They said, Stuart, we've got it narrowed down. We've gone through about six hundred other young man, we've narrowed it down to four. When you're one of those four, I said, oh, well cool. On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we're on part two of our look into the cultural impact of the book Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. He drove the bus to the game where the coon Hunters showed pop culture what was up and made us all proud. We'll talk with the childhood actor Stuart Peterson, who starred in the original nineteen seventy four Walt Disney movie and learned how he got into acting and why he got out. His reason might surprise and challenge you, and he'll tell us if that mountain lion fighting the dog in the movie was real. Well again, talk with Redbone coonhound man Ronnie Smith, and we'll have a discussion with Dr Sean Teuton about the key emphasis of the book, which is that period of life when an adolescent boy becomes a man, and we'll talk about crying boys. If you haven't watched the original movie or read the book, you ought to check it out. But regardless you're not gonna want to miss this one. And the irony is that his lack of education actually makes him a bed a person. He can get his education from the woods itself. It's mythologized in the life of Abraham Lincoln. This is what Teddy Roosevelt thought. That's why he went west and reinvented himself. He really wanted to reinvigorate his masculinity in the practice of frontier life. And that is really an American thing, it is. My name is Clay Nukelem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF gear, American made, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. It makes me mad. Folks like that getting such a fine hound who as I'm alive, it'll wind up being as mean as they are. Billy and his grandfather are watching the Pritchard brothers ride away with a hound pup, so I would like to buy it for you. Billy, I ain't much better off than your part. You'll have your own hands before long. I don't know, Grandpa. Sometimes I think God don't want me to have any Yeah, so what well, I've been asking him for dogs as long as I can remember. Nothing's happened yet. It could be that you ain't doing your fair share. What do you mean, Well, if God was in mind to get you dogs slick as cutting line, and he'd be doing all the work, that wouldn't be good for your character. I don't want character. I want dogs. You want dogs bad enough, Billy, You're gonna get dogs, But you want his health. You're gonna have to meet him halfway. In part one of the series, we introduced the American literary classic Where the Red Fern Grows, and we celebrated how the obscure pastime of raccoon hunting with hounds did a three sixty slam dunck on mainstream culture. It's a wild case study because the book has sold over six million copies and has been mandatory reading in elementary schools from Seattle to Miami since the nineteen sixties. The book was also made into two major motion pictures, and we already met the childhood actor Stewart Peterson, who played Billy Coleman in the original movie. We learned a ton about Woodrow Wilson Rawls, the author, and how he wrote the original manuscripts on brown paper bags, and late in his life he finally got the book published. He only wrote two books, and both of them were after he served multiple prison terms in two states. Our interest in his criminal life wasn't to point fingers, but rather to paint on the canvas of redemption as we looked into the life of an ex convict that became a beloved children's author and speaker. Fist bump to Wilson Rawls. American literary classics are heavy hitters. They go deep and you can't cover it all in a short time. I want to continue digging into the book with literary expert Professor Shaun Tuton of the University of Arkansas. He's about to give us insight into by such an obscure place and lifestyle could have such general appeal and will learn something about novels. I've read that well. It was in the preface of this book Claire Vanderpool, and she spoke of that Wilson Rawls clearly established a deep sense of place. Why is place so significant if you've never been there, Because most people that read this book have never lived in the Ozarks. Why do we why do we like that? Well? This goes back actually actually the history of the novel itself and the rise of the novels were written as early, I mean in our European tradition as early sixteen o five with with Servants wrote Doute. Robinson Cruso right by Daniel Dafoe was written in seventeen nineteen. Both of those novels. You think about that, what what drew? What draws readers? And the why are they time? This classic? Still today we make movies about Robinson Cruso. It's the difference, right, It's the unusual life being offered to us. And we learned as we as we encounter something utterly beyond our world. And that's the reason why we call it the novel itself. It means something that's new. Right. So this the novel emerged during the These were the first novels that humans ever wrote. Some say their earlier novels in China, but in Europe this is some of the first novels during the Industrial Revolution in England, when people had the division of labor grow where they wouldn't really know about the other lives people had. You wouldn't work in the same place anymore, and it alienated labor. And people were dying to know how other people live, right, And so they saw the novel take off in that moment because people would finally get a window into the daily life of someone living completely different. Yes, so the whole point of why place is so significant is if you've never been there. That is the point is that you've never been there, And so if you can really dive in and see the rootedness of this human in that place, that's the beauty of it. See that that wouldn't have been intuitive to me. If you think about the introduction of the novel was probably as powerful a moment for humanity as the introduction of the Internet, maybe even more powerful. The idea that made up stories written as words on a page that could be read anywhere and could create an out of body experience for the reader who had been trapped in their own mind and world their whole life was a wild concept. They didn't have television's, radio, or video games. Imagine a world with no fiction books. I don't think I've realized how much identity and instruction we get from novels that have impacted our culture. Even if you're not a reader, your life has been influenced by fiction writing and Professor Teuton's book called Native American Literature, he said this, in reading, we enter a world where actual people or characters relate experiences, perhaps extremely different from our own. Through that process, we may come to understand or even are some views or values of another. In literature is the power to transform end of quote, Professor Tuton. Part of the book that Wilson Rawls I think did such a great job of showing just a window into Billy Coleman's life was when he went to Talaqua. He traveled thirty something miles upriver from where he lived, and he went to the big city of Tallaquah, Oklahoma, which is a real city, and it is not a big city at all. It says that there are eight hundred people in the city of Talaqua, which to him was this massive place, and there's a series of things that happened that It's just such a