Ep. 60: The Deathwind - Lewis Wetzel

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast we’ll be looking into the life 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 Deathwind. Clay Newcomb went to the Ohio Valley to interview outdoor writer and author, Chip Gross, to learn about the life of Lewis Wetzel. This dark-deep-dive comes at the request one of Steve Rinella of MeatEater, who is also a guest on this episode. We’ll talk about Wetzel’s life and the brutality of the American frontier. Lastly, in an effort to understand the mind frame of
Wetzel, Clay will interview mental health professional, Zach Newcomb, to learn if our boy Wetzel was truly a sociopath, a serial killer, or if his actions simply the result of life lived in a war zone. We doubt you’re going to want to miss this one.  We know folks let their young kids listen to Bear Grease (which we love), but we’ll warn you -- in this episode there is lots of talk of graphic violence.

Connect with Clay and MeatEater

Clay on Instagram

MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube

Shop Bear Grease Merch

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
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

(00:28):
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,

(00:48):
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

(01:08):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:58):
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

(02:20):
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.

(02:40):
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

(03:01):
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.

(03:22):
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,

(03:43):
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,

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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,

(04:49):
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,

(05:13):
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

(05:36):
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,

(05:57):
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

(06:20):
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

(06:41):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:27):
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.

(07:48):
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

(08:09):
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

(08:33):
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

(08:53):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:36):
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

(09:59):
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

(10:21):
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.

(10:41):
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.

(11:02):
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

(11:24):
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

(11:44):
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

(12:08):
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,

(12:28):
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,

(12:52):
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.

(13:12):
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

(13:33):
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

(13:55):
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

(14:19):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:05):
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.

(15:26):
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

(15:47):
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

(16:07):
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

(16:29):
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

(16:53):
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.

(17:16):
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

(17:38):
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

(17:58):
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

(18:21):
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

(18:42):
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

(19:05):
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

(19:27):
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

(19:49):
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

(20:10):
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.

(20:36):
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

(20:56):
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

(21:18):
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.

(21:42):
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

(22:02):
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

(22:27):
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

(22:49):
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

(23:13):
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

(23:33):
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

(23:56):
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

(24:16):
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

(24:37):
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

(25:01):
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

(25:24):
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.

(25:45):
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,

(26:08):
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,

(26:29):
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

(26:51):
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

(27:13):
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,

(27:33):
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.

(27:55):
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,

(28:17):
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

(28:39):
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

(29:01):
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

(29:23):
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

(29:47):
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

(30:07):
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

(30:31):
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

(30:53):
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.

(31:14):
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

(31:34):
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

(31:56):
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

(32:16):
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

(32:39):
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.

(33:01):
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

(33:24):
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

(33:45):
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

(34:07):
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

(34:28):
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,

(34:52):
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

(35:14):
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

(35:39):
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.

(36:00):
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

(36:21):
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

(36:41):
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

(37:06):
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

(37:29):
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,

(37:51):
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

(38:13):
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

(38:36):
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

(38:59):
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

(39:20):
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

(39:40):
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

(40:01):
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

(40:21):
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

(40:42):
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,

(41:03):
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

(41:27):
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,

(41:50):
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

(42:10):
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

(42:32):
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

(42:55):
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

(43:15):
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

(43:37):
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,

(43:58):
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

(44:21):
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,

(44:44):
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

(45:06):
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

(45:26):
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

(45:49):
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

(46:10):
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.

(46:33):
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

(46:55):
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

(47:16):
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

(47:36):
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

(47:59):
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

(48:22):
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

(48:44):
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

(49:05):
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

(49:29):
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,

(49:53):
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.

(50:16):
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

(50:37):
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

(50:58):
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

(51:19):
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.

(51:41):
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

(52:05):
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

(52:26):
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

(52:47):
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

(53:07):
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

(53:28):
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

(53:50):
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

(54:11):
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

(54:32):
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

(54:55):
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.

(55:15):
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?

(55:39):
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

(56:00):
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

(56:22):
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

(56:44):
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

(57:08):
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

(57:29):
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

(57:50):
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,

(58:10):
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

(58:32):
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

(58:52):
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

(59:15):
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

(59:37):
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,

(01:00:01):
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

(01:00:25):
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

(01:00:47):
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?

(01:01:11):
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

(01:01:33):
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

(01:01:56):
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

(01:02:17):
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,

(01:02:41):
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

(01:03:02):
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

(01:03:24):
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

(01:03:46):
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

(01:04:08):
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

(01:04:30):
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

(01:04:52):
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