on the steel, and sometimes not. If he caught him on the still, he rested them and took them in and destroyed the steel. He didn't always catch him on the stell. 00:18:21 Speaker 8: You know. 00:18:21 Speaker 1: That was just sometimes they were there, sometimes they were not. But a lot of times they would camp on the still and stay there with it under cover of darkness. You don't see smoke at night, but you know. Then the other method was Houston Valley was a thoroughfare for people out of a different county to go to Ashville. And Papal told me that they wouldn't go through Hot Springs because there was a railroad track that crossed the highway, and if they happened to time it wrong and the train was coming through, the moonshiner would have to stop at the train and the law could catch him at the tracks. So they would come through Houston Valley to try to get to the night have to stop, yes, because there was no railroad tracks. So I might run you down there later and show you there's a little small bridge. You don't even notice it. It's just like over a little tiny creek. Papa was set up right before that bridge, and he would have another car up the little road down below him, and the shiners would come run up on his stop point, and if they tried to get away, the other car was already behind them, and then he would also just wait from them to come down the road. He just set in Houston Valley and wait for him to come through, you know, with their car bent down on the hind end, and run them down. Now, I do get a kick out this story. Everybody likes to talk about how well moonshiners can drive, because that's the beginning of NASCAR, the shine drivers. 00:19:43 Speaker 3: That's the folklore around NASCAR that it started with guys trying to outrun the law. 00:19:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, but I get a kick out of it because I say, well, if you think the moonshiners can drive, you ought to have met the revenuers because they run them down all the time. And my grandpa and my grandma would work together and she would be prepared and when he would run a car down and run it off the road, get it stopped if he had to, he would take the guy driving the car to jail, and then my grandma would drive the moonshine car to the jail with the load of liquor. 00:20:19 Speaker 2: Grandma riding down the road with a load of liquor. Now that's interesting. We're going to learn quite a bit more about Grandma in just a minute. Her name was Hazel and they were a unique pair. But hold your East Tennessee racking horses, because this isn't even what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about his Houston Valley plots. This moonshine busting is just a sideshow to Barry's family, his work, and his plot hounds. His passion in his life, besides protecting and loving his family, was his hounds. No doubt, though his law enforcement work and his motivations are a fascinating aspect of his life. On the last episode, we explored the American plot house genesis story, and I'm glad to report that I'm still alive and well. To my knowledge, no one has tried to assassinate me, though the episode certainly lifted both dander and grins. But the conclusion we arrived at is it doesn't really matter how the dogs got here, whether those five dogs were on the ship with Johannes Plot or not. The Plot dog arose from the frontier hollows of southern Appalachia in the early nineteen hundreds like a four legged, sabertailed brindle Champion prize bear fighter, fully developed, having been kept in regional isolation by a tight circle of bear hunters for one hundred and fifty years. 00:21:53 Speaker 3: In the early nineteen hundreds. 00:21:55 Speaker 2: When this part of Appalachia began to open up, sports writers came and hunted with these Brens dogs in the Plot family, who's bred, hunted and developed the breed for over a century. In the early nineteen hundreds, the New York Times printed an article calling them Plot Hounds. The national attention on these dogs began to grow. In nineteen forty six, the UKC officially recognized the American plot hound breed in their registry, and the demand for these hounds is bear, coon, mountain, lion, and hogdogs skyrocketed. And I haven't expounded on this yet, but the hound received global recognition. Houndsmen from Spain, Denmark, Russia and other places still come to the epicenter of the plot world and Appalachias today, paying large sums of money to get what is, in their mind the finest hounds on planet Earth. This isn't hearsay. This happens a lot. As a matter of fact, I have personally been approached by bear hunters from Russia and Spain reaching out to me wanting to buy America plot hounds. Like I said from the beginning, the most interesting thing about the plot hound to me is the human part of their story will begin right at the start. Who was Bury Tarleton? 