00:00:05 Speaker 1: There's a war they didn't teach us about in American history, and the spoils of the conflict were unlikely characters. This war wasn't fought over oil or political ideology, but rather muskrats. It's called the Islanios Trappers War, and it took place in nineteen twenty six in South Louisiana. And on this episode, we're setting up the context for the war, why it happened, and meeting the men whose families fought in it. The flavors of South Louisiana will be flying high as we hear from a New Orleans filmmaker, a fur handler, and even the raging Cajun himself, James Carvill. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one, And don't forget. The Bear Grease feed continues to complexify and get better. We now have on this feed Bear Grease, Brins, this Country Life Podcast, and Lake Pickles, New Backwoods University. I've heard this called the Great Southern Takeover of Meat Eater. Yeah, something like that. I hope you enjoyed this episode. 00:01:18 Speaker 2: So powerful people said, well, this is not right that little people should be making all this money when really it's rich people that really need money, and that's always happened in the world, that rich people are going to take the labor and work of poor people and moneturize it and make more money on it. 00:01:35 Speaker 3: That's not new man. 00:01:36 Speaker 2: That didn't start in nineteen twenty, and it ain't ending in twenty fourteen, and it's not going to end in twenty one fourteen. 00:01:43 Speaker 3: It is the sort of inherent. 00:01:45 Speaker 2: Right of power to acquire powered money, to acquire more powered money, and it played out right there in front of my very eyes. 00:02:03 Speaker 1: My name is Klay 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 f HF Gear, American made, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. 00:02:37 Speaker 4: Can y'all hear me? 00:02:38 Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay, you can hear yourself? 00:02:40 Speaker 2: Good? 00:02:41 Speaker 1: Do you hear me? 00:02:41 Speaker 4: Yeah? 00:02:42 Speaker 1: I don't know where to start on this one. I guess we'll just start by introducing our first character, the Muskrats. 00:02:53 Speaker 4: Okay, Mushkrat. It's nothing but a small rat. It's a rat. It's a vegetarian, doesn't eat meat. It's the body on us, about twelve to sixteen inches long. Usually a big rats around fourteen inches between two fourteen sixteen inches. I'd say it's got a triangular tail. They don't have no round tail like a gut a rat. Your tails are more of a triangle. It's small in the bottom and it goes up a little higher and it comes to point on the top. And the tail is usually about another twelve fourteen inches long. And they live in a prairie, a wet prairie. I used to work in the firehouse my dad, my grandfather bought for us. 00:03:44 Speaker 1: Also, that's the voice of Paul Leguard of Placabon Parish, Louisiana, character number two. So there's two sets of characters on this episode, the muskrats and the living people. They're one set like Paul, and then the folks now deceased who were actually involved in the trappers war. Here is character number three of the first group. 00:04:12 Speaker 5: How's this this good level? Okay, So I'm going to talk about the movie. Let me turn my phone off. 00:04:23 Speaker 1: Here we go. 00:04:26 Speaker 5: My name is David Dubos. I'm a screenwriter, producer, filmmaker from New Orleans, Louisiana, which is where I currently reside, mainly because of the movie tax credits that are here in Louisiana and that are a big draw for Hollywood movies and even international films to come and film here. And my main source of income is through screenwriting. I've got four projects in various stages of development, one of which is going to be filming this year in later twenty twenty five called Chainsaw Confidential, which is about the making of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre film in the early seventies. 00:05:10 Speaker 1: Now that's interesting. New Orleans filmmaker David Dubo's also made a film about the Trappers War in twenty fifteen called Delta Justice Theeslanios Trappers War. He's going to help us out a lot. Now here is our fourth living character. 00:05:29 Speaker 6: All right, there you go, there you go? 00:05:31 Speaker 1: Oh okay, pull it up, there we go. Can you hear me again? Yeah? You comfortable? Oh yeah, okay. 00:05:40 Speaker 6: Well, my name is Lloyd Serenade, better known as Wimpy. And the reason why I got that nickname when I was a kid and my siblings told them that all I wanted to do was eat Hamburgers. So I told him, and Dave would read the comics to me. You know, never had TV, but anyway, it would read the comics. And that character Whimpy, I thought he it was hamplers, you know. So I told him to call me Wimpy and I would go out and play. And if my mother would call me by my real name, Laud, I wouldn't answer. She called me, and I answered. So I just sto Wimpy all my life, so everybody know when it is Whimpy. Of course, I was born down in Delacroile, you know. And y'all wanted to talk about the Trappers Warm, I'm only gonna tell you. 00:06:31 Speaker 3: I'm gonna tell you what I was telling. 