EP 471. Alabama Rock Hunter

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. How you all doing today? Man, I’m reaching back in the past today, going to reach out to my buddy Shade Murrah from North Alabama. Man, we go way back, we go too far back we go back to, I tell you how far back we go, 20 some odd years ago, me and him was hunting together in Texas and had to pull it out of the shitter. How’s it going today, Shade?

Shade Murrah: Awesome. Yes, I remember that hunt. Hunts always just burn into permanent memory, so, yep, that’s a good one.

Ramsey Russell: I had Eric Patterson, who’s from your neck of the woods on here recently and we went all the way back to the chat room days and that was a fun conversation, talking to him about how the Internet emerged and it’s crazy, Shade, where my world was this within my physical reach with people I knew and called back on the old rotary phones back in the day, if they were in my little notebook, I had their phone number, back when we all had to write down phone numbers to the Internet and the Internet opening up everybody’s world, it’s like all of a sudden my duck hunting world and my duck hunting contact list got a lot bigger. And it goes back to the old chat rooms and I guess that’s how we met Shade, because I was sitting there thinking before we mic’d up, how did I meet Shade Murrah? I’ve known you forever now, but how did I meet Shade Murrah? How did we end up meeting Shade?

Shade Murrah: Yeah, we would have never had it not been through that chat room in the early Internet days and then and then Billy Hodges was there in Texas and said, hey, you all come hunt with me and we said, well, gosh we all got together and went down there to South Texas, back when the snow geese were thick down there and we had a ball and met each other. So it was kind of like an extended invitation and it was the early stages of the Internet chat rooms and look where we are now.

Ramsey Russell: I hadn’t talked to Billy Hodges and I really hadn’t even seen him around social media in a long time.

Shade Murrah: It was Bay City Outfitters. Lanier, what was his name? Remember him? He was a outfitter.

Ramsey Russell: I think he did work for Mike Lanier back in the day.

Shade Murrah: Mike Lanier? Yup.

Ramsey Russell: And sometimes there are no refuge forums. The invite came out, he had a week or some days off and invited some of us Internet guys to come down there and hunt with him down on the old Katy Prairie or Garwood Prairie. I don’t even remember where exactly in Texas it was, but it showed, it turned out to be myself and you and Jeff Anastasio and him and we all 4 just hit it off and went hunting and it was a great hunt.

Shade Murrah: Matagora Bay. We hunted there, too for ducks.

Ramsey Russell: We did hunt Matagora Bay. I forgot all about, shot some redheads.

Shade Murrah: We did.

Ramsey Russell: That was a Houston cop, that was also on refuge forums that said, hey, if you all are off one afternoon, let’s go shoot some dabblers.

Shade Murrah: That’s right. Oh, now you bring it. Oh, gosh, now. Yep, I remember that. Yeah, it was more of –

Ramsey Russell: I had forgotten all about that. Yeah, Shade help –

Shade Murrah: Had a ball, we shot cacklers, remember, shot –

Ramsey Russell: It was a foggy morning.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, you got so excited when those little old Canadas came in. You said, man, that went into slow motion. Did you see all that? And I was like, I know you had it in your blood. I know, you’re going – all these hobbies we get, it’s easy to talk about them when you feel like you own the subject, right?

Ramsey Russell: Man, we’re going back 25, 30 years now. I’m telling you, that was a long time ago, I’ll tell you how long ago it was, I had springer spaniels, that’s my family, my granddad.

Shade Murrah: I remember them.

Ramsey Russell: Ray Springers.

Shade Murrah: And you carve decoys.

Ramsey Russell: I carved a few decoys, that’s getting way old back in the bushes.

Shade Murrah: Double our decoys.

Ramsey Russell: Double our decoys.

Shade Murrah: I remember them.

Ramsey Russell: But Jeff Anastasio showed up with a raw, at the time, a raw female, black lab. He had just gotten her from somebody else, she was adult dog. He had just started train her, ended up, it turned – I ended up hunting over that dog throughout her career and she was an amazing black lab female and my old springer was getting, wasn’t getting no younger, I tell you, he was getting older and I decided, I think I’m going to get a lab dog and watching, gosh, I wish I could remember Jeff’s dog’s name, but watching, he had to tether her because she wasn’t even steady at the time. But watching that dog’s attitude and watching her passion and drive, going and recovering some of those birds, I said, Jeff, where’d you get that dog? And he got that dog out of Tennessee and this going to blow everybody’s mind if you’ve been in the market for a black lab lately, he paid something like $400 for that lab. That’s how long ago this was and out of the blue, he called me, I don’t know, 2 or 3 months later and said, hey, just want to let you know, the guys up in Tennessee are going to repeat, breed that litter. And I called up and got in line to get a black lab female and it was the first lab I ever had, she was master national eligible at 16 months old. And come to find out, you wouldn’t believe Shade how over the next, over that dog’s life, she died when she was 9 of cancer, but as recently as 5 or 6 years ago, I was on a dove field and somebody flagged me down and said, are you Ramsey Russell? I go, yeah. He goes, whatever became of that of that dog you had, that black lab female? It’s like 22 puppies out of those 2 breedings, every one of them and I bet I’ve talked to half the people that own dogs out of that one of those 2 litters, every one of them. It was one of the most memorable dogs they had or went way up into the hunt test or was an amazing duck dog or just one of those dogs that, like granddaddy said, you’re lucky if you ever have one. It was just one of those dogs and it all started right there on that hunt that me, you, Jeff and Billy went on and I’ve just, man, that was a fun trip, wasn’t it?

Shade Murrah: It was. Yeah, we had a ball. Got to meet each other face to face and have some good hunts. You got a bird dog out of the deal or a connection and yeah, good times, good memories.

Ramsey Russell: Made friends for a lifetime. We were young men back then. Now, do you know, we were young men, Shade.

Shade Murrah: We were. Yeah, but we both still love to bird hunt and I’m going to do it until I can’t. So just, we’ve got it in our blood, we enjoy it, it’s just something we love.

Ramsey Russell: Shade, what is your duck hunting story? How did somebody, were you born and raised in North Alabama? Is that where you’re from? And how does somebody in North Alabama become such a passionate duck hunter? Because it’s not exactly the nexus of the duck hunting universe?

Shade Murrah: Oh, it is not. You’re right. We in the Tennessee valley are kind of like in a mini Mississippi Delta, because most of Alabama is peanut stuff down south and flat red clay, but up here, we are kind of like a Mississippi Delta, just mini and the Tennessee river runs east to west, it runs through here, it floods into all these TVA lakes, lots of backwater, we got the Flint River that empties into the Tennessee, the Paint Rock River, A lot of classic old duck hunting spots, if you’re from North Alabama and let me tell you, when it’s right, you’ll think you’re sitting at clay pool reservoir, maybe not that many ducks, but a bunch, all you need, I mean, you can only get 6 a day, right? So we got plenty of water and when the time is right, plenty of ducks. And we’re kind of a tweener, we’re Mississippi Flyaway, but we get Central Flyway birds. So, I mean, I’ve killed banded black ducks here and back in the day, we used to get a lot of black ducks and stuff off the east coast, so we’re kind of different up here, but we don’t have as much habitat as you guys to spread out hunters. So it’s easier if you grew up here and know people, know the farmers, know everybody, because we don’t have as much habitat. But let me tell you, it can be very good, you ought to come up and try it sometime.

Ramsey Russell: Who introduced you to duck hunting? And what age did you start duck hunting in Alabama?

Shade Murrah: Oh, I’m probably about – Oh I bird hunted with grandfathers and dads’ early doves and quail but duck hunting was a little later, early teen, through my dad and it’s kind of like having your first shot of whiskey, it’s terrible. I was cold, leaky waders, holes in the waders, did not like it and my dad shot a garbage bag full of ducks and we were on Martin Road in South Huntsville, right close to Redstone Arsenal, which is a big military area and he had leased some property there for many years and hunted there and it was wonderful, old bird Springs Hunting Club, anybody from North Alabama will know that name. Lots of old karst environments, blue holes, spring fed, you know that story, we had only open water and what happened next. So anyway, yeah, right there and then, of course, after that day, after he got a bunch of ducks and it wasn’t a slow day it kind of caught on and then you start enjoying it a little more. And back then, he gave me a pump gun because he said, I’m going to slow this boy, he’d get too excited. He’ll keep shooting the auto and bird’s still 20 yards and you’re empty, right? So he’d slow you down by giving you an old birds –

Ramsey Russell: I know with my kid, the birds 110 yards away, going away and they’ve still got a trigger, they’re going to pull it. I mean, they going –

Shade Murrah: Oh, they’re still pulling it.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t shell out regardless, go ahead.