00:23:15 Speaker 1: Here's Tracy Well to me, it was my papa. That's the regional term for grandfather. And in the community, he wore a lot of different hats. He started work at a place called pet Milk when he was sixteen, worked there day, retired, never had a different job. But he also was a constable and then he was a farmer. He bought the farm that we live on. He bought it in nineteen fifty five. The deed says that he paid an unspecified amount of money some kind of trade goods, and assumed a debt of five thousand some dollars that the people owed on the place. He lived in the mountains, the farms out just at the foothills. He always wanted to move from where he grew up to here to live, which is about ten miles away. But my grandma had a plot of ground on her family farm, and she wouldn't move off of it. Jesus would not move away from her home. 00:24:15 Speaker 2: Hazel, Barry's wife, would never leave her home place. That's where she and Barry lived their whole lives. Barry was also deputized in Madison County, North Carolina, so he could chase moonshiners across the state line without stopping. However, he spent his entire career forty eight years at pet Milk in Greenville, Tennessee. Here's more from Tracy on some unique specifics of Barry's life. 00:24:44 Speaker 1: His daily routine was insane his whole life. He had to be at work, I'd say four thirty It was very early and he worked till two thirty or three at the milk plant. He would get off from there go buy the farm, feed or whatever he had to do cattle, farm, cattle, hogs, tobacco, hay. Then he would go home and feed his dogs. He kept a lot of dogs, you know, sometimes as many as twenty. There was no too many dogs for him. I tell this story a lot. His wife's name was Hazel. He had an old seventy eight Ford truck and you could hear him coming about a half a mile away, had big little called co op gripspur tires. You could hear him rumbling down the road. Dogs go wild when they'd hear him. When mamma would hear him coming, she would have supper making. He would go up in the doll lock to feed, which was on a hillside. And he was a very strong guy. He could carry two five gallon buckets of water uphill up into his seventies. And while he fed and water at his dogs, she would get supper ready. And when I say ready, I don't mean just cooked. When he walked in the house it would be on the table. He would sit down the table eat while he ate she would go draw his bath water. When he got eating, he got up from the table, he would go take a bath. While he was taking a bath, she went got his pajamas, whatever he was going to wear to sleep in, got all that ready for him, brought it to him. He come out of the bathtub, sat down in his chair, and every night he watched the news. He was insane about it. He listened to an hour of news like it was a religion. When the news went off while he was watching that, she would go turn his bed down, just fold his covers down. But by eight o'clock he went to bed. When he went to bed, she went back into the kitchen and she would take a bowl of cereal, pour his cereal out, put the sugar on it, cover it with a luminium foil, and set out a care for him. The next day, pack his lunch in his lunch box, put it in the refrigerator. And that was their relationship. She loved him, he loved her, yep, And she never wanted much. She just didn't care for things. But she always wanted a good car, and so he would always keep her a good vehicle. And she drove like a maniac, you know, everybody talks about your grandma driving real slow and putting around. She had white knuckle you on the roads down through the valley where they lived. When I tell that story, it makes her sound like some little passive housewife that got run over by some overbearing guy. But nothing was further from the truth. She was a pistol. She was just old school, and she believed that her joint life come from taking care of him. And she went to town once a week on Thursdays to get her hair done and get groceries. Wouldn't go outside the house with her makeup on today to be country. Everybody thinks, you know, being country is dressing down. But the old Mountain people they were not that way. The old Mountain people were not nasty, crude people. The mountain people I grew up around, they had work clothes. Then they usually had good clothes, and some of them would have what they called their Sunday best, even if it was one fair overalls that were only word. 00:28:04 Speaker 3: Of church, old school, he called them. 00:28:10 Speaker 2: Barry and Hazel were married sixty three years until his death in twenty twelve. She adored him and he adored her. The covenant until death. To his part was real to them. 00:28:23 Speaker 3: We're getting a. 00:28:24 Speaker 2: Peak through the veil of time into Appalachia. It might be easy to point a finger and say the housewife of the nineteen fifties America is a relic of the past. 00:28:35 Speaker 3: In some ways it is. It's easy to recognize. 00:28:39 Speaker 2: The perceived faults of the past generation and identified the way that our society has progressed above those faults. But it's harder to understand how we've digressed. How modernity, technology, social norms, these things new to humanity have crept in like a thief. Our current faults and the fruit that produced in decades to come will one day be evident. 00:29:04 Speaker 3: Many are already evident. But it's just interesting to think about. Again. 