00:00:05 Speaker 1: In that time. In those years, people were dying by the thousands. Death was just everywhere. Every family was touched directly by death. On this episode of the Bargarase podcast, will be looking into the life of a man whose legacy is wrought with conflict. To Americans who lived in the Ohio River Valley, he was a folk hero, but to the Native Americans he hated and murdered in cold blood. He was known as the Death Wind. I went to the Ohio Valley to interview outdoor writer and author Chip Gross to learn about the life of Lewis Wetsel. This dark, deep dive comes at the request of one Steve Rannella of Meat Eater, who is also a guest on this episode, and we'll talk about Wetsell's life and the brutality of the American Frontier. Lastly, in an effort to understand the mind frame of Wetzel, I'll interview mental health professional Zack Knucom to learn if our boy Wetzel was truly a sociopath, a serial killer, or where his action simply the result of a life lived in a war zone. And yep, Zack's my brother. I doubt you're gonna want to miss this one, and hey, I know a lot of you folks let your young kids listen to Bargaras, which I absolutely love, but I'll warn you in this episode we talked about some pretty gruesome and graphic stuff. There was no guilt in his mind, there was no regret. It was just I've got to do this, and it continued doing it basically until until the day he died. My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived 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. Well. In one of the stories that I've written about him, I say, if he were alive today, he would be labeled a serial killer, and he really would. But he hated Indians. He wasn't killing white people, but he was killing Indians. He would kill hostile Indians. He would kill you know, not hostile Indians. He just just hated them. And where I think this came from is when he was younger. When he was just thirteen years old, he and his brother, who was eleven, were taken captive by Wyandots. He later that night he had his brother escaped got back home. But he made a vow to himself when he was a kid that he would kill Indians anytime he could. And then later in life one of his older brothers is killed by Indians. His father is killed by Indians. So he had a real vendetta there. The Shawnees called him long Knife, the Hurons called him destroyer, and the Delawares called him death Wind. The death Wind coming moving fast, crawls to him, and he's been a looking for the men to burning kill. And when he's coming, you can fill the death of chill. And he won't stop blowing to his peace and then not his pal. In the days of the Sender, we struck to survive so that the hunger and me but stay. You know, a man with a gun, he's stung too. To the people, he was out of the wind. The cultural impact of a frontiersman can often be gauged by if they have a musical ballad written about them. This is one from a band called the back Roads called the Ballad of Lewis Wetzel. I love these old songs, and how about those backup singers, And I'll give you a digital fifth month if you've ever heard this one before. Louis Wetzel is a controversial figure, and it's interesting to read about him, hear him sung about, and see him honored, and then go back into his life to try to make sense of it. Many Americans in his time viewed him as a hero, but to somebody was a criminal, a murderer, a madman. But the confusion isn't surprising. The time period when the American frontier was being pushed into the middle ground what is now Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, heroes and mad men could easily be confused because of overlapping traits. Westel was by profession and Indian scout or Indian hunter, and he became known as the most effective Euro American single combat fighter potentially ever. He was believed to have killed in one on one tussles as many as a hundred Indians in his short forty five year life. He claimed to put a bit of silver in his bullet to protect him from Indians. Some of his killing was done on the clock, and some of it was done with a recreational flair. He took scalps with pleasure, but in doing so protected his people, elevating him to a folk hero. There's a county and a wildlife management area named after him in West Virginia, along with multiple businesses, parks, and springs that still carries aim to this day. Born in seventeen sixty three, Lewis Wetzel and his family did some fighting in the Revolutionary War. It's also believed that Lewis Wetsell served as a scout on the Lewis and Clark expedition in eighteen o four. He served multiple prison sentences and escaped once in a coffin. The Feller had quite the resume. If you've been following bargaries, you know that I'm prone to tell stories with crescendos of redemption. This one doesn't have one. It swoops low, arcing towards darkness. But lucky for us, darkness creates a context for light to be seen, and I think by looking at the roughest examples of a time period, it puts into context others that we've learned about, like Boone, who compared to Wetsel was the Billy Graham of the middle Ground. He was a Saint. Chip Gross, the first voice you heard on this podcast, has laid the founder sations of what built Louis Wetzel. As a kid who was taken captive by Indians and later his father and brother were killed in a riverside bush whack. Louis made a vow that he'd kill every Indian he ever saw as long as he lived, and he proved to be a man of his word. If you recall on the Mediator podcast, Steve Ornella made a public petition to get me to tell the story of Louis Wetzel, which I agreed to do as long as he agreed to take to heart some friendly advice on how to blow a crow. Call here's Steve. Steve RONNELLA, how did you get connected and interested in the Wetzel brothers. I'll answer that, but first I want to thank you for doing this because I want to learn more. I want to learn more about the Wetsels. I'm fascinated by him. Even though I didn't know about him that long ago, I became aware of him in this way. I was interviewing a Daniel Boone historian and in this we were talking about how Daniel Boone and was this this very noble, ethical individual somewhat of opportunistically pacifist when he could be. He was a pacifist when he could be right. He was a friend of the Native Americans when he could be sometimes went out of his way to be that way. Talked remorsefully about taking an Indian's life unnecessarily right. This historian ted Franklin Blue then made a comment to me about some real bad dudes and mentions the Wetzel Brothers. I didn't know who they were, but a body of mine then text me, how they do you not know about the wet Cels. The Indians called him the death Wind, And that's when I decided to start lobbying you to do a thing about the wets You'll hear us throughout this referring to the Wetzel Brothers. But the most famous Wetzel, and the one we're talking about the most is gonna be Lewis Wetzel. Lewis was born on a section of the Wilderness Road in West Virginia in seventeen sixty three, wrapped in a union jack flagged his father and mother were on their