Shade Murrah: Yeah. So he taught me how to behave and what to do and then, of course, over the years, we’ve all learned how to outsmart them and still learn about a duck every day. They still amaze me.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about, well, let me ask you this, you talk about those black ducks and I can remember there were, that all of my associates and friends that hunted up in that part of the country, you’re talking about when those clippers would come through, you all would shoot black ducks.

Shade Murrah: We did.

Ramsey Russell: You all shot a lot of black ducks, didn’t you?

Shade Murrah: We had, used to, now, I know everybody says used to, we’ll still, you get the 1 or 2, but I have been on Guntersville Lake and in some areas on up through Stevenson and other areas where we’d see flocks of 30 black ducks. Not just a straggler hanging with some greenhead, like, you’ll see, but, yeah, back in the day, we get a clipper and sometimes that would happen, it’s changed. It changes over the years and the flyways shift and things go on but so I think the hunting here used to be much better, but it’s still worth going, anytime you can go, it’s worth going.

Ramsey Russell: Almost everybody listening has been hunting as long as we have, Shade will say the hunting used to be better, there’s just so much landscape changes and environmental changes going on right now around us. Shade, were you and your dad, were either one of you all old enough to, could you start talking about hunting that little mini delta up there, the Tennessee river valley in North Alabama? Were you around or your dad? Did you all ever catch that Lost Flyway of when the migratory Canada geese still came down?

Shade Murrah: Yeah, we had the Wheeler Wildlife Refuge. Used to be huge wintering for one of the varieties of Canadas. I can’t remember. Maybe it was a –

Ramsey Russell: It was interiors. Yep.

Shade Murrah: Yeah. And it was the Southern James Bay. And I think the development in the Southern James Bay, that was our corridor for North Alabama geese and boy, we used to have the geese, I mean, you wouldn’t believe it. And I’m going back into the 70s now. 60s, 70s, the 80s it tailed off, I think there was development. They even the city of Decatur even was did research because they wanted their geese back and tried to stop development up kind of up there. But I think urban sprawl and the passage of time, things changed. But that was where our geese came from, from North Alabama, at least our Canadas, we were shooting, they’re actually, they opened up sandhill cranes. We can kill, I believe 2, you got to get it, you got to draw a tag. But we are getting more and more cranes and lots of sand cranes and you got to take a test because wheeler has whooping cranes on it, so they want to make sure you behave. But, yeah, so it’s different how certain things show up and other birds are, you don’t see them as much like the black ducks left, but the cranes came right.

The Lost Flyway: A Vanishing Tradition of Waterfowl Hunting.

This wasn’t part of that big migration you’re talking about and my host got excited and he said, I’m going to show you why that’s so exciting to see those Canada geese on this property.

Ramsey Russell: It’s what they call, it’s almost a Lost Flyway. In fact, a few years ago, I visited some people up near Decatur to include state waterfowl biologists from Alabama and we hunted just outside of Decatur, Alabama, next to Wheeler on some private land and actually shot a couple of one or 2 Canada geese. And they’re just big resident type birds, right? This wasn’t part of that big migration you’re talking about and my host got excited and he said, I’m going to show you why that’s so exciting to see those Canada geese on this property and we stopped up kind of with their old, where we parked near, I call it their headquarters, but it was just some storage buildings, whatnot, like that and he opened up that storage building and showed me, son, I’m telling you what, it was 100s, many 100s of homemade Canada goose profiles that former members way back when, back in those golden days you’re talking about had made and he said, there was a time, Ramsey, that you’d come down to this property and there were pit blinds and there still are pit blinds, like you say, they’re hunting sandhill cranes now, he said and those decoys, rule number one is the decoys went out opening and stayed out. These decoys right here went out around these blinds and stayed out and there was a time you’d be standing right here and up down that gravel road to the gate would be truckloads of men waiting their turn. So, the minute you got your limit on Canada geese, you returned, that was one of them rules and made room for somebody else and he said, all day, every day. And they were killing Canada geese like nobody’s business. I just thought that I’m like, golly, what a – It reminds me of my grandfather’s generation. My grandfather, particularly some of my most treasured possessions on earth are just a handful of paper documents that were titled Goose Camp. He was in the Mississippi Delta back in the same era and he and his associates would go out of Lake Ferguson, down the Mississippi River, dig into a sandbar for a week or 2 each year and what they called Goose Camp, just go out and hunt my greater Canada geese back in the 50s and 60s, when those birds would still push this far south and it just blows my mind that there were generations of people not too terribly long ago that this culture around big migrator Canada geese in the deep south as far south as Mississippi Delta, Northern Alabama, of it just existed that are almost just gone now, except for old decoys sitting at a barn somewhere. That’s crazy, isn’t it?

Shade Murrah: They just don’t want, they’re hanging on to the past, they’re like, they just probably go around and look at them because, yeah, those geese don’t come here anymore and I remember reading stories in some of the old books about those Mississippi sandbars dig in goose hunts. Boy, wouldn’t that have been fun to do that? I was up here in North Alabama hunting geese, but not down there and of course, I was young, I didn’t have some of the best spots, but you didn’t need one, we had so many geese.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to have to go rummage through some files when we get done recording, go find one of these old documents because the last time I looked at them, one of them was a budget. And I’m going to say it was less than $20 ahead for each camp member and for a 2 week expedition down the Mississippi River, but it was a grocery list. It was a proposed grocery list for their week or 2 on the sandbars and it’d be like 5 pounds of butter, 2 bottles of bourbon, 5 pounds of sugar, so much flour and man, these old guys were just coming together with scratch and living. I mean, that in itself would be an adventure just to show up and make all your pancakes from scratch and your eggs and your meat and your bread. I mean, it was just incredible. It’s a whole bygone era, is what I’m trying to say.

Shade Murrah: I read stories where they were on houseboats, weren’t they? Sometimes they all get up on a boat –

Ramsey Russell: Man, some of the pictures I’ve seen and my grandfather, they didn’t live in this digital era taking pictures, let alone taking a lot of pictures and printing them and keeping them. So it’s just a handful of photos. But I know there were houseboats, like, what I would think of is a boat, like a houseboat you see off the Gulf Coast a sleeper cabin or they would, big army tents they put up on one side of sandbar and at one time, there was actually, there’s one picture of, literally, they just went out before the season and built a tar paper shack and that was camp for the week. And then they’d get in the little boats and go out to wherever the geese were, but they just roughed it, man, like, I mean, really roughed it. Can you imagine? I cannot imagine just getting together on a full military expedition type tent, just me and my buddies and going and camping on the cold sandbar to shoot a couple of 2 or 3 Canada goose a day. That’s doing it right there, son.

Shade Murrah: It sure is. Yeah, no doubt.

Ramsey Russell: So you remember those days and familiar with the Lost Flyway in Northern Alabama?

