00:00:00 Speaker 1: M you have the story in itself, right, this is a boy who likes to go on coon hunt's when is your basic story? And you think, well, you know, okay, that's interesting, let's read about it. But then a great writer will tell a story with depth, meaning that when he goes in the coon hunt, he learns about how to behave, how to treat your fellow man right, the pitfalls of of lying and treachery, cunning and ambition and resilience. On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we're exploring a great work of American literature whose plot rides on a most peculiar but beloved pastime of rural America, coon hunting. We're diving deep into the book Where the Red Fern Grows, written by Woodrow Wilson Rawls. How did this unlikely author, a one hit wonder some might say, with such a mysterious past, make it into the ranks of American literary giants. Well here from Professor Sean Tutan, as we search out the national impact of the book. We'll talk with Stuart Peterson, who starred in the original nineteen seventy four movie, and we'll cut some hounds loose on the story Ozark Night with a man who's been devoted to red bone hounds his whole life, the ride is guaranteed to be wild as we search out that one time when coon hunting did a three sixties slam dunk on mainstream culture and they loved it. You're not gonna want to miss this one. Boys. My dad had red bones when I was just just a little fella. The first I remember, I was probably five or six, and he had a three legged dog that he called Bob. And I'll tell you that something gonna geortre. He out run most all the four legged dogs. Well, I never knew anything. You can imagine if he had four legs, he probably wouldn't win Worth Nickel. You know. My name is Clay Nukelem 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 lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. And one day I was down in the field. Papa had me chopping some weeds out of some young corn. Roality was with me. He was always with me, and I had the old book with me, and I'd read him page your two out of it two or three times that day. I guess I don't know where the thought came from or the idea, but I do know that a million times in my life I wish you hadn't to come around. But I thought, well, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could write a story like Call of the Wild. I don't know where this came from. Talked to a lot of writers, but the more I thought about this, uh more it got into my mind. And I first talked over with Rowdy. I didn't have anyone else talked to. I asked him what if he thought I could write a story like that? And I think he understood a little bit of what I said. I know he did. Wagy's tail. That was the voice of Woodrow Wilson rawls, and I want to tell you an incredible story he's involved in. It's complex because our story over the next two episodes will weave in and out between real life and fiction, past and present, life and death as it swim in and out of the storylines of a book a major motion picture in people's lives, like a winding Ozark road going from holler to hilltop. Our story as multiple characters, layers, and objectives. First, I want us to understand an obscure pastime of rural America hunting raccoons with hounds, known far and wide as coon hunting. The sheer mention of it evokes warm, nostalgic responses in many and often people can't even explain why the story of coon hunting is deeply personal to me, but it's something far from gone. Coon hunting is alive and well in the rural United States. Secondly, I want to explore how a story about this niche pastime found its way into the halls of American literary classics. This book about coon Hunting Where the Red Fern Grows. I'm sure you've heard of it. It's been a signed reading in America schools from Los Angeles to New York City and everywhere in between since the late nineteen sixties. I'm very interested in places where historical hunting traditions overflow into unlikely mainstream places like schools, works of literature, and Hollywood movies. The book has been made into two movies, the original and nineteen seventy four starring Stuart Peterson, and the other in two thousand three starring Dave Matthews. Yep, the Singer. It's pretty rare that our story, the Hunter's story, is told in such pristine tones that it creates widespread and undeniable affection for the hunter and the hunt. I think there is something unusual going on here, and I want to trail it up as we tell this big story. It will require an understanding of the storyline of the book if you're not familiar with it, but I bet you are. Our curator will be Professor Seawan to Ton of the University of Arkansas. He's a professor of English interested in the literature of the Ozarks and on a larger scale, Native American literature, which, as it turns out, Wilson Rawls was a member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Here's Professor to Ton giving us the general outline of where the Red Firm grows. Hopefully it doesn't make you cry. This is a story of a boy in the Ozarks who wants desperately to become a coon hunter, and he pleads with his parents day and night in tears to get some dogs they live. They are very poor. They live in a little cabin on a piece of land, and the father works very hard, barely eke out a living for them. There is no school anywhere, and the boy, Billy, and his three little sisters are schooled at home by their mother, whom they call Mama. Their only connection really with the outside world is a general store down the road run and owned by Grandpa, their grandfather, who is a source of wisdom and advice. So finally the boy just save enough money on his own secretly, and Billy gets fifty dollars, which would be a lot of money in and with fifty dollars, he secretly makes a deal with his grandpa to purchase two red bone hounds, and he waits weeks and weeks to hear about when they would arrived there, coming from Kentucky, And then finally he hears that the hounds are ready to be picked up, and he secretly leaves the house the middle of the night and walks thirty two miles to the southwest to Talaqua, and there he gets the deepot and finally holds those puppies in his arms, and he's in tears. So he trains these these dogs in a year or so and they are fully able to hunt coons. In the novel, there are two big moments of the hunt, and one of which is when he gets challenged on a bed to get what is called the ghost coon. And the Pritchard brothers, Ruben and Rainey are not nice boys. They're dishonest and they they they challenge Billy, and the Grandpa's so offended he tells Billy to accept the challenge against his better wishes. And that is on that terrible momentum when they finally go to get the ghost coon, Billy discus overs and the dogs discover the secret to the ghost Coon's trick. He jumps off a tree branch and dumps it drives into a hollow post on a fence. So Rascal Ghost, so Old Dan and Little Anne. The dogs finally tree the ghost coon and who comes run or not but the Pritchard's bluetick hound. That's when the dogs getting a big fight and Reuben says, I'm gonna kill those dogs, and he grabs the axe and runs with it. And this is the moment we all remember is when Ruben falls on the axe and it it lodges in his stomach and he dies right there on the in the ground and two young readers. That's a very desperate, sad moment. And it's complicated because