powerful literary mechanism because by showing us the city and Billy's response to it, we see his world and One of the things that happens is he walks in front of down an old downtown street where there was shops and stores and big glass windows, and he's dops in front of a window and he sees for the first time the full reflection of himself in a window, and he just kind of becomes a little bit self conscious about that. I mean, where did Wilson Rawles come up with this? I mean that is such a powerful moment there, because you just think, holy cow, these people were so poor they didn't have even have a mirror in their home. It's also humorous, yeah, it's it's it's a genius passage, you know, excellent, right, because the way that works as a piece of irony and literary theory, that'd be irony. What happens is we are drawn into into Billy's world so seamlessly, they were not really unaware of it. We get a little description of him, but it's a literary device to put something in front of a mirror, and you're not gonna have a mirror, you know, in the frontier kind of home like that. When he finally sees himself, we're kind of jarred by this, you know, and specially the ladies who were on the sidewalk. We see that he's wild, right because again, like I was talking about wilderness in the notion of being uncivilized, you know, in a good way, right, you're also innocent and you're uncontaminated by society or right. And then becomes clear when when he walks along very politely and runs into the kids from the school. That school is a two story schoolhouse. It's got a fire escape that they're playing down going down the tube, so it's a it's a big school. And they're not nice to him, and and he doesn't care. He shrugs it off. You know what, what do they what slang derogatory term did they use when they see him? They called him a hillbilly? Oh, cut through the heart. They called him a hillbilly. You know what's interesting to me about that is that these were these were kids from Taliquol who were rural kids by every estimation anywhere in the world. Yes, these quote city kids from Taliquo would have been viewed by anybody outside of this region as hillbillies themselves. They were familiar with that term, and in a derogatory way, obviously, because the way they used it and then they see a real hillbilly in their mind and they're like, you hillbilly, And I love that term. I to me, it's a term of an dearmant now, but it urped Billy Man. Hey, he's got to check it down. Dog business, down these dogs along to a rich manor and he's holding for dogs. This is the classic scene where Billy Coleman fights the city kids. Mine let me buy. Hey, this guy's trying to escape. Don't do that again. You want to fight? Uh no, don't touch my dogs again. So in the movie they didn't use the word hill billy, but Wilson Rawls did in the book. I would have probably been offended if Walt Disney had said it. At some point. I'm going to dive into the deeper meaning of the term, because it's different than some of the other descriptors used to define rural people. But in my book, it's got a touch of nobility. And it sure was a fast way to take off Billy Coleman, which was not something you wanted to do. I had some advice that I would have given to Wilson Rawls, but let's see what Dr Teuton thinks and we'll cut right to the heart of what this book is about a boy becoming a man. As I read this book and looking at it from a literary perspective, I'm amazed at the amount of stuff that's going on that's really intriguing, From the dogs fighting with the city kids, to the Pritchard's to win the championship coon hunt, to the dogs dying and a red fern popping up at the end. I mean, it's just like it just stacked with these little subplots. If you would have told me that, I would have advised Wilson Rawls, well, buddy, you might be getting a little too complex. This is just weaving people like in and out of so many ups and downs. You know, you may be you may want to simplify this a little bit. How did he pull that off? Or is there and obviously it's that would have been terrible advice. Is it common to have that many ups and downs that we even to a to a story. You can map a novel, you know, and scholars have done this, and a good writer you can get books on how to write a novel and they'll tell you how to map it out. Often, if you read a novel and you put it down, it doesn't keep your interest. It's because they didn't honor that the continuum in the novel. Novel has to have a crisis action and a falling action. That means you have to have conflict, and usually that conflict occurs somewhere in the middle, and then you have maybe one more minor conflict and then everything is resolved. And then the other point is that characters have to can be flat. Around. If they're flat, it means they're just um. There's people walk in and out like the sheriff and can never see again. But around character is a character that has to grow, so by the other novel they're changed, there's something different about them. At any rate. When you map this novel, it fits perfectly to that crisis action you got certainly you got you got the Pritchard's, you know, the terrible death. Then you have the competition, and then of course you have the cougar. But the way that the novel ens in a beautiful resolution, if you will, is is the dog's buried on the hillside. Is that kind of what makes it what it is? That the resolution at the end that it's like a bitter pill to swallow, but also really redemptive. Yeah. Yeah, And his father even tells him right here at the end it's it's not He's Papa tried, Billy. He said, I wouldn't think too much about this if I were you. It's not good to hurt like that, I believe. I just try to forget it. Besides, you still have little aunt. That's of guys. From a man to another incipient man. You know he's gonna become a man soon. This novel is so full of tears. I mean, Billy cries at anymore all the time. I thought that was a little unusual. I did. I thought so too. But as a as a writer, I think Wilson Rawls is trying to make it clear there's a contrast, you know, between what a man, how a man experiences emotions and deals with loss, from how a boy experience emotion deals with lost. When his father says it's this is not good for you. You You shouldn't do that, it's kind of a bitter, like you say, bitter sweet, right. His father is saying, like my father would tell me, you can't cry like that. So that that's another aspect of this novel. It's very uh, Like I said, I found a little. I have to say, if there's a critique in the novel, meanbe a little overdone. The crying. Yeah, I had the exact same thing. I thought, again, he's crying again, man, Yeah, he was crying at stuff that I wouldn't have thought a kid would cry at. But I I cried my fair share as a kid. But I don't think I would have been known as like a crier. But I didn't know some people that were quote criers. I look back at a period in a boy's life when he would be a few steps away from tears at any moment, and that's pretty. That is a really vulnerable, beautiful, unique period of a man. You know what will become a man of a man's life. And that's kind of the whole point of this book. I think Wilson Rawls was just like trying to pound at home. This is a boy. He acts like a man, he does things that a man would do, But this is a boy. As a father, it's painful to watch, you know. And