way to homestead on Big Wheeling Creek in the panhandle of West Virginia, fourteen miles from the Ohio River. It seems your life is usually more exciting if you're from the pan handle of a state. Nine states have panhandles. That's not relevant. His father was considered by many to be reckless or maybe just naive because of how far he settled from permanent white settlements. He was way back on the very edge of the frontier, and it was a time of great instability and constant guerrilla warfare between whites and Native Americans. The wet Cels ended up having seven children, and they had seven peaceful years before Wyan Dots burned their cabin and captured Lewis AND's younger brother, Jacob. Four of seven Wetzel children would be captured by Indians at one point in their life, and a couple of them got captured more than once. That's an incredible stat Here's the story of Louis's beginning, and you begin to see the inklings of the young Louis's uncanny ability to navigate backwoods life. So in seventeen seventy six, he and his younger brother, Jacob, who was eleven were kidnapped by Native Americans. They're working corn and the boys had seen a black bear. They had reported seeing a black bear around the cornfields, and Louis thought the black bear looked funny, and so he goes back and tells his dad Martin. The older brother says, saw bear, and Louis goes, I don't think it was a bear. I think it was an Indian in a bear skin. And it kind of red flagged the family. Well, sure enough, that night they hear something and they're kind of on red alert and they look outside and they see an Indian coming up to him, and the dad shoots and kills the Indian. This isn't when he gets kidnapped, Well, it's connected to that. That brings retribution from the other Native Americans. Within a couple of weeks or a couple of days, he and his brother Wetstle thirteen, Jacob Levin are kidnapped, straight up, kidnapped by and that's when he got shot. He was in a cornfield and a bullet grazed his chest. He gets caught and they stay in captivity for two days before he makes a pretty daring escape and and he showed a lot of intuition inside of situations with Native Americans, even from when he was young. Like they had him tethered with like leather straps, and they had him tethered up at night, he and the brother together and they started moaning about the straps being too tight. The guys come over and loosen their straps. Long story short, they escape after the guys are all asleep. This it sounds like five or six guys. It's a detail about this escape that that starts really speaking to his sort of coolness and also just kind of the person he was where the Indians had taken his father's rifle and here he is like at any second, as far as he knows, he's gonna get tom a hawker or taken and has the has the run a gauntlet. You could get killed doing that, Like this guy has no idea. He gets away, but they don't want to leave without recovering their old man's gun. And there's like a detail too that the Indians had moccasins that they were drying by the fire, but they shrunk up. The boys couldn't get the moccasins on their feet and had to go down to the creek stole the moccasins, but then had to go down to the creek and soak those buckskin, not moccasins, in order to get him stretched out enough to pull him over to their feet and then take off right. So rather running off free, running off barefoot without the old man's gun, they get free, get their old man's gun, get some footwear, and then take off well. And the story was he had to go back, so they they escaped and actually left the camp and in they realized they didn't have shoes. This is a version Almontel's. They didn't have shoes, they didn't have the gun, and they go and he and Wetzel sneaks back into the camp and gets the stuff and comes back out, which is risky. I mean, you know, like the guy was laying on something, you have to kind of get it off under his head. Almond didn't go into that that detail, but that was the foundation, which would be the vowel that Lewis Wetzel made as a young boy that he was gonna kill every you know, Native American that he came in contact with, and not in an Don't it sounds so weird to seeing an organized fashion, not with the military, not in support of like military campaigns, not in support of any kind of strategy. It was just like in and of itself, even to kill allies. Stuff that happens in a person's childhood is always an important player in their life, whether good or bad, were foreigned by our experiences, and I do believe that we have a choice of how we respond to the good and the bad. Later in the podcast will hear from a mental health professional on this stuff. Here's the account of the first time Louis killed a Native American. As a matter of fact, he killed three when Louis was sixteen years old, So this is three years after he and his brother Jacob had been captured. They went on a mission with a bunch of adults to retrieve some stolen horses. So a group of Indians that stole horses. His dad's horse was in the mix, and so they go out. The guy's getting a little shoot out with the Indians, and the adults retreat and Wetzel goes back and it's like, what are y'all doing? And they go, well, YadA, YadA, YadA, and he goes, well, I'm going back in and he basically employed a tactic that he used most of his life in certain situations, and that tactic was they called it being treated when in the Indians would retreat but hide and be waiting for you. And basically he knew where these Indians were hiding out, and he snuck in there, and he put his hat on the end of his gun and leaned it out from behind the tree. He knew that they were watching him, and when they shot and hit his hat, they thought they killed him, and so they exposed themselves. And he had a loaded musket. So a one shot musket was a real big deal back in those days, because you pretty much had one shot and then you had forty five seconds to two minutes of loading a gun, depending on how fast you were. So they shot, they thought they killed the guy, and then Wetzel lets him get in close, steps out. It's two Indians, shoots one in the chest and takes off running. And what they didn't know, and what he became known for was he could reload on the run. And he became famous throughout that part of the world in the Native American tribes for always having his gun loaded. But he could he could load on the run, and so he runs and the these guys already shot their bullet, and so he takes after him, and then he runs for however long, and then his turns with a loaded gun and shoots, and the they've never seen anything like that. And so he came back with all these grown men. It was like, holy cow, who is this kid? Came back with scalps. They they collected scalps like trophies. I don't want to glaze over the act of scalping a dead enemy. I think it's easy to go numb to the brutality of the act. Maybe it's Hollywood books. I don't know, but scalping started in Native American warfare, and then as Europeans got involved, many took up the practice. Perhaps it was unrestrained retribution, or maybe it was