00:00:14 Speaker 1: My name is Clay and Nukam and this is a production of the bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast presented by f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. Welcome to the Bear Grease Render. We have a pretty normal crew of the Render here today and we're gonna talk about the magnum opus of my life. Wow, this podcast is the best podcast that's ever been created, none accepted. Wow. Wow, that's that's my opinion. Let me introduce who's here today. I have my lovely wife, Missy knucom to my left. Hello, great to have you here, Great to be here. To Missy's left, Brent Reeves Bent. Okay, glad, I want to hear what you think about this this podcast. All right? I listened to Brent's left, Ben Lagron, thanks for all the time, buddy. You've been here a couple of times on the burgera surrender a couple of times, one time. If you've been here one time, you've been here a couple of times. That's right. That's right. And Ben Ben feels particularly familiar today because he has a nineteen eighties Bess Pro Shop hat on. Yeah. Those are hard to come by these days out here. Yeah, or maybe not hard to come out with their popular. That's why I wore the meat Eater shirt to make sure there wasn't too much of it of companies. You got his meat your shirt on two. Ben's laft. Josh Lambridge, spillmaker who's been wreck is starting to get wreck nuys once every other week. Yes, it's my micro celebrity grows by the every other week by weekly tell us where someone like I got recognized by a great young man by the name of Jacob down at the tool Local tool rental business doing some remodel work on my house. Had to go rent some tools and he was like, are you Landing, Hey, Well, you asked me my name, and I was like, Josh Billmaker, and he goes, are you familiar with the Bear Grease podcast? I said, way too familiar. He said what's your middle name? And you were like land Bridge, that's right. One at a time, that's great. To your left, the man who's been missing for a couple of episodes, the pattern Familius, Gary Believer, NWCAM. Good to be here, yeah, man, good to have you. Yeah, I've been listening to your stuff at last. Render group was really good. Did you like it? Yeah? I really did. Man. I'm at the Squirrel yeah camp, Yeah did you Yeah. Good to hear, good to hear. Hey, I'm like all business today because today is a monumental. This is a monumental Beargreas Render because we are well. Let me back, let me back up one step. There is such a thing. There is such a thing called the Beargrease Hall of Fame, which is a very real thing. This isn't a joke. Like one day, I believe there will be a mountain somewhere in the Ozarks with the faces of these people carved into it. Beargrease Hall of Fame. Very real. Men who qualify women, who qualify, People who qualify to be in the Beargrease Hall of Fame have a very some very evident, and some very intangible qualities about their life that make them shoe ends. And sometimes these qualities are hard to articulate, but when you see it, you know it. Okay. The current the current Beargrease Hall of Famers are number one. My dear friend James Lawrence from Mina, Arkansas. Yes, long time, you know I've used the word mentor. That's probably not the best descriptor of him to me. But we love James Lawrence. Love James mountain man, backwoods man, incredible, washtam mountain deer hunter, humble, honest, hard working, a lot of good things about James. Number two Warner Glenn. Warner Glenn, eighty seven year old cowboy from Arizona. We got a film coming out about him that is going to be on the meter and there's a film premiere, yeah, that on March the third in Bentonville. You want to be hey, give can is it? Is it too soon? I mean this time, I'm certain. I hope that all the tickets are sold. Well, we only had two hundred tickets. The venue we got could just hold two hundred people. We we we put it up. Two hundred tickets are sold, So if you don't have a ticket, I'm very sorry, but maybe will do this again. But Warner Glenn, when you meet a cowboy like him, you would think you were gonna meet a proud man. Warner Glenn is one of the most humble guys I've ever met, hardest working. Just no one ever told he was told him he was cool. He doesn't to this date, he doesn't know that he's cool. When he sees a film about himself, he's gonna be like, I'll be darn you know that kind of guy? Okay? James Lawrence Warner, Glenn Roy Clark, my dear friend, Roy Clark and East Tennessee plot man, multi generational plot man and bear hunter. Just a relic of a man, a relic of Appalachia. He grew up in a family where alcoholism was a pretty big deal. Roy Clark made a decision when he was a young man that he wasn't going to touch the stuff, and he has been a bear hunter's bear hunter ever since. I don't think he's ever been out of a pair of overalls. I have never seen the man wear a pair of pants. Incredible world class bear dogs. But le's Roy Clark. Number four. Daniel Boone, God Rest his soul. Daniel Boone was one of America's first heroes, and he forged much of what, especially people who live close to the land and hunting, what we know of the American identity. So much of it came from Boone. The love of wilderness. People used to be afraid of wilderness. In the dark Ages, people wanted to get as far away from wilderness as they could. Wilderness is where he went to die. Daniel Boone went into the wilderness the American Frontier and came back with articulation that the world had never heard before about the beauty of the wilderness and the beauty of solitude and living one with nature. He was fifty something years old before he ever became famous, so all the stuff he did that made him famous he did before he was ever famous, So he wasn't trying to show out incredible incredible man. Daniel Boone lived to be eighty four years old and just had scrapes with death that would blow your mind. Okay. Number five. Frederick Gerstacker. Frederick Gerstaker was a German that came to Arkansas in eighteen thirty seven. He stayed here for about six years. He did. He spent quite a bit of time within twenty miles of where we sit today in the Ozarks. He was a young educated German that just kind of wanted to get away from his his his background in Europe and he you know, they had money and he came to Arkansas, and he was the first guy that came to the backwoods of Arkansas and came out with this glowing review of the people and the way they lived, which was massively contrasted with like who we talked about in this podcast about Schoolcraft, most guys came down here and went and reported back to the world that this was a backwater, just rough, dirty place full of scoundrels. Well, Gerstalker came here and he said that these were some of the finest people on planet Earth. And he and he stayed with families and he was a big hunter. In one of the first podcasts I did called the Death of a bear Hunter. That story we know that story because Gerstalker and he was. He was on a bear hunt with dogs where his acquaintance Erskine was killed about twenty five miles from where we said in the Ozarks. Incredible man, incredible writer, an incredible romantic. That's a phrase that people would use to describe how someone views reality in a way. And I like romantics because you could you could make a decision tomorrow that your life is terrible and that the world is no good, or you could wake up and