00:06:38 Speaker 1: The connection between Paul, David, Wimpy and the Muskrats is that they all had family involved in the Trappers War. So now we're going to go to the second cast of characters from the actual nineteen twenty sixth war. On one side was a judge named Leander Perez. Some called him a dictator. He was in Placamon in Saint Bernard Parish in Louisiana, just south of New Orleans. The other side of the war was the Islanios, people of Delacroix Island, who had trapped there for almost one hundred and fifty years, and their main man advocate was named Manuel Malaro. But the ironic part is that Leander Perez, the parish bad boy, was in Islanios too. 00:07:31 Speaker 5: So Leander Perez was a highly educated Islanios and he saw a way to usurp the land from the Islanios. He would have his cousins and you know, buy up the land and then turn around and lease it back to the Islanios, but then start charging them more and more money, and eventually got to the point to where they couldn't afford it. And they said, yeah, Perez is coming in and finagling and you know, shaking hand with the Islanios and then stabbing them in the back and with his other hand. And his idea was to monopolize the industry and make the money for himself and pay them pennies on the dollar kind of thing. So the Islanios, they were very poor but hardworking people, and to them a dollar fifty two dollars a pelt for a muskrat was a lot of money. They could go out and trap and make and bring in anywhere from fifty to two hundred muskrat a day. So they were making plenty money. Well, eventually, when you start making a lot of money, it calls attention to itself. And so Leander Perez, who was then the district attorney in Blackman's Parish, but he was also in Islanios, and he looked at the situation and he decided he wanted a piece of that. 00:08:52 Speaker 1: The antagonist, Leander Perez, wanted to take over the muskrat fur trade by controlling the trapping leases and jacking up the prices. History would remember Perez for his stances on segregation. Many said he was a high octane bigot, but he was also loved by a lot of people. We're about to hear from James Carvill, the Louisiana political advisor who rose to national prominence in the Clinton era. Yep, James Carvill. This clip was used by permission from David's Delta Justice movie. Carvill is talking about Leander Perez. 00:09:35 Speaker 2: I've heard that be said that there's some good in everybody, and I'm sure there was some in him. To my knowledge, it never manifested itself. 00:09:44 Speaker 3: In any way. 00:09:46 Speaker 2: Not surprisingly given my sort of political persuasion, I think he's one of the most odious people in the history of the state. 00:09:52 Speaker 1: Now saying a right, Perez was a real stinker. Later we'll get into some bizarre detail on the man, but for now, you just need to know the general architecture of this story. The trappers started making money, and people from the outside moved in and wanted a big piece of the pie. Here's Carville with all you need to know. 00:10:15 Speaker 2: So powerful people said, well, this is not right that little people should be making all this money, when really it's rich people that really need money. And that's always happened in the world, that rich people are going to take the labor and work of poor people and moneturize it and make more money on it. 00:10:32 Speaker 3: That's not new man. 00:10:33 Speaker 2: That didn't start in nineteen twenty, and it ain't ending in twenty fourteen, and it's not going to end in twenty one fourteen. 00:10:40 Speaker 3: It is to sort of inherent. 00:10:42 Speaker 2: Right of power to acquire power and money, to acquire more power and money. 00:10:47 Speaker 3: And it played out right down in front of my very eyes. 00:10:51 Speaker 1: You nor I expected to hear James Carvill on Bear grease. But what we really need to remember is that Manuel Malaro is our protetagonist. He represented the right to the trappers in a head to head legal battle with Leander Perez over the land. Here is how the war started, but well how. 00:11:12 Speaker 5: The war started. It was a one day war. Perez got a crooked judge to give him overturned the appeal that Manuel had won, and he tried to Now, of course you have to enforce that. It's just a piece of paper. So when he went back to the Islanians and said, hey, get off my land, they just said, you know, screw you. And that's when Perez turned around and hired a bunch of mercenaries from Texas to come in, get a boat, get a Gatlan gun on it, and go down to buy you Whether Islanis said. His attention was to murder them, but the Islanians got wind of it, and so they were ready for them and kind of ambush them. And that's the one day war, which was referred to. As you know they talk about street justice or courtroom justice. This was delta justice. This was by you justice, old school, old fashioned, you know, Hatfield's McCoy's kind of you know, between the Islanios and Perez. Many of the Islanios, I would say, they are proud of the fact that they stood up for themselves against what they felt was the tyranny of the local government, who was just Perez and his ilk were mainly interested in the money to be made from the muskrat trapping, which would turned into fur coats up north and sold. And there was a lot of money. I mean, it was maybe a couple of dollars per pelt, which now is nothing, but back then was a lot of money. I think in the film we convert the money that they would have made on Africa per trapper to you know, and it was close to like one hundred thousand dollars. There's a lot of money for trapping. The film is ten years old now. 00:13:18 Speaker 1: I asked Wimpy Sarenay how valuable furs were to these people. 