I remember my father telling me, and he was kind of rough about it. He'd say something to lip in you, you can't cry. I'm a little more gentle with my kid. My son's and yet I'll tell them then you know, there's there's other ways to handle this, you know, because sometimes they'll cry out of frustration. I said, you gotta take deep breaths and we'll make a plan. We're gonna fix it, you know. And I try to be practical with them. But I think about the same thing about how dad's handle boys crying, because yeah, it evokes something in us of like, boy, you better stop that, because that's not what a man does and what we're in this mentality and movement of bringing them to manhood. But yeah, it kind of made me wonder if I was too hard on my boys, because you know they're going to grow out of it, But in the moment, you're like, man, what if this guy's years old and still crying, and so you feel like you gotta do something. You know, you better suck about kid. But then you see, uh, Billy's dad probably manage him the way you would hope to be managed. But I bet a real ozark dad probably would have been a little rougher on him. Yeah, his mom is one's getting the whippings though too. Yeah she gets a switch and she's she's whipped him before It's always a question in fatherhood whether your son changes it gets be on a difficult point his life and you think, was it because I said stopped crying or did you just grow out of it? Yeah? Exactly, because if you didn't say it, maybe crying his whole life. So you know, you don't have to be a perfect father. You just got to be a present father. I think, yeah, that's the important partner. And I never would have known that novel will be about fatherhood. But I'm also thinking about the father. You know, I have a feeling these good, incredible works of the literature find us where we're at. Good writers find us where we're at, and that's exactly what old Wilson Rawls did. But why do a bunch of coon hunters like us care about literary mechanisms. If I am irrationally moved by something to the point of an impact in my life, I want to understand why a fundamental and constant in our lives is media. And by media I mean books, television, social media, podcasts, basically any type of human communication that isn't human to human. And don't say I don't take in media clay, because your and to a podcast, right now. Our lives are full of media different forms, and it uses natural forms of human communication to draw us into being interested in something for better or worse. News agencies often use hype and hysteria to get people fired up. Podcasters use long form conversation to make us feel like we're in the room. Television uses radical and often underalistic circumstances to draw us into a captivating stupor. Sports engages with our love of competition and delivers a magnetic pool towards tribalism. The point is this, there are great powers at work, and if we are aware of ourselves and those powers, we can choose where to spend the energy of our life. I'm very interested in things that control us beyond our recognition. Personal awareness and responsibility is powerful us. Back to the central idea of this novel, which we've declared is a boy becoming a man. I think this issue of bringing boys in the manhood is extremely relevant, as it seems manhood in our culture is up for grabs on its definition of all people. To speak on the subject, I'd like to introduce my wife, Misty Newcomb. You would have heard her on the render. She's an educator. She runs a private school. She's a mother of boys, and she has some insight into the development of young boys, which is the theme of our book. So I run. I run a private school, a K twelveth private school at the seventh twelfth grade level. We have a student population that male. We found that parents were bringing their young boys to us because of concerns about how modern Western culture treats young boys. And there was concerns about how they're being brought up to kind of loathe certain aspects of their just natural identity. And these young boys have a very unique biological developmental trajectory and a lot of what we consider bad, not well behaved, not good is actually really normal. So they're they're actually even been studies where and just so that you understand a little bit about academics, test scores, standardized test scores are not subjective at all. They that's the idea behind having a standardized test is that there's no human opinion. Grades at school are very subjective, and so a teacher's opinion matters on how they respond to essays, how they respond to participation points, and things like that. Studies have shown that even though boys and girls they've they've looked at a group of boys and girls, and they don't have any difference on their standardized test scores, but the grades that teachers give them are different based off of whether they're a boy or girl. And I don't think teachers are sitting back there saying, you know, I don't like boys, I'm gonna mark them off. I think that there's behaves that boys naturally have that are less desirable in a traditional classroom. And that's a problem, like that's that's a problem because it's communicating that these characteristics are bad. What you see inside of the red Fern grows, for example, you see Billy just kind of running wild, working with his hands and having to think through complex situations with these these k dogs. And you know, there's not really a lot of experiences or environments that young boys have to develop those types of skills in modern society. So Billy's development, now he lacked on the academic side, we do know that. But but this idea of letting a boy be a boy, yeah, is a good thing. And now that I think we could get confused and we're not saying let a kid be rebellious and not do what you say. No, no, Billy didn't do that. But we're not saying tell all the little guys to sit still, put their papers, never run around, never move rocks, never chase the cat. Never. Instincts are always something to be suppressed. Sometimes they should be suppressed. Really, there's a lot like if you think about just the wildness of Billy's life and of his experience, that is extremely valuable. It's not the only thing that's valuable. It's not the only thing that should be emphasized. But there's an aspect of of his upbringing that you, as a young man look at and say, man, I'm glad I had parts of that, or I wish I had that, And you want it for your sons. You probably want it for your daughters to hey, hey, let me say one more thing. I will say that we had two girls and then two boys, and everyone I ran into always told me, oh, your middle school years are going to be so hard with those girls. They're gonna cry, They're gonna be so emotional. No one, no one told me about middle school boys. And I remember being an absolute shock, more emotional than any girl guys I think he was. I mean, I'm just saying it is it will shock you how much boys cry. I don't think I don't think he was overplaying his hand at all. I think that he was tapping into he was he had to have been a crier. The conversation right now about the definition of manhood is very interesting. There's got to be an accurate definition of masculinity, and when it's right, it's healthy and productive in the life of the young man and everyone around him. Kind of like Billy Coleman. He respected his