That’s Ted Franklin Belue in the middle, with Janis Putelis and Steve Rinella (right) of the acclaimed Meateater podcast.
Our friend Ted Franklin Belue is a featured guest on Episode 288 of the Meateater podcast. I’ve mentioned before that I really like Meateater and its spinoff podcast Bear Grease. They are go-to listening when I’ve got hours behind the wheel or behind the plow on chores. There’s a deep love for our history and heritage here, with the intellectual honesty and courage to look at it all with clear eyes.
It’s great to hear Belue with them.
Episode 288 — Viscera and Bones:
Steven Rinella talks with Ted Franklin Belue, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.
Topics discussed: Jani’s trouble with pant zippers; majoring in Boone and minoring in Kenton; dropping out of school to play the banjo; Ted being an extra in Last of the Mohicans; fashion forward longhunters; Boone’s “tick licker”; the difference between a long rifle and a musket; making your own powder with your urine; the importance of basic diplomacy and not reveling in war; the first long hunt in Kentucky; a skeleton in a sycamore; alot of mythology; how Boone sang to his dogs; the two mysteries; hybrid accounts, footnotes, and a second West; the strange fate of Boone’s remains and when bones and viscera are in different places; women civilizing men; Finding Daniel Boone, The Long Hunt, The Hunters of Kentucky, and the rest of Belue’s books; and more.
I love that line, “majoring in Boone, minoring in Kenton.” My script was flipped after I read The Frontiersmen. I did my history major thesis in college on Kenton, and he was the lead bio in my book Warriors of the Wildlands. Of course, following the sign of either man leads to undersung tales of other Frontier Partisans of the dark and blood ground of Kentucky, what is now West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania — Bland Ballard, the Wetzel Brothers, Jesse Hughes, Samuel Brady…
No matter how far afield I roam, that era and geography always remains at the center of the Frontier Partisans universe.
The first 40+ minutes are wildly discursive and kinda goofy, bouncing from inadequate zipper length to Ted Franklin Belue’s background to the sexing of chickens. It’s all in good fun, but if you want to get to the meat of the matter (sorry), it starts in earnest at about 43:20 when Rinella asks Belue to explain what a Longhunter was.
TFB is a great friend of Frontier Partisans, and we’re talking about doing a podcast together, maybe this winter. Read his books and look for his work in Muzzleloader Magazine.
CodyL says
Just listen to it It’s a good one
lane.batot says
Ted Franklin Belue and I should exchange “Last Of The Mohicans” Xtra tales! I wonder what he portrayed–a soldier, I’m guessing? I wonder if he remembers the elusive, rare, and often invisible Coureur De Bois? All I can say is damn–I’m sure glad I was a Coureur De Bois and NOT a soldier on that production!