there's nothing redeemable about the behavior of Reuben Rainey, and yet we feel a moment of compassion for them because they two are brothers. Um, it's a very sad moment. And it's later on when Billy comes back and he leaves, he leaves, leaves the hatchet in the tree and never takes it out. He said, he doesn't win everyone hunt again after what he saw and told his father, and his father tried to go out there and make amends with the very ranged family, the Pritchard's, and uh, he said, oh, we're very very sad. In the novel, every novel functions on conflict. There has to be some kind of conflict, whether between people or or the land. Humans and the land. This novel has both of those conflicts, which makes it feel powerful. So the very sad moment a lesson about honesty, you know, fairness and uh and loyalty all that to play in that moment. And and the notion of mortality and death, which foreshadows the eventual death of the hounds at the end of the novel, and of course, later on, Grandpa has saved money and use some of the money from Billy's wages from selling the first to participate in a competition with people from all over the country. The different states are driving up for this coon hunting competition, and he's now of local renown. He's he knows he gets more skins than any but any other boy or man for that matter. And then the three generations, Grandpa Papa who wasn't gonna go because he was still busy, and Billy, I'll get in the wagon and hand head up there, which is probably about twenty miles away, but a world away for for some. So that's an exciting moment for any boy and a boy reader. Three generations. You got your grandpa with it, your dad who's too busy to do anything, and here you are and your dogs. So they have the great competition in the competition. What happens is and gets wins a trophy for the being the prettiest dog, right, because that's what she's known for. It's not exactly aggressive, but she's smart and beautiful. Right. And then Dan is just ferocious and indomitable, you know. In the hunt by them, they finally treat those four coons to win the trophy. There's an ice storm, Grandpa's broken an ankle, and the dogs are like and it's not supposed to be humorous, but it almost is. The dogs are so frozen with ice they look like ghosts. And they build a fire. They're always able to do that, right. It's as exciting as a reader when you're a boy, that Billy can build a fire at any time he falls in the icy river, he builds a fire and he can do that. He's that competent in the woods. And so they win the two trophies and they head for home. And then after that, after that moment, we we have this terrible event of the hell cat or the cougar that the dog's tree and devil cat, the devil cat, devil cat of the Ozarks. And the only way to redeem that story is that the dogs say Billy's life, the devil cat was going to pounce on him, right, So that's not really is about about love at the heart of all of this, and it's the love between the two dogs, Dan and Ann. And so when Dan is torn up by the cougar, and thence he dies on the porch and the mother, again, the gracious mother, She tries to put his entrails back in his body and sew him up, and she watches them all off and everything really understanding that kind of country life. It's kind of a world away from me. And so's O's up Dan and he lies in the porch and he does die, he lost too much blood. And then it gets the sadder moment though, is when Anne dies at a broken heart, you know, as a kid. I mean you're reading this part and and there's not a dry eye out there in the readership. I mean, it's a real moment when a boy or a girl has to confront mortality, you know, in death itself, and and and it's a tender moment because Billy doesn't understand it. He tried to talk to his father about it, and his father consoles him by telling him that there's a reason for everything. There's design in the universe and purpose. And the original plan was Billy was going to stay behind and work with Grandpa at the store. And now because the dogs died and he would know long are be coon hunting, he could accompanied the family when they went west. This is what Billy asked, Is there a heaven where even dogs can go to hunt as they wish day and night? And he said, yes, that's where they're going to go. So when they're buried up on the hilltop side by side, a red fern grows between them. And there's a legend in the novel. They say it's an old Indian legend. At one time a boy, sister and a brother were walking and a blizzard and they both froze to death. And there's a chance that could be a reference to the Trail of Tears, because a lot of Cherokee people did freeze to death when they walked that nine fifty miles from the east into Oklahoma. And there's at least a quarter of all Cherokees died in that terrible trek. And so if it's a reference to a little boy and little girl, maybe maybe Cherokees it's a way to to redeem their lives and make make it so that their lives meant something and they have purpose. Because now when the red fern grows, it's only, as they say, planted by an angel, and it's a it's a it's a fern that never dies, so it's sacred. So in that moment, and this is a big theme in American literature is whether you're Native American or European American, you sanctify the land, and the land becomes sacred because something happened on either someone died and they're putting the ground, you know, or many people died, like Gettysburg. That's how we hollow ground. That's hollow ground and you can't build on it, for example. So in that moment when the when Danna are put in the ground, finally, you know, Billy has a place there and in the burial a lasting place forever. And in the burial itself, the author says, or in the narrator, that he buried his childhood there. He put it in the ground, and now he's now a man. He hands the box of the winnings to his father without question. Right, And I underlined that novel saying, this is the moment he's become a man. Right, it's no longer about me, it's from my family. And it's a really touching moment. And then when they're in the wagon and there's the fern up on the hillside and Dan and are in the ground, and he says, I left that land the ozarks, and I never riched earned. In other words, he left his childhood. You're good, he's become a man. Now. To broaden our understanding, we need to take a step back. This book is autobiographical, meaning it's based on the life of the author, which makes it really interesting because we're about to learn some stuff about old Mr Wilson Rawls that will make us scratch our heads. Let's talk about the beloved, peculiar and unlikely author. Here's professor to Tom who was Wilson Rawls? What do you know about Wilson Rawls. Wilson Rawls was a writer and a writer unbelievably successful if you consider the fact that at present to date, his most famous novel, Where the Red Fern Grows, sold six million, seven hundred fifty four eight cops with two movies attempting to portray the novel. So in terms of books like American literature books in this category with be I mean that sounds like a lot to me. Six million copies? Is that super successful? That that is very successful? And it's still being printed today, still printed today. If you walk into any Barnes and noble that you go to the rack, he'll be on the rack with great novels like like The Yearly or Charlotte's Webb. Charlotte's