be like you know what, it's a pretty good place. Frederick Gersharker number five, number six. The current last member of the Bear Grease Hall of Fame is none other than George mcjunkin. He was that He was born a slave in the eighteen fifties in Texas, moved out to New Mexico after the emancipation, became a landowner, became a big ranch hand, and was a very intelligent man, an educated man. Learned to read on a chuckwagon cattle drive. Was he was a naturalist. He collected bones, and he took archaeology. He made he made mechanisms to measure the wind speed in direction. And one day he was out riding riding his horse, and he came across an unusual bone pile sticking out of the ground in this arroyo, and he goes, those are not normal bones. He takes a couple of the bones home with him. It was in nineteen oh eight. He spins the next over t In the years trying to get people to come out and look at the bones, he'd go back into town and talk with people and say, hey, y'all, somebody needs to come here and look at this. They never came. He dies in nineteen twenty three, so it's fifteen years he tried to get people to come out there. He dies, and literally three months after he dies, an amateur archaeologist goes to this place where they're, like George said, there was a pile of bones over here. They see the bones and they go, oh my, after they send them somewhere and then they go, these are the bones of a bison antiquis, which is an ice age bison is no longer here, and some museum says, well, we got to excavate those bones. They start excavating the bones and they find stone points inside inside of the bones indicating that these animals weren't This wasn't just a pile of dead animals. These animals were killed by humans. And at the time, the greatest minds on planet Earth, with all the data information, would have been no different today than the great minds of our time telling us something that was a matter of fact. No different. I mean, it would be like them saying, absolutely, this is the truth. They believed that humans have been in the North American continent for about three thousand years. Well, they knew that these bison bones were over ten thousand years old. And that these it. By finding these stone points, it meant that they had humans had been here for over ten thousand years, and it totally rescripted how long humans had been in North America, and that became the Folsome point. They found folsome points there. And so George mcjunkin African American Cowboy found this site and died before we ever knew that it was there. Yeah, so those are the six current Barghrias Hall of Famers today. This day we are going to induct Josh. We're going to h yeah, yeah, okay, y'all picking up on the wrong intents. Clark wore overalls every day. I'm trying to get in. Uh. None of them had great must or notable mustaches. Um, so maybe that's okay, No, tell me Gerstocker didn't have a notable Yeah, there's some photos of him later in his life. So we're gonna we're gonna. I'm gonna put on the table the proposition to induct not one, but two men into the Burghers Hall of Fame. So just works. We're gonna give Ben voting rights today because he's uh, you know, the rules change as as my whims change, so necessarily a regular. But I know Ben's character and judgment for long enough that we're gonna give him an active vote and something that cannot be repealed. No historical revisionists will ever be able to come back and tell me that Warner Glenn did something wrong. I don't care, all right, so irrevocable, once in, always in. Okay, the man that I would like to put on the table to be inducted into Bargheras Hall of Fame, there would be a vote, There would be a we will go one by one and you will vote yay or nay. Okay, the man I would like to induct into the Burgheras Hall of Fame. It's it's overdue. Hault Collier Whult Collier was born in the eighteen fifties, died in the eighteenth and died in the nineteen thirties, and his story is too long to tell. He fought for the Confederate Army. He became a nationally renowned bear hunter with dogs in Mississippi. He guided President Teddy Roosevelt on multiple bear hunts. Halt Collier was a deputy sheriff. Halt Collier shot and kill Old uh two white men, shot one white man, and was never acquitted. It was acquitted of all charges. He was a brilliant man and he was from Greenville, Mississippi. He's buried in Greenville, Mississippi to this day. That the series that we did on Hulk Caller was incredible. It's learning his story. Yeah, and what's so wild is that his story is hardly known by America. There's one book written written by Minor Francis Buchanan, a lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, who wrote a book on Whult Collier. That's it, and it's hard to get. He now has books he made after the podcast, he reprinted the book. Awesome because I'm still getting DM ye. He reprinted the book and so you can now go to Minor Francis Buchanan's website and order the book Hulk Collier. Well, so Misty, what say you? Yeah, Brent yay bah yeah, Josh yeah, Gary yeah yeah yeah yeah, Clay yea, all right, Holt Caller is now officially people in the Bargreas Hall of Fame voted twice. Garry voted twice. Yeah he's yeah, yeah, but I'm all in good putting me down for he's a worthy candidate, right, Yeah, are we conducting someone else too. Yeah, so this is this is a big day, big day for Holt Caller. Okay. The second person that I would like to induct into the Bear Grease Hall of Fame irrevocable by historical revisionists one hundred years from now. If you're if you're a hundred years from now listening to this on some archival mechanism that you can listen to stuff like this, you can't change this. I would like to induct to Kumsa, the Shawnee Shawnee leader. Incredible. The Really, when I do these series, I just I just get into these guys and I just feel like I know him. And we did a big three part series just finished it. Unti Kumsa. His name means a panther crossing the sky. He was a visionary. He was He led the largest combined Native American forces against the United States of any Indian leader in American history. Basically, he was the biggest threat to American expansion westward by Native Americans, and he was considered by some to be one of the greatest potentially in so speculatives, we don't have no recordings of them, but by evidence by the way that he could move people. One of the greatest orators in American history, potentially great warrior, great hunter, walked with Olympus whole life because when he was twenty one, he fell off his horse when he was hunting a bison. Incredible man, incredible resoluteness. Died when he was forty five years old. Prophesied his own death, Shawnee leader to Compson Misty, what say you, yes, as long as we call him by his proper name, to come, that's right, good answer, good answer. Well say yea, yeah, but I'll have to pull a tooth or two to get to comforth consecutive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely, one hundred percent. Ben, definitely. Ben's in. Josh, I'm in. Absolute, you're in. I'm in. All right, let it be heard. We've now inducted two new people into the Burghers Hall of Fame. There's now eight. I'll have to get the engravers over here, say monument, so let it be ridden. So let it be done. That's right, this is big, this is big. Excellent. Well, now we're going to talk about my magnum opus. I'm told that