00:13:24 Speaker 6: I'm upon it this week. I remember they were what they what they call dollar around, no other words, dollar for each far And my dad needs to catch you by the hundred rounds a day, a. 00:13:38 Speaker 5: Lot of money. 00:13:40 Speaker 6: So for how many months of the year could he do that? From December till March. Well, I'm gonna put it this way. When you first went, you know, you caught a lot of rap, but towards the end of the season, you you finishing up. See the way they trapped. Let's see it. You had a squapys of land, so you would trap what they call him. You'd put your traps all around the land, all around the outside of your land, your boundary lines, okay, And as the season goes by, you keep closing that that circling in and you keep closing it in, so you're catching the rat. And at the end of the season, you got them in one little spot, so you would get right I was left, you know. 00:14:29 Speaker 5: So the Islanios were very they're very prideful people. I mean. And these some of these people in Saint Bernard Parish and the lower end of it where Dela Crowe Island is and where the original descendants lived, there's only five families left there. And it's so between Hurricane Betsy and nineteen sixty five, and of course Katrina years later, forty years later, just kind of wipe out Delacroue Island. But that was once a very fertile place for fishing, hunting, trapping, and that's what people did. They lived off the land. My grandfather on my mother's side, that's what he did. He lived off the land and that's how he fed his family. But I would say that the majority of Islanios had heard the story of the trappers ord because it was passed down generation to generation oral histories basically, and they looked at it as an unfortunate thing that happened. But they had to defend themselves against the Perez people and his group, especially when he hired mercenaries from Texas to come over and murder them. They just felt, Okay, well, that's the last straw. But they were lucky that they had Manuel Malero, who was an educated in Islanios who knew that they were being taken advantage of. 00:15:54 Speaker 1: We're learning little bits of this story as we build the context of the value of trapping bad Boy. Perez would end up hiring mercenaries to kill the Islanios trappers, but we'll get to that. But to understand any story, you've got to understand the historical context of the Roaring twenties. 00:16:16 Speaker 5: So if you can picture America in the nineteen twenties, this was a high time for the coastal cities. Hollywood was just getting started and was thriving with silent films, and New York was like the talk of the nation. Everything new and innovative was going on. It started in New York and slowly made its way around the country, and fur coats became a status symbol for a lot of rich, wealthy women who lived in New York and all over the East Coast. So there was this great demand for furs, and of all the furs that were prized, muskrat fur was considered the most expensive and the most desired. And so you can imagine all the great department stores that sprung up out of New York that were trying to sell these coats. They had to get them from somewhere. 00:17:18 Speaker 1: Well. 00:17:19 Speaker 5: They eventually word got down to South Louisiana, where the muskrats were thriving throughout the marshes and Bayous. So the Islanios trappers and the hunters and the fishermen and shrimpers who made a living off the land, they were contacted by these outside sources to say, hey, they need these muskrats. 00:17:47 Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty five, prime muskrat furs were going for a dollar thirty each. The math adds up if you're catching over one hundred per day for the seventy five day season, which yields a single trapper making three to four thousand dollars per season. It's estimated that Plaqua Mine Parish alone sold over a million dollars worth of muskrat hides in its peak in the late twenties, and author Glenn Jeanson says that Louisiana produced more furs than any other states and more muskrats than all the other states combined during this period. The territory of Alaska, thirteen times larger than Louisiana, sold only one third as much value in pelts in nineteen twenty five. Here's Paul, what does it Does it feel like? Muskrat fur? 00:18:42 Speaker 4: Oh? Well, you know what a mink feels like. You have rubbed mama, your grandma's mink coat. Well, mink. The head is smaller and shorter on a mink. On a rat, A good rat. It was a good prime, right. I'd say that the furs inch and a half long sometime, and the top of the rat was black. They had some of the best rats they caught. Was out of Canovn. That's a little settlement right down the river here, that's where all lands behind. 