Shade Murrah: Oh, yeah, I am very familiar with it, that whole area you’re talking about, Decatur, is, that’s where the big national wildlife, Wheeler, General Joe Wheeler, an old confederate general, they named it after him and he – Yeah, that the TVA up that way will drop the lake levels and expose huge area where they clear cut, large old hardwoods. You’re a forester, right? Seems like I remember that, well, before they flooded the Tennessee Valley lakes back in, well, they dammed everything up back in the 1930s. Of course, they did archaeological surveys and all kind of stuff because they know here comes the lakes back during Roosevelt and WRP or with the workforce trying to come out of the depression, they put a lot of people to work. So they built dams in the 30s and harvested a lot of timber and before they flooded it. So when they lower the lake levels over there in Decatur, you’ll see these giant stumps, you can just about crawl in the middle of one that’s raw and it’s your duck blind and ankle deep water all around you and the duck, you can put decoys out and it’s perfect for a puddle duck, it’s knee deeper less and a lot of water weeds and so it’s like a, I don’t know, a mini real foot lake. I mean, it’s like, it’s a hidden jewel, it’s where I cut my teeth, duck hunting and it’s a dangerous place, you can high center on a stump and duck hunters get mad at you when the water, when the sun’s coming up, you’re stuck on a stump in 8ft of water. But it’s fun, it’s still out there, it’s still public hunting, which is amazing in this time and age that there’s good public hunting and you got to watch the lake levels and know when they’re down, so you got to have some know how. But boy, you can shoot ducks, I went out there this year and did well. So, yeah, it’s a great jewel over there in Decatur for duck hunting, it’s still there and it’s not – like I said, not like it used to be, but still a lot of fun and it attracts a variety of ducks, everything we’ve got is out there.

Ramsey Russell: I was just fixing to ask you about canvasbacks because it seems like canvasbacks was a big deal for you all.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, we had – Well, I’m actually over here in Langston, Alabama, now, on right I’m sitting here looking at Guntersville Lake and it draws a lot of canvasbacks. I’ve got a one man layout we’ll put out there and shoot divers, used to be a giant gadwall place because of all the Millfield, hydrilla, coontail. There was a lot of biologists because we, I mean, we just attracted just huge numbers of gadwall on this lake, not a lot of mallards but you’d shoot everything, I’ve shot white winged scooters on this big lake, I think Guntersville is 44,000 square acres. Don’t quote me, but it’s a biggest lake in Alabama and it’s a draw at times, but things come and go, a lot of fishermen bring in different water weeds. There’s this thing called eelgrass, it’s kind of like fescue, it’s choking out the good weeds that the ducks like, so the gadwalls left and now we’ve got eelgrass, which looks I don’t know that it has a lot of value to a bird because there’s certainly nothing eating it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I wonder if it’s the same thing, there’s so many colloquial names, local names or what they call, because, like, I know when you get off into marine habitats on the west coast, from Alaska clear down to Mexico, you run into these eelgrass beds and they’re a long, slender, beautiful grass, actually looks a lot like seaweed, smells like hay when it’s washed up on shore and the Pacific brant, that is their food source and they love it and boy, they’re delicious because they eat so much of it. It’s got to be a different plant than what you’re talking about, because it’s their food.

Shade Murrah: It must be, I’m not sure you could look at it if they call it eelgrass, but you could you remember Shane Smith, Texas? He’s right up the road in Bridgeport from me. And I was hunting with canvasbacks with him one day and he pulled up some hydrilla and said, Shade, this is worth their eating and at the bottom of the hydrilla is these little tubers, like these, they look like little sweet potatoes, I’m talking about – And he popped one in his mouth, he started chewing on it and I said, man, he – So I popped one in my mouth and I guess the tuber as big as your thumbnail and it tasted just like a water chestnut, well, no wonder they’re eating this stuff, it tastes good. I mean, it was like, it was hydrilla and wherever you could find a hydrilla bed, boy, the canvasbacks loved it. They pull it up by the roots, they weren’t eating the leaves, they wanted those tubers. So I learned something, he’s into ducks like we are and the gadwalls, I think, like the coontail, I don’t know, I’m not a biologist, I can’t tell watching the birds what they think about.

Ramsey Russell: Gadwalls are a big coontail species, yep. They’re a big coontail species down south. That’s one of their principal foods, so that’s why those cypress breaks have got a lot of coontail attract so many gadwalls.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, there you go. I’m not a biologist, I’m just watching birds, seeing what they like, yeah. And every time we can find hydrilla, you’ll find some divers on it.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. So, I mean, you’re still a very active Alabama duck hunter. That’s your stomping grounds, that’s where you hunt, you don’t travel very far away from home much, do you? You still just get up in the morning and go hunting some of the same old hawks you’ve always hunted?

Shade Murrah: Well, I do, but we do go to Arkansas some more and more we’re traveling and I’m going to call you and book with you as well, now that I’m getting close to retirement age, I’m going to do that. But, yeah, we’ll go to, we go around St. Charles, we hunt with dean over there, you may know him, some of those guys around the White River, we’ll go hunt with them 2 or 3 days and I started quail hunting. Got a buddy up in Kansas, we’ll take a trip up there, but most of the duck hunting, yeah, right here and a lot of good hunting, fishing in the Tennessee Valley with all these TVA lakes, most all the bird hunting is up here in North Alabama. I would imagine you start getting Birmingham, south, you’re getting into the warrior river and all that, a lot of wood ducks and that they, the occasional mallards and they may have their honey holes here or there. But for the most part, most of the migration is around this Tennessee River and then I guess when you get down to mobile, you’re going to see the divers and I know they hunt down there in the delta some, but never hunted down there. I’m a North Alabama boy, so this is where I do, I spend most of my time.

Ramsey Russell: You were talking about hunting those rivers, the only time I’ve ever duck hunted in Alabama, I used to deer hunt over there a lot around Demopolis when I was in college, some of the best, God almighty, some of the best deer hunting I’ve ever done in my life and I would drive over from Staunton on a Friday evening after school or maybe Friday midday after class and it wasn’t a matter if I was going to see a deer, it just wasn’t a matter if I was going to pull the trigger because you were going to see deer, every time you went and got in a deer stand, there were deer coming out your ears over in that part of the world. And I actually did a lot of forestry work up on some TVA land up in, around Paris, Tennessee, up in that area. And none of those guys, none of them knew anything about duck hunting, none of them and then I actually did a lot of hardwood research down in the Mobile Tensaw Delta and it looked like, it could be some good duck habitat, but nobody I knew down there duck hunted around there did anything about it, it was almost like it was a predominant deer hunting country, like everybody I’ve ever met. But I will say this and it’s going to kind of lead into what I want to talk to you mostly about was we – I did my master’s thesis on some hardwood regeneration and I wish I could remember to name that little Whitehall – White oak. White oak, Alabama, which is east of the marvelous, east of Montgomery up in that area, just closer to Montgomery, I guess, if I had to put it on a map, White oak, Alabama and there was a new WMA, we were putting in a lot of hardwood regeneration and doing some different research for – And it was hotter than blue dang blaze, we got to doing that regeneration study. Well, we’d go swimming in the afternoons and I don’t even remember what river that would have been, but it’s a lot like what you described, it was – Had a good gravel bottom, it was kind of shallow and I was out there swimming one day and got out to dry off and look down at my feet and found an arrowhead, put it in my pocket, lost it within a day, but found an arrowhead down there and one thing, I know you as a duck hunter to goose hunter from our time together and as long as we’ve known each other, Shade. But, man, since we met, since we were down in Texas, you fell off big and became a rock hound of epic proportions, like one of the biggest arrowhead hunters I’m aware of and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about coming, you probably know more than have collected more and it’s like, I would stay in touch with you and you did more arrowhead hunt, it seems like, than duck hunting, when you was out on the river bank, how did all that come about?

The Unexpected Thrill of Finding Artifacts While Hunting.

Sometimes one hobby leads into another, something as a boy, I hunted quail with my granddad over in Russellville, Alabama and shot a quail down as a kid and run over there looking for the quail, staring at the ground and find an arrowhead, not the quail.