to communicate with their enemies in a way that they could understand. Anyhow, the sixteen year old Wetsel took three e scalps that day by what would become known as Wessel Spring near St. Clair'sville, Ohio. Lewis's success in guerrilla warfare was that he could load his gun extremely quickly. Ship Gross is from the Ohio Valley. He's retired. Game Warden authored multiple books and has had over one thousand of his articles published about hunting shooting in Frontiersman. Years ago he took an interest in Lewis Wetzel, and here he'll give us a critical detail of how he was able to reload so fast. Now Here, here's another wilderness skill that he had, and not many other frontiersman had it. Simon Kenton could do it. A few others could do it, but reloading on the run, and he was very very good at this. And what he would do he was he would take two or three lead bullets and actually put him in his mouth. Believe it or not. Now this was before they knew much about lead poisoning. I'm sure it. He didn't seem to care. He would carry these extra bullets in his mouth and that would help him reload much quicker on the run. Some historians in the past have written that Lewis got lead poisoning from all the mouth bullet stuff and it turned him into a madman. Though that can't be healthy. I don't think that's the only culprit to his obsession with killing. Here's chip with more unloading a musket fast. Once you're the firearm is empty, what you have to do is you have to pour powder down the barrel and then you step one. That step one. Step two is then you have to take a bullet which was a round ball, lead ball, and drive it down against that powder with a ramrod. And then the last step is to take a small amount of powder and put it in the pan, the firing pan. That's not easy to do, and then you have to hope that everything is going to work when you pull a trigger, because a lot of times a gun might fire called a flash in the pain in, but the powder in the barrel doesn't go off, and sometimes that did. That did happen with him, And then you're down to hand to hand combat, and he was good at that too. He had all the wilderness skills. You know, it's interesting now we're all used to firearms, and we're used to firearms that shoot cartridges that are essentially fail proof. Just pull the trigger and a gun goes off. That that's no longer a question. But during this time period, a warrior's world was dominated by this possibility that his gun wouldn't go off when he absolutely needed it to. Number one, and then number two, he was dominated by this limitation of time. You get one shot, boomb and then you have to go through a pretty detailed sequence of events to get it loaded again. And so that was actually a tactic of Wetzel in his fighting, was that he could reload so quick that the Indians knew that if a guy shot, there was a span of time when he couldn't shoot again, and they would rush in. They would they would draw the volley of their their enemies and then they would say, Okay, now we've got a minute before they can reload, and we're gonna go in and take him hand to hand or whatever. And that's where Louis Wetzel, I mean, that was his trick, was that he he could I mean, it would be interesting to actually have the data on it. I mean, could he do it? Could he do it twice as quick? Could he do it? Of the time? Louis being able to reload his gun fast was probably his most valued skill. I want to read you an excerpt from the book The Life in Times of Lewis Wetzel by C. B. Almond. This book was published in nineteen thirty one. At the age of seventeen, Wetzel maybe said to have entered on his life's work, that of hunting Indians the warfare with the Reds was not restrained by proclamations or politicians. It was a free fight. Anybody could enter and keep at it as long as he liked. The rules were simple and consisted of get his scalp. Wetstel was a stern, sober, silent sort of person, never boasting of his exploits, but pursuing his way with the tennacy, which made his name as much feared by the foe as they were hated by him. He shunned the company of other people and was never so content as when roaming the forest like a wild animal. Wetzel's picturesque appearance, joined with his growing reputation for daring, added to his popularity with border folks. Five ft ten inches tall, unusually strong and well developed in arms and shoulders, slight and active of limb, with piercing black eyes, scowling brow, and black hair, which, when combed out, hung to his knees. This ranger was the ject of much approval on part of the young ladies at the settlement. Graceful, morose, fascinating, and blind to their charms, the dashing youth doubtless reeked considerable havoc among the feminine hearts not recorded by tradition or listed in printed tales of the Frontier. His true love was the long trail and the thrill of the encounter. End of quote. The intel that we have about Wetzel is sparse, and many authors have published contradicting stories. There are three main books about Wetzel that I found. One is CB Almond's book The Life and Times of Louis Wetzel, which I thought was pretty good. Another by Robert Myers, published in eighteen ninety, was called Lewis Wetzel, which honestly I didn't think was that well written, sorry man. And the latest was in nine called That Dark and Bloody River by the famed author Alan Eckhart. It's not all out Wetzel, but he talks about the Wetzel brothers. Lastly, the author who's attributed with making Lewis's nickname the Death Wind famous was a novelist named Zane Gray, which in his book The Spirit of the Border used the nickname because Gray's novels, which were fiction, used the Wetsel brothers as characters, which is kind of confusing, so it's not a clear where the nickname came from. But a poem called the Ballad of Lewis Wetzel, written by Glenn Baker, gave me the only true citation of the Death Wind that I could find. Chip is a native Ohioan and he has studied Wetzell a lot. And here's him describing what he knows about the nickname the Death Wind. And the death Wind name was kind of interesting because where that comes from is you probably know, if you take a muzzle loading rifle and you blow over the into the barrel, you get kind of a hollow sound, like blowing over a bottle, you know, empty bottle, that type of thing. And he would he would use that to mess with the Indians if he got up to a group of Indians, maybe an Indian camp, and there was too many for them for him to take on. He would get within hearing distance and he would blow across the top of that muzzle to let him know I'm here, you know, and I may be coming for you tonight, and me may the next night and maybe down the road, you know, two or three months. And so that's where death Wind comes. And another part he grew his hair very long. He was a big man. Crew his hair which was totally black as long as he could, which was knee length, and he was basically taunting the Indians, come take it from me if he can, and none ever did. It's striking to imagine a buckskin frontiersman with cold black hair down to his calves, and apparently he wore his