mother and father, he respected and took care of his little sisters. He worked hard, he told the truth, he admitted fault, he took responsibility. Pop culture has declared manhood as dangerous, incompetent, and self focused, which I take offense at. But I think that many know that true manhood is defined by sacrifice and service to our family. It's about leading by example and living a governed life, a life guided by principles outside of our self interest. Seems like it would be difficult for anyone to find fault with this. That's some good stuff, all right. If we were on a coon hunt, the dogs just struck a track in an unexpected direction, and we're gonna head toward him. On the last episode, we met Stewart Peterson, the childhood actor who played Billy Coleman. We've already heard his voice on this episode. Ironically, Mr Stewart has been on the show Meat Eater and you can watch him on Netflix season nine when he guided Steve Ronella Janice would tell us and Adam Weatherby on a mule deer hunt and Wyoming. That was him. The episode is titled Wyoming Mule Deer. His story is a winding road and I want to try to connect the dots from Hollywood actor to backcountry guide. So, Mr Stewart Peterson, you have no idea how neat it is for me to see you, and how kind of shocking it was a years ago when I learned that this boy in this movie. It was real impacting to me guided my friend Steve Ronnella in Wyoming for mule Deer and then to be here in Wyoming with you now it's pretty neat. So my my main question I want to start off with is how did you get into acting as a child? How did that start? Um, Well, it all really started with my mother's brother who was in the motion picture production business. At some point he had had the idea that he wanted to do a film based on the book Where the Red Fern Grows. And when he finally got the rights to do that, at that point in time, he was had begun kind of feeling out what, you know, how he was gonna cast and who who he might cast. So he was the was he He was the producer, the producer of the show. Now where did he live? He lived in California at the time. Of course, growing up here, all I knew was ranching, so the film industry and even and he asked spirations for that, never ever and still don't enter my mind. But when he got ready to do the film, he had had a script put together and had taken it up to Wilson Rawls, the author of the book, who lived in Idaho Falls, And on his way up he had kind of put out to somebody here in coke Field might have been a fourth grade teacher, because she was the one that actually made a reference to someone in Cokefield that she thought might fit the part. Someone that wasn't you, wasn't me. On my uncle's way back through on his way back to California, he thought, well, I'll just stop in and see if I can't meet this other young man as he came through. I happened to be at my grandparents home and this young man shows up to be introduced to my uncle, who then took him into my grandpa's dan and and proceeded to interview him. Slash let him read out of the script to see what he was going to be like. Meanwhile, I was just out messing around out there, you know, in the living room, probably talking to grandfather. I don't know, barefoot, wearing over I never went bear fit in this country. This that was really a new one for me. But in any case, when he got through with my uncle, uh, this friend of mine, why my uncle came out and he said, hey, Stewart, why don't you come in and read for me in the den? And I said, I'm okay. He says, it's not a big deal. He said, just come in and read a few He says, you know, there's no pressure. I thought, okay. Well, so he brings out a script and and he thumbed through some pages and he said, well, here, why don't you just read Billy Coleman's part here and read it as if you were gonna you know, you're gonna say him to somebody, and I did a little bit of that. And it was kind of a half hearted attempt when I did it initially because I wasn't really interested this. Just read this, and so I did. There was never an aspiration that was a burn to say, please, uncle lyman, why don't you let me do this? I I just left it. I just did. I walked away from it as if it was just something that I had no interest, which I didn't. After this initial imprompt to read through with his uncle, Stuart's mother got a call a few weeks later asking if he would fly to Los Angeles to audition in front of the director, which he did. After that trip, he got a third call and a few weeks later they said, Stuart, we've got it narrowed down. We've gone through about six hundred other young man, we've narrowed it down to four. When you're one of those four. And so I said, oh, well cool. But that's again as far as my thought process went, I just didn't have any inclination. Ended up uh. In the last phone call, they said, we'd like to do one last set of screen tests. We'd like you to come to Tulsa, Oklahoma. We'll fly you there will be these other three young men, uh down there. You know, gosh, little league, a little league football was gonna be coming up in a few short weeks. Was this like a high budget movie for nineteen seventy four? You know, I thought it was high budget because I've never heard of those kind of numbers. But I think it was just under a million bucks. But but it was a high quality product. It was a hYP was like it was. It was like a first rate movie for yeah, and and for the you know, the people that the director, he was very well known. He had directed a lot of Disney films. The impression that I got as an adult, as I've gone back and watched that movie, we just we gathered up the whole family watched it just the other night. It was really neat. The impression I got was that it was actually a really well put together film for the time. And I was trying to make a connection of I think as I understood it, you know, based on the casting of the other people that were fairly well known and and the interests that they had, because as I went to Tulsa, I did the screen test and there's four four guys, so they had us all there and there was something that kind of clicked in me that said, Okay, I became very competitive from the standpoint I wanted to win the part, and I could have cared less whether I did the part. After that, understand, I started trying to pay attention to what they were trying to do to help coach me maybe how to express myself in this scene or that. When it was all said and done in my own was carefully. He knew that with the production of financials that they put into it, he needed to try to remove himself from from the decision making process. He turned it over to the director and said, you know you're you're gonna be the one working with the the young man, so you need to make the decision. Uh. When they came in and told me that I had the part, I didn't know quite how to feel, other than the fact that I was already now starting to feel homesick because they told me they said. My uncle came and said, well, Stewart, you've you've earned apart. We're gonna start here probably next week, and so for the next week, I'd like you to start toughening your feet up, So you need to start going of my questions was, how did you get it. I didn't have tough feet, because you know, and I tried, I truly tried. I took my shoes off, I went and tried to walk on the rocks, and I just never went barefoot around here. We