means it's like the work of your life. Yeah, okay, um the Big Bear of Arkansas. This, uh, this short story. I read it years ago and I've most likely learned about it from Brooks Blevin's book that I read years and years ago, his book Arkansas, Arkansas, which we're going to talk about a lot. The book is titled Arkansas Spelled the Normal Way with a with a with a hashmark, Arkansas Spelled with the W as is that title of the book, Arkansas, Arkansas, And he talked about this, this short story the Big Bear of Arkansas the Southwest humorists. And what's so interesting to me is that everything's so complicated, like stuff just you kind of have these simple stories of the way things happened, but when you really look into it, it's really it's really complicated. In this guy Jet, this fictional character Jim Dogget kind of branded Arkansas. Brent, what did you think of the podcast? Well, what stood out to you? Was there a part that was fun that it was surprising? What what stood out to you? Well, I've never heard that story before. That was totally ignorant of that amongst a volume of things. I'm totally ignorant. But it was kind of ironic that he set the tone and the idea that people that weren't from your head of Arkansas, and it was a guy from New York that did it exactly pretty great. Interesting, Yeah, that was totally removed. Might as well have been on the other side of the planet, you know, as far as his relationship to what was going on at that time. Here he was, he was is he was coming down the river on that boat. He was seeing it for the first time too, you know, so I thought that was kind of ironic. Yeah, but he did such a good job. Absolutely, even in the way he told the bear hunt, it was clear. I don't think people told Thomas Bangthorpe about about bear hunting because he knew some of the It was intricate details about about the way bear's bay a dog, and about the way a big bear will walk a pack of bay and dogs. It's something that you would you got the or I got the idea he'd seen it before. Well, if I described that to someone who had no context for bear hunting and then I said, okay, go write a story, they wouldn't include that because it's really it's it's kind of unusual to see a big old bear surrounded by a bunch of dogs and the bear acts like they're not even there, nonchalant. Yeah, it's it's it's like, what's happening here? And I think he had to have seen that and then and then all kinds of stuff. I mean, even the way if that was a coincidence, it was like a bolt of lightning, and I don't think it was. Yeah, I think there's some one of the things. You know, when you see somebody else or when you see another culture, you pick out things about that culture that they don't even realize they do themselves. Yeah, And so I think that's a piece of this is that he the description the man telling the story sounded like my uncle's. I mean that it was like, oh, yeah, that's I know the type of person that's telling the story. I can see it, I can hear it, I can I can feel it. And I think it has to be you never know what would stand out to someone who had never done something before. And so I agree he probably did see a bear hunt before, because that would stick out, but almost like as an unfamiliar person with it, not like a routine bear hunter, but as someone who who saw it once and was kind of surprised now that it was clear that he was He was enamored with folk speech, is what it was said about him after literature experts were able to analyze his whole the breadth of his life as a writer. So he always was like going in somewhere and talking like they talked. And so to be able to do that, you've got to be an astute observer of culture. Yeah, and these guys that were writers, especially back then, I sometimes think the modern media is so easy for us to get that it doles our senses about about people and perceptions. I don't know, everything spoon fed to us so much. These guys the only the only entertainment, the only media they had was either going to like a live performance of something which would have been rare, and the written word. And so a writer like Ronnella said, back in those days would have had the average writer back in those days would have had a more power full command of the English language and of their craft than than probably the writer today. Right, And but it's clear that he was an observer of typically rural culture. Yeah. You know, if you listen to a if you're traveling and you're in Alabama and you watch a newscast, the local newscast, they talk just exactly like the people do in California, that in Montana, in Arkansas, the there's and a lot of them I'm sure from different places. But like even the people newscasters, the newscasters that are from Arkansas that are on our local statewide television, they all they all talk the same. You talk different than me, We talk different than Josh and Ben. So it's all what I'm saying is, back then he paid a lot more at tension to and I guess everything that's now is is fed or designed to be appealing to everybody's and back then it was, hey, this is exactly what this folks, what these people sound like, or this particular person in this particular spot. Yeah, so that was cool to me. Well, yeah, it's interesting you say that about newscasters. They try to find people that have what's what's the name for an accent that is just so neutral, like a neutral like a neutral American accent. Yeah, Saint Louis, Yeah, Midwestern or Midwestern. I think Christie has one. I think Christie has one too. Josh's wife Christie accent? Really you think so? Yeah, same as she's from the Midwest. Who jet, My wife's from the Midwest. This one come across a not having an accent. Hm, well, they do that politicians typically do better on a national scale if they have a generic accent. Is that true. I believe it to be true. I don't know if it is. Do you have anything to back any I think, to be honest. Of all people that I thought would come up on the Beargage podcast, I heard them say that Barack Obama had a very generic accent, like he wasn't Southern, he wasn't northern, he wasn't this, he wasn't that. And they say that he's one of the greatest orators of American presidents a long time. Yeah, And I think that's true when I think about also other other in terms of like preferences. You know, I agree one hundred percent with a statement. I think Barack Obama was in an incredible order. I think if you look at our very own Bill Clinton, you know, he had an accent, Yeah, and people liked them and they found him charming. And you look at because people like people from the South, if you look at his campaign like that is that is not That's not where I was going with that, but not where I was going. I didn't say that wasn't true. I was saying, that's not where I was going there. But I mean, I think he actually appealed to people because he had that folksy capacity. Yeah, so I'm kind of disagreeing with There's a difference though, between southern and folksy because because there was a charm in the way that Bill Clinton would speak that drew people in. However, you don't always get that just with the with the run of the mill southern man. You know what's wild, There is no run of the mill Southern accent when I go It's true fifteen miles from right here to the farm that I've deer huntred on for twenty years and talked to that landowner who is is connected to