hair this long until his death. Glenn Baker's poem agrees with chips version of what death wind means. But I've heard three possible sources of the nickname. Number one being blowing over the end of a muzzle to intimidate Indians. Number two, someone inferred that he had a trademark screamed that he made when he killed an Indian, and the escape ees said it was like a death wind. Lastly, some have thought it just meant he swept quietly through the woods, dealing out death like a death wind. Here's Steve on Lewis's start as an Indian scout. At age seventeen, he became a full time Indian scout. It was like an employment. I don't know how he gets the settlements would have you know, you hear him described as militia, and then there was so you had like these informal militias. Then you had rangers which were more tightly like like Samuel Bray who was a contemporary at Lewis wetzel Um who was under employ of the army, like underemployee with the army, but ran a group of frontiersmen who were known as rangers. But these were guys who were just on the lookout for raiding parties. And the thing they might do is they might just travel the north shore or the south shore of the Ohio and pick up tracks going one way, follow those tracks to see if they had stolen anything, intercept tracks of Indians that were coming south, and alert villages, alert settlements of what's coming. If there was were kidnappings or burning of buildings, they might get on the trail and follow to go get retribution. And at any given time there were any any small collection of these groups out doing like the scouting or these groups, these frontiers might also ally themselves with the military, and when the military is going to do like a formal campaign, they're out ahead to find where they're camped to make sure they don't fall into ambushes. Um saying, like like a in Vietnam, the long range reconnaissance patrollers, they were just out in the jungle, listening, looking, gathering intelligence. When you understand that too, it helps understand why these guys. You give some context for why they were doing what they were doing, and why that these guys would be potential folk heroes, not even folk heroes, like just legitimate cultural heroes, because they were the ones that were protecting quote unquote the first line of defense and also delivered. Imagine you're a Euro American, you're a white setter at this time, your child's abducted, and someone delivers your child back to you. I mean, that's one of the things that made Boon famous. It's the most kind of like iconic hero tales what's never looked back after becoming an Indian scout. Here will learn some of his exploits that made him a folk hero of the region amongst the whites. Wetzel, there's two times that he was documented on having saved somebody's wife, and it was the same story. Both times, He's out hunting with somebody or traveling with a man and the woman was back home, you know, with a family. Two different times he went back with the guy and found the cabin burned and the family gone. And usually the usually the women were spared, and the children also painting an idea for just the brutality of the era. The first guy, his last name was Touch. He was hunting with his a young guy, and I don't even think they had kids. But there was an extended family there with some men and the man's new wife. And they they they're going to have dinner, you know. I mean, they're like coming home. And they get there and they see smoke, and they come and they find the dead bodies of all the men scattered about, and the hogs had gotten loose their their tame hogs and had eaten the bodies, like had just mangled the bodies. And then but the woman is missing, and Lewis wets I mean it sounds like a movie, you know, Louis Wetstell finds the tracks of a size six woman shoe going off with the moccasins, you know, and so they know that she's alive. And so it takes them two days, but they catch them and kill the Indians and save the lady. And I mean that was a common story. It's hard for us to put ourselves into the shoes of people who lived in an era with such brutality. Here Chip will tell us the story, showing us that Louis's killing of Indians was motivated by far more than it being his employment. He was cold blooded. There was a time he was living in the Marietta area, which Mariette is a town right on the Ohio River. It's the oldest town in Ohio. I think it's the oldest town in the Northwest Territory. At one point, the people there were getting tired of the Indian wars and so forth, and they decided, we have to try and settle this, you know, make a treaty or do something. So they got ahold of a bunch of tribes and they said, let's get together. Let's let's have a piece of about three months. And the tribes agreed, and they camped about two miles north of the river and would walk back and forth to Marietta for meetings and that kind of thing. Well, there was one Seneca chief who always walked by himself, which was not good. Guess who was living there and noticed this Lewis. And Lewis knew that these were, you know, not hostile Indians at this time, but he didn't care. So at one one day he lays for this chief, and as soon as he got within you know, fifty yards, he steps out from cover, didn't say anything, just pulls his rifle up and shoots and hits him in the chest. Of course, the chief goes down, he runs up, he scouts him, runs off, and everybody knows who this guy. Had long black hair, he had a particular colored hat, blah blah blah. So they go grab Lewis. They put him on trial and they bluntly asked him, Lewis, did you did you kill this Indian? Yes? I did, and he he wasn't didn't feel guilty about it, no remorse, no nothing. So the judgment was, well, you're you're going to hang for this. What I haven't told you yet is that this wasn't the first time that Lewis killed an emissary of peace. In Lewis Tomahawk, the Delaware chief that was involved in peace talks, but the war, combined with weak Backwoods justice, meant that nothing was done to Lewis. The murder Chip told us about took place in Sight nine, and Lewis was sentenced to hang for the murder of the Seneca chief to Gunta. However, he broke out of jail two consecutive times and was recaptured, but was ultimately released and functionally acquitted of the murder when the famous backwoodsman Simon Kenton brought a large gang of Ruffians to the jail and demanded Wetsel be left free. Are they taken by force? So they let him go. Kenton coming to Wessel's aid shows the favorable reputation that he had in the region. This wouldn't be the last time that Wetzel ended up in jail though. Here's Chip with more insight into Wetzel's tactics for killing that showed his brutality and the mind frame he had. And this is interesting too. I think Lewis was at times just over the edge. You can be courageous, but you can also be stupid sometimes. And he got to the point where he didn't care if he was outnumbered two or three to one. He'd figure out a way to kill those Indians. And there's several times where he was tracking Indians and might come across a group of just two or