00:29:09 Speaker 2: I'm so grateful for this recording that we have of Barry. How would you like to hear him tell the story of how he met Hazel. I want to hear it straight from the man himself. 00:29:21 Speaker 7: Well, one Sunday evening, there's an a little thirty five ford down through the valley, and she was walked. It's a road there there. Neighbor rights out a bit of bit uh huh. I stopped and ask her what she's doing. 00:29:31 Speaker 6: She says, she's waiting on a board friend. I said, you get a board friend. She said yeah. I said, well, get ready him. 00:29:39 Speaker 3: I'd like to. 00:29:41 Speaker 6: She said, are you kids? I said no, I am here. So next week they didn't come to show back head And next week I come back now. And she got rid of it. And so and she come down to the store where I was at a little store where I worked in. I understand it. 00:29:58 Speaker 7: She said, turn in and horses out there the man. So he let her go and I got her be with her sixty he's sixty two years. 00:30:10 Speaker 3: Get rid of him because I'd like to go on a date with you. He said, Now that's bold. 00:30:15 Speaker 2: Then Hazel proceeded to call him out to the storekeeper, pointing at Barry, saying that's the man I'm gonna marry. We're kind of building this story backwards. But here's more from Tracy on Barry's early life. And this is all starting to make sense. And remember this is a story about plot hounds or plot dogs. Here's Tracy on what I call possum poverty. 00:30:43 Speaker 1: Papa Barry was born in nineteen twenty eight February of nineteen twenty eight. He was born in Houston, valley, you know, not in a hospital. I'd have to sit down and count them. But he had six or seven brothers and one sister. He was really close to that family, you know. They were very tight knit, and it's one of the neat things was all his life, even up into his eighties, he always referred to his daddy as Poppy, and he always caught his mom mommy. They were extremely poor. I'm talking about destitute type poor family in the mountains there. And when we say poverty, I mean if they caught a possum that was too small for a meal, they would put it in a cage and feed it until it was large enough for a meal to have meat. That's poverty. He was thirteen years old before I ever went to town the first time, and they went on a wagon. He said he was shocked because he thought town was just one big building, because he'd all he ever been to was a country store. He got the town, saw those buildings, he couldn't believe it. He just thought town was a bigger store. I can remember him telling me that him and one of his brothers were sent to the store with a dime. To walk to the store with a dime and his brother wanted to take it and keep it. He had a brother was a little rough. I think he tried to cut Pap off with the knife to take the dime. They fought over it a dime. But I never knew them to be an unhappy people. In fact, I would say, of all the people that I've known in life, he probably handled life better than anybody I've known. Just if he was at work, he was happy because he grew up so poor. He was always thankful to have a job. Within the last two weeks, you know, there's there's a song dropped some dude's mad about his job, and it's real popular right now. Well, I think Papa started to work at pat Milk at a quarter an hour, and he said he was lucky to get the job because everybody wanted it. Coming out of depression. He wouldn't be singing no song about how much he hated his job. He'd laugh about people talking about the good old days. He told me one day, and he was laughing about it. He said, I remember them good old days. He said, I don't want no more of them good old days. 00:32:50 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. 00:32:53 Speaker 2: Fattening a possum out until it's big enough for a decent meal. Is an acute anecdote, a genuine look into hard scrabble poverty, giving us more insight than a government tax return ever could. And I think it's important to interject something made clear to me about Barry. It's that he was a modern man, all for social, economic, and technological progress. Of his three grandchildren, one became a pastor, one has a doctorate a nursing. 00:33:24 Speaker 3: And another a lawyer. 00:33:26 Speaker 2: And for all the hound people out there, he loved tracking callers when they came out. Here's more from Tracy. 