Shade Murrah: Oh, yeah, well, as the hunting got slow, like you said, it’s like they’d see me out of the duck blind, it’s like, where’d Shade go? He’s out hunting rocks. But, yeah, it’s just like you said, Ramsey, sometimes one hobby leads into another, something as a boy, I hunted quail with my granddad over in Russellville, Alabama and shot a quail down as a kid and run over there looking for the quail, staring at the ground and find an arrowhead, not the quail, right or find both and then think, that’s kind of neat, but it doesn’t – And you don’t think, hey, I want to find another one, you just think, that’s cool, put in your pocket and keep hunting birds. So I did find artifacts as a kid, but it didn’t really sink in until we were, we’ve got a little place where the Flint River empties into the Tennessee and we had a little duck club, like a lot of us have and built up a dike and I found one laying on the dike and thought, boy, that’s not neat and then I’d like to find some more so you just kind of get into it. So, like you said, one hunting or duck hunting leads into another hobby and so that’s kind of how it happens, then you kind of start wondering, why was it there? How was it there? Who made it? And all those questions enter your mind and it’s interesting to hold something, somebody hadn’t, somebody made 1000s of years ago and you’re standing there just in awe, holding it, thinking, wow how – What was this used for hunting? Was it in a war? What’s its use? All those things come through your mind. So I wouldn’t say I’m no archaeologist, I’m a proud Auburn University graduate, but I’m not an archaeologist, I’m just well read on the subject and it’s kind of like you, Ramsey, when I see you hold up a bird and talk about what they eat, their colors, the parts of the bird, where they come from, when it’s your passion, it just flows off your tongue and you learned a lot about it just because you enjoy it, so that’s kind of like rock hunting and that’s where I’m at.

Ramsey Russell: Where do you – I mean, I don’t even know where to start with this subject with you, Shade, because I’ve got a couple of dozen arrowheads I found over the years, but a lot down in Texas, some in Mississippi, that one in Alabama that I subsequently lost. And for me, it’s just been like you describe, I’m walking down a road or down a sandbar or looking for a dove out in the field and just look down and well, look at that, there’s an arrowhead, pick it up, put it in your pocket. But you’re not just – and it is something about holding a rock that was a projectile point 1000s of years ago, if not longer and wondering, I wonder how it got here. I mean, was it stuck in a woolly mammoth that wandered off and died right here? Who knows? A lot of the ones I found had been, I felt like because they weren’t truly finished, they were just pieces or kind of started to rough out were like, maybe it’s where a camp had been. And that was just some of the off, some of, they messed up or started and left camp before they finished, I don’t know but you start, sometimes you’ll find a bunch of them in one place.

Shade Murrah: It’s exactly like you say, if you find some that are kind of roughed out it might be what’s called a preform and you’re standing in a workshop, you might have be right around a workshop where they were just kind of finishing up roughing out artifacts, it’s interesting. And going back to how you found it, I remember as a kid standing in a fishing for bluegill and shellcracker over here on Guntersville and standing in a bed look down, reeling in a brim, looked down into the fanned out brim bed and there’s an area ahead where the fish had fanned it out for me and that was cool. Wish I’d had a picture of that, because I’ll always remember that one. But, yeah once you find one, you’re thinking, well, why? What’s here? And as you look and learn about ancient sites and how they lived, well, then you start clueing in on where you should look like they got to have water, right? You got to be close to old water source. So I forget, what is it? You can only live a few days without water, right? So most of them are real near water and also high ground because before these TVA dams and flash flooding was rampant before flood control, you better be on high ground, that’s where your village or your camp needs to be all the time, because you didn’t know when that wall of water was coming or what the weather was going to do. So high ground with quick access to water, you just start thinking, what would I do if Walmart wasn’t right down the road? And you start thinking, well, you better be here, you better be on a protected site, high above the waterline, but close where you can get to fresh water. So, in ancient times the ice sheet came down, gosh, I guess Indiana, just North of Kentucky, so imagine how cold it was in Mississippi, it was probably more conifers, more pines, a lot less hardwoods, the whole landscape changed, so you better live close to a spring, open water all the time, 68⁰ everything else. So a lot of artifacts you’ll find around old karst, you heard me say karst, that’s a limestone sink or spring, you start, now I start talking like a geologist, like, I know, but I’m just, like I said, well read, studied it just because it interests me. But, yeah, some of these sinkholes where it would attract ducks so that the ancient people hunted ducks and hunted them hard, it was one of their main sources of food were ducks. And we’ll find bolo weights, you’ve heard of it? You know what a bolo is? Okay, well, I’ve got a few of those in my collection, sometimes you’re hunting around a karst environment, you’ll find weights. All it is, is a rock, but you can see a worn crease in the rock sometimes in the form of an X where they would tie cordage around these rocks and sling them into a flock of birds and it just tangles them all up.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Shade Murrah: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How big would that bolo rock be?

Shade Murrah: Oh, maybe a baseball to a softball.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, I’m familiar with bondolares and whatnot down in South America that they and those carve shows to this day I guess. But a lot of the historically, they, I guess they used them to hunt, they didn’t have, I don’t know what they hunted, I know they hunted those emus they got down there, those rhea birds, they would toss them and tangle up their legs and trip them up.

Shade Murrah: Right. Yeah, deer, you could tangle up a deer, throw it into the deer’s legs and so, yeah, when you look, you talk about projectile points, but there’s all kind of artifacts, I found bone fish hooks that are made out of the only bone of a whitetail deer’s leg. It’s a natural curve down there in the ulna bone where you don’t have to work it as much, so it’s already a natural curve, you just got to sharpen it, put an eye on it and sharpen it up and it’s a fish hook. So found some of those, but a lot of those are gone because bone doesn’t last long in the environment, right? You’ll you might find one of those just because you’re in an area where it was preserved between muscle shells or something else calcium or something, where it didn’t touch, just acidic Alabama clay or something. But the rocks live forever flint, chert, that’s what these are made out of the, projectile points and nothing really harms them except farm equipment tearing them up digging them up.

Ramsey Russell: What would be the date range of some of these artifacts you’re finding? Like how many are we talking, 200 years ago or 2000 years ago?

Shade Murrah: Yeah, all the above, the stone age was as young as 200 years ago. So you might find what people call a bird point, right? One of them little triangles and that was truly an arrowhead, when you see these large pickwick arrowheads, big as your hand that was not tight, that was not shot out of a bow that’s too heavy. Most things you call an arrowhead are not an arrowhead, they’re a projectile point, which means it was on an atlatl spear, which is a short spear, ATL.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I know what atlatl is.

Shade Murrah: And right and you threw it with leverage, with a throwing handle and it’s so, and they would fly more on a heavier spear, so the bow and arrow wasn’t invented until much later. So, yeah, the small little points, it could have been an arrow or bow and arrow or a blow dart, this river cane, you hollow it out and some of these little arrowheads, I find, are as big as your thumbnail, just sharp as a tack and they’re a perfect little triangle you could put it in a river cane and blow it, hit a bird. So who knows exactly how they were used, probably all the above, no game laws, there was dead falls, whatever you wanted to do, poison, get a cotton mouth, milk it, dip your spear in it we all wonder about what they did, but when you’re out there on your own, I’m sure all of it was in play, right? All game wardens. So, yeah, it’s interesting and all I’ve found Bannerstone and celts, which are –

Ramsey Russell: Go tell me what some of this stuff is.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, Bannerstone is a, usually a softer stone they can work and grind down, peck down into a weight. And it’s got a hole drilled in it where it would give you more leverage in your atlatl, throwing spear, the spear you’d throw, in the handle you threw it with, so it would make, it was all about physics and they figured all that out so it’d make the spear a little more a little more distance out of it or whatever so you’ll find those a lot of people will walk right by them because it looks like a rock until you see the hole drilled in it. So most people that look for arrowheads or whatever, they’re looking for an arrowhead. But if you keep your eye out, there’s all kinds of, what was in their toolkit, you’ll hear an archaeological archaeologist say, their tool kit, which means all kind of interesting things, grinding stones, celts, 3 quarter groove axes and a lot of in our area, it was made out of greenstone, which is a little bit softer stone, they could work and yeah, some beautiful, highly polished artifacts where you could see they were making dugout canoes or whatever, just chopping trees down for to build a home or whatever they were using it.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, they use natural materials and boy, I tell you one of the most unique things I’ve ever been shown that somebody found was, I ought not even talk about it, but a buddy of mine in Pennsylvania’s mama collects stuff and was somewhere up north and found a rock that looked very phallic.

Shade Murrah: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And she picked it up and when she handed to me, she said, see how it fits your hand? And I mean, it fits your hand and I said, is that what she said? Yeah, she said, she took it to a university researcher, professor, somebody one day and said I found this interesting shaped rock, is it what I think? And she goes, yes, ma’am, that’s a squall pleasure, it’s existed since forever. I mean, you can’t make that up.