this place as it's possible to be. He has a very unique Ozark accent. When I interviewed our province thirty five miles south of here, very isolated in the Ozark Mountains, he had a very unique accent different than this guy over here, also in the Ozark Mountains. Um. I mean when I when I first left my home, the home of Gary and Judy, knew him and went off into the world. Um. Misty says that when I would come home, we realized how big of an accent like dad had in my accent would increase. Yeah, but when I was away it was it was kind of less, I mean, like totally unconscious of what was having. We have a home video of Claying his dad talking and it's almost comical to listen to because in the conversation you hear Clay talking more newcome southern. Yeah. You know, what's what's interesting about that to me is that my dad taught what we called a country school back when I lived in Hot Springs, you know, a pretty good sized place for Arkansas, and he was he was ten or fifteen miles out of town at what we called a country school. No, it was found like now, it's a big school, you know for Arkansas. And uh, I went there third, fourth, and fifth grade, and I picked up this accent. My oldest sister went there. I guess she was about in the seventh grade when we moved there, and she stayed there all through high school. She's got the most country accent you've ever heard. And my other sisters stay at Hot Springs. And she asked what you'd kind of think of as a neutral accent and just being being in that country school for three years, I developed this country accent, which I think it's not as bad as it used to be, and bad might not be the right word. It's probably not as distinct as it was twenty years ago. Well, and then and then you go down into Brent's part of the world, which Brent lives three hours from me, down in the flat lands, and you used to live even further south than that, and that accent down there is very different. So point being, there's not really a Southern accent that everyone could get behind. Perhaps there's certain words, but but anyway, Thorpe was able to pick up on something very unique. But truth be known to me, I would I would like to think everybody in Arkansas in eighteen forty one was like Jim Doggat. But the reason that this was a fantastic story is because Jim Doggat was exceptional. He was a character. He was he was an exaggerated caricature of probably a I'm not gonna say a small group of people, because there were a lot of a lot of backwoods them and then hunters, but there were also a lot of people in Little Rock that were that we're trying to get away from that we're trying to get away from that image that, like Bob Cochrane said, they wouldn't have liked this story. They would have been like, that's not who we are. And there's still people like that today that are trying to move away from. Yeah, this this image, but no, that's a good that's a that's a good one. Um. I want to go around the room and just get your just like what stood out to you? Whatever it was, Ben, what stood out to you? Well? I think what I was pondering a lot during the episode and and I look forward to the next episode because I think you're probably gonna hit on this a lot is just how fast that formed an identity around our Kansans. Yeah, and I was looking at it from a real broad like human picture of like, man, why are we all so quick to try to put a certain people in a box to understand it? I think there is a desire to try to understand and identify the similarity so we can relate to people, identify the differences so we can better understand them. And sometimes as humans, we try to compare ourselves to make ourselves feel better, you know. But I thought that was really interesting part of that story and how that formed the identity of Americans, And it made me think about just in my own travels. I've been fortunate to travel the world soon, but I really like what the professor said about whenever you shine a light you it actually makes the space bigger. Analogy name. His name was Bob Cochrane. Okay, Bob. Jessica. My wife had like five classes with him. He is like her hero. I was listening to in the kitchen during lunch today. She's like Bob Cochrane in fact, like he's a cool old guy man. He's like seventy five or something. In the honor school. Like all these believer all these students like loved him, and they had this kind of this joke of like does Bob Cochrane know your name? Well, he knows my name, Like yeah, yeah, just a brilliant man. Well, I really like that. And you know, I'm talking about when the light shines on something, You're um, did that analogy? I had to think about that a little bit before it made sense. Did it make sense to everybody? Yeah yeah right away? Yeah yeah, yeah. Well, and I thought that smart and I thought about just my experiences in traveling. So when I was in college, I taught English in Cairo, Egypt, and got to live in a Muslim culture that over over in America. Did you wear that bass pro hat? I did not, And uh, you know, in America by that point that would have been like, I don't know, like twenty twenty, two thousand and eight something that people had a very preconceived notion of Muslim life. And I really enjoyed getting to know that culture for real. But the more I got to know the culture in Cairo, I quickly found out it was very different than the Egyptian culture. And Alexandra, you know, only a couple hours of north, very different than Jordan or Syria. And but the more ignorant you are, you kind of just lump everybody into a certain group. Yeah, And so the more ignorant, not in a derogatory way, but literally literally like if you don't know, yeah, you would think all these people the same kind of Like we talked about it on the TCMPS episode that in general, a lot of Americans would think Native Americans were just one group of yeah, but they were actually very vastly different, hundreds of tribes. And so it's caused me to do that less like less generalized and be genuinely interested when I meet somebody from somewhere not stereotyping. Now. I used to get so annoyed when I would meet people from big cities and you know, they found out was from Arkansas. You hear the same glass, they all wear your shoes. Did you marry your cousin? I mean this classic stuff that's weird. You know, I carried that inferior already complex, like like you kind of hinted on by the next episode, But I've changed to where now I'm when when I get those responses, I almost not pity them, and I was kind of like, oh, wow, like you really don't know that you're ignorant. You really you've never been in Arkansas. Yeah, but it's like, wow, your worldview is really small, because what I've learned is this everywhere you go, there's something interesting about every place and every person and and so. I but you could just see back then, when media is so limited, how that one story would catch catch fire and that would just brand your way of viewing that and these are things we just didn't have time to go into on this, but that story just okay, let's go back. If there was a company. If there was a YouTube channel that did really good in a certain space, like in the hunting space, what would happen? That YouTube channel would be copied and other guys will start doing the same stuff. I mean, there's a thousand examples, from meat eater to the hunting public to I mean, just like a thousand, like