00:33:33 Speaker 1: I say this a lot. When I was young, men bragged on how hard they work. Well, we've got the point. Now people brag on how hard they don't work. That was a foreign concept to the old people. You would never meet an old mountain person who bragged on being lazy. Oh you can ask somebody now, Like you stopped by the story, You see a bunch of people sit around the stairs, say, way up to not much, not much of anything. Ain't getting nothing done today? Laugh about it. The old people, they wouldn't want to be associated with laziness whatsoever, not even in a joke. But he loved work, But mostly he loved his dogs. So that's kind of poverty we're talking about. Well, through work and multiple jobs, including the factory, the farming, the constable work. He never stopped, he worked constantly. It would save you know, every penny he could get saved. They were able to build a house, keep decent vehicles, got to where they could take family vacations. And what I'm saying is Papa, on fifty cents an hour could buy a farm. Now, Papa's grandparents only farmed. So you went from only farming to having a job to still keep the farm, to be nearly impossible to get a farm the time my generation came along, you had to go out and get a white collar type job or inherit land to be able to have a farm. Where we live, the land value so high that it was greater than the land's productive ability. So when we talk about poverty, you may have a kid with a nice car and a nice iPhone, he'll never own fifty acres land. Do you see what I'm saying? 00:35:15 Speaker 3: Yeah, you describe that so well, what does that mean? Well? 00:35:20 Speaker 1: I think it means that we viewed people as really poor who had things more important than we have, and we view ourselves as really rich with things that are not very important. 00:35:31 Speaker 2: Tracy has brought up a philosophical question about poverty. Is it completely understood through finances? Who actually was poor? That's something to think about that tickles to the point of cracking the very foundations of our modern society. Perhaps our generation has been hypnotized by overpriced trinkets, giving us a sense of financial superiority over past generations, while things of significant real value are being taking from us while in a glazed stupor. I've got a question for you. How do you evaluate your own life's meaning and value? Is it weighed heavily in economic, social status and external achievement. I don't think Tracy is suggesting that meaning in life is calculated by owning land. 00:36:20 Speaker 3: Either. 00:36:22 Speaker 2: We're gonna let that cast iron skillet soak in some warm water before we try to scrub it out. Tracy keeps coming back to Barry loving as dogs, but he didn't just love any dogs. He loved plot dogs. We're going to get into the details of Barry's line of Houston Valley plots, but we need to understand the deep history of hounds and the Appalachian people. This is fascinating and if you haven't picked it up yet, Tracy Jones is an articulate and insightful fellow. 00:36:56 Speaker 3: Here's Tracy. 00:36:59 Speaker 2: To me. 00:36:59 Speaker 1: To underst stand the Appalachian people, you have to understand that this area was settled by primarily Scots, Irish people and some Germans, but they are all immigrants. Well, the reason they ended up in these mountains is because nobody else wanted them. It's hard to make a living here with a you know, a mewle and forty acres, so the people moved in here. A lot of them come off the border wars between Scotland and England and all that was going on there, and they fought over there like cats and dogs, over borders and especially family honor. You know, if you I read a book one time on why the mountain people, you know, fought each other so much like the hat Fields of McCoy's, and the author really said, it just come down to one thing, his family honor. And you'd rather be dead as somebody to slight your family. But over in you know what the old timers always referred to as the Old Country. They didn't have their own land. It was owed by somebody else. You know, if they had a horse, that would have just been some kind of service horse, and they wouldn't have had hounds at all, because they wouldn't have been allowed to hunt. That'd been saved for the nobility. So when they finally got in here, they were poor. But the one thing they could do is they could raise stock, and the hound put them on the same level as the people they used to be under the thumb of. For instance, George Washington was a houndsman, but he was wealthy. But a guy in these mountains could raise a fox dog that could be better than George Washington's and there was nothing Washington could do to get it. And then they felt the same way about their horses. They got to raising horses, and they would have local horse races, and the poorest dude in the country could end up with the fastest horse. And he may not have a nickel to his name, but if he beats you every serre the horse race, he was the man. I think that the horses and the hounds became so important to the mountain people because they had lived for centuries under the thumbs of other people, and now they could be on top at the things that were the most important to the people that had them under thumb. 