we just didn't. But there was somebody that worked, you know, that was a little more creative thought out of the box. They said, hey, why don't we just put some duct tape on the bottom of his feet, And so if I had to run in the stubble, if I had to run on the on the gravel, they would just get the duct tape and they'd go over there and they just slam it layered on the bottom. But anywhere in the movie where you can see that, I don't think so. I think it was all so quick, you know, with the stride that was my introduction, and I was thinking I wanted to be home so bad. I I really didn't want to be out there doing the field, you know. And of course Mom and dad. Dad was in the middle of the in this in the hay, and and Mom had five other kids at home that she was busy with. So she just basically assumed that uncle, my uncle Lyman was gonna be and he did. He took he washed over me. But I thought it was for me. It was it was kind of a chance to be independent. That was my first experience ever. They gave me a per diem for the week, and I remember my They brought a little binna envelope to me and it had cash and it was like eighty eight dollars for the week, and that's what I was to use for my meals. And of course at that age, I don't need to eat that much. That was a lot of money for thirty. There was I say, a real Billy Coleman story going on inside the set of the Billy Coleman Story. Yeah, because I just wasn't used to that. Being raised on the ranch, we never saw that kind of Well, this is the responsibility of a young man with money and stuff. So how long a period? How long did it take to shoot? It was two months filming time, Is that all? Yeah? It was two months. Took two months to film and then the production it came out in the spring with the premiere. Where was the movie actually shot. The movie was actually filmed in Tallquah, Oklahoma, within miles of the old Homestead and the in the same places that Wilson Rawls roamed as a young boy. It's interesting to get a behind the scenes look at how all this went down and will continue to see the parallels between Mr. Stewart's real life and Billy Coleman. In the last episode, we talked about some redbone coon hounds, which played a significant part in the book and movie. We're Coon Hunters, so this kind of stuff is interesting. Here's what Mr You had to say about the actual hounds in the movie. And how about that dang mountain lion scene. Man, I need some answers. We had for that film because of the age groups. There were thirteen dogs, you know, because they had the pups and then they had the half groans, and then they had the adults dogs different thirteen different dogs because you considered the two month period of time that we filmed. You see him as pups, and then you see him as a half groans, and then you see him as as adults. But they also they had some when they were doing the scene where the mountain lion where he's you know, coming back with the dogs for the first time. He's nestled down for the night there and that mountain lion comes in. When they had those dogs, those older dogs going again, they had they had a tame when and they had a wild mountain lion, and that the wild when they had a cable tied to a caller on that cat. The cable you couldn't see. I was able to watch those scenes at night as they were filming it because it was at night, and I was just constrolled by how those dogs would go in there and you know, keep that cat at babe. But they they had a few different dogs because there were a few dogs that they send in and they got smacked and they'd yiping off camera and they'd have to send another one in. Wow. So so I wanted to ask you about that because that wouldn't fly today, you know, to have and when I watched it just as an adult, and now that we see all this uh animation and everything in Hollywood that has to do with animals, a lot of it is fake and computer animated. When I watched that last week, I was like, that is for real. These are red bone hounds being a real live mountain line. The winning of the Gold Cup brought me and my dog even closer than before we became an in separate Bouteau, and although I'd always known their love for me was great, I never realized how deep it win until the night of their greatest sacrifice. As we hunted together in the psychone camera, I don't see anything. Do you think the Hollywood world would frown on a real mountain lion and the dog fighting today? Clearly, in nineteen seventy four, this wasn't an issue. If we're talking about historical revision, which is taking today's value system and placing it in a different time. This brings up some interesting questions about what has changed. But we're in the weeds, boys, and we gotta get up out of here, and we'll do it by talking to Mr Ronnie Smith. He was the red Bone man from Arkansas we went hunting with on the last episode, and his grandson bat me fifty two dollars that there was a in a tree, but it was a dentry complicated situation. Mr Ronnie has some information on the real hounds used in the movie. I've always wondered if those were just Hollywood dogs or real coon dogs. So you have some intel on the dogs that were in the movie. So there there are two movies that were made what do you know about those dogs that were in the mill at the time. I was a young fellow in the seventies, not seventy four, you know. I graduated high school in seventy four. So the movie came out and was no big deal really, but we went we watched it. Of course, did you watching the movie theater? Do you remember? Yeah? But being that, uh, there's one in the town of Rogers if it's called the Victory and it's open for plays now it's not open for the movie pictures. But but the original dogs and they were local dogs in Tallqua that the owner of the male dog was Glyn Davis now and and I didn't know Glenn personally, but I've been in this Red Bone Association since night. So it's good good while, you know. And he had the mail dog and he called it dog rambling read. The dog that they called Dan was rambling, just rambling read, that's all. And Glenn got paid to use his dog. He got five hundred dollars. They could have probably got the dog and some feet along with that if they had one before. That's a landslide. Five hundred bucks, you know, now, are you saying that's a lot that was a lot of money in nineteen seventy four. That was five was rambling read a good conduct. The local fellas, and I've talked to a couple of them recently since you and I spoke. One of the fellas hunted with the dog quite regularly, said he was sure enough a top and channel mystery solved. Quote sure enough a top notch hound means a lot coming from Mr Ronnie. Now that we've got the dog situation and squared away, let's talk to Mr Stewart. I want to know how he pulled off being such a great actor with no experience or training. So had you, at age thirteen, had you read the book? I had not. They encouraged me too, but you know I was never an avid reader. I I just assuon been outdoors. It's not like I was again so interested in trying to become Billy Coleman that I was living my own life of the outdoors, so to speaking. You know, Mr Stewart, what's so unique about that movie? And I I said this before I knew you, I knew that I would ever know. It's what a good actor you were. I mean that was pretty because there's all you know, all of us have watched movies where there's a kid actor and they're