everybody kind of well, when this story came out and it did so good, it was published in New York City and went all across the country, and everybody talked about everybody loved it. And then so what happened is that a bunch of boys in Arkansas started writing about bear hunting, and so it kind of fed on its own, on its own gravy, you know. Well and yeah, and then later Mark Twain was kicked up on that, on that type of stuff. But um, what I what me and doctor Blevins talked about which wasn't on the cut, which is what's so great about the beargars renders we can talk about this is that as much as I would love to say Arkansas was the bear hunting capital of the world during that time, it was, I mean, it was as good as there was anywhere, but it certainly wasn't the best. They were bear hunting everywhere. It was the creation state. Yeah, but you know in Mississippi they were killing bears like crazy. In Missouri they were killing bears. In Kentucky they were killing bears. So it us becoming the bear state was really tied to this media branding it and and that is really interesting. And I said on the podcast that this is a pretty darn near new to earth experience of media and in Beargrease, in the Beargrease world, we think about the world and the massive big picture of history. Yeah, humans have been around for a long long time, and media with printing and audio and video is an extremely new thing. To be kind not the idea of marketing. I'm sure the fulsome hunters would have gone to their neighbors and been like, dude, you should try out this. Yeah yeah, so I mean they were marketing. They were they were, but but and not that marketing media are different things. They're kind of lumped together. But point being, it's pretty new in the media like we have today is a completely new human experiment, really is there has never been anything like this before. Ye or you're being so you're being you're being told so many stories and they all have in a agenda. I mean, just like the Big Bear of Arkansas. I don't think Thomas bang Thorpe's was. Thomas Bangsthorpe was wanting to brand Arkansas as a bear state. That was the last thing in his mind. But it did it. People took it for that, you know. And then there's another real famous guy that was actually more famous than Thomas Bangsthorpe named Pete Wetstone. He wrote under the name Pete Whetstone and wrote hundreds of articles. He was from Batesville, Arkansas, and he talked about bear hunting all the time. A little bit later, a little bit later, just like maybe just even a few years later. But I thought it was interesting that Thorpe this was the pinnacle of his writing career and the second best was Did y'all understand what Cochran was saying. He said that The Big Bear of Arkansas was the pinnacle of Thorpe's career, and it happened early on in his career. And he said the second best, most receipt well received short story that he wrote was called A Piano in Arkansas. He said it was trivial compared to it took him. It took a minute to tell. Yeah, what did a good story though, but it was a story like we would tell today. It didn't have all that Yeah yeah, yeah, it was like the chandelier story that Jerry Clover told. I mean, it was that quick. I think. I think one of the things that I really appreciated about the story is my when I was in high school, I had a teacher named Missus, Missus Shoemaker, and she was a very strict English teacher, but there was something about her that made you love English, made you love vocabulary. She just she built that into us. So I've always had a great appreciation for someone who could paint a picture in your mind. And I love the way it's not just the story, it's everything surrounding it. Yeah. And so when you when you picture him on the riverboat and you you know, you picture him tall, you picture him boots, you know what I mean when he tells when he says, the line that I liked was, um, I didn't know whether the dog was made front and bear. Yeah. I loved that. I loved those those phrases that just make you it's a really novel idea, you know. And I appreciate that about the story. This podcast. We're recording this podcast. You're listening to you right now. On the day that this podcast came out, I've already been somebody's already sent me a post that someone put on Instagram and they have their their squirrel dogs sitting in the driver's seat of their truck and they take a picture of him and he's all astute looking out the window at squirrels and it says, I don't know if he was made for him Instagram. So yeah, I think that's I mean, the story of the piano in Arkansas, it's a cute story, but it doesn't create the It's almost like as you hear him tell the story, it's like it's like the pictures are unfolding and like someone's painting it as you're walking through it. And I really I have a great appreciation for that. Yeah, I think that was to me one of the I really enjoyed the part where you and Steve Rannella talked about just language and and how how they had such a strong command of the language, and I think it really is something that is missing in modern in modern discourse, and I you know, brit In Clay sometimes get on these these kicks where they write each other via text in old English format, so they'll write things like lengthy messages it's been a fortnight since and I am privileged sometimes to be cced on these messages and I get to enjoy them, but you know they were there is something to be said about just like as an educator, and Ben can probably back me up on this, like when you are writing, it is doing something different inside your brain than when you're speaking, or then when you're receiving knowledge, when when like Josh talks to me, different activities are happening in my brain than when I write something out, and those when you're creating things. That's how you become a good speaker. That's how you become a good writer. Is the brain activity that's happening when you frequently write. And these guys were writing all the time. I mean, that's it's it's becoming a lost art in our culture. And if you even look at the difference inside of education and curriculum today versus fifty years ago versus one hundred years ago, it was much more focused and centered on writing than it would than what we're doing now. And even as an educator, you think about the amount of and I'm not opposed to this, like I'm not one hundred percent posts of this, but a lot of the emphasis for us as educators is to be entertainers, like education should be engaging and entertaining. And yeah, and it's it's interesting all of those little tiny choices that we've made over the last whether it's you know, you look at the Internet, of course that has a big impact. You have smartphones that has a big impact, but also just even the basic decisions we're making about how we instruct and how we teach people. It's taking this wonderful, beautiful thing that we have in written language that translates to beautiful oratorical feats, and it's we're losing that as a culture. We're losing that, mister. I don't know if anybody in here is familiar with it, but Abraham there's a famous letter that he wrote to a mother of I think it's a letter to missus Bixby. Yes, have you read that? I have? I couldn't quote it for link and wrote one called by first Night. Now, yeah, part of the loss. Most eloquent letters I've ever written. It's it's a