00:39:10 Speaker 2: The deep roots of why people love what they love and how the value of that thing has passed from generation to generation isn't always externally obvious. Here it touched the very foundation of the human class structure. Hounds were something that money and class couldn't manipulate, but whether it was earned through generational persistence, ingenuity, woodsmanship, and crafty breeding, the horse and hound delivered a sense of freedom independence. Most of these mountain people didn't have money, but they had hounds. Today this artifact is still evident, but. 00:39:50 Speaker 1: I think it's ingrained in our psyche now that those are the things that not only put you on the same level as the rich guy, but in some cases put you above him. It ain't a thing he can do about it. You may never have his thousand acres, you may never have his clothes, you may never have the future. He could have his kids because of his money, but he can't have your dog, and he can't have your horse, no matter how much money he's got. 00:40:17 Speaker 3: It feels like it feels like too that with these strains of dogs like your family has, it's handing down a cultural heritage to them. That is not in the form of finances. 00:40:34 Speaker 2: And that's really unique, especially as intact as it is like what I see, and it would be with other breeds of dogs and other places, but specifically with the Plot breed. There are Plot families that have handed down these tight strains of dogs for generations, like a financial inheritance, and that's really special. 00:41:02 Speaker 3: That is special. 00:41:04 Speaker 2: Money is handy, and we could all use a little more, but the delivery of a cultural inheritance is true power beyond the physical flesh and bone of something that will eventually fade back into the earth, like a buried hound, the beast becomes a host or a carrier of family identity. Physical things can be temporary tools to deliver imperishable things. Financial distribution has never, nor ever will be just, but neither are hounds. In the words of plot historian John Jackson, most people have not been bequeathed a royal strain of Mountain bear dogs, but some have. I want you to meet Ben Jones, Barry's great grandson. He's twenty nine years old. We're in the dog lot looking at a bunch of dark brindle hounds. So how would you describe to me the way these dogs look like these what do they look like? 00:42:10 Speaker 1: Well? 00:42:11 Speaker 9: I like a dog that is long legged with a small framed body, not huge bones. And I don't like a super long ear on a dog. I don't want to pass their nose for sure. 00:42:26 Speaker 3: What's the premium plot bare hound color? How would you describe it? 00:42:32 Speaker 9: Right there? I like them jet black with just a enough brindled restroom. 00:42:39 Speaker 2: Ben is typically a man of few words but lots of action. I find myself hesitating to brag on young men for fear that my words would entice them to succumb to the darkest villain of their age category, their greatest potential weakness, pride. But I followed Ben in the mountains, and I can tell you Ben is not just a plot man. He's a bear hunter who could stand with the best hunters who've ever laid a boot sole in these mountains. Ben Jones is the real deal, and he is and has been the Jedi master breeder of the Houston Valley plot line for the last ten years. Do you ever think about how I mean, these dogs and some of the dogs and these other places are the I mean, it wouldn't take but a generation to lose all this I mean in terms of the kind of the legacy of your family and stuff. 00:43:39 Speaker 3: Do you ever think about that? 00:43:41 Speaker 2: I mean, especially with losing you know, it's dangerous hunting dogs and stuff. 00:43:46 Speaker 9: Yeah, it's actually almost happened to her or three times in prior years. I mean, I've a forked my life into trying to hold onto that strain without breaking it. And to this point it's still an unbroken chain since nineteen fifty three. 00:44:07 Speaker 3: Why do you like a plot dog more than another dog? 00:44:11 Speaker 1: Well, truthfully, I don't like plots over other. 00:44:14 Speaker 9: Dogs, but I like my plots. 00:44:20 Speaker 2: In that statement, you see the practicality of these Appalachian plot men, And like I said, in some ways we're telling this story backwards. I want to ask Tracy how Barry got started in plots. Here's what he said. 00:44:36 Speaker 1: What pat Ball said was he coon hunted a lot. His daddy was a cat hunter. Bob cat hunted, and so they learned and enjoyed dogs from their daddy. I guess they got to get in tree dogs, and in doing that they got to train a bear every now and then, like in the fifties, and somewhere along the line, he was having a discussion with some folks, and von Plott was involved, and he said, if you're going to be serious about bear hunting, you need to get plots. And Vaughn wouldn't let him have a dog, wouldn't sell him a pupp or nothing. 