Shade Murrah: Phallic symbols, I think one of the oldest. You go out there and look at some of them geology or archaeology magazines, one of the oldest artifacts ever found, I think, is a pregnant woman, it’s a phallic symbol or phallic God or something so, yeah, that stuff’s out there, that stuff’s they –

Ramsey Russell: He described this to me being a very prehistoric sex toy.

Shade Murrah: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Which you just can’t make that stuff up, it just never crossed my mind. I figured they were out there too busy hunting for a living to have to worry about that stuff.

Shade Murrah: Well, it’s like they said, the white man screwed it up, right? I mean, they were hunting and fishing all day and then doing that, come into this 09:00 to 05:00. I mean, thanks, Europeans.

Ramsey Russell: Have you found anything like pottery or like, have you found any pottery?

Flint River Pottery: Brushed, Stamped, and Plain Variations.

And as you pick up a pottery shard, I can turn it on its end and say, oh, okay, this is tempered with shell, that’s new pottery or I can pick up a steatite shard and say, wow, that was a 1000 years earlier than this one.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, pottery is interesting too. And I have found and when I’m talking, I’m talking North Alabama because that’s where I’m from, but this stuff is all over the country and it’s made out of different things and so I’m talking Southeast United States, but around here they used, I think you call it steatite, at first, that was the first pottery which literally pecking a stone into a bowl, you could imagine how long that took, get a harder stone and then peck a steatite which is a little bit not as hard as the pecking stone you’re using and just on the side of a boulder of steatite pecking out this pottery and then and then they figured out probably around a campfire, hey, look at this clay hardening next to the campfire and so they started making clay bowls, which were very fragile because they were just clay so that’s the next stage of ceramics is steatite to just a non or only, I should say only clay. Then they said after they started using some clay, after they’d eaten some mussels and some of the crunched up shell got into the pottery, they noticed, hey man, that pot is harder, it’s staying together, it’s not breaking as easy. Well, they tempered it with ground up muscle shells so it tempered it, like rebar. So that’s even later in the process. And as you pick up a pottery shard, I can turn it on its end and say, oh, okay, this is tempered with shell, that’s new pottery or I can pick up a steatite shard and say, wow, that was a 1000 years earlier than this one. So it is just like finding a 22 caliber bullet on the ground, it’s all about CSI, well, that 22 caliber was made in what, I don’t know, 1940 – When did the 22 caliber bullet made? So then you can gauge how old something is and it’s all stratification, how far you find it deep in the soil. So over time, things get deeper in the soil, that’s another way they can age thing or just the technology. Yeah, the technology of being able to temper pottery so it’s stronger and yeah and then different, they paint the pottery with – you’ll hear a red ochre which was used as kind of like a dye. So they started painting it, designing it, they would – So you wouldn’t drop the pot, they’d hang it in a fishnet while it was wet to get that pattern on it and I’ve got shards where it’s around the Flint River, they’ll call it Flint River brushed or Flint River stamped or Flint River plain if it didn’t have anything on it. And they also did designs of the local animals, I’ve got pieces of a tail of a wood duck or a head of a wood duck off of a pot, most of its all broken. I don’t think I’ve ever found a whole pot because that stuff just doesn’t last the test of time. I think a lot of pots were in burials which are they put offerings to their loved ones like we would do, they’re no different than us, they’re human, but a lot of things you’ll just find in a plowed field or broken from the time and plow and modern machinery.

Ramsey Russell: Shade, I came into a, I don’t know, half to 3 quarter piece of pot, I’ll send you a picture, I came into it with an old soil scientist, now deceased and I assume since he was from Georgia, this may have come from Georgia. I’m going to send you a picture and see what it’s made of. And I have no idea, it’s just, I don’t know, it’s the size of a – Like I say, it’s been broken, but it’s mostly 3 quarter, about the size of a kitchen bowl and I just put the handful of arrowheads I found in there and kind of keep it in one place and he also imparted to me it’s a, let’s say half the diameter, half the circumference of a snuff can, but it’s shaped like a hockey puck and he described it as a game piece kind of like hockey, but not that they played out on some of these playing fields in the deep south. You know what I’m talking about? I can’t remember what he called that.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, I have found some, actually and I believe I know what you’re talking about without seeing it, but –

Ramsey Russell: I’ll send you a picture of it.

Shade Murrah: They played a game called chunky and it’s called a chunky stone or a game stone. And a lot of what we’re talking about is theory because nobody was there to watch them play these games or it’s very little written down or –

Ramsey Russell: They didn’t have a rule book.

Shade Murrah: Right. No, it’s not like today we’re having, they’re free throw lines, we know everything where everything’s drawn out, right. But, so they’re a highly polished stone, it’s kind of, it’s called a discoidal too.

Ramsey Russell: Discoidal.

Shade Murrah: Discoidal. Maybe that’s the technical archaeologic term. But then they said they’ll also call it a chunky stone and they played a game called chunky and I’ll tell you about that, but these are highly, I have found some that aren’t real pretty, but they’re chunky stones. They’re dished out round stones and I say dished out, they got a dimple on the inside. And the ones I found, I found one that’s kind of nice, but it’s almost like I’m finding the practice ball, where the game ball, the Saturday morning game ball is pretty, the one the baseball coach gave you the brand new ball for the game, nice and white, some of them are real pretty others look like they’re beat up, like they were practicing, that’s the only thing I could figure out or a kid’s usually them learning to play the game of chunky. But anyway, chunky, from what I understand, is a game where you would, somebody would roll the stone on the ground and the object of the game was to throw that atlatl spear and throw it in the air and try to make the spear stick in the ground where the discoidal stone came to rest, not hit it as it’s moving, but where it came to stop. So it’s almost like, oh that’s a good hunting technique, where’s the deer going to stop? Because that’s my best shot, I can’t hear a deer on a full run, so we’re, maybe that was some kind of hunting technique, I don’t know, So, but that’s what chunky, that’s what I’ve heard that game is all about and yeah, some of those stones are beautiful, they’re made out of some of the most prettiest quartz and highly polished and you just wonder how they made them without having any, they couldn’t go to Lowe’s and pick things up, I just, grinding, sand, grit, polish, however they could do it. But that’s interesting.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve noticed in North America, for example, is there’s parts, it seems to be like, for example, get up to the Pacific Northwest and those primitive civilizations had such a luxury, an abundant luxury of wildlife, salmon, rivers choked with salmon and it’s almost like making a living was easy enough that they had a lot more leisure time. And so you see like these totem cultures, very artistic totem cultures, very decorative art pieces and pottery and things like that begin to emerge in these super productive regions versus getting down to, let’s say, I don’t know, way down into desert, Sonora desert, Mexico. Man, those guys, they were having a hustle to make a living and maybe they didn’t spend as much time decoratively or artistically as much as they were just scratching out a living. Do you see some of that variability or have you noticed that, like, is that an oversimplification from somebody that doesn’t know what you’re talking about?

Shade Murrah: I am right with you because you’ve seen the classic paleo man getting trampled by the mammoth while he’s trying to kill it, right?

Ramsey Russell: What a hard living.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, no, listen, I think it was an easy living, that’s a misnomer. When Paleo man they think he crossed up at the Bering Strait when there was a land bridge and came down from Siberia, through Alaska, down into the Western United States and on into the lower 48, he came into an oasis with an abundance of life, that man, that mammoth stood there and looked at this man and thought, who is he? What’s he doing? And until he got shot and I thought it was, I would think it’s an easy living, abundant wildlife, beautiful waters. Yeah, it would, I think it was stress free, not stress free, but it’s nothing like the hard living, you think.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s what led humanity to North America from elsewhere in the first place. Man has always wandered looking as a hunter, which we evolved for an abundance of naive wildlife.