short paragraph he wrote to this lady who had five sons that were killed during during the Civil War. I do remember that it is uns you know what. I think it actually in a movie. I can read it right here, it's so sure. Yeah, Rinella brought up Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, that's what made me think about this letter. Read it all right. I've got like the original version here, and I'm trying to see I've been dear madam. I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjudant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they die to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherish memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully a Lincoln. He wrote that he didn't have a speech writer. Yeah, that's that is Yeah, that's pretty emotional without without backspacing, and exactly, yeah dad, what did you think? Well, man, you off said at all. But oh you know, I really really really really really really like this. It was just I don't mean it was it just created at all of that culture where orators ran the world. I mean, they were the ones. They were the powerful ones, you know, you think hunters, you warriors, whatever. Uh. The way he spoke what was that called the southern something he's Southern dialect. Yeah, yeah, folk type deal speech, you know, his his little comments that he would make about the beard had moved and yeah, you know I loved him like a brother and yeah. Uh and and we've I think we've lost that, you know. Um one of them mentioned Mark Twain and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I mean, how many kids grew up thinking they were real people, right? I mean I mean they they created disillusion that that you know, these are real people, you know, and uh, today we don't need that. We don't have time for that. I want to turn on the news, get it quick, you know. Uh. So I was intrigued by that change in our culture where you know, writing the written word was powerful. Now you know the sound yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go yeah yeah. So uh anyway, and I made little notes on all these little comments are so what are you? What's in your notes? So you know? Uh uh? I mean because it helps me to remind me of some of the stuffing. Okay, so much. Actually Jiuju did this as we were coming up here, I said, make some notes here. Um, the bar was an unhuntable bear bar who died when his time had come. And in other words, I could I could envision that so much. You know, we hear about a guy killing or a girl killing a big old buck and you know, they don't know what they're doing, they look up and shoot it, shooted off the front porch. And when we go that that animals should not have died that way, right right, And and you know his analogy was that that the bear knew his time had come, and there was a spiritual aspect to it that, yeah, don't when you're with your buddies, don't talk about how are you gonna hunt this bear? Because he might hear, he might hear you. Man, I love that so much. I'm total speculation, but that's what literary critics do, is that he and Sid I mean, basically, Jim Dogget said, the bear might have heard me talking about what I was gonna do. And that is a legitimate thing inside of for sure the Coukon people, but probably if you really dissected, would be in other Native American ideas. But the Coukon, you know, we have this research and they absolutely believed like you don't you don't talk about it bear, you speak in code. That the example they give in the book. Nelson gave him the bookcase. He said that Josh, if me, if I went out today and found some bear tracks in the snow and tomorrow I wanted to go and hunt them, I wouldn't. I wouldn't say, hey, Josh, let's go hunt that bear. I would say, Josh, tomorrow, I'm gonna go around the mountain and probably carry a gun with me. You're interested in going definitely, And you would know, yeah, wink, you wouldn't know what I was talking about. I mean, it wasn't a joke to them. They lived in a very spiritual world. And I just thought that was so interesting. And then Moore is going to come out in later episodes. But dog gets doctrine about the creation bearing the creation state, very very Native American feel and what you're gonna learn, and this is foreshadowing, but I'm shining a light on the shadow so that you see what I'm talking about. There's a deep one is that in the in the Arkansas Delta, there was a thing that was happening that was really unique where some of the first Europeans that came there were that occupied there, were French and they lived with the claw poles, and they actually intermarried and kind of had this weird thing going on where they just all kind of lived together and got along and traded, you know, for a pretty short period of time. But there was a deep indoctrination of some of those backwoods folks and with Native Americans. So it's like dogg It for sure had some Native American doctrine running in his blood. Dad, tell me what else is on your list? Up? Eyes flashed with so much fire it would have scorched a cat talking about bear shot. Bear shot in forehead and walked down the tree as gently as a lady from a carriage. Yeah, can't you just see it? Just kind of just kind of just kind of and that that point, I think he slapped a dog out of sight. Let me tell you something. Going back to Thorpe knowing bear hunting, right, I'll tell you there's one group of people in the world who are experts on bears climbing and coming out of trees. Do you know who it is? And the first time that I saw a big black bear up a tree I was in I was in Appalachia and West Virginia and there was a bear that was tree. I bet he was sixty foot up in some big old gum, you know, big big tree, setting up there on a limb, and we pulled the dogs off the We weren't hunting, it wasn't hunting season, it was training season. We pulled the dogs back off the tree, and the bear could have come down this pole. This is just this big limbless tree. But he walked across a limb about as big as my leg, probably seven or eight feet, walked across it like a squirrel, jumped onto a little sycamore about as big as a tell phone poll, and came down at least fifty foot as fast as a gray squirrel could have well I'm not kidding you. I've never seen I mean, a bear hunter is going to be like, well yeah, but Thorpe saying and it was just this one smooth motion and it was so weird because he walked out on this limb, just walked across this limb, jumped on a tree, and slid down like a fireman. Hey, right, there is a perfect example of our culture telling that story. If Thorpe had told that story, I mean, you would really be glued to your seat, and it probably would have taken five minutes. You know. Uh now, I who would have told it? Thorpe? Well yeah, I mean if he'd have told what's the story you just told? Right right, it would have been so much combellished. Yeah, well so we we you're saying, he made a good metaphor that painted it for us, kind of yeah, in as more simple way as that would. Yeah, it's like this stuff I'm reading. Yeah, this bear moaned in a thing like a thousand centers. Man, I mean, this guy had some spirituality. But later he said Sampson, Hey man, if this bear if Samson, Yeah, there was so much to talk about. But when he said, uh, he said that this bear groaned like a thousand centers. This was written in eighteen forty one. This was a time of massive