00:45:08 Speaker 3: He said, you got to get plots, but you're not getting them from me. 00:45:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what they told me. So he found a female dog, got a Kentucky. Like I said, they didn't sit around talk about history match. They talked about what they did last week. We don't know exactly when he got his first plot, but we know he gave a pup to my cousin Charles in nineteen sixty five out of a litter, so we dated from sixty five that we know for a fact he raised litter plots, but he had plots prior to that. Well. In the early seventies he made friends with Gene White, and Papa got a young female from Gene, brought it up here and she got hurt on a bear. And when she got hurt, she was crippled and couldn't hunt anymore. Traded her back to Gene and she became sort of Gene's really. I think a real significant portion of what he ended up breeding over time as a brute jip and then in trade papall got a female and on the papers her name is Roberta, and from her I think Ben told me history she read five times. Roberta became the foundation of the whole deal. And then that's still what Ben was talking about, the unbroken line from Roberta to now. There's been outcrosses, but the breeding decisions was made in the family all the way back to her. I think there was maybe sixteen generations. Now. 00:46:30 Speaker 2: You may remember von Plott from the first episode. He was the great great grandson of George or Johannes Plott who started the breed. I think it's funny but fitting that Vaughn told Barry, you need plots for Bear, but you're not going to get any from me. Like Ben said, Barry got started in plots in the early nineteen fifties, but it wasn't until the mid sixties that they were able to start documenting the Houston Valley line of plots. And in the nineteen seventies they really began to take off with a legendary jip named Roberto. I want now to ask Tracy about strains of plots and what that means. 00:47:12 Speaker 1: Well, that really answers the question. That back to something Ben said a few minutes ago when you asked Ben about plots and he said, well, what I really like is my own. That's not an arrogant statement. What Ben was saying was the overall breed of plot itself is not a cohesive breed. It's splintered into strains. So if you say what are the characteristics of a plot, it's really a too general of a question because there's no such thing as a standard that plots have been bred to meet across the country. There's no governing board. So a guy across the mountain there his plots may have a rental hide like mine, but be nothing like mine at all. So you can't say that a breed is characterized by certain traits because it's not that way. Strains strain simply mean a narrow breeding philosophy among certain families or groups. Well, I mean, you're friends with Roy Clark, and what you'll find is people that bear hunt, and especially from the mountains. If they're serious. I'm not talking about people who just you know, hunt here and there and don't care, but serious people, if they breed plot bear dogs, and they live in these mountains. There're gonna be a lot of like, a lot of like, because they've got to do the same thing. 00:48:31 Speaker 2: If you followed bear Grease for a long time, surely you've heard of bear Grease Hall of Famer Roy Clark of Cock County, Tennessee. We did a series with the Clarks on episode eight and ten of bear Grease. We also did a big video with mister Roy that's on the media YouTube channel. Tracy thinks the world of the Clarks and there are many great strains of plots and many worthy worthy plot men, but there just isn't enough bear Grease to go aroun to tell all their stories. But we don't have to take it from Tracy on how to breed a good bear dog. How about we hear it directly from Barry. Here's a short, simple explanation from him. 00:49:14 Speaker 7: Of course, when I've bred a dog, greet a dog. But I always breed to this female old guy. She ain't don't care. I'm breeding uh good. And he's gotta be getting to you, you know not because papers are good and I ain't gonna break to yes, sir, I want to get those on. And you got all Adrea and his real friendly almost like I have that was friendly dog Elon, you know. 00:49:41 Speaker 6: And when it comes to Barry, I all to get a difference. 00:49:46 Speaker 2: Every time I've been around a successful old time dog breeder, I'm surprised at how simple they make it seem. He said he wants nos and grit, and by grit he means a dog's ability and desire to not afraid of a mean bear. But it's interesting that he wanted them friendly to a human like a house dog. But he said when it comes to bear, they're all together different. I had a specific question for Ben about this Shuston Valley line. We're back in the dog lot, standing in front of most of the living animals of the Houston Valley plot line. Is that do you think a dog like that, like the best dog in your pack, would be as good a dog as the Houston Valley line has ever had? Like, when you think about a line of dogs that is seventy years old, are the dogs getting better? With Barry Tarleton think that was the best dog in the country. 00:50:48 Speaker 9: Well, I really don't want to say that, because there are so many years of dogs that I never gotten to see to evaluate myself. But I can tell you as far as overall hunting, the dogs that are tied here now have seen more game and been more places than they ever would have prior. Part to see so much more out of them. I mean we're going everywhere and also hog hunt them, and you know, it's just a more well rounded dog. They get to see more and you get to see more out of them. I mean, when you're hunting them that much, you're going to find the flaws that you wouldn't have never even seen before. You also find the you know, the better qualities, but you find the bad ones too. 00:51:31 Speaker 2: There's got to be a strong ability to remove personal bias when truly breeding top notch animals. You've got to be able to see the good and the bad, and in the case of these family lines, you've got to be able to remove the emotional ties to the dogs that could easily lead the breeder astray. 