kind of the the weak link of the thing. Then that movie, man, you just carried it so well and we're such a natural actor, Like, how were you able to pull that off well? And see, in my mind when people I've had people tell me that before, I'm still saying, are you sure? Because I was telling Steve this the other day, when Steve Ronnella had called me, I told him I said, I really didn't know that I was acting. I think I was maybe reliving a lot of what I who I am. I honestly don't know, other than I believe that a greater power, which I firmly believe in God, was how I was able to do what I did annoyingly because it wasn't something I I thought about, Okay, I need to do this this way or that way. I did it the way I felt, And I guess if that's that was you know, they say, well, that was good acting. I'm thinking, well, I don't know if it was good acting or just portraying what the emotion of I felt at that time. Well, I think what you just described as a good acting, I mean to to be able to live a character because you're so familiar with that character. I mean, it was just one of those things that you didn't have to act like a country kid. You were, and you the genuineness that you came across inside of it, even inside kind of the moral issues inside the story. I see that today inside of you sitting here talking to character matters to you, and in that movie that was such a strong theme of it. It really was if I had to do a part that was different than that that maybe wasn't me. I don't know what I could do it. It's clear to see that character mattered to the real Stewart Peterson character also mattered to the fiction character. Billy Coleman character mattered to the author Wilson Rawls, who created this story. But what's ironic and redemptive is that in the last episode we learned that Wilson Rawls served time in prison in his younger days for what we can pretty much say was a lack of character. And by the way, Mr Wilson pleaded guilty to those charges, so it's unlikely he was wrongfully accused. My intent in speaking with Mr Stewart was just to get a look behind that period of his life and to see how it affected him. I asked him what it was going back home to Copeville, Wyoming as a movie star. All through my the rest of my junior high in my high school years, I was very aware of the fact that my competitors, whether it was football or wrestling, they knew who I was. That was a little bit of a challenge for me, because I've never forgotten the story of we had a little tournament here in Cokeville, and wrestling tournament, and I had the fellow who was in my weight had just moved there, I guess from California. Was supposed to be somewhat of a big deal. And when we got there, he'd sent one of his little buddies over and said, hey, you, so and so wants to want you to know that you were going to be counting lights, which is a terminology used in wrestling. You're gonna be on your back, you know. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm not going to let that happen just because they think I'm a movie star that I should be, you know, some kind of a badge of honor. If they can beat me, you're kind of a target. Then I became a little bit of a target, and I kind of I wouldn't have wanted to watch you if you're anything like Billy Cullman from Well. I just I just didn't want that kind of a you know, I didn't I didn't want them to think just because I was in the films that they were gonna be I was gonna be easy pickings. And it was just it was it was kind of a poetic justice for me because I was extremely nervous, but I was so excited when you know, when when it all said and done, you know, he was the one counting the lights instead of me, so I won. You know, I just thought, well, you know, that's uh, that's what I dealt with him. I thought a lot about that, and it just kind of felt like it was a little bit of a ball and chain in many ways, because I never wanted I never wanted to to to be and receive the accolades because I've been in a film I wanted. Accolades has come because of my efforts, like in my wrestling and my football. That's where I wanted. And the movie would have been widespread enough. I mean, the same was released stor you probably had people recognizing you on the street. I mean, and and even today as I get you, even losing my hair a little bit. And you know this many years down the road, really you still have people that recognize. Somebody that might have recognized Mr. Stewart was Mr Ronnie. Ronnie was in the target audience for the nineteen seventy four release of this film. However, you might be surprised by his response to it. What year were you born? Okay, So Wilson Rawls wrote the book Where the Red Fern Grows in nineteen sixty one? Would you have read that book as a kid. I have read the book. I might have been, but now I'm an avid reader. Most folks that was up that I knew never read books in their life, that didn't go to school very much. To be honest with you, but I've read a little bit of everything. But I would have read it. I don't know that that book was readily available to me. I mean, your dad was you had red bone hounds at that time. Did you think much about it or just it was it just normal? It wasn't kind of like m well, you know what I mean. It was just like an everyday kid would have done. Here, Okay, so the book it was like life to us. You know, really we literally made money picking up soda bottles, you know, for five cents deposits, you know, I mean we really did to buy hound puppy was you know, it's just we're just like the deal, you know, we do that. That's what we do. You know, getting to the train station you would have been a big deal for us, more so than buying the puppies. You know, any any book you read, if you're a good reader, you and you've had a good author, then you're you become part of that book in my mind. You know, I read a Western novel literally almost every night, one complete novel before I go to bed, uh, you know, Louis Lamore and Zane Gray. And I've been that kind of reader. I mean, I've read The Red Fern Grows, you know, I read the book, you know, probably a couple of times. But it wasn't that big a deal because it was life in the Hills and truthfully was which that's not far from here, talk, it's not very far. How far as a crow flies away from Taloqua. I mean, yeah, it's it's an hour and hour in minutes driving. It was interesting for me to hear the impact of a movie on a person who was almost play by play living out a version of Billy Coleman's life. The literary mechanism of connecting a far away place and a foreign lifestyle didn't hook Mr Ronnie. The truth of it is this living in some version of hard times in the Ozarks. Wasn't that romantic of a life. It was just life. If you listen, this next section is the most impacting of my interview with Mr Stewart. I asked him if he did any more movies, and his answer surprised me. So after the movie, did you do any more movies? I did? My uncle, who was into family valued movies, he we did about three or four more. So how long did your acting career span in terms of years? You know? It tell about nineteen and then and then, uh, I had opportunity and have had a few other little I guess check backs with me and I just haven't ever been compelled again to want to say yeah really so, so when something like that, like you've kind of got a fuel it by just like going and trying