revival in in frontier America. This was something that was connecting with people because there were these kind of charismatic revivals and people would go into these sessions of repentance and be loud and showy, and so him saying that connected to people. Oh but he knew that a bear death moaned. How many Americans could you walk up to today and say, is there anything peculiar that happens when you shoot a bear? And it does? I mean, I, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I don't know how many out of a thousand a thousand random Americans, I would say ten, maybe maybe probably. I didn't know that. Okay, yeah, they have a wild death moan. One of the few animals. I tried to look up all the animals that do it. The only one I know for sure that does is a Kpe buffalo. That's the only one that's that. I did not know that. But Dad and I the first bear that we ever killed, death moaned, and we didn't know that they did that. And uh, but the way he described it was so was so what else is on your list. Good. Hey, hey, one thing you triggered my thought was I was really um caught up in the fact that people from the east wanted these stories. I mean, this was like, please deliver something to us. Yeah, we want to know what y'are doing, you know out west. Out west was Mississippi, Arkansas. You know, um, and you know we're the same way today. I want to get on the news and I want to find out stuff, you know, and they were hungry for these type of stories. The bear fell through a fence like a tree falling through a cobweb. I mean, you know, we just don't talk that way. Every every little thought he had he created, it's an own image in your mind. You know, you're going like, wow, it's a heck of a bear. Well, when he came over the fence, he came over like black smoke. Yeah, And I mean it's like, all of a sudden, your mind just goes like black smoke being graceful to barbaric when he lived there. So I tell the story. Josh tells a story. We go, we tell the story. You know, we put us off in a room, we tell the story. We tell it in five minutes. Hunting stories over this guy. I mean he's created ten, fifteen, twenty thirty different stories. My mind just sees this bear running through the woods being followed by a pack of hands. Only reason he's running, in my mind, it's entertainment. Once he gets tired, he goes, okay, boys, gigs up, I'm gonna slap you out of sight or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, if you've ever seen a bear navigate and obstacle, it's shocking if you if I don't think he would have described a deer jumping a fence like a tree falling through a cobboy, he would have described it different. But a bear, they are extremely articulate with all their feet and they can just move through stuff. I mean, they are some of the most mobile animals and able to move their body. In the description of it coming over the fence like a black mist, it's just kind of like it's kind of like a ball of jello, just like yeah, just kind of like how did he do that? What? Look up on YouTube a bear climbing a chain link fence and it just you're just like, how did he do that? So Thorpe interesting, Thorpe had been around bears. I think I think so too. He almost had to to know that a bear would just stop after a little bit, just goes man, I'm tired of playing this game, yep. And only big bears do that. Yeah, the little bears. The little bears typically today anyway, we will run and run and run and run and not even tree. The big ones often stay on the ground or just barely get up in trees. The midsize bears are usually I mean a small You can tree a small bear, but rarely would you tree a big giant like five or six hundred pound bear. That bear is almost always going to stay on the ground. Yeah, but interesting. Interesting. I thought it was interesting the conversation you guys had about you know, the one that got away or the order the you know, after killing the trophy there's a sense of loss, which made me think that that's why angling is superior to hunting. So just one everything. You can catch him release. I mean I can catch a trophy fish on my fire rod, put him back and dream about catching him again. Well, now if you want to go there now with bear hunting with the hounds, though, it's the catching release sport man, you only kill the ones you want. It's like you with fishing. There you go. So it really is you can treat him and let them go. It's tough to tree a deer, though, Well, yeah you can, I guess. Let them walk, you let him, you can let him watch something. Something I never did a whole house. I had a guy I want to play off something. I had a guy right in you Remember I asked people, I said, what do you think he meant by creation, bear, creation state and finishing up state? What do you think, dad? I think he was putting a spiritual connotation. It was such a magnificent animal. It was beyond belief, especially to the Eastern nurse. They would not believe what he was seeing in the wild. So it had to be here from the beginning, Sampson, he would have got whipped by this bear in the state was the same way. It was such a magnificent place. That's the way I saw it. I'm gonna see what do y'all? What do y'all think? It's a tough one. I kind of thought. I kind of thought a similar thing like like this bear was was spoken spoken from the word of God, you know what I mean, into the earth, and he had just been a fixture you know what I mean, he was such a magnificent creature that he'd been a fixture on the earth. You know, Ben, I honestly didn't know, because and I used to study a lot of history in that time period. People use words in ways that we don't know, right, and so just because we think think that's what creation means, I honestly have literally no idea what he might have said. I've never read it. Didn't it do exactly what you feel like the author wanted it to do? Probably? So yeah, I mean there's no doubt, Like you don't hear that and think, oh, this was a inconsequential bear? Yeah, exactly. You hear it and you're like, oh, this is a special Yeah, it was very biblical to me listening or my interpretation of what he was saying. Okay, a guy from Pennsylvania sent me this. He must listened to the podcast at four am. Clay, I hope this voice memo reaches you. Well, Um, I just listened to your podcast on on the bear, um the creation Bear, and I just wanted to share my thoughts on on the what I think the creation bear means and what the creation state means. I think it's the platonic ideal of a bear. Um. I think he saw that bear as not only sort of the perfect representation physically, but also culturally and spiritually of a bear. U. And I think he used to Creation's interesting because the same with Arkansas. I believe he sees it as a as you know, these are two things that represents God's hand and they aren't muddied up by worldly impurities. So that guy's name is Martin Highly from Pennsylvania. But what he was saying was that it was the representative bear, undefiled by anything else, undefiled by the world. And that fits with him saying Arkansas is the creation state, the perfect state, undefiled by the world, like Eden. I guess, yeah, like a like an Eden. We'll say. Yeah. That's the beauty of the way he wrote is that you create your own answer. Yeah, you know, you see a bear walking down a tree like a lady climbing it off a carriage slaps a bear into wherever. I mean, so you can