Webb. Yeah, it's it's still a very much read novel. It's a very teachable novel um, but it's certainly of deep scholarly interest. So when when was he alive? See he was born in nineteen thirteen and died in four and the novel Where the Red Fern Grows was published in nineteen sixty one, So you think about it, he didn't really get get to that novel until later in his life. And in the meantime, what did he do well? If this novel is considered to be autobiographical, he probably left Oklahoma or the ozark as he prefers to call them, around almost maybe fourteen years old, right in ninety seven, I would say, So that's just around the before the Great Depression. As you know in the novel. If we're thinking autobiographically, his family is very poor and they leave in a wagon. Seems earlier than it is because they're so poor they can't afford and that would have been very consistent with people living in this part of the world. And his family was headed for California, you know, like another famous novel that takes off from Sala, Saw the Grapes of Wrath. Right, they're headed for California. The car breaks down in New Mexico. I believe Albuquerque and the family never leaves that having the Grapes of Wrath. No, no, in, Wilson rawls his life. He's not get the two confused? Yeah, is it true he never came back to the Ozarks. Well, I think he made it back to Oklahoma because we know that he served to prison sentences in Oklahoma. No way, Wilson rawls, Yes, this crushing my dreams. Why did he go to prison? I don't know. But the third time he went to prison, it was in New Mexico. Are you being this is not a joke about being punked? It's unbelievable with me, really, and then you know he shocker man. He eventually he got jobs. He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, now just in construction, but I think it might have been a higher level position. There's something in my mind as a scholar's kind of turning right now working for the Atomic Energy Commission, living in a cabin on a lake in Idaho Falls. That's where he ends up, and that's when he gets first gets married, and then he begins to write write the novel. So after he had been to prison. Yes, Wilson Rawls went to prison three times. The character and morals portraying the book make this a shocking discovery. When I went to research his criminal background, I was thrown off by how hard the information was to locate. After talking more with Professor Tutan, I had to confirm the truth of this for myself because of the things written about Wilson Rawls say nothing about it. There is one tiny blurb on the Internet on Wikipedia that talks about it. That's it. Considering he was a children's author pre Internet, when it was easy to hide stuff, it would have been pretty easy to hide it and clearly wasn't something publishers or he wanted to highlight, which you can't blame him for that, but I had to confirm this for myself. He taught me a Christian. Hello, my name's Clay. I am trying to find out if someone has been in prison in Oklahoma. Could you help me find out some information. I can get you over to record and then they can move him up for you okay, great, that'd be great. One Sean is not available to take your call. Please leave a message after the town Preston town Kea. Hey Sean, my name is Clay and I'm trying to get some information on a man named Woodrow Wilson Rawls. He was born septem n and it's alleged that he served some prison time in Oklahoma and I'm just trying to confirm if that's true. He's to see east. If you could help me track that down, really appreciate it, Thank you very much. I was a bit nervous while I waited for the confirmation of Mr Wilson's criminal record, not because it really mattered, but all the social cues screamed that it couldn't be true. But it was. Here is the information that I found. When he was twenty years old in nineteen thirty three, he served eighteen months in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for larceny of domestic fouls. That means he stole some chickens and went to prison. Man, that's a tough judge. I guess his second term in Oklahoma. We couldn't figure out what it was for, but I was able to find that On March twenty second, nineteen forty, at the age of twenty seven, he pleaded guilty to breaking and entering and burglary in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was sentenced to two to three years in the New Mexico co State Penitentiary. The prison records say that he was five ft ten and a quarter, he weighed a hundred and forty eight pounds, had a vaccination scar on his left arm, and was a smoker. Wilson Woody Rawls, that's what they called him, was an unlikely bestselling author, and his personal story is wildly intriguing and redemptive. He was one of six children born in the community of Scrapper in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, a fitting birthplace. He was educated by his mother, who was part Cherokee Indian, and as he recounted, when a school was finally opened, he had to wade across a river to get there, the Illinois River, which is in the book and movie. He was often tethered while crossing the river with a lariat rope around his waist so he wouldn't wash downstream. He went to school during the summer and only went for four years. As a young boy, he read the book Call of the Wild, which inspired him to want to be a writer. It was also during that time that he coon hunted with his blue tickhound, Rowdy. Mr Wilson and his family left the Ozarks of Oklahoma when he was in his early twenties. He would end up living in New Mexico, finally settled down in Idaho for a lot of his adult life, but he died in Wisconsin in nineteen eighty four. He primarily worked in construction his whole life. Wherever he went. Throughout his young adulthood, he would write multiple book manuscripts by hand, as many as six, they say, and some of it on paper sacks. He would later say the spelling was horrible and that the handwriting included no punctuation. He kept the writing secret and was seemingly ashamed of his moonlighting passion before he got married at the age of forty five and nineteen fifty eight, it's believed that he burned many of his manuscripts yep let him on fire. It was only after he got married to his wife, Sophie, that he confessed his writing habits, and she encouraged him to write. It is believed that Rawls quit his job, and in three weeks he rewrote the entire thirty five thousand word book, Where the Red Fern Grows From memory. This would have most likely been in nineteen fifty nine. Sophie helped him edit the manuscript and submitted to a publisher. Mr Wilson's story was originally published as a three part series of nineteen sixty one in the Saturday Evening Post under the name The Hounds of Youth. From this initial exposure, a publishing company picked up the book and published it under the name Where the Red Fern Grows without Mr Wilson's input, and it said that it broke his heart because he didn't think it would reach the children as effectively with that name. And this is what's wild. The book was not an immediate success. It wasn't until nineteen sixty seven, six years after the book was published and decades after he originally wrote the first manuscript, that he got his first break. Mr. Wilson was invited to speak at a children's book conference, a place that ex cons usually aren't invited. This was in Utah, and this would ignite