00:51:51 Speaker 3: Here's more from Tracy on Barry's bear hunting. 00:51:55 Speaker 1: This to me is crazy. You take people who have to work like dogs to make a living, and now all the Mountain people did the factory work. They work like dogs. They're farming. They had to work like dogs. And then you picked bear hunting for your hobby. You're not getting the day off man, Yeah, yeah, why do you pick bear hunting for a hobby? There's no rest with that. You're gonna probably work harder that day than the five days you just worked. So to me, that tells you a lot about the kind of people you're dealing with. They were not looking for a day off. 00:52:32 Speaker 3: It's hard to understand it if you haven't been on an Appalachian bear hound hunt. But it's hard work. Here's more from Tracy on hunting with Berry. 00:52:42 Speaker 1: So we'd be up on the mountain and he had this ongoing thing with my cousin Rocky about old slew Foot and that was this mythical bear that was the biggest one in the mountains. You know, never killed him. I don't know if we ever even running, you know, but we'd turn loose dogs, be running. Papa get wired up. I mean he'd be he's seventy some years old, be wired up like a thirteen year old boy. When he would drive in normal everyday driving, he drove the slowest guy. He's the guy that you did not want to pull out in front of you. So up on the mountain he'd drive faster up there in a bar pursuit. Maybe then he would going down the Nashville Highway, he'd just lose his marbles and his hands would get so nervous. He'd pat the steering wheel like see, just patted this fast. He could pat, just wild eyed crazy about it. He said, we'ren't hot pursuit. We're in hot pursuit. He loved, Oh my goodness, he loved it withever fiber of his being. He couldn't wait to do it. I mean, he worked because he had to eat, and he did the comfortable work because he didn't want his family living in a community that he considered to be unsafe and trashed. But he bear hunted because he loved it. I mean, I've known lots of bear hunters, and I'm not going to say that when I was growing up Houston Valley plots were better than the people's dogs. I would not do that. I would not say that now. But I am saying that he loved them, and he loved the plot breed. He had some dogs that were not plots when I was When he was younger, he had some great dogs he couldnu and he ordered a couple of blueticks from Dell Lee one time. But once he got Plots, he just fell in love with him. There was nothing like a plot to him. He knew there was good dogs and ever breed. He wasn't stupid, but Plots was his dogs, and man, he loved them. I mean the guys over here in the mountains, Manna, they would rag him all the time. They would take a walker dog and sneak it putting his dog box and take a picture of it, just to say he had a walker in his blots if they killed a bear. And when he got older, everybody was really good to him, you know, they'd still let him get his dog, get down by the bear and have his picture took with it, you know, like he had done everything that day himself. They'd run in with a couple of walkers on the lead, try to get into the picture before he could get up, you know, and he'd just carry on how he had get that dog out of there. And then he wouldn't do this. He wouldn't do it if it was in danger getting run over or something. If he was going up a mountain road, if somebody spotted dog was you know, walking up the road, he just drive on bite. I say, Papabo, stop here, let me get that guy die. I own that dog, my dog box. Ain't putting that white dog in there, and everybody loved him for it, you know, uh huh, he ain't gonna pick it up, yeh putting it in his box. 00:55:22 Speaker 2: The hound world has an ongoing favorite breed rivalry. It's NonStop and seems to track deep into hound history. I want to go back to the dog lot with Ben and ask him a question about the level of commitment it takes to maintain a truly top notch pack of hounds. 00:55:42 Speaker 3: What's it take for somebody to keep a bare pack all year? I mean, most people can't do this. Most people can couldn't have all these dogs and train them and be dedicated to him like this. I mean, like this is a major lifestyle commitment. 