out for parts and taking the chance of flying somewhere for I mean, I guess I guess somebody in movies like stuff just comes to him, but that's not That's how everything for me, it all came to me. It was never an aspiration or my saying I'm I want to do it. I'm an aggressively approach it. When I got through with Pony Express, writer and I did I mention that one anyway, there was one called Pony Express, right, I think that was one of the last ones I did. The director of that at he later did a film called The Sackets. It's a Western, and he wanted me to play one of the Sack brothers. And as I read the script, there were just some things that we're kind of went against the grain of my values and that I told him. I said, I just really don't think this is a part from me as as for my person. And I've always felt that way that if you act and you are into the part, you're gonna feel a lot of the same things that you would in real life. And uh, in the case of this one, this The Sackets, you know, there were some things where they'd been out on the range for a while and then they came into town and it was party time, and you know, with the women and the alcohol, and I just said, that's just not me. I can't portray that, even though it's acting. I can't do that and didn't want that to carry over in any way, shape or form. And as a result, you know, once I got married, I understood exactly why I didn't want to do that, because I didn't want to have to feel anything that would be contrary to what it should be, and that's fidelity and commitment to my wife. The mind and body don't know the difference when you're faking it and when it's real. So was that was that a factor in closing down it was? I love it, man. It's bizarre to me how media portrays human life. They often prey upon our extremes and in turn promote the normalization of those extremes. I think as a society we could almost universally agree that infidelity degrades people in families. However, you can hardly watch a sitcom, movie or program that doesn't portray it in a compelling way. Think about it, and think about how bizarre that is. I absolutely love it that Mr Stewart had the fortitude and wisdom at age twenty to see the potential pitfalls in the life as a Hollywood movie star, and he intentionally navigated around it. Rows. That's some high level stuff. This is the part of the Bargarase podcast where we proclaim that having character is cool around here. You're not the cool kid because you do dumb stuff. You're the cool kid because you do wise stuff and having a value system that you live by. Nope, none of us are perfect. But you got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything. Que the errand tipping not really, don't do it. Phil Mr Stewart truly was an up and coming Hollywood movie star. The road was paved before him. He received the Star of Tomorrow award in the nineteen seventies, and he purposefully walked away from a lucrative future. I love it. He went on to build custom homes, running outfitting business called Cricket Sky Outfitters and Wyoming and have a wonderful family. So you after they are in the early twenties, you were done. Yeah, and you went off to have outfitting business and build homes. You know. I do some rustic furniture, right. I like to be creative with my hands, and I'm I'm a person who likes the physical aspect of life and not merely an entertained part of life where you know a screen or you know some of that stuff. And I'm not saying I'm just glad there's there's all types to make up the world, because I wasn't born to be able to make things happen on a screen or or that you know, that kind of stuff. Let's get back with Professor Tutan for a final look at Wilson Rawls and some of the American ideals that shaped this book. I'm interested in why we are the way we are, and I'll reveal what the saddest part of the book was for me. Now, biographically, we know that Wilson Rawls did return. I mean not just to go to prison. You know he did return. He returned. Uh. I know that he returned because I know I know some Cherokee folks over in Oklahoma that said he came with their classroom back when they were kids. So he did come back. It makes me feel good. But even if he didn't play, that land has been sanctified. It's sacred now and there will always be some of him there in that land. The saddest part to me in the book, even more sad than the dogs dying is that he had to move away, and that's that line that he never came back. Because what makes me pound the table is, I mean, I just love rural life so much, people's connection to place, and just modern the modern world just disintegrates that in so many ways, and it's just part of life. And the fact that Billy's the winnings of his championship coon hunt where the thing that gave them the money to be able to move away and never come and in the book they moved to Tulsa and presumably never come back. That's what got me. Man. Yeah, this is the genius of of literatures is we continue to read it and people say, why would you want to read that again? Well, some some say that literature reads us. You know, when we read it, we read it, and every time we read it, especially at the years have gone by, you read it differently. When I was a kid, what struck me most was the death of the dogs. But like you, when I read this recently, when they're the wagons packed up and they're gonna leave, and he's looking back at that land one last time, and that that humble cabin where they work so hard, it's a tear jerker in that moment. It is because you know he'll never be back. And all of us have that tied to home. And many would say that when they dream, When we dream, we have a childhood home that's in our dreams, and it's always the same house. For me, it's always the same house, the same place. I know, the smells, you know, and that's home. You Know what's wild too, is that in the movie you can actually see this cabin, you know, and where they lived. It's like, oh man, that's I want to go there. Back in those days for those people that really lived in that kind of poverty, that kind of isolation, that wasn't a dream like and so them going to town was like major upgrade in everything. So right now, when all of us live in cities and have these urbanized lives, we dream of going back to the country. And so you know, you kind of have to switch it around. And where they were seemed like paradise and they were leaving to go to this thing that we now all know, which is it's just interesting. Now. You know, what makes a great great work of art in literature is his irony. Right when something turns out to be the opposite what we assume. And in this novel, when Billy finally goes to Talaqua, which is the big city, he runs into some kids who were in school and they're not nice to him. Is that city living? Is that what it means to get in education? Is is Billy going to turn out like that? You know? And the irony is that his lack of education actually makes him a better person. That he can get his education from the woods itself. And that's very much an American theme right in our literature, is that the land itself can teach us something right and we can get you know, it's mythologized in the life of Abraham Lincoln. You know, he he learned right with a piece of charcoal on a on a wooden shovel by firelight in a cabin, you know. So we we really value that kind of education that