a flame and open people's eyes to the mastery of his narrative. Mr Wilson was in his mid fifties, a construction worker and had never spoken in public before, and he almost didn't even go. After this conference, orders poured in for the book, and its hype spread like wildfire, and he would spend the final twenty years of his life before his passing the night traveling to over two thousand schools making inspirational speeches to children, encouraging them to read and explore writing. An ex convict turned best selling author turned children's motivational speaker is an unlikely but redemptive path. It's easy for me to believe that he wouldn't be too quick to talk about his past, which seems like he never did. Maybe his fictional story was his way to right the wrongs of his youth. It's pure speculation. Here's a clip from the Disney movie Where the Red Fern Grows. You're going to hear the young voice of a man that we're about to meet. Well, Billy, you better get gone. They'll be stirring soon. Good. So I'll be looking for a bit coonskin on the smoke house wall in the morning. Maybe seeing the party, I can find cap bro Hunter. All right, touch everything and all. Now we'll go see if you're Coon dogs rich You're not. I was. I'm asking it. It's for you to true Coon and I'll do the rest. Okay. I told you at the beginning of this about a man named Stewart Peterson who played the protagonist Billy Coleman in the original nineteen seventy four movie Where the Red Fern Grows, which is by far the best movie. I love it, you gotta watch it. I was able to go to Wyoming and meet Mr Steward, now in his early sixties and hear the story firsthand from him because he met Wilson Rawls. He actually met him in Tallquah, Oklahoma, in the fall of nineteen seventy three, on the movie set of Where the Red Fern Grows. Here's Mr Stewart. So while you were down there, you had the opportunity to meet Wilson Rawls. He came down on the set and was there for but I think he was probably there a week. And so what was he doing there? Was he he came down to just observe and to see how things were going and what things looked like. We see an old man then yeah, he would have been uh, you know, of course, at thirteen, when people are over sixty five, everybody's old. I think he would have probably been in his uh, he would have been probably in his late sixties, already seventies at that point. Here, you know, I was thirteen, and uh, but I just I felt a real friendship kinship to Wilson Rawls right off the bat. He was just that kind of a guy that he liked things that I liked to do. Was when he talked and told me. I was fascinated by some of his stories, his real life stories. He spent some time with me, Yeah, I was. I wanted to be hearing him because he was He had a way with words to tell us what was he what was he like? He was just just just a Southern gant just kind just seemed to have a kind personality to me. But his his interests just were right kind of down my line. He wanted to be outdoors all the time. But did you know that he's been to prison. I didn't know. You've never heard that before, Listen, Wilson Rawls served three terms in prison. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, I was. It was when he was younger. I sensed that when I met him at my stage of life and his stage of life. He was past that to the to the extent that he was trying to make correction, uh, for the things that Maybe that's what's so interesting is it's autobiographical. But when you're when you're a fiction writer, you can go back and make this story that's kind of about you, kind of the way you want it to be. Yeah, And so maybe he was going back in and kind of fixing his childhood because I had never thought about that way. But a story, you know, it was just chucked so so full of character and Billy wrestling with God about stuff and all these little moral things going on, and then the boy dies, and you know, I just assumed Wilson Rawls was just just like lifelong, upstanding guy, and I was. I was kind of surprised, when I would have to say say the same. I was surprised based on the fact that when I met him, I was I was immediately drawn to him just because there was a genuineness and kindness in his eyes that I never I wouldn't have ever expected. You know. Of course, I believe there's people in jail that can fully with the look in their eyes, but for the most part. It's just like for me, looking into horses eyes, I can kind of have an idea of their disposition and their character from how they may be. I refer and Dad kind of My dad always kind of alluded to this as I was growing up with him around horses and as if you look in their eyes you can see a lot of what they may be in the future. Um. But but I also recognize that there are those horses that have had a wild eyed look and down the road have changed and people can do the same. Mr Wilson has been gone for almost forty years, but in one of the few recordings of him, he gave a speech called Dreams Can Come True and lucky for us, we can listen to it and in some small way meet Mr Wilson. Here's a short excerpt from that speech. I think you'll pick up on what the young Stewart Peterson did back on that movie set. Now, before I go into this talk, there's a few things that I think we better get straightened out. I'm not a professional speaker, although there seem to be an awful lot of people trying to make one out of me, But I don't think I could be a professional speaker, even if I wanted to, I'd have two strikes again me to begin with one, my word vocabulary is practically zero, and I'm going to make a statement now that I don't know whether very many people would have nerve enough to make at this kind of a setting, specially English teachers. You're going to hear more grammar mistakes in one speech to day then you will hear the rest of your life. I don't think this is altogether my fault. My mother said that Osborne in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I guess she's must have been right. Now you're going to hear words to day and my talk that some speakers may say they're not very appropriate words for speaker to use, but I don't care what other speakers has to say. They're the only kind of words that I know, the words that I grew up with. There's a boy words from the hills, the folklore word. You'll hear words like mamma and papa, gran'ma and grandpa. These are the words that I grew up with, and they're the only ones that I know how to use. I grew up in those hills on a little farm. This farm has been deeded to my mother. She's part Cherokee. Back in the latter eighteen hundreds, when the government chopped up the Cherokee strip and deeded it out in allotments to those who could lay claim to the Cherokee heritage, my mother was part Cherokee. I even have an old number myself. I was the only boy in the family at that time, but I had a whole house full of sisters, five of I never have thought that was fair, but to wasn't anything I could do about it. And like most country boys in those days, I didn't have any boys to run around with or play with. Neighbors were few and far between, and I was always alone. But the only friend I had was an old dog. And I couldn't play with my sisters. That was utterly impossible. It couldn't do that. I was interested in the outdoors, hunting and fishing, and I don't think I've ever had all of it I wanted in my life. The folklore word are the