three. So he figured out that instead of just charging in the camp, just let him go to sleep. You're going they're going to go to sleep sooner or later. And there's several times this story is told. But after they were asleep, he would slip in there with knife in one hand and tomahawk and the other and drive the knife into the heart of one, tomahawk the other and if the third one heard something and jumped up, he'd get the same thing and he would kill all three. I mean, he was that obsessed with with killing Indians, and he was that good at it. Uh, it's scary to talk about. He was very much a warrior, you know, he really was. And uh. And again there was no there was no guilt in his mind, there was no regret. It was just I've got to do this. And he continued doing it basically until until the day he died. I heard them mention and and this put it into context for me, is that he viewed killing an Indian no different than he viewed killing a bear, which is a kind of a wild thought. The cultures were so different that they a lot of people back at that time, What's Will probably included, did not think of Indians as human beings. I don't know how you can do that, and we certainly today aren't there. But there was a time in history when people thought that that they're not humans. They're like us, but they're not humans, so we can we can go ahead and kill them. Yeah, and it's it's hard for us in to put our mind there. Well really, I mean, it's a trend inside of human nature. And it makes it easier to kill your enemy if you think they're not human. That's part of this archeological aspect of it. If that person is not a person and they're a bear, that's a lot easier. Yeahs almost like a coping mechanism for guilt. And you build that into your culture, and your dad tells you that, and his dad told him that, And it's time you're young, you're taught that, you know, and then the more you do it, the less you're bothered by it. The human story is wrought with tragedy, and in North America, the de humanization of indigenous people is one that happened here, but to be historically accurate, many Native American ideologies didn't believe the white man to be fully human either. The Shawnees believed that whites were of a lesser order and were created by an inferior god to the one that made them, and in turn, they were often extremely brutal towards the white interlopers who invaded and took over their ancestral lands. Was a bloody and wild time period. I think this would be a good time to talk briefly about some of the other Wetzel brothers, because you're gonna need to just know they were there. Louis's older brother, Martin, was the second most notorious of the brothers. He once executed sixteen Native captives with his tomahawk, and he once snuck up behind an Indian in the midst of a peace negotiation and literally split his skull with a tomahawk. Martin was once captured by Native Americans and was their captive for over a year, and by deceit he gained their trust and then escaped after murdering one by one the three Indians he was hunting. With John Wetzel Jr. Another brother, He once infiltrated an Indian village by dressing like an Indian. He stayed undercover for several days before he murdered two Indians outside the village and later complained about only bringing home two scalps. All the Wetzel brothers were involved in this war and in murder and Indians. Now, let's talk about a critical moment in the Wetzel Brothers young adult life. The biggest marker and understanding who Lewis Wetzel was and all the Wetzel brothers and why they did what they did was when their father was killed. And it was in seven and it was Louis, his brother Martin, his brother George, and his dad. So four Wetzel's father and three sons. They're in a canoe on the Ohio River or some type of boat on the Ohio River, and they get ambushed from the bank for no apparent reason and essentially kill John wetzl Sr. And George Wetzel. And so the two that are alive are Martin and Lewis, and they survive in kind of a wild story of jumping in the water and being on the back side of the boat. And they go and make retribution for their father and kill a couple of the Indians that were a part of this. And they say that that was that was the thing that solidified his vow. So he's made this vow when he was a young boy, after being captured when he's thirteen, he becomes a scout when he's seventeen and then at twenty three, his dad and brother get killed in front of him. They bury him in a shallow grave on the banks of the Ohio River and Hickory bark coffins, so that that that like solidified the next twenty years of his life. Before he died of of he was just gonna kill everybody that he could find. This is a great place to try to venture into the mind of Lewis Wetzel. Zach Nukem is a clinical social worker, but he has also served as the clinical director of a psychiatric hospital. He spent his career in the mental health field, and I wanted to get some clarity on the possible conditions of somebody with a resume like Wetzel. And yep, Zack is my brother, older brother. You know, as you described for me Wetzel, in his life, a couple of things pop out that would that I would want to explore deeper. One would be his the initial childhood trauma that he experienced. You've got to go there. To me as a as a clinician, I'm gonna you know, PTSD is something that's going to be strong on my radar. Honestly, with trauma like that it would be hard for me to believe that there's not PTSD there, right, Sure, I mean that's pretty you know, post traumatic post traumatic stress disorder from as a child being distressed by confrontation with these Indians being kidnapped. Yep. Absolutely, it just grew through his life probably yep. So you've got that trauma right there, which changes a man, right, that changes a human being. And then as you described to me the environment he lived in, which my understanding, I mean he was basically that was his profession, was to kill Native Americans. And so as you described that to me, the first thing that comes to my mind is, I mean, that's not that's not an environment in any of us, at least in the US live in today for the most part. I mean, that's a war zone. What you're describing to me as a war zone. And so you know, so if you're assessing anisocial personality disorder or or is somebody a sociopath, you know it is a soldier a sociopath for doing what he does in on the battlefield. Right, So those are things you're gonna have to take into account. So the context matters, The context matters, The context matters, that's good to know. I asked Zack if he would be able to diagnose Wetzel, and here's what he said after he almost slapped me. So it would be unethical. It is unethical for me to diagnose someone who's not in front of me, that I'm not actively assessing. So when people ask me these things, Hey, this character from the past, or this that and the other or there, you know, it happens to me all the time, like, hey, my brother is doing these things, or my boyfriend or my girlfriend, are they a psychopath? Right? I can kind of look at things, little