Shade Murrah: Right. Well –

Ramsey Russell: I think what the heck projects me down to some of these remote areas of different continents is what we all kind of dream of, is just, let’s just take it to a duck hunting level is man an abundance of dumb new ducks, right? It’s always deep inside some –

Shade Murrah: That new cold front bringing in new birds, makes it a little easier. You don’t have to work as hard, but, yeah and Ramsey, if you look at time and you look at any kind of cultural period, you look at what they were creating and the beauty of it or the non beauty of it. So Paleo man created these unbelievable artifacts, some of the Paleo, when I said Paleolithic, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, hunting megafauna, giant mammoths, mastodons, all those creatures, they made these fluted projectile points that are just magnificent and you don’t make pieces of art when you’re under stress, you make things, when Ramsey’s under stress, he ain’t taking the time to finally create a flute on either side of a wonderful parallel flaked, beautiful killing tool, it’s just the time and effort, you’re not under stress. Just like the Renaissance, the Renaissance would we have some of the best art, literature, music come out of that time because there was no wars. Right?

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Shade Murrah: That’s what they claim. Well, these hunters, there was no wars, it was abundance of wildlife and they killing something was an art form, it was that easy. So that’s the way I look at it and I look at flint napping itself, the best was Paleo and it got worse over time. So it’s called a reverse technology. You know how the model T Ford was the first car or whatever and over time, we get to Corvette. Okay, it got better. Well, in flint napping technology, Paleo were like experts, we use the best materials and then over time, after we got into agriculture, domesticating animals not needing to hunt as much because we could domesticate the technology tailed off. So, yeah you just look at all these factors and just make your decision, I mean, nobody knew, no, we’re talking 10,000 years ago. Who knows? So this is just Shade expressing his, what he feels about it and I think when you and I, Ramsey, inject the outdoor life and hunting into it I’m thinking these guys weren’t, they didn’t have Gods and this and that, they were just trying to survive, most of the time, you’re just trying to survive, they always say, oh, this was ritualistic or that. I’m all about, I think first and foremost, they were trying to survive so there’s all kind of stories and you’ll read even in the archaeological record where they think it’s ceremonial, this and that. And I kind of just boil it down and kind of like you had mentioned, no, it’s just, they’re just looking for a good hunting spot, they’re looking for that X.

Ramsey Russell: Here’s something you were talking about, like a lot of the materials, like the bones or different natural materials they use wood, I’m sure they use a lot of wood or the clay pottery, a lot of it will disintegrate over time. It’s very hard to find intact and it reminded me of, again, I wasn’t looking forward, I just happened upon this event was we were one time down in Peru and we were hunting up against the Pacific Ocean for cinnamon teal and white cheeked pintail and it’s a real interesting topography because down in that part of the world, it’s like a sliver margin of coastal marsh and wetland, a very productive low lying, just like a real mini narrow delta between the ocean and what they call the Atacama desert and that Atacama desert is vast and I don’t mean with cactus and plants and – I’m talking sand. Sand forever, sand.

Shade Murrah: Wow.

Ramsey Russell: And we were coming out, so, like we would cross through all this sand on this road along this river and drop down into this valley. And then when we’d come out one day the translator started talking about all of stuff like this and she said the ancient people buried, used the desert because it was easy to dig in and they buried people here, I said, really? She goes, well, yeah, there’s a bone. And I looked outside the window and there was a, what appeared to be like a human femur and we stopped a little ways and there was this, a big cave dug into this rock, big cave and in the middle of that cave was a grave that had been dug up. And she was explaining to me how they would trade from the mountains down, back in the old, ancient times down this river and she was explaining how they would store the grain and these great big clay pottery, I was just kind of digging around that cave and I found a piece and Shade, it was probably 2 foot by a foot and a half, but kind of triangular sized, big head, I’m going to say that thing weighed 25 pounds and I picked it up and she was telling me how that was, like, the lip, the top of this massive clay vessel that had been built that, like, bigger than a 55 gallon drum that they store grain in way back. And I wanted to bring it home and she’s like, Ramsey, they would throw you under the jail, you can’t bring stuff like that out of other countries. But I think, my gosh, it was – because now I grew up in the Mississippi Delta and we scratched around the Mississippi Delta, around in Indian hills when we were babies, when we were children and a lot of times you’d pick up pieces of clay pottery the size of a quarter or dime or nickel put them in your pocket. But this was massive, this was beautiful and I just laid it down and left it there. But the following year, I was down there and my buddy Nate Metcalf had gone way up this sandhill to take, like, some B roll, some landscape B roll with his camera for Mojo Outdoors and came back down and said, you all have got to climb up here and take a look at what I just found and we thought he might be messing with us, but he wasn’t, we walked up that, way up that sandball, way up the top of that hill a couple hundred yards and looked down as far as you could see, Shade, as far as you could see were dug up grave. I mean, thousands of dug up grave and we walked down and it was, I’ll be honest with you, it’s a tad uncomfortable, but it’s like watching a wreck, you can’t not, I mean, you stumble upon something, I mean, thousands and thousands of these dug up graves and as we walked around, careful not to step on anything, there was human hair, there was fabric, like I described as, like, burlap type fabric, there were bones galore and in fact, we walked up on one, talk about disturbing, we walked up on one and it was like somebody had taken all these parts of a skeleton, there’s a skull, there’s some rib bones, now, I’m no doctor, I’m no scientist, but I have been to college and looked at bones. I know the knee bone connected to the leg bone, connected to the shin bone, etcetera so you could tell that they just made up, like taking a femur and used it for the arm bones or used it for the femur and used it for this and used it for that and just laid out and reconstructed a human skeleton on the sand. And to top it off, most disturbing of all was they had this great big old femur sticking straight up into the air where his penis would go, dude, I’m like and I finally said, who in the world would do this or just what the local kids doing? And she goes, no, Ramsey, that could be 1000s of years old and she described when a lot of the Europeans started coming through that part of the world, they were looking for treasures and when they became aware of that, these people, these Pre Incans had buried their people out in this desert, they started just digging them up and they were looking for gold or for jewelry or for something of value. And she said, the big prize is, she said, these coastal chiefs would have these very ornate robes made out of feathers and feather robes that for, in a very impoverished part of the world, even to this day, that would be like hitting the jackpot on the black market. If somebody were to find one of those pre ink and feather robes, it’d be like hitting a powerball. But she said, so they dug up, the conquistadors, would have dug up all these graves, not knowing that these people, since forever, had no treasure. They were very poor and very simple and there was no treasure. But when she pointed to that skeleton laid out like that, she goes, Ramsey, that could have been there, just imagine a band of conquistadors laying that out for entertainment. She said, that’s how long that’s been there.

Shade Murrah: That’s crazy.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.

Shade Murrah: Yeah. Now, yeah. And that kind of leads into laws here in the states. I’m sure where you are, you have to know that international travel, you better know what you’re doing, I remember taking international business in school and some of the customs and some of the things you got to know how to behave. You’re not –

Ramsey Russell: You don’t bring nothing out.

Shade Murrah: You ain’t from around here, so you better behave. But anyway, yeah, in the States it’s like the antiquities act, so what we’ve been talking about, you cannot collect artifacts on federal state property, there’s laws that say do not pick up artifacts on federal property. I think it’s even 50 years old and I’m 60, so I’m a walking, talking artifact. So it’s –

Ramsey Russell: You’re an antique.

Shade Murrah: Yeah. If I’m walking the riverbank, you don’t pick me up, but there’s a lot of discourse about artifacts, if you don’t pick it up, it’s going to slide into 40ft of water in the Tennessee River. I mean, when an artifact erodes out, it’s lost all archaeological context, context meaning how far was it down in the soil? What was it associated with? What other artifacts was it associated with? So it’s very hard to gauge anything.

Ramsey Russell: It’s lost its identity.

The Role of Federal Regulations in Protecting Artifacts.

So that’s why they don’t want, the federal government does not want you digging or doing anything because when they come back to do a survey, they want to get good data they want to do it the artifact and that’s a good thing so yeah, but there is between the collecting community and the federal government in the states.