00:55:59 Speaker 9: Well, honestly, you have to sacrifice almost everything else. And that's why I don't judge somebody who tries to hunt. You know, they work a full time job over time, and they get to hunt two days a week during kill season. A lot of people want to hack on them. I don't feel privileged to do what I do, but I've sacrificed a lot almost. I mean, don't go to the lake, never been to the beach, never been on a vacation other than hunting in my life, and I wouldn't trade it. But most people aren't going to give up all that just to chase the bar. 00:56:40 Speaker 1: I think it's awesome to know that in the early seventies there's dogs that I would have gone hunting with. I don't say hunted with, because I was just a kid that was tagged along in the early seventies, you know. I mean, I was riding the truck and see what the big men did. But I know those dogs, and I know what was said about those dogs by those men. I still have those memories. Four generations later, I get to see my son doing the same thing with dogs that are great grandchildren of the dogs I saw when I was a kid. Then I also get a kick out of knowing that in these mountains that the bear are the same children and grandchildren of the same bear we hunted when I was a kid. So it's like an ongoing drama series, generation after generation of us and the bear. 00:57:28 Speaker 3: You think they know when they hear a Houston Valley plot coming, No, I. 00:57:33 Speaker 1: Don't think that, but I think it's I think it's a great story. The same bear are being hunted by the same families, and it just goes on, and I hope it goes on for generations to come. 00:57:48 Speaker 3: As we come to an end. 00:57:50 Speaker 2: Here's Tracy with some powerful conclusions on Barry's life, going all the way back to his law enforcement days and his value system. 00:58:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, he was not interested in the law for the law's sake, So I wouldn't even say he agreed with all the laws. I wouldn't even say he was above that sometimes doing his own thing regardless of the law. But he just hated liquor. And one of the interesting traits of boy him too, is that he hated certain uses of language or offensive to him. There's an old Mountain word called blackguardish. That's the word blackguardish, yep. And if somebody were to say something like some particular slang type word for something, you know, that was crude to him, offensive to his mind, and it's that was a rough guy. But he had a sense of holiness for God that made some things not sacred to him. And if you address something that should have been considered sacred in a crude way to him. He would call that blackguardish. 00:58:53 Speaker 3: What do you think that meant? 00:58:54 Speaker 1: Crude, unacceptable, nasty. 00:58:57 Speaker 3: We were with a guy yesterday afternoon who was speaking about Barry, and he said he'd hunted with him thirty forty years ago, and he noted that Barry did not tolerate people around him using foul, crass language. Yeah, you know, I love it when I hear people that just have a standard and they're comfortable with that standard, and they're not trying to inflict it on people outside of their jurisdiction, but they have a standard. 00:59:29 Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to make him sound like a saint, and he wouldn't want to be made sound like a saint. He had his flaws, but what he believed in he believed in pretty thoroughly. And I like that in a person, even if their beliefs different from mine, because I can trust that person. Papa was as friendly a man as you will have ever met, jovial, love life, laughed all the time. I'm not saying Papa was the best bearer hunter ever lived, because that just wouldn't be true, but I have said nobody enjoyed it more. He loved it. I absolutely loved it, could not wait to get up in the morning to go. But he had this aside to him that if you got to that point, he was dangerous. He was just a dangerous human being. But everybody loved him, everybody, everybody that well when he died. When he died, it was unbelievable that the people who come through the line, and people most of people his generation. He died in when he's eighty four, so most of his friends were gone already. But it was amazing how many people who came through the line who said, he said, Barry Charlton was my best friend. Over and over and over. 01:00:47 Speaker 3: People loved him, loved him. 01:00:52 Speaker 2: Barry Tarlton's story has opened up a unique window into Appalachia. I knew this was going to be good, but more than that, it opened the window into the life of a unique man, loved and respected by so many. And don't forget the only reason that you and I know this story is because of the American plotthound. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. I don't do this kind of stuff often, but if you would like to hunt with Ben Jones and his strain of Houston Valley plots. You probably can, that is, if you're tough enough. Ben runs a bear hunting outfit called Pale Horse Guide Service based out of. 01:01:51 Speaker 3: Greenville, Tennessee. 01:01:53 Speaker 2: You can see his ad in Bear Hunting Magazine or just look him up online. Again, thank you so much for listening to Bear Grease. Share this episode with your friends, leave us a review on iTunes, and don't forget about Steve Ranella and I's new audio book now available for pre order. It's called The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five. It's an incredible book about the Foundation's really of American deer hunting and it's really good. 01:02:26 Speaker 5: Man. 01:02:26 Speaker 3: You guys are gonna love it. I'm already looking forward to the Render next week.