story worries, and they're all kind of anecdotal right at this point in time, and I can say, hey, you know what, if they were coming into my office and I had this information, I can say, you know what, these are things I'd be looking for. Okay, man, Okay. So it's unethical to go back and diagnose someone that you can't actually speak with. That is good to know. So now let's learn about sociopaths psychopaths and how both of these fall under the category of anti social personality disorder and people throw around like you just throughout the like sociopath sociopath is not an official diagnosis. It's a just kind of a term to describe a set of behaviors, right, and so sociopath and psychopath fall into under the category most of the time of antisocial personality disorder. So what is the sociopath? So, if you're looking at sociopath versus psychopath, which is kind of the easiest way to see them, sociopath would be somebody who you know, they lack empathy for others. Generally speaking, the sociopath is aggressive, Like there's a lot a lot of anger outbursts, there's a lot of aggression. The sociopath, they can be uh, demonstrative and and and people explosive. But also, like what I'm trying to get at is people can you know, enjoy their company to a certain degree because they're they're wild and crazy and fun. Okay, so they could be like almost normal people in some social settings. Yeah, Now the psychopath more the contrast of that would be the psychopath would again not have the the emotional connection to people, not really feel empathy, but generally speaking, would be able to discern I'm gonna laugh and smile to manipulate this person, but really they're not laughing and inside that's a psychopath, have very clinical, very very unfeeling. So do you think a guy that would have killed this many humans, he could fall under a category of a sociopath. Yeah, okay, so somebody like Wetzel could be considered a sociopath. But this is the main source of the problem, this antisocial personality disorder. We need to learn what this is, alright, So and that social personality disorder. And this is straight from the ds M five, which is the diagnostic manual. This is straight from the textbook. This is textbook. So somebody from them to meet that criteria, they have to meet three or more of the following. Okay, Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest, so check. Check. Deceitfulness as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases or conning others for personal profit or pleasure. I would say, check, would you okay, you know him more than me? Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead. Man, I might fit into that one, see that one. At least based on the story. Those those three things, No, there's more. There's a list of seven here. That will go. He's got to have at least oh, he's got to have at least three, at least three of the sew. We can't diagnose him because that wouldn't be Yeah, yeah, we're not gonna do it. But this is like a good guideline. Irritability and aggressiveness as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults chick. See okay, I mean he compulsed, he killed people just constantly. Yeah, but in the context of war. Yeah, so then reckless disregard for safety of self or others. Check. Consistent irresponsibility is indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations. Check. Counterfeiting. Uh. Lack of remorse as indicative by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, they're stolen from another. Oh wow, triple check. So based on those criteria, those seven, well, he for sure had six. This is a diagnosis. But these are the things Zach would be looking into if Louis Wetzel came into his office. So as we move forward, the definition of a serious killer is simply someone who has murdered more than one person. Here are Zack's final thoughts from everything I'm hearing in our conversation. If you very potentially have the labeling of a serial killer, you very potentially have the labeling of a sociopath or somebody with antisocial personality disorder, uh, and you highly likely have some post traumatic stress disorder. We're going to learn that Wetzeld got into some serious trouble with some counterfeit money later in his life. But I think this general checklist is pointing us in the right directions we try to understand it. What I learned about this antisocial personality disorder is that it's very serious and that really less than five percent of the population could be diagnosed with it. And it doesn't mean that you don't like being in public or don't like talking to people. It actually doesn't mean that at all. It means that a person wouldn't comply with the very basic premises of society, and a high percentage of people in prison have this this order. But let's get back into Wenzel's life and look at the only thing we have, which are the stories that are recorded about him. We're gonna tell two stories of cold blooded bushwhacken murder that had to do with turkey hunting. But first Steve will discuss the hazy nature of human storytelling. You know, when you're talking about how stories get a little messed up in the telling. Yeah, I have a friend who tells me a great story that involves him. Okay, so my buddy Ronnie tells me a story about Ronnie. I then tell my friend a story that happened to Ronnie. A couple of years goes by. My friend is talking to Ronnie, telling Ronnie a story that happened to me. Towards the end of the story, Ronnie says, wait a minute, that didn't happen to Steve. That's my story. Yeah, I bring that up where there's a there's like this apocryphal Wetzell's story about a Native American who is hunting whites by mimicking the sound of a wild turkey gobbling and lures and and kills too. Who are He's targeting people who are out hunting turkeys in the spring. He gobbles when they come slipping in, he kills them. Lewis Wetzel gets wind of this, sneaks into the area where he knows this individual is hanging out, throws a rock to make a noise. The individual who's masquerading as a turkey reveals himself to see what the noise was, and Wetzel out smarts the guy who's out smarting everything, and they call that guy the gobbler Indian. And it's like, did that really happen? You know what I mean? It's like so crazy, but also so it's like a perfect story. Alman tells that story, and he staked out where he believes this Indian was. He got up in a bluff, and there's actually a photo in this book of a bluff that is believed to be where he shot the Indian from. And so it's like a place that they think it happened, but it winds up being it's like, how many adventures is one guy get to have? Yeah? Well that and that's where it just starts to stack up thick, because listen to this one, Steve. So somehow they knew that there was some Native Americans hunting over in this area and that they were keyed in on turkeys. Louis Wetzel had killed the turkey the day before, cuts off its foot, it's wingbone, and puts it in his pouch, it said, and whether he was using that to turkey hunt because he was a good hunter too. I mean he was making a living