00:19:24 Speaker 6: It's not like a horse rat. It's bigger than the house rat. It's about this big, you know, and it looks like a rat. 00:19:32 Speaker 5: It's a rat. 00:19:34 Speaker 6: It's a musk rat. And they have two lands of musk in them. And you know when they would catch them and scin them, you know, and of course the Caucasus they were trying to buy you the buzzies and that would eat it them. They would take the musks and like my mother, she would she would get the musk and they'll put them in alcohol in preserva them and sell them to people who make foray fuel. 00:20:03 Speaker 1: With the muskrat. 00:20:05 Speaker 6: I think that's what it is. This toy from gold mustard probably came from that, you know. I remember the jaws, you know, full of musk rat must musk in the jaws because they would put them a s m alcohol and something in presumab and the wins and that would that would their money. 00:20:26 Speaker 5: You know. 00:20:31 Speaker 6: The hair felt very smooth. The top of it was not black, but very very dark. The bottom was like the color your shirt gray on the bottom, you know. And when they when the skin them, the skin from the back legs, you cut right along with tail and you turn them inside out and just peel the skin off. And then you would put it on a rat stretcher and you put the rat on air and you let it go. It stretched the you're far out and then they would create the excess meat off of the bottlement that far was inside out. Then they would hang them on what they call uh right hangers, you know, uh big big hangers with with booge with nails in it, and they'd just hang them up. You know, we have pictures of that in the museum down as in. But then they would they have pictures of God hanging up muskrat to dry. You put it in the some and dry and once they dry, and that's when the uh the deal is what we call you know, would bottom the fur even even you to sell pieces if if one of the rants was ate up or something, they don't just sell the piece or whatever they had was left because there was I guess it was with a lot of money they could sell it all well. The way I understand it was, it was the fashion in the twenties was for a coach. Even the men used to wear long fur coach. My mother had a said she had my dad had muskrat coat fulls lant coat made out and beautiful. It was so soft one the time they they tanned it and worked it out and men then then the colt out of it, you know. 00:22:18 Speaker 4: They I used to work in the firehouse, and uh they bought him for from Simon Yoka, the Jewish Man, and uh he owned Delta Row Farr. 00:22:29 Speaker 1: So so in your lifetime that fur business was alive and well. 00:22:34 Speaker 3: In New Orleans. 00:22:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so you worked How long did you work in the firehouse. 00:22:38 Speaker 4: Well, I'd go there at the end of the trapping Caesar and they'd be shipping to New York, and uh, they'd have all those fires in there. Lord, they had furst stack from flowing around the walls from the flood of the seal. 00:22:53 Speaker 1: All muskrat h No. 00:22:54 Speaker 4: Everything you had marsh grat, you had mink, she had honors. You had cools. 00:23:00 Speaker 1: Added the firs down here compare with northern firs. 00:23:03 Speaker 4: They got to have you thicker far up there because of the cool water. But you had cold. We had cool windows down here. When I was a kid man. You know, I don't say every morning, but i'd say quite often. You had icycles hanging off the tin roof. Like I was telling you, I worked in the firehouse and they'd taken all as far as would go in and at the end of the season they had shipped to New York, and uh, so I'd go in there, and uh, plenty of them had mildew on them. And then so they take the otters. Otters got a lot of fat on them, and you'd scrape them. They had big boards and they'd scraped that inside hide and get especially the tail, and you put that it put that fat in a in a rag. And for ours that stand there at their tables and wipe them rats, wipe the. 00:23:57 Speaker 1: Mill with the with the otter fat with the fact. 00:24:01 Speaker 4: And made it beautiful. They came out beautiful. And uh, then they'd take them and they'd put them in a press. They had a press about as water as this table. And then they did press it down full of muskrats, full of muskrats. They weighed about four or five hundred pounds or you couldn't. 00:24:20 Speaker 1: They were shipping them green. Yeah, you ship them green, right, shipped them green. Wherever they processed them, they turn them. 00:24:25 Speaker 4: They t well, they didn't even process them here. Most of them went to Europe. You see, they they'd go to they'd go to New York and then they had a forest sail up there and they'd sell them to the people in Europe. My great grandfather was was a farm and that's what he did. They didn't know nothing but for him. And when my grandfather got down there, they you know, they trapping was starting to pick up, and uh so he uh and know those days, there wasn't no you owned this piece of land. And now the guy I owned up it was all open priority. It was just like wild wesh And uh. When you know when a story at the beginning of the season, you went out there and you picked out a spot and you put your trap on out and people honored each other's areas. 