only words I know how to use, he said, his distinct soothing ozark drawl are endearing and familiar to my ear. The speech is over an hour long, but I just wanted us to interface with his demeanor. The place of authenticity from which Mr Wilson wrote this book is what makes it special and unique. I still think it's odd that he never publicly addressed his past life. I would think it would have been a point of celebration and overcoming. Who knows. You can listen to the whole speech on a YouTube channel called Jim Trelease Wilson Rawls Part one, two, three, four, and five. It's called if you're familiar with the original nineteen seventy four movie, you might have also recognized Wilson Rawl's voice because he narrated parts of the movie. Nobody told me that, I just recognized it immediately. Here's Professor Teuton given us some insight into autobiographical scholarship and the Native American influence in the book. Sometimes it's fun to consider someone's life as a story or as its own work of fiction. And if you think of Wilson Rawls as kind of has this being the story of his his confession or his being reformed. Right, He's gonna his gift to two young men will be a novel about how to behave Yeah, how to find an exactly so you know, don't don't be like the Pritchard's. So how many other books did Wilson Rawls? Right? One other? Uh, some of the Monkeys. So he just wrote two books just too. He was not a prolific author, it was. He was kind of a one hit wonder I think. So. Yeah, But you know, I should also mention that Wilson Rawls was was a Cherokee, and it's very culturally interesting to see how important that culture was to him as an author, and in the way it plays out in a subtle manner in the novel. So it's one of the first scenes in the original movie from nineteen seventy four. He's he mentions, he says, this land was given to my family because of the Cherokee that ran in my mother's veins. Opening scene. It sets it up and and from being from this part of the world very much Native American the present still in Oklahoma to this day. If you if you know a little bit about the culture or the Cherokee history, it becomes pretty clear that it's it's it plays a role in that novel. I mean, he's you know, Willy's referencing the the Allotment Act of eighteen eight seven you know, on the one hand, those who were progressive, and sometimes a tribe would be split on whether to allot the land. Some believed it was it was a chance to finally make Native Americans. Yeoman farmers learned the value of property and prepared them for citizenship, which they did not formally received until nine but they did under Allotment Act in eighteen eighty seven. If you got your land allotted, you did becoming. So the Native Americans on the reservations were not US citizens until nineteen twenty four? Is that what I heard you say? Officially? For some it was like, for example, a Navjo nation was not allotted because the land was not arible. So I believe the Navajos weren't you as citizens until by birthright. Some say as a reward for for serving in World War One. You know, more Native Americans per capita serve in our war than any other group. Wow. So that novel opens with theirs in the background there that the land has been allotted, and you know, the billy and his family have a little piece of land. Um, and it kind of dramatizes the trouble that Native Americans had. They get this piece of land, and now suddenly it's taxed, it's entrust with the federal government. So they do this because they didn't believe Native Americans were competent. That was the term they used to own or sell their land unless they had a minimum of a quarter white blood. Wow. Yeah, So they're living on this land and that's something the background, you know, and the paw Paw and mom are trying to scrape by, you know, and uh, if they don't pay their taxes, they're gonna take their land. And that's almost foreshadowed in the novel You're called when the Pritchard's so you can't get the ghost coon and they lead him up to this house and they say they used to and it's kind of eerie. I don't know if how do you feel about this? The lands kind of haunted because there's no house, but you can see there's these beautiful trees around something that might have been her house at one time. And there's this fence with the tall post where the ghost coon hides in the hollow post. But that the purchase say some Indians used to live here, and it's kind of haunted because you think, well, what happened to them? Why did they leave their land, and it could have been. There's so much in the book, just little pieces like that that are so that do such a great job of reflecting really what happened. It's it's all over the book. Yeah, you can tell whoever you know. If you didn't know Wilson Rawles, you didn't know the story, you'd read the book and you'd be like, this person did their research. Ye, and we begin with the biographical, shocking biographical materials. But what it makes me ask is where did he get this education? And he said he had virtually note books in his home. You could see he was very poor. How did he manage to do this? I mean, he is a very good writer. Let's hear what Mr Wilson has to say. Doing those three years, as I bummed around all over the country, I kept writing. I couldn't quit. Every chance I got, i'd write on something. And sometimes she said I didn't have money enough to buy a writing paper with. But this writing had gotten such a hold on me that I wouldn't let anything stand in my way. I I used to go around in the alleys and strange little town and I take the brown paper sacks from the trash cans, and I cut the bottom of the mountain spit am open, and I had a big sheet of paper, take the brown paper from box cars and cut it up into strips. I wrote a lot of stories on that old brown paper, but I was so ashamed of those stories and the writing. I couldn't spell anything. I can't do very good to this day. I couldn't punctuate any it. I just write one line after the other. Whoever, my voice broke, there was a dash, there was no paragraph. It's just one line after the other. I have the old handwritten manuscript, and now I go to the school. I take them with me sometime and show them to the kids. Try to prove to him what a man can do if he really wants to do it. The literary mechanisms used by Mr Wilson are extraordinary, especially when you consider his background. I mean, this guy wrote this novel on brown paper sacks. This should inspire it's it tells us that it's possible for the common man to rise above challenges and achieve purpose. I've gotten more questions, Professor Teuton, how is a book qualified as an American literary classic? Like? What officially qualifies this is that the amount of books sold. Is there some way to scale the impact of a book on our culture or is it an assessment that's hard to put your finger on. You just know when you see it is a fine question. Now, copies sold could actually count against a work and its greatness. Yes, it could be considered a too popular but yeah, some some novels can be considered, you know, too popular and not a great literature. Nowadays, if you go into a bookstore, we don't have are usually we don't see a fiction section separated from a literature section, right, meaning that there's a notion of low art and high art. Right. We really worked against that, and we now think about it. If you think