Steven Rinella

The British...

the colonial British don't want American colonists who they view as like, the frontier people they view as like the worst of the worst, hillbilly rednecks are these American colonists out on the frontier, right?

They question their allegiance and they don't want them crossing the Appalachian mountains and hunting in native land because it causes so much trouble.

with the Native Americans.

The British were somewhat friendly, were somewhat better than the Americans became at dealing with Native relations.

So the British would say, you're not allowed to go over there.

And then it also violated Native law, where the Natives claim these areas, the Cherokee, the Shawnee, they claim these areas as their hunting grounds, but these colonists like Boone realize they can make a lot of money

going into the Indian territories and hunting deer skins, which they're forbidden, the British forbid them from doing it, the Indians forbid them from doing it, but that's their biz.

So like Boone going through the Cumberland Gap, you know, the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap, he's looking for deer skins.

And these guys have no, they have no cash economy.

You raise crops, you use, a family raises crops, the family uses 90% of those crops.

The only access you have to cash is you might sell a small amount of corn or whatever, but all of a sudden they have access to a cash economy because they can kill whitetails.

And we see then this deer hunting era, late 1760s into the 1770s, we see this phenomenon that we're going to see again and again and again where these guys, like with a commodity, whitetail deer, we see that they're able to wipe places clean.

They're able to go into an area and literally kill everything.

And what do you when that happens?

Go further down the trail and literally kill everything.

And from that point, we start seeing this, like, this de-wilding of America from commodity hunting, from commercial hunting.

And, man, I got nothing but respect for Boone.

Like, I've done projects on Boone, studied Boone, phenomenal, phenomenal woodsman.

But that becomes the American tale is deregulation.