hunting essentially, I mean just for his own food. And you know when he was in the frontier at least, and but he knows that there's guys around, and what he does is he takes the track. I'm pretty sure Lyman Draper is the one that recorded this, so it would have been like third hand, Like Louis, it's a told a guy and that guy told Draper, so you know, it's about as good as we can get. And Louis said that he made turkey tracks in the snow bank, so he didn't leave his tracks. He left turkey tracks and went up on the hill, staked out a hundred yards away in a clearing, and he made the sound of a fly up a turkey flying up to roost by slapping the wing strategy used by a modern but you use the wing to make the fly down. But the difference between us and them, we hunt him in the daylight, and they would hunt him oftentimes sometimes in the dark. Well, he made this the loud sound of a turkey flying up to roost, and then he had a wingbone call. And I mean the guy the Native American appears and starts tracking those tracks, and he shoots him, kills him dead. I mean, so it's wild. You know, these stories, I think you have to can with a grain of salt, but you know they come from I mean, that may be just the way it happened, but it also might have been a fraction of the truth as well. What we know is that in that time, in those years, people were dying. By the thousands. Death was just everywhere. Every family was touched directly by death. You could not get through years without seeing dead people laying around. You couldn't get through life without seeing mutilated corpses. You couldn't. Yeah, so was every one of these little murder incidents or whatever he said, like, is it? Like, I don't know. But what we do know there was a lot of people killing a lot of people during those years and that part of the country. Think about being in the spring Turkey woods here in a gobble and trying to decide if somebody's trying to lure you into kill you. That is next level. Here's the suite of stories that continued to paint a picture of Wetzel's wild life. There's a story of once of him escaping from Indians swimming. He swimming the Ohio River a lot. You know, Whelan, West Virginia was right on the edge of the Ohio River and then the Ohio Territory was where a bunch of the stuff was going down. Multiple times he swam the Ohio River in bad conditions and once he and a buddy escaped. They had one horse. They the buddy takes the horse for whatever reason, I guess he was riding it. The horse takes him across the Ohio River swimming. Wetzel has to swim, and I mean they're fleeing for their life. And he gets across. It's in the dead of winter and he's dieing a hypothermia and a story as they kill the horse, split it down the middle, Wetzel crawls in the horse and survives hypothermia inside the horse. That's kind of a throwback to the old you know, you wonder where the guys at Star Wars got that when they killed There's there's there's accounts as well of hide hunters, buffalo hide hunters surviving storms inside you know, inside the abdominal cavities of buffalo they kill. They didn't get it from Star Wars. Well, I'm saying the Star Wars got Star Wars Spielberg. He got it from those boys. Okay, in my knowledge of Wetzel, this was his most cold blooded move ever. So in his adult life, Lewis was captured by Indians and he he stayed with them for some period of time, and they capture him and they know who he is. And interestingly, inside of Native American culture, if they capture a great warrior, even from the enemy, they treat him different, you know, I mean, like you'd think with us, it might be like kill him immediately, good, different always Because you know the story of Jacob great House, him and his wife, Jacob great House, the o're bad very much in the vein, very much in the vein of Wetzel. Jacob Great Else commit some atrocities, and when they caught him, they took him and his wife and they opened their bellies right above the pubic line, pulled out the lower intestine, tied it to a sapling, and made him go round and round in circles. The wife died pretty young, but they say Jacob grey House went so far he pulled his own stomach out before he died. Because he had done some bad stuff, and he knew him and he paid for the bad things he did. In his case is unprovoked. Unprovoked killing of friendly people. Yeah, well, in the account that is told by Wetzel, because he was the only one there, they are trying to figure out what to do with him, because they've got a real trophy on their minds. This is a great warrior, and he can hear him, and he can speak Delaware, and he can speak multiple Native American languages fairly well, so he can understand what they're saying. And they say, well, we're gonna burn him at the state tomorrow. Pretty much, that's what they decide. But there is a war chief that didn't like that idea, and in the night came and turned Wetzel loose, freed him and actually gave him a gun and gave him a horse. And in his mind, a great warrior, even if it was a warrior against his own people, didn't deserve to die that way. What does Wetzel do shoots the guy that's turned him loose. That's cold blooded, brother. If you remember I mentioned that Louis and his family participated in the Revolutionary War. Here's a war story. This is an interesting story. This is a revolutionary war story. Martin and Lewis are at Fort Bealer in West Virginia. That they were in a log fort. The fort was being attacked by Native Americans, which they were on the side of the British, and so and and there was they saw where some guys were digging a tunnel under the wall. And Lewis is standing there with his tomahawk and the first guy makes it under the wall, tomahawks him in the head. They go ahead and pull him through under the wall. Well, the Indian behind that guy just sees his feet go under the wall. And there's a war going on, so they can't hear much and there's a thick wall there. Well, the second Indian goes under the wall, comes up, there's Louis Wetsel walk hits him, kills him. They kill six guys crawling under the wall and just stacking the bodies before they finally figured out what was You know, I don't know, they quit coming under the wall. Isn't that wild brutal? There are just too many stories to tell about Wessel, but I can't take a swing and telling you about his life without telling you about this one. He ended up in Louisiana and got involved in this counterfeiting money scam. Some say he got romantically involved with the Spanish officer's wife and was framed. I would imagine the black locks down to his calves would have been hard to look away from him for some women. But that's neither here nor there. But however it went down, he went to prison twice for counterfeit money. However, just like the first time he went to prison, he found a way to get out. But the wild thing is is so the second time that he escaped from confinement, and he was in a real prison at this time, was he got someone on the outside to bribe the head of the prison paid him money, and Lewis Wetzel fakes being sick and fakes his own death and they carry him out in