about something. I'm looking right now on my bookshelf here and I'm looking at Huckleberry Finn. And you know, other great American writers are writing at the time, and they were looking east, people like Henry James, he would be an American, but set his novels in England. And you have someone like Mark Twain come along, who grew up on the Mississippi and reflects on his early life on the Mississippi and invents his character Huck Finn with this amazing vernacula that spends his time on the river in the woods, and suddenly we have a great work of American fiction. Now, huck Finn actually did sell well, but was still considered very quickly to be a great work in American literature because it gave voice to the uniqueness of American life, right and the way people talked in and of itself, the verna kular. It was authentically American. Yes, there's that. So there's that element. It occurs on American land. It expresses an American experience, even down to the voice, the color of the language, of the way people dress and talk. And that's what makes it great. The other element that when we might think about what to makes something very literary and and and worthy of discussion and and and searching for meaning within it, is it usual functions on a couple of different levels. You have the story in itself, right, this is a boy, you know, and where the red fern grows. This is a boy who likes to go on coon hunts. There's your basic story. And you think, well, you know, okay, that's interesting, let's read about it. And you may see a book that it just tells the you know, the daily experiences of a way on a kuon hunt right, and that probably wouldn't be that appealing to most people because they don't have that experience in their in their background. Right. But then a great rider will tell a story with depth, meaning that when he goes in the coon hunt, he learns about how to behave, how to treat your fellow man right, the pitfalls of of lying and treachery, hunting and ambition and resilience, all the all these these very important values in the young man's character Billy begins to to learn through his coon hunting. So the novel is not just about coon hunting, but certainly about the very notion of love itself. I mean, on page two forty three in my book, I mean, this is when Mr Kyle was the judge at the final competition, and when he sees the way that Dan and Ann behave towards each other, he says. Mr Kyle says, it's a shame that people all over the world can't have that kind of love in their hearts. He said, there would be no wars, slaughter or murder, no greed or selfishness. It would be the kind of world that God wants us to have, a wonderful world. So there I bought this new copy so I could write any listen, I have the exact same phrase underlined in my book, and then just just uh. Moments like that, And this is one most explicit moments when when Wilson Rawls wants to really let you know the depth of the story importance of it. But other times he's very subtle. And so what makes it a classic is its depth, Yes, and it's connection to anybody. You don't have to be a coon hunter, and it's it would be very easy to say that point nine percent of people that love this book and have read it have never and will never go coon hunt in their life. But they received value and meaning from this and connection to it. That's what makes it a classic. I guess as a kid and into my adulthood, I thought Where the Red Fern Grows was a regional phenomena because I grew up within a couple of hours of Taquah, Oklahoma, where the book was based. I was completely oblivious to the wide reaching impact of the book. Just in the last year, I've encountered multiple people from far away in foreign places to me, like California, that have said they were impacted by the book. I was shocked. They've never heard of it. Here's my friend Andreas a Tai. He's a video producer at Meat Eater, and he loves the book. Andreas, So you read this book as a kid. Why was this book meaningful to you that? There's so many reasons. I think growing up in Orange County, California. One of the big ones was the connection it brought to media nature. When I was growing up, there was still farmland, there was still space, but a lot of it was disappearing very quickly. But the thing that there wasn't a lot of in suburbia was the freedom. Like young adults urine right, like that that freedom that the character of protagonist has, It's like we all experienced that as adolescent children. However he actually got that freedom. We don't have that as much anymore. But seeing the protagonists do that, that's fantastic. Like the fact that Billy was able at twelve to like save fifty dollars in nineteen whatever, the depression era, that's insane. Imagine how much money that is and just all on his own, Like that is freedom. Like removing the ozarks from this I don't even think that we need this book to be in the Ozarks. But this is a different kind of freedom that resonates so nicely, especially when you're in school, and we were. We had to read this book. It's a really So this was assigned reading in Orange County, California. Yeah, not just Orange County, like my wife read it in Lakeport, California, which is ten and a half hours north of Orange County. If you think about it, it's pretty wild that a book about hunting raccoons with hounds is required reading in some of America's most urban areas. Honestly, as a group of people concerned about the future of hunting, we can look to this as a pattern. Wilson Rawls masterfully combined the human story with hunting. He humanized the coon hunter and made him relevant. I just can't get away from Wilson Rawls. When I first started making this podcast, I planned to talk about him for like five minutes, but his story just keeps interjecting itself into the relevance of our discussion. Here's Professor to Tom. So when someone writes an autobiographical novel, so it's it's fiction. So it's not it's technically not a true story, but it reflects a true story. How much of this do we know would come from Wilson's life. We're kind of dis guessing assuming, yeah, and it's it's uh, it's an error in scholarship to assume that the fiction is an exact representation of the author's life. But it's it's thoroughly acceptable to speculate and looking to the biographical material. It's called biographical scholarship, where we look into the life of the person and trying to find elements of that person's life in in the fiction to illuminate the meaning. So we know that Wilson Rawls, for example, didn't have sibling dogs. He had he believe he had one bluetick, one blue tick. Yeah, but he didn't have redbone hounds. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say that's the one part of the story that I bet isn't true. I bet Wilson Rawl's dog wasn't as good as old a little Land. Yeah right, because if I could go back and rewrap my childhood history of COONa, my dogs would be better than they actually were, you see. And that's the genius of fiction. It's your world. I just actually, I wrote a novel I'm trying to get published and once you go down that rabbit hole into fiction, I mean, there's it's it's become so such a work of pleasure because it's your world. Do you get to paint the picture you want, paint whatever you want, and there's something you want to correct from your childhood, you can't. You can get the dog you wanted. Yeah. And the reason they're red red bone hounds and not a bluetick hount I believe is because they match the color of the red fern that grows between them on the See. There's a pretty strong literary move from someone who wasn't trained in literature. Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. I was. My next question was gonna be why did he not go with the blue ticks? Because I know coon hunters and coon hunters like their breaths of dogs, and it's hard to break somebody away from whatever they get attached to. So I was really surprised to hear that he had a blue tick and he went with red bone in the In the book Red Bone Hounds, you say, I want to introduce you to a real red bone man. Hello, Yeah, it has been a while. We're just kind of peeking around. This is my mom's this is where I raced, of course. Yeah, that's where I grew up. Our first house was, well, the first one is where I live, and we moved in fifty eight up to that building out there, and in the sixties and then they built this one. But anyway, I'll be done. What's your name, buddy, I'm Clay skin Cap. Yeah, that's handsome. I'll tell you. It's an awesome This is my friend Ronnie Smith and his grandson Brentley. We found ourselves at a beautiful fork in the road where I want to bring us back into modern times. We've got to understand a bit about coon hunting and red owned hounds to understand this full picture. So far we've talked about Wilson Rawls and the impact of his book. But I want to plant us down in the life of a real modern American coon hunter. And if anybody qualifies, it's Mr Ronnie and we're going on a coon hunt. So this is this is your home place, this is your farm migrant, yes, sir, and my my grandfather, uh was born about right down in this holler right here, and they lost this place that it went out of the family during the depression, and I was fortunate enough to be able to buy it back, and it's like coming home, you know. But this is a part of the original with the come in on a stolen horse or not. I don't know, but this is where my grand my grandfather was born and race. Yep, man, what a beautiful night, hu, It is a beautiful night, a half moon half moon, stars are glowing. Sorrier, tell me about these dogs. Well, this is uh, this is this Isliza Jane right here, and she's eleven years old. She's a grand Night champion. She's pretty good dog. Treat a lot of coons with her and the other ones. He's an eight year old male. I don't know if he's wanted anything and the competitions or not. But I just got him three or four months ago. I've been trained quite a few coons with him. We're just still send him down the road again. There should be use. I don't hunt this one, I said. Hopefully they'll trick cone, but we're gonna have a good time. But even if they don't. Yeah, saw your is Ronnie's youngest son. We've cut the dogs loose in to the starry Ozart night, undoubtedly no different than many nights that Wilson Rawls would have hunted less than fifty miles away. We're standing in the dark listening for dogs. Did you hear a dog bark the creek? Yeah, one of them, Liza. They might treat coup. He just barks a lot, Aliza, don't work for no reason. He does better than me. They'll get that one trade where they're at. I'm sure I figured there'd be if you around this pond. I've I've been seeing a few around you when I've been around here at night. They found I think, I don't know if if you can hear it, but we just we were hearing dogs off. How far you think they are two and fifty yards? Yeah, just kind of something. We're listening for him there there. They've struck it and they're trailing a little bit. Not too hot though, is it not too hot? Before we go to the dogs, I want to learn a bit about Mr Ronnie's connection to coon hunting and redbone hounds, because these two things created the unlikely architecture by which Wilson Rawls put himself among the literary greats of American fiction. This is myself and Mr Ronnie back at the house. So Mr Ronnie how long have you had red bones? My first when I was about probably my dad had red bones when I was just just a little fellow. The first I remember, I was probably five or six, and he had a three legged dog that he called Bob. It was dog, and I'll tell you that something going short trick and he out run most all the four legged dogs. Well, I never knew anything. That can imagine if he had four legs, he probably wouldn't win worth the nickel. You know. So your dad started hunting red bones? What what time period did that have been. That would have been, uh, all in the early sixties, early sixties. And we meet hunted and hide hunted. You know that we ate some coons and sometimes glad to have it. You know. Yeah, things were a little poor here in northwest Ark in those days. So you grew up right here out here on this farm. I'm within a half a mile to where I was born. How long has your family been coon hunting that you can track? My dad told me the story before I was born that the first raccoon that they ever seen in this county. People come from miles around to say it. Well, whoever whoever treated that coon, I couldn't say who they made this shout it out with tree. I don't know that there weren't any coons here. That would have been when he was a young man in the I supposed early fifties. And so your grandson is sitting here with us, and you said he's a fifth generation. My grandpa was a was a hide hunter, but it was possums and skunks. There wasn't any coons here and maybe maybe a bobcat once in a while, you know. So that was and he'd done that with hounds. Then my dad and of course myself and my boys, and then there's my grandson. So he'd be the fifth generation that I know of, you pretty much right here on this spot. And so y'all have hunted red bones, well, we've We've had a few others, and I've handled in in some uk C nine hunts, in the World Championships and things. I've handled some different breeds of dogs for friends of mine, but my mind stays always been red dogs. If you were trying to describe the different breeds of dogs to people that had no context for hounds, would there be anything that would stand out to you about red bones that would be different than another breed. They're pleasing to that. They're beautiful dog to look at. But you know, we we hunt them for the tree and abilities and the natural born instincts and these dogs and they're eager to please and not quite as hardheaded as some of them. You know, maybe a little plothhound or something like that. Easy now, easy, now, he's ribbing me about hunting plothounds. That's what coon hunters do to each other. You know. They're just born natural tree dogs and if if you're hunting tree minded game, you better have something that'll They don't matter how fast he is, if he won't stay there until you get there. You know, would you agree with me in saying that of the six or seven breeds of u k C Registered tree dogs treehounds, they're all gonna kind of do the same thing. A lot of it is aesthetics. It's kind of like what kind of truck do you want to dress? Do you want to drive a Chevrolet, a GMC, a Dodge? I mean, is that about right? It's about right? But the types of hound have changed in forty years. We used to have a cold trailing dog with a superb nose that could man. You'd think of a bloodhound. They could trail a coon two days old things like, you know, and have the coon most of the time. But today's dogs for the most