00:25:19 Speaker 1: You know, any good American story starts with a land squabble, which is such a primitive qualm. And deep in our DNA is a hidden carnal playbook, and on page one of that book it says, look out for your own interests and no one else. Territory to the Homo sapien is equivalent to food, water, and air, and in this case, these god forsaken swamps, encompassing tens of thousands of acres in the region had historically been no man's land owned by the state, the parishes, and absentee landowners. The islandios were easily able to get cheap trapping leases for generations until all of a sudden the land had value because of muskrats. Most of the people that had historically trapped these swamps were from Delacroix Island. Here's whimpy. 00:26:21 Speaker 6: I grew up at Delacra Island and that was a big story, you know, since I was a kid, about the Tramp's War and what happened. The people from delacrow made a living off the marshland, you know. So there were a lot of muskrat in them days, you know. So it was they made their living in the winter with the muskrat. And so these people were just you know, they were descendants of the Canary Islands and they settled down at delacro Island. After the Revolution war, of course, I was born down in Delacrosse. Uh, the Canary Islanders moved towards the Delacraland and the Bayoux Arizona. You know, at Denacrue Island. It was not French. My dad was French. He spoke French, but the whole. Uh, Delacroix Island spoke Spanish. You know, I can speak to Spanish that Spanish today but uh, and it's only about maybe six or seven of us that that speak it right now from non Donacrol and then you know in the middle living trap and Muskrat. 00:27:35 Speaker 1: The Islanio's people were Spanish speakers from the Canary Islands, southwest of the coast of Spain. Here's Paul paint the picture for me of who these Islanio people were. This was like a Spanish group of people. 00:27:51 Speaker 4: Yet yep, you heard the Canary Islands, all right. They inhabited the Canary owns, I don't know how far all. And when Spain owned the Louisiana purchase before before France sold it. They were brought here back in the seventeen nineties to to guard that river, to keep the English and whoever else wanted to come with that river. And and uh and Colin, I's take it away from you know, Spain had it and that's what their their purpose was. And they were they were. They were not only brought there, they were brought to Galveston and a couple other spots where they were. 00:28:36 Speaker 1: So now is was this your family is this? Is this part of the family. 00:28:39 Speaker 4: A lot of my found my my my grandmother's side, on my daddy's side was Arcelonia. 00:28:48 Speaker 1: The Islanios settled on Delacroix Island. But is it really an island? Described to me why it's what what bodies of water surrounded that make it an island? 00:29:00 Speaker 6: Well, yeah, a lot of people. If you ride down there, you wouldn't think it's an hour. And if you good on it when you get the dinner crow on, and if you have lake livery here and buy you literary, and then you have buy you tarry buff and then you have buy you gentility here, and then a little all these links, so it made it an island. So they called it an island. 00:29:22 Speaker 1: Mmm. 00:29:23 Speaker 6: You know. So if you drive down there and you still on this sign on the road today, you. 00:29:28 Speaker 1: Don't have to cross a bridge to get there? Is that what? 00:29:31 Speaker 6: You can raise it as one little bridge, you know? But it's just a buyo. 00:29:39 Speaker 1: Now that that's settled, let's talk to David. He's the filmmaker and some of his family were Islaanios. But the story of the Trappers War somehow remained hidden. 00:29:51 Speaker 5: I didn't even know about it. This is a classic case of being a tourist in your own hometown. I had no idea this even existed. Late aunt, great aunt Doc Benj Dorothy Benj. She's a direct descendant of Manuel Malaro, who was a big player during the Trappers War, and she was very fond of him. And she called me one day. She knew I was a filmmaker and I was part of the large family on my mother's side. My mother was a new Nez. She was Neslanios, which means they came from the Canary Islands. I didn't know a thing about it. So she called me dot did and she said, I want you to do a documentary on my grandfather, Manuel Malaro. She felt he didn't get the credit that he deserved. And I always am attracted to people who don't get there just due. So I put together the budget schedule, I hired, you know, people, started putting the whole show together. I called my DP, Gabe Mayhon, who did a brilliant job on the film. He came down with his crew and we assembled extras from the local area and we shot on the land where the Islaanios had lived. Parts of it. We shot at the museum. Some of the interviews we did there, and then we did a lot of the reenactments in the marsh and in the swamps where they would have been in the nineteen twenties. This took place in nineteen twenty six, But my aunt was the one that got me involved, and once I started researching it, I just felt, this is such a great story that no one knows about. 