um that can that can occur in the woods without much technology or or or city living. There's even an assumption that city life will uh will weaken men. This is what Teddy Roosevelt thought. That's why he went west and reinvented himself, you know, and started hunting, wearing bear skin coats and Indian looking clothes. Yeah, you know, he got riched glasses. You know, he didn't he want he really wanted to reinvigorate his masculinity in the practice of you know, frontier life. And that is really an American thing, is you know, I'm I'm trying to understand this rural American identity and what interests me is specifically where it's connected to hunting. And so that's why I ask you, is it really an American idea that we learned from the land and and you know, we we've done series on Daniel Boone where we've seen that this idea of solitude and the wilderness is really an American idea. Like much of much of the world. Prior to a couple hundred years ago, we were doing our very best to get away from wilderness because the wilderness is where you died. You know, there's themes inside the Bible of wilderness being separation from God and all this. But then when we get here to what is now America, it was different. I guess I'm trying to understand. Even the the European settlement of America and all its trouble and wild stuff that happened, it was pretty unique to the world and that it was it was the last big block of the world that was kind of modernized, if that's an appropriate word, but a lot of for some unique stuff to happen in terms of the way we interacted with the land. And and I'm also interested in how Native American culture deeply impacts kind of rural American culture today in ways that we don't understand, and this book shows that strongly too. Definitely, when Europeans arrived here, they invented the notion of the frontier. You think about it, it's probably obvious, but you know, Indigenous people didn't think of the front They didn't have a frontier. This was just where they live. Yeah, didn't have a notion of wilderness either. They said, you know, there was nothing wild. I mean, they say Luther standing bearrom than reading him right now. He's a famous suit chief, and he said, and he lived in a time before even saw a white person on the plains, and he said, uh, it was not wild, it was tame. Because they were so comfortable in their ancestral land. And it's taken centuries for Americans to become comfortable in this land. When the Puritans arrived here in six two. They were in armor, breastplates and muskets and were you know, are armed and ready for that great threat of a wall of forest and beyond it. They knew nothing, just that they were already stories of savage people that would kill you, and they're absolutely terrified. And the first thing they wanted to do was clear path. I mean, get some of the trees down so they can get see. We were talking about the fear of the dark. You know, it's taken Europeans in North America were absolutely terrified of a forest, you know, I mean the imagination runs wild with you know, indigenous people ready to kill you and scalp you. Absolutely terrified. And it took, like I said, centuries for people to move Europeans and move into the woods and understandably adapt some of the ways of Native Americans who knew how to do it, and slowly became more American in that process. And that's something I didn't come up with. That. Fredis Jackson Turner, the famous historian, said that long ago. He called that a frontier thesis. And that's what makes us uniquely American. If you look into the accounts on the frontier, as Europeans would call it Native Americans and frontier people, you know, white settlers were living side by side. Often they were neighbors, you know. But what's important members these people knew each other. They knew each other my name, and would live within you know, a gunshot of each other. That was the rule back then is you had to be able within a gun far enough that you could barely hear a gunshot. And so it's a process that we're very proud of, right and still today. Those are the values that many of us, whether we're thinking of becoming a back to the lander or you know, wanting to you join the Boy Scouts and take hikes, all of that. We're kind of, in a healthy manner, were re enacting that, that frontier spirit. And sometimes it can be corny if we're not self conscious of it. Reflective, like like you said a moment ago, we can romanticize tough living in a cabin something that you know, like I mentioned my father, they had no running water, you know, they had no electricity, and as a child I romanticized that. But he was very happy to escape that life, you know, although never quite comfortable in a suit, never and as soon as he retired, he was oddly regained the Southern accident came back to him. Yeah. Yeah, I've never been back to the old arcs. All I have left are my dreams and memories. Yes, some day, if God is willing, I'd like to go back and walk again in the hills I knew as a boy, And I'd like to touch the heart that's carved in an old sycamore tree, just says Dan. And An and I look for that sacred spot by the river where the red fern grows. Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on it. But whatever culture you're a part of, you've been impacted by its literature and stories. Going back into deep human history. Since the beginning, stories have been inoculated with a live value system that is looking for hosts to carry it onward. It might be pertinent to ask which came first, the story or the value system. Do we create stories to carry values or did the values create the stories. A famous Native American author named moment Day said, quote, man tells stories in order to understand his experience and achieves the fullest realization of his humanity in literature. End of quote. Undoubtedly, the book Where the Red Fern Grows is one American classic that I can fully get behind. Aside from Billy hunting them red bone hounds, the story is replete with character, and it also has a fundamental component of spirituality that I believe is an important and vital part of the human story. I still marvel at the widespread reach of a book about coon hunting. Surely Mr Wilson tapped into an awareness of his own humanity and was truly gifted in his ability to connect us to place in such a seamless way. We all felt like we were there, regardless of our past background, geographic location, or economic status. The story is a humble human story, and therein lies a pattern for those of us interested in seeing our lifestyle of living close to the land persists through time. Nobody cares about coon hunting, but they're moved by people's story and their connection to place. Thank you all so much for listening to Bear Grease. All the things we talk about on this podcast are deeply personal to me, and me and the team at Metator work hard to bring you quality content every week, and I can't thank you enough for the support and for listening. Please do me a favor and share our podcast with friend and foe this week Thanks to you guys, the demand for our bear grease hats is off the chart and we're sold out again. Our apologies, but we should have some new hats by May. When they come in then you better get them quick. But we do have some of those black panther believer hats on the metator dot com right now. See you next week on the Rent