Shade Murrah: Yes. Like those bodies had lost a lot of, how far down were they, did the sand move? You can’t carbon date it as much it’s been exposed or something. I don’t know all about it, but I do know, though, it loses a lot of value because it’s out of context. So that’s why they don’t want, the federal government does not want you digging or doing anything because when they come back to do a survey, they want to get good data they want to do it the artifact and that’s a good thing so yeah, but there is between the collecting community and the federal government in the states, you got to have permission to walk the farmers land, don’t just walk out there and do it, always I think that it leads into this, you should know, always do it the correct way. So, yeah and a lot of the sites you find it’s easy, we going back to that, there was a reason why they buried them on that hill, it was up high out of the flood zone, it was a ceremonial place maybe closer to the stars or whatever. So once you start thinking about why here, you start getting into that and a lot of times you can find. You can go to Google maps. So after they, if they took the pictures with Google Earth or whatever, on some of the fields that had been plowed, you can actually see the dirt turn black on an archaeological site from them living 1000s of years there, right? So this Alabama red clay, as I’m walking through a field, it’s just sterile. No artifacts, no flint chips, no nothing, then the ground starts turning from red, kind of gray and then it turns black and I’m standing all in flint chips, tiny pieces of pottery, so to the common eye, you wouldn’t know, but it just makes sense thousands of years of fires and just living on a property stains the soil, I mean, it literally does, so you could – And you’ll look, yep, that’s high ground right next to the river, right where that black spot is on top of that hill. So some of it, once you know what you’re looking for you can find places to hunt like that and you’ll also hear our archaeological folks say multicultural. In other words, everybody want to live on that, the nice house on the hill, right. Everybody wanted a nice house on the hill. So you’ll find a bird point, which is a couple 100 years old, laying next to a Paleo, which is 10,000 years old, right there in the plow zone, because everybody wanted to live there. These folks didn’t know each other, you may even find a new foundation stone in a marble laying there next to these because that house is gone now, but it was on that hill, old barn nails all of it’s just mixed into the plow zone. So yeah, I find just with a naked eye, old coins, everything like that, sometimes on places you could just tell it was a great place to –

Ramsey Russell: History kind of repeats itself. What was good then is good now for habitation. To your point, we’ve got a new hunt south of Mazatlan, considerably down in a state called Nayarit and they just built a new lodge, a beautiful spot right outside of a little farming community. And it’s up on a high hill and down below you is this beautiful river, a lot of the locals go swimming there in the evenings, a lot of black bellied whistling ducks come fly over to camp house and land on the sandbars and fill the night air with their whistles and stuff and come to find out that right on that same hillside, because they did a lot of construction to build this lodge and it’s still, they hadn’t quite done the landscaping, there’s a whole lot of arrowheads and rock chips and stuff like that because for thousands of years, somebody’s chosen to live in there for the same reason they chose to build that new Estacia. Isn’t that crazy?

Shade Murrah: Yeah, no, you’ll hear it over there in Israel, old religious sites are built on top of old ones are built on top of old ones and it’s no different here in the southeast, all around here where it might be a plowed field and it’s not anything like structures like we’re talking about there in Israel or somewhere, but you can see the remnants of culture after culture living on top of each other. And that’s pretty prevalent in archaeology, you’ll see that a lot.

Ramsey Russell: How many pieces, just ballpark, how many pieces might you have picked up in the last 20 or 30 years, Shade?

Shade Murrah: Oh, thousands, Ramsey. I picked up so many arrowheads, I give them to kids it’s a lot like, arrowhead hunting is like hunting and fishing now, it’s just like, I want to look for early archaic and Paleo, I’ll carry you to my bird hunting, my bird point field or my wood limit aera, because that’s not as old and the artifacts aren’t as pretty. But my Paleo sites in my early archaic, I’m going to keep them in my back pocket, that’s the good stuff, carry your best of friends to them or something, so it’s no different duck hunting. I’ll carry you to a little wood duck hole. But, boy, with that mallard X, I’m going to leave that one in my back pocket.

Ramsey Russell: But it also sounds like that no differently than hunting itself, that at some point, as long as you’ve done it, after so much of it and having learned so much that you’ve shared, it’s almost as, to you it may almost be as much about the process and the act of the actual hunt and the figuring it out as it is that pick something up.

Shade Murrah: Multifaceted, just like duck hunting, you got your decoy guy, you got the guy that likes the duck call, you got the dog guy, likes the dog, you got the shooter, it likes a nice shotgun. Same with rock hunting, yeah, very similar and yeah, it’s interesting and it goes in many different directions, a lot of these you’d gone back to talking about what these rocks are made out of here in North Alabama, they’re made out of, the local stuff is called Fort Payne Chert, bangor Chert close to Decatur, Buffalo River Chert. And so most of the artifacts you find are made out of those lithics, but I have found points here, literally on our property at the Flint River, made out of Tallahatta quartzite, which is a vein that runs through South Alabama, South Mississippi. So you’re like, well, how’d that rock get up here? Well, they traded stone or they, however, it ended up there, who knows? But you’re talking about sending me that picture, that bowl made in Georgia. That the source of it may not be from Georgia, a lot of our greenstone I was telling you about, stilts, it’s not as local as it is toward Georgia. So these waterways were their highways, so when you find an arrowhead, it may not be a localific, it more than likely is, but a lot of cases, we find all kind of different things, I have found, boy, if you want to google something neat, look up horse creek chert, it is beautiful, it comes from Savannah, Tennessee, over near the shoals, muscle shoals, that area extreme west Alabama, beautiful river cobble. It is red, blue, yellow and it’s a river cobble and they really love that stone. It didn’t move too far because it was like the diamond. I’ll give you my cubic zirconia, but I’m going to keep my diamonds. It was a beautiful rock, Indians were no different, they traded with what they wanted, I’ll give you this 8 shot, but I’m going to keep my 3 and a half inch number two. So it just goes to show you it’s really interesting and when you’re on the river it’s just like being on highway 65 through Alabama. Anything can be thrown on the side of the road and it may have come from California, because they drove over here, so same with Tennessee River, that arrowhead, that was Tallahatta quartzite, I had to look it up and I’ve seen in the artifact shows that, there’s artifact shows that they’ll have them in Huntsville and Birmingham and if you want to learn, go to these artifact shows and you’ll learn a tremendous amount about your local materials, about your point types, everything you could imagine. You can ask all the questions you want, so I’d recommend anybody go to those. You’ll see them pop up, they’re free and they trade rocks and talk about rocks and as much as you want to talk about them at those shows.

Ramsey Russell: So what is your absolute of the 1000s of pieces you’ve picked up, what are one or 2 of your absolute most treasured and why?

Shade Murrah: Oh, yeah, it wouldn’t be all Paleo. You’re right. There is a – I’ve got a Cumberland point. It’s, some archaeologists say it might be older than Clovis, which is very old. The first Americans, I found one of those in an old cotton field that is now Toyota Mazda, so gone forever. Yeah, there’s a lot of urban sprawl, you imagine how big Huntsville is and the growth, I think Huntsville is now the biggest city in Alabama over Birmingham, it might be, population wise, I had to, it was in the paper, Al.com, but urban sprawl has really wiped out a lot of the places I would artifact hunt, had permission to so, yeah, I’ve got a Clovis base that’s in this frame I’m sitting here looking at and I wish I could show everybody the points that I found in, that’s now the parking lot of a Publix supermarket. So, yeah, you need to look because it’s never going to last, a lot of the building industry around here, a lot of these row crop farms have turned back into pines, so for lumber and they’re never going to be plowed again or at least not in my lifetime. But you need to look anywhere where there’s any type of erosion, water coming up or down after a big storm, after a good plow, after the rain, after every rain. This Alabama red clay takes a hard rain to wash down, it’s not like that alluvial soil that is like flower that won’t turn that first time. So it may take a couple good rains for this Alabama red clay after they turn it. But just the no till has hurt artifact surface collecting, that’s what we call it when you just walk around hunting arrowheads, that’s called surface collecting by archaeologists. So, yeah construction sites, as they move that topsoil, watch where they move the topsoil, they like to get down to the hard pan so they can lay their footers and everything, but they’ll move the topsoil back because topsoil is valuable, it’s more rich in nutrients, but wherever they move the topsoil, that’s a good place to look, it’s all different, out west, I’m sure, in those deserts after that, sand shifts, after a windstorm is probably a good time to go. So artifact hunting is a lot like hunting, it’s very opportunistic. You want to hunt that cold front, you don’t want to hunt it after it’s been hunted and no new birds or so you want to hunt after that big rain or after that big flood or whatever caused the erosion after that big plow and that’s when you need to go. And a lot of times I’ve got all these sites I know about and on my drive to work, I’ll just take a more scenic look to work, get up a little earlier and drive by a couple fields to see if they’ve been plowed or to keep your eye out and drive back from work, back home on a different route to take a look and then when the time’s right, you go. It’s like, Ramsey, a lot of people say to carry me and head hunting. And it’s I can’t – They think I could just say, okay, let’s go at noon today, I don’t have a place to go right now. I mean, I have to wait till it’s right. And when I call Ramsey, it’s like when I say, let’s go, now yeah, it just rained, I mean or all you’ll find is footprints, you won’t find arrowheads, you’ll find footprints, which means somebody else was there and picked them all up. So there’s not a whole lot of secret spots, especially when arrowhead spots dwindle down. You may have your few secret spots, but some of the well known sites pretty much get surface hunting.