00:31:33 Speaker 1: Part of me would like to make a bear grease just about David making this film. He's an eccentric, brainy guy and knows more about cinema than Dale Brisbee knows about going ninety on a buck and bull. But I asked David how true his movie stayed to the real story. 00:31:51 Speaker 5: My favorite if I made Digress for just a moment. My favorite anecdote on that is in nineteen sixty two, when Lawrence of Arabia hit the a gentleman and British journalist took one of T. E. Lawrence's colleagues to see the movie and when it was over, he said, well, sir, what did you think of the film? Oh? Most entertaining? Most entertaining? He said, well, how accurate would you say it was? And he'd say, well, I'll tell you they got the sand and the camel's right, and that kind of leads to this kind of leads into though the whole trapper's war idea, because you know, Wimpy Serenade was one of our interview subjects. He told me, he said, the one thing that gets lost in war is the truth any war, and he said, you're always going to have people pointing at each other. You know, they still don't know who fired the first shot in this war, and so there's always this ambiguity of who was right, who was wrong? Can you right or wrong? By being wrong? 00:33:04 Speaker 1: The truth gets lost in war? Ain't that the truth? I want to learn about Paul's family. They're trapping in their camp. 00:33:15 Speaker 4: And you see, we trapped too, and we had a camp and uh, I spent my winter, well, I spent all my holidays with them, and uh get off for Christmas holidays and all and uh they would be at the camp trap and I'd go back there with them and sit around that table at night and they tell stories. Sometimes I don't like to talk about it, but yeah, they'd dose stories. And you know, your surrounding them was a kid listening and uh, That's why I picked up as much as I know about it. 00:33:57 Speaker 1: Was there somebody in your family that was that was there trapping that was. 00:34:02 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, my grandfather was there when it all went down. My grandfather was Paula Gord my dadd who was junior. I'm the third and uh my, my my son is the fourth, and his son is the fifth and uh and the boy said he's going to name his boy too. Yeah. Yeah, but uh, I tell you what really were really started it off. He was working at the at the slaughter house they called the Avatar. They had a big stainless steel troughs that ran through there, and they take their intestines and they turned those intestines inside out and they washed them to make sausages. But they put the sausage in in them days. They didn't have all that synthetic stuff they got today. And uh, all the guys that were working that to be leaning up against their trough all day, they were all getting intestinal flew and dying. So my grandfather got it and uh, my great grandfather told me, he said, paul you're gonna die. He said, you're gonna die. He said, why don't you just quit? He said, And come and form with me. He said. We ain't gonna make much money. He said, but you might get well and left. He was he was well and very sick. So he did. And uh so he went down there and started forming with the old man, and the trapping started getting better and better, and people were starting They were starting to ship for us overseas. 00:35:36 Speaker 5: Well. 00:35:36 Speaker 4: They always did ship them overseas, but they, like I said, we got better. There was money in it. Like I said, he started trapping, and plenty of him down there told him they laughed at my grandpa, and they told him, you think you're gonna make a trapper. Grandpa told me, sad, I'm gonna do it. I do my best. And they wouldn't show him nothing. And uh, he said, I used to go out there and sit that in the evening time, watched them animals move, because they'd come out in the evening, some of them, you know, and watch them move, how they moved, where they ate at, where they where they messed at. And he, uh, I'll tell you what. When he died, ain't none of them could keep up with him. 00:36:18 Speaker 3: He was. 00:36:19 Speaker 4: He was. He trapped way until he after he was seventy five years old, and he didn't walk the prairie, ran it and uh fast fast, and he'd run from one trap to the next. And he taught me how to trap. When I trapped too, when I came back from Vietnam, I trapped. 00:36:48 Speaker 1: Muskrats meant a lot to these people. Wimpy is eighty four years old. He was born in nineteen forty one, fifteen years after the war, but he grew up going to the family's trapping camp, which they still own today. Paul's family still owns all that land today too. We're building the context to understand why people were willing to murder over muskrats. Wimpy also grew up in the Alanios trapping camps. Do you remember going on the trap line with your dad? 00:37:21 Speaker 6: No, I was too small, you know, I was a kid, But I remember what they'd done because my brother's in all used to trap, and us kids would take the few trapped and put them behind the camp or something, catch a couple of the muskrats. I was very young. 