a coffin like Louis Wetzel's dead. I mean, the prison is like Wetzell's dead. They're carrying him out in the pine box they probably did, and then he gets out and escapes, and it's just I mean, that's pretty bizarre. But as far as I can tell, that is like a fairly well documented thing that happened. Man the coffin prison escape. That's classic. Man. If I'm ever wrongfully imprisoned, and if i am, you guys will probably hear about it. I'm gonna remember this little stunt. With all the outlaw and talk of late on this bargrease, I might need to be thinking ahead. I still think Brent Reeves is after me. But hey, we're all friends here and you are the only ones who know about this, So y'all be looking for me walking down the side of the road. Here's Chip with some deep thoughts. What do you make of the idea that at the time he was a hero, he was a hero of the frontier. But then now we look back at him and we see that he was essentially a serial killer, was killing Native Americans for sport. How do we What do you make of that? Let me say this, and it's very difficult for us now in midern times to put ourselves back on the frontier. And I make this statement in one of my stories. I said, and again I said, if he were alive today, he would be labeled a serial killer. But early pioneers living in the Upper Ohio River Valley and the late seventeen hundreds, he was considered an avenger because they were losing family friends to Indians and they didn't know how to stop it. The only way they could stop it is moved back east. And that's what where they came from. When they didn't want to do that. They wanted the land that was here. They wanted to live here. And so for those families, here's a guy out front that is killing the people that are killing us. So that's the way they looked at it. And it was a time period of significant warfare and conflict constant, so it wasn't It wasn't today to think of all these people dying and houses being burned down, and I mean it wet sold so many times told stories or there were stories involved of his peers being their their houses being burned down, their families being murdered, and I mean think about that today, like if that happened one time in my life, would be a big deal. Oh it would. I'd write a book about it. But how traumatizing that would be and how that would affect society, create instability, I mean like internal personal crisis. You know, here we've had our gas prices are you know, five dollars a gallon, and people are nervous and getting crazy. Well, what if there was a pretty good chance that your house at some point in your life was going to be burned down and a fair chance that your family might even be murdered. Like what, who would you then look up to? Who would you look to for security? And here's this guy that is taken on the threat And so yeah, I'm not justifying it. I'm just trying to make sense of it. But you're right, if we were back in those times, our heroes back then would be a lot different than they are now. Our hero now are sports figures, you know, people like that. That wouldn't have been the case back then because those people were dealing with life and death every day. I like what you said there, that our heroes are sports figures today. Back then they would have been the frontiers. We're always looking for heroes, aren't We's human nature. Here's Steve with his final synopsis of Wetzel and the time period he lived in. I think I think about with Wetzel is informed by our understanding now of what happens to veterans, first responders, law enforcement individuals who are just subjected to these like really traumatic experiences. Were now very versed in this idea of of PTSD. Um. I know that my own father, from his experiences in the war, suffered from PTSD. Right, I think that some sort of future historians, some kind of future like physician slash historian individual. Well, someday look get like, how is all of that death and violence to what extent was it scrambling the brain of all those people involved? Do you know what I mean? If you now came and said, if you're talking about a guy down the road, Oh, he was shot, kidnapped and shot, escaped, watched his father die, watched his brother die, lost all this family to all this bloodshed, siblings were kidnapped, and then you learned that he went on to be a mass murderer, a serial killer. What would be the first thing that would come out of your mouth? Figured, yeah, and and and it's it's like when you if you grow up watching like westerns, you know and I know you have and I haven't. Warror movies with the heroes are celebrated for their indifference to it. Right, you shoot the bad guy down and go have a drink, play some cards. But there there must have just been a lot of I don't like to run around. You know, I'm not one of the people that runs around like attributing everything around me to some version of childhood trauma. But this isn't that. This is dismembered hog eating tomahawks, bodies, man of relatives and stuff on both sides of this. Let's call the war just mass I mean, ruthless, inhumane atrocities, right, And it's like, to what degree was all that just fueling itself? M Like, to what degree where all these people or many of these people just kind of, you know, suffering from these things, Like it's unimaginable to us now, had to have scrambled their brains out. They were tougher than us. But how tough can you be? Man? Humans weren't supposed to live that way. Well, that's the thing. That's that's the part is I think about all the time. Lewis Wetzel, the Death Wind himself ended up near Natchez, Mississippi, and died at his cousin's house in eighteen o eight at the age of forty five, probably from yellow fever. He was buried in Mississippi, but in nineteen forty two, a hundred and thirty four years after his death, they exhumed his grave and moved his remains back to McCreary Cemetery in Marshall County, West Virginia. That's a bold move. They claimed his kathleenked hair was still visible and that there was a musket lyne beside him in the coffin. This grave movement was likely connected to the author saying Gray re igniting an interest in the old frontiersman, and then a bunch of these other guys right and about him. Man, we're gonna have to start talking about some lighthearted stuff on the Bear Grease podcast to pull ourselves out of the dark ditch that we found ourselves in. As a matter of fact, the next episode it's gonna be a deep dive into the life of Mr Rogers. Or I guess we could just move on and know that we've all come from a dark and bloody past as full of some wild stuff. The wild nature, physical hardship, and brutality of the lives of those on the American Frontier continue to put my life in modern times into perspective. Thanks so much for listening to Bear Grease. I feel like a giant monkey is off my back now that Steve has his podcast on the death wind. Hey be sure to check out the meat Eater dot com for all kinds of hunting, camping and outdoor apparel stuff. You could even get a super cool bear, grease or believer hat there. And thanks again for listening and have a great week. M