part, are not that way. Tell me why back in the day you would have needed a dog like that and why today's dogs are different. Well, it goes back to how we started out here, that there weren't any coons in this county. Coon hads got up to I can remember forty eight dollars, which was a tremendous amount of money, and that was the early to middle seventies. And uh, you didn't go every night and tree fire of coon's. You might go tonight and tree a coon and you might skip five nights trying, you know, so if you had to have some gun that didn't get fooled too easy. You know, if a coon would tap tree, you know, would run up the tree and jump in different things, and the old hounds that I had would check that tree. Today's dogs don't check. They roll up to that tree and closer eyes and they just forget everything except let's wait till we get here. Okay. So when when the coons were scarce and when we were meeting hide hunting, you needed a different time, you had to take advantage of every track that you got. So if your dogs found a coon, if it was old, you wanted them to find it. So why are they like they are today? Well, they've just bred them up to be a little what I call hot and hot nose. There's such an emphasis in the night hunts, and night hunts is a big deal when you go that's the competition, petition hunt night hunt. In the competition, you get extra points to be the first dog tree and you being able to declare that dog treade. So when it come around the tree and you know, you get more points. People figured out a way to speed dead up a little bit. Maybe they mixed a little of this, or mixed a little different breeds in there, who knows. There's all kinds of stories, but that was the reasoning behind it. So they wanted a dog that would lock onto a tree quicker. But I guess the thing even behind that is now we have a ton of coons, ton of coons. I found over time that dogs seem to miss tree a lot more coons now than they did in those days because they checked harder, and maybe the coons don't run as hard. I don't know. But it doesn't seem to be quite as difficult as it did as a young fellow to just get out and tricks, get out and trick coon. You know. I keep going back to the question of why is coon hunting so culturally iconic, especially in the South and Midwest. Why was Wilson Rawls imprinted so deeply by it. I think it's a complex answer. It's that we interact with the world at night. It's man's connection to a dog, it's the adventure. But I think a lot of it has to do with what Mr Ronnie has alluded to. There was a time when a good hound was extremely valuable, he said. In the middle nineteen seventies, about the time the original movie came out, coon hides went for as high as forty eight dollars per hide in the commercial fur markets. Raccoon hides are used all over the world for fur jackets, trim on jackets, and hats for stuff. Is really cool, and I think it's coming back into fashion. To put that number of forty eight dollars into perspective, minimum wage was two dollars and thirty cents an hour in nineteen treeing one prime coon would be equivalent to working over twenty hours that minimum wage. And I don't know about you hillbillies, but that sounds like a good way for hill billy like me to make money. A good hound was extremely valuable, especially to a poor family, and that monetary value build a deep cultural value to tree in a coon, which is what we still have to this day. Though coon hides are of a little monetary value today usually a hide is worth less than five dollars, but the imprint of the days of great value is still alive. It's a cultural artifact. When I was in high school in western Arkansas, I once to remember driving my Chevy S ten four by four pick up to the Walmart parking lot and meeting a fur buyer who was making his way through our town. I brought him eight case skin frozen coon hides in not ironically Walmart sacks. These coons have been treated by my blue tick town named Thunder, who was not very good. The buyer looked at the hides and commented on the dog sign on them, meaning they've been chewed on a little bit, and he said, I'll give you eight dollars a hide, and I absolutely agreed. I've never in my life been more out of sixty. I can't recall what I did with it, but the cash was meaningful. After listening to the hounds trail a coon, Mr Ronnie and Brentley finally say Liza Jane is treed. We jump in the truck to get a little closer. Things are a bit different since Billy Coleman hunted in these hills. You guarantee she's gotta said. I like that confidence. I bet you bet fifty two dollars she's gotta coon. Alright, let's go see. Oh boy, oh boy, the injured. Sure you don't want Liza Jane is barking at the base of a dead hollow treat. That's what we call a den treat. Billy Coleman would have cut it down, but Mr Ronnie is happy just petting his dog and calling it good. The raccoon one. Brentley and I call our bet a drawl. We both knew it wasn't a real bet, and we didn't shake on it. I continued to be amazed at the response that humanity gives someone who's humble and authentic. This humility I speak of covers the real life Wilson Rawls and its fictional character Billy Coleman. Secondly, I'm amazed that a coon hunting story has been so widely read and accepted by society at large. This story and sends human experience and personal history, and people can't help but love it. I'm not sure how to take Wilson Rawls not talking about his checkered past, and perhaps he did, and it's just not recorded. It's encouraging to think that he found a way to move past the character flaws of his youth. Perhaps Billy Coleman's character is who he wished he'd been as a young man, and in this creative way, perhaps he righted the wrong by leaving such a strong deposit of character in the form of this timeless story that won't be snuffed out by time. When I think about American hunting, which is deeply personal to me, I realize even more how it's a part of our collective American story, it's part of our identity. And there are ideologies that are currently interested in snuffing out many parts of our hunting lifestyle, including hunting with dogs, which is often a target of anti hunting sentiment. And I'll pound the table and declare that if our ability to hunt with hounds is stripped away from us. That part of our humanity is also being stripped away, and you'd think we'd realized by now that that's not good for anybody. It's my hope that this series will be a celebration of a literary masterpiece portraying rural America that made it into the mainstream. On this episode, we've introduced Professor Seawan Teuton, Stewart Peterson, and Ronnie Smith. In part two of this series, we're going to get deeper into the book and we'll hear about Mr Stewart's experience as a rising childhood actor and why he quit. And we'll learn more about the nuts and bolts of coon hunting with Mr Ronnie. It's guaranteed to be good and insightful. It sure was for me. Thanks so much for listening to Bear Grades. Please share our podcast with friend and foe. And hey, those bear grease hats that everybody loves are finally back in stock on the Mediator website, so go get them. And hey, that black Panther believer hat is on the website too. You can check that out at the Mediator dot com. And hey, we'll hear you next week on the render talking about all this stuff

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