00:37:39 Speaker 1: I was nothing with a kid, you know. Were those fond memories or was it just work. 00:37:45 Speaker 4: To me? 00:37:45 Speaker 6: It was? It was great, It was really Nye was great. 00:37:50 Speaker 1: Was your mother there, your whole your whole family would go to the traffic camp. 00:37:54 Speaker 5: Right. 00:37:55 Speaker 1: Was it a like a something celebrated or was it something that people just had to do? So it was just like work, right? 00:38:03 Speaker 6: They was like what for that? 00:38:05 Speaker 2: You know? 00:38:05 Speaker 6: The older one was like my brother trap and my two oldest brothers they trapped with my dad. 00:38:12 Speaker 1: But did they I guess what I'm trying to understand is did they like today, if I had a camp and I went out there trapping, it would be it would be like this extra thing. It's recreational. 00:38:27 Speaker 6: There wasn't. 00:38:28 Speaker 1: This was not right. 00:38:29 Speaker 6: No one that was your home in the winter. 00:38:31 Speaker 1: I mean, they would have been doing something else if they could have made money. 00:38:34 Speaker 6: Doing something else, probably so, But that's that one. The way they middle living and the winter was trapping. Spring was fishing crabs, and then you had the troll season and they made uh, they're living catching shrimp fish, you know, with big shams and all that. Then when it was it was legal then you know, and they would There was some family that would fish for they catch fishing which and some of them trill. My dad was a trawler. He was shrimping. Matter of fact, he was one of the best ones, not because he was my dad, but he didn't catch shrimp when y'all grew up on a cleaning shrimp and you know, on the shrimp boat with my dad and a song. Well, no, I used to enjoy it because there was so much wildlife, you know, ducks and man you go right off the camp and kill the dog and you eat it, you know, things like that. You just lived off that land. And what I used to enjoy when I was a little kid was the blackbird, the red winged blackbird. And of course we all spoke Spanish, it wasn't English, you know, when I was a little kid, and they had this this fellow called Adam Millery, and he used to come when out when I was old enough, when I was out there, and he used to come out with the boat and buy the muskrat, you know because they would hang it up on the hangers and dry it and all that kind of stuff. Well he uh worked for Delapa Corporation, and they would buy all the the far far from me, and he would come and ingrid the far and all that. I remember, all that kind of stuff, and and he would buy the far and I used to like them, uh, little red winged black words and uh and they was always singing, you know. And I told mister Anam and he gotta he called me that ever since anyway, he said, And I told him, say, you know, mister Anam put them little birds of singing And he said, what is that? 00:40:30 Speaker 1: Whimpey. I said, they're saying. 00:40:32 Speaker 6: Panfrio, panfrio, we called French toast. We call that panfreo in Spanish. And I said, they want panfreeo. They're saying panfree. Yeah, isn't they would go like Toledo, Toledo like this? I said, they want panfril. You know, it was that I wanted, I guess. I said, they're saying they want panfree. You know what he left me. He got a kick out of that, and the rest of my life whenever I was saying, he me fun for us. It was just a joy to be out there. 00:41:04 Speaker 4: You know. 00:41:09 Speaker 1: I think we're starting to get a glimpse into the culture of the trapping camps. It seems like an idyllic place, but the work was long, hard, and the conditions primitive. But all this would come under literal gunfire in nineteen twenty six. In this episode, we've built the context that shows the value of these Muskrats to these Islanios people. In the next episode will get into the actual details of the war, including machine guns and murder, and we're gonna explore more into Leander Perez's life. We'll close with a final thought about this story from James Carvill, taken right out of the movie Dealt the Justice, which will lead us into our next episode. 00:41:57 Speaker 2: This is the oldest, most predictive movie in the world that has the shame beginning, the shame middle, and the same end every time. 00:42:07 Speaker 3: It don't change. 00:42:09 Speaker 2: And you could look at the history of the modern world through these land people of Saint Benard Parish and it would be It would be right now. 00:42:20 Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share a podcast with a friend this week look out for Lake Pickles, Backwards, University Brints, this country life podcast, and truly thank you for listening to these stories. Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live. You know, they're trying to sell a bunch of our public lands. We all need to take action because that's where the bears live.