Mr. Ballin
speaker
36,020 appearances
164 recordings
11 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard yesterday
Mr. Ballin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 101 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 21.
Appearances
But once you get there, spend the entire time chewing as loudly as possible with your mouth wide open.
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Okay, let's get into today's story.
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On the freezing cold night of February 8, 1874, a 65-year-old man named Israel Swann sat around this roaring fire with a big group of men inside of this valley in western Colorado.
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The men around the fire, including Israel, were all gold prospectors, which meant they traveled the western United States looking for gold.
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But over the past several weeks, this group of prospectors had been trapped in this valley because of all the terrible winter storms.
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They had these storms coming in that each time would dump up to six feet of snow.
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But on this particular night, as Israel sat by the fire, you know, enjoying the flames and hearing people tell stories, one of Israel's friends, one of the other gold prospectors, whose name was Alfred Packer, he stood up and basically pitched the whole group as to why they should come with him and leave the valley right now.
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Basically, Alfred told the group that, you know, the weather is starting to turn a bit, it's not as bad anymore, you know, the snow's starting to melt.
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And Alfred said, I know a pathway out of here that will take us out of this valley in just two weeks, and it'll bring us right to Breckenridge, Colorado, which was an area that was known by prospectors for having lots and lots of gold.
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And so Alfred's basically telling them, you know, this is a win-win.
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We can get out of here sooner, and we can get it.
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Rich.
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After Alfred made this pitch, he sat back down and everybody just stayed quiet for a second.
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And Israel, he kind of looked around and watched to see if anybody would take Alfred up on his proposition.
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Now, Israel knew, unlike him, most of the other prospectors didn't like Alfred.
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They said he was lazy and difficult, but Israel felt like that was really not the reason they did not like his friends.
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He believed the reason other people did not like Alford was because Alford had epilepsy, which meant he periodically had seizures.
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And because he had seizures, it kind of made him a liability for journeys like this, where you know the whole group really needs to rely on everybody and everybody needs to pull their own weight.
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And so they were kind of worried about a guy who at any moment could just become kind of useless because he was having a seizure.
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But for Israel, Alfred's epilepsy really didn't matter.
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Showing 4221–4240 of 36,020 · page 212 of 1801
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