Ramsey Russell: You’re not the only Alabama rock hunter after all, are you?

Shade Murrah: Oh, no. They call north Alabama like the world’s largest Easter egg hunt in the spring after a good plow. So I was, listen, I was close to, in South Huntsville in a field looking and there was these guys roofing a house and I was out wandering in this cotton field, walking in circles and I could hear these 2 guys on this roof saying, what in the hell is he doing? Has he lost his mind? And they didn’t know I was arrowhead hunting. It was the funniest thing, they were like, man, he’s just wandering. They didn’t know, I had a stick in my hand they said, is he planting marijuana? He’s poking holes in the ground, I got so tickled because I don’t, it’s so – I see somebody walking a field, I know exactly what they’re doing. But some people, they’re just not in touch with that hobby and they’re thinking, you’re a lunatic and yeah, I’ve gotten so, I have literally gotten so focused in on arrowhead hunting. I’ve been clotheslined by trees because I’m staring at the ground so hard and knots on my head, but it’s all good, it’s fun to find them and I tell you on these sites, another tip I’ve got, Ramsey, is I’ve got just 5 gallon buckets, I’ll just leave them in the garage. So when I find broken artifacts I find a base here, a tip there, whatever. I’ll label the bucket the site like The Dead Horse Site or The Dollar General Site, because there was a dollar general close by, whatever. I’ll throw these broken pieces from these sites and these buckets and I’ll go back and glue them together, get a whole artifact, just because over time you may find it during the next plow. I have even found broken after the plow came through the base and the tip land side by side and glued it back together. And you can tell a new break versus an old break, like an old break a tip impact fracture where he shot it, it’ll be patinated over. You’ve heard patination. That’s like a antique, furniture patinates in it. Well, a rock does, too. So this old fork paint chirp will and an Alabama red clay soil will patinate white all the way over. So it may be a broken arrowhead, but it’s white all the way over, even where the break is, well, a new break, it’ll be black flint and then white everywhere else. So you can tell the plow just hit it, yeah. There’s a lot of CSI you arrowhead hunting, you’re an archaeologist, you’re a geologist, you’re a meteorologist looking at the weather, when is it going to be right? When’s the rain coming? So all those factors add up to a successful rock cut.

Ramsey Russell: Did you see, last question, did you see where all this collect and all this form of humanity? Were They themselves collectors? It seems like in the same way that humanity, since the dawn of time, has wanted and thirsted for an abundance of naive wildlife to go hunt that in the same way that it’s something about human nature that just wants us to collect stuff, have you ever -?

Shade Murrah: Oh, yeah. What they buy, what the Indians they sold Manhattan Island for some trinkets. I think it’s a real pretty beads they’d never seen.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shade Murrah: They didn’t realize the value of land. They thought, why do you want the land? The land’s everybody’s, they didn’t realize deeds and stuff, but, yeah, \so they traded the pretty rocks and the beads. Yeah, they were just like us, they probably, I often wonder, what were these ancient people think about us admiring their work when they were just trying to make a living, they didn’t see it as such and some of the old timers, rock hunting, some of these barns around here, there might be arrowheads just sitting on the – I’ve heard sitting on the beams where the farmer found a few and he just threw them in there or they used to skip them across Tennessee River because they didn’t think they’d have any value, find them on the riverbank, skip them, flat rocks it is, now all of a sudden, they’re a value. So a lot of times, even us didn’t realize the value in it until old people like them, I don’t understand why some of the old timers just they were trying to survive during the depression and they didn’t collect rocks. They knew they were there, but the appeal didn’t come till later, which is kind of strange, isn’t it?

Ramsey Russell: Same as the old working decoys.

Shade Murrah: Yeah, them old –

Ramsey Russell: All them antique decoys that are trading for tens of thousands of dollars that sold for $3 or $4 or $5 back in the day.

Shade Murrah: Now, there a lady that comes to these artifact shows. She’s long since passed. Sweet lady from, she lived over in Lacey Springs, I had met her. But back when you could collect the riverbank, because the riverbank is federal property here in Alabama, it’s a, I guess, corps of engineers or TVA, but before the laws, the antiquity laws, she would collect with her father. Her father liked to fish and she liked to pick up what call Indian rocks and so she would get buckets and stack them inside each other 5 or 6 buckets and he would drop her off on the bank and he’d float down the river while she walked the riverbank and he’d catch fish and she’d pick up arrowheads and she would fill these buckets with arrowheads and then leave the whole bucket there on the bank and pull an empty bucket out of the stack and just keep walking and then when he finished fishing, they’d come back and pick up bucket loads of arrowheads, yeah, just miles walking down the river. And she had some of the unbelievable collections, now, this was when it was legal but you could imagine, because nobody did it, nobody hunted for them, nobody cared, they were laying around as thick as gravel, just like you were saying, all those artifacts in Peru just eroded out and nobody really cared except for this little girl in South Alabama and right there in Lacey Springs, Alabama. So interesting stories, but that’s the passage of time, even from artifact collecting perspective.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Shade, I’m going to tell you what, I have enjoyed this, I knew it was going to be a great conversation, it’s just, I greatly appreciate your time to come on and tell us all about this, I really do. It’s a fascinating topic to me and the parallels between my nature as a, well, let me say this, going back to that first hunt we did down in Texas together, I remembered when you said it about getting excited about shooting those little Richardson geese. They were some of the first at the time I’d ever shot.

Shade Murrah: Me too. I don’t think I’ve shot one sensor before.

Ramsey Russell: Or Richardson’s.

Shade Murrah: Richardson’s, that’s right, I called them cacklers.

Ramsey Russell: But you’re right, they are a, quote, cackling goose, one of the 4 subspecies of cackling geese but they’re a little Huston side is what their name is and evolving now, having shot a lot more of those and a lot more subspecies, but really it ain’t about, I thought at the time I was collecting species and I wasn’t, I was collecting experiences, collecting friendships. That’s what, in hindsight, that’s what it looks like and just, I guess the parallels, what’s always intrigued me about your passion as an Alabama rock hunter has just been the parallels between that and going out and chasing ducks around the world or something. It’s very strong parallel in that, but I just, I know so little about the topic, it always just fascinates me when I meet an expert like yourself.

Shade Murrah: Well, I don’t know if I’m an expert, but it’s like you say, there’s a passion and it’s easy to learn when you enjoy it, you just absorb it like a sponge and just like you with duck hunting and I watch you talk about them ducks and I can tell, you may not be a wildlife biologist, but you may know as much or more than anybody I know about a duck or a waterfowl and yeah, Ramsey, I’ve enjoyed it, too. We could talk forever about these rocks, there’s so many different things we hadn’t even talked about or even approached it kind of one topic leads into another, but enjoyed it. And, yeah, want to hear more about rocks? We can do it again. Nobody says we can’t.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s jump into a duck blind soon and catch up. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where you all been listening to my buddy Shade Murrah, North Alabama, rock hunter of epic proportion. See you next time.

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