New History Channel show - Mountain Men

[tanvil]

4th, Thermopolis?

Yep the history channel went from the 'Hitler Channel' to the social engineering channel.

[Sharpshooter]

Newton Minow was right.... Television is a vast wasteland.

[4thIDvet]

Originally Posted by tanvil

4th, Thermopolis?

Yep the history channel went from the 'Hitler Channel' to the social engineering channel.

Thermophiles. Mountain Man country.. Jim Bridgers great granddaughter owns a museum there. Well she did in the early 80s.
Part of the "Outlaw Trail."
That was where old Jim retired from trapping and set us his trading post.
"Unsolved History" is a good show.
They set up famous battles and re-create what really happened.

[droog]

I worked around Thermoplis and all towns around that area. I was a driller on seismic top drive drill.That was fun.There is the best digging you could as for 200 feet of blue clay and there is also a lot of bentonite around the area.I loved that in and out in 12 minutes .I could dig 2000 feet and be done about 1 or 2:00 and had the rest of the day to hunt or fish.

[Mr_Posthumous]

I saw a lot of dinosaur stuff in thermopolis as a kid when my grandparents took me there in the late 80s. Pretty cool.

I have several hundred digital cable channels, and with a 3 year old and a 1.5 year old in the house, we watch Curious George and Little Ensteins. And no others so it seems. until they go to bed.

Have to watch this mountain man show. sounds interesting. I was a big fan Survivorman with Les Stroud, Dual Survivial, yes, even man woman wild.

My wife and had a running joke/laugh about the History channel, everytime we see its on, its about Hitlers Bodyguards or the last days of Hitler, and we jokingly say "Holy crap the history is showing something about Hitler!"

I like the Military Channel and G4. Also HCI and H2, because they play older History Channel shows, not just WW2 and hilter.

[Sharpshooter]

Originally Posted by Bradrock

I watched & thought it was ridiculus. My idea of a mountain man does not drive a $40.000 pickup truck or an airplane. One quote was " He just makes enough to pay his bills" ! Mountain man with BILLS??? WTF ,Yeah right! The one couple had a log home bigger than the Cartrights ponderosa!

I read this post a couple of times and I thought about it a little bit. I have this to say as a thought for everyone. We are in a unique position in this nation that our fore bearers were not in. They had many more options available to them than we do. First of all you could homestead, I don't even think that is possible in Alaska nowadays as they stopped the practice a few years back. Secondly even after the passage of the income tax in 1914 we still had people who did not pay taxes to the government and yet they owned their land and could work it and prosper.

Our options today are vastly more limited, if you go and try to live on BLM land and squat for too long they will run you off or arrest you, no option to homestead. If you buy a piece of property no matter how remote you will pay at least property taxes or they will put a lien on it and evict you no matter how far out you live. If you have no job with taxable income then the IRS is going to say your subsistence activities are in fact a job and try to tax the produce of your labors such as trapping and hunting.

In fact other than Alaska there is no place in the union where it is legal any longer to subsistence hunt or fish. Try that where I live you will be fined and then jailed if they catch you doing it more than once or twice and I live in one of the more "Free states" left in the union. These people on that show have bills because we don't live in a free society any longer. In fact with property tax which is only slightly less onerous than income tax you are at best never the owner of your land. Merely a lease tenant.

Even if you live like these blokes on TV the best you can ever hope to be is a mere shadow of what someone who lived 75 to 150 years was. Yes we have cars , jets, the Internet and what essentially amounts to a whole society that has been permanently indentured to the government from the time we are old enough to earn a paycheck till the day we die in front of the TV.

[Mr_Posthumous]

Originally Posted by Sharpshooter

I read this post a couple of times and I thought about it a little bit. I have this to say as a thought for everyone. We are in a unique position in this nation that our fore bearers were not in. They had many more options available to them than we do. First of all you could homestead, I don't even think that is possible in Alaska nowadays as they stopped the practice a few years back. Secondly even after the passage of the income tax in 1914 we still had people who did not pay taxes to the government and yet they owned their land and could work it and prosper.

Our options today are vastly more limited, if you go and try to live on BLM land and squat for too long they will run you off or arrest you, no option to homestead. If you buy a piece of property no matter how remote you will pay at least property taxes or they will put a lien on it and evict you no matter how far out you live. If you have no job with taxable income then the IRS is going to say your subsistence activities are in fact a job and try to tax the produce of your labors such as trapping and hunting.

In fact other than Alaska there is no place in the union where it is legal any longer to subsistence hunt or fish. Try that where I live you will be fined and then jailed if they catch you doing it more than once or twice and I live in one of the more "Free states" left in the union. These people on that show have bills because we don't live in a