take that. I think your answer would be correct. We don't know what that means, but to me that's what it meant. It was, you know, it was bigger than life. It created an image of dogg It that we wouldn't have had before because it's like, Wow, this guy, this guy knows something we don't know he And that's that was Bob Cochrane. We weren't able to include it, but he talked about how this story from a literary perspective is really unique and how dog It is set up. And it's because the city slicker from New Orleans is so anonymous and vanilla, like, there's no personality to this guy from New Orleans, like everybody is like little, and dog It is huge, and dog It becomes the envy and people see him and they're enamored with him. And there there it breaks the stereotypes like Ronella said of this country bumpkin, rural backwoodsman and Kylie. This guy's deeper than all of us. This guy has this robust life. He talks about his dog Bowie Knife, being the most modest dog, but only because he can't talk and he's the best bear dog in the world. I mean, just he was able to describe life and like Ronella said, he lived it with this robust lust for life. Yeah, but that created that the creation state and creation bar so interesting. Well, guys, yeah, Dad, I was just I think you might have alluded to this, but it was Arkansas created for the world or the world for really, my hat's off to both of you guys on this deal. I think Ronella really hit it hard, you know, to the heart. Steve so sharp man. He you know, he's never read that before, had no knowledge of Thomas Bangsthorpe. Um. I gave him that essay. Well, I sent it to him. He printed it off. We were hunting together in Mexico. Here's a bad story. We're hunting together in Mexico. And I knew I was going to be with him and have my podcast stuff, and I said, I want to hear what you have to say about this essay. All I told him. I told him it was influential, and you know, and gave it to him. He prints it off, takes it to Mexico and like we're like, okay, we got to do this like this afternoon, and he's like, okay, well let me read that essay, and so he reads it and then we go right into it and he has like some pretty in depth analysis of it, you know. So yeah, he's he's sharp with literature stuff, and yeah, he was. He was cool to have on there. I was disappointed only in one aspect that well, they said Jim's last name Wooden Reeves. That's what I was waiting for. We we wanted him all to all to be our last name. Man. I uh, it's it's it's to me. So as Newcombs, we're lucky that we had somebody did a pretty extensive genealogy search of the Nukembs, like our last name, and uh, there's a book. Uh, I think it's Thomas Joseph Nwcomb has written on the front of it, one guy from Scotland that came over and it's his genealogy and it goes and Gary Newcomb's name is in the book. Uh, you know. And and that's how that's how we know our history. History gets lost so easy. I mean, it would be nice to say how easily it gets lost even in modern day. Yeah. Yeah. And it's neat for me to think that the first Nuncambs came here right about the time this was written and all this was going down, and it was in the early eighteen thirties before Arkansas was the state, and you know, been here ever since. I love being connected to place. The next podcast, if you ever thought you wouldn't be interested in something, you'd be wrong on this one. And if you think I don't care anything about Arkansas, you're wrong. You do and just don't know it because nobody ever told you. The next episode is going to be on Arkansas identity, and it's fascinating and I think there's a lot of things to be learned. It's about human nature, but also America inside of this story, which I said it on this one, Arkansas in the twentieth century the nineteen hundreds was proclaimed by scholars like documentably the most ridiculed state in America. That's right where we live. So closing thoughts anybody, I would just say I love it. Gave me a new appreciation for literature and how artists capture the complexity of an experience. I was thinking about experiences I've had standing next to somebody and have a totally different perspective. And I remember one time working on an airplane in my buddies business where they refurbished airplanes, and it was he needed some quick help and called me and another guy in and we'd never had any experience there. Worked there for like ten hours left, and I was like, that is I never want to do that again in my life. The guy next to me, he was like, that was amazing. On the car ride home, all he could talk about is how much you want to work on airplanes? How much he loved that work, And it just it shows that there's people with a gift that can slow things down and capture the complexity of something. And it makes me want to be more aware of the experiences I have because there's beauty in it that I may not have seen before. I liked that about the writer. That's good. You know, we have a choice of how we let the modern world impact us. I mean, just because we talk about all these things coming at us and a media pounding us every direction. We get to choose how we live and how we develop ourselves. Like Misty was talking about how people are. They developed the skill to be able to interpret the world in such a way and communicate that to other people through language, and that was a skill that was built and it's less now. Well, I mean, you got a decision of what you do tonight after the sun goes down, whether you're gonna go you know, and not that there's anything wrong with watching television, but you know, you got a decision of whether you're gonna do that, or whether you're gonna read a book, or whether you're gonna talk to talk to your family, like actually talk with your family and build build culture inside of your family. And these are things I think about. And I don't claim to have it dialed in, but it's things I think about. I'm like, man, how can I how can I not just talk about some of the stuff that we admire in the past, but like, we don't. We don't have to be pushed around by by modernity. Ye, so Dad, good to see you, Hey, good to be here. Man. My dad lives two hours for me, So I don't see Dad unless he's coming up here. I go down there and I've been a little while. Yep. Yeah. We kicked him out of the house and they never came back. And they never came back. It's like my brother told my nephews, boys, when you graduate school, you ain't got to go to college. You ain't even got to go to work. You just got to go. Hey. This podcast comes out on a couple of days before the Black Bear Bonanza in Bentonville. It's it's Bentonville, Arkansas, big all day event. I'll be there, Brent will be there, Ben'll be there, Josh'll be there, Gary believe in Knucom'll be there. Missy'll be there. Missy had to leave. Um we it's it's gonna be a big deal. We're doing a live Burgers rendered podcast there on site. Major big event. Lots of vent enders and stuff going on, al hooting contest and you can buy tickets at the door, and it'd be good if you bought them before you get there, but you don't have to. You can just show up. And so that's all day Bentonville, Arkansas. You have to go to the website to get all the details, but just the website. They'll figure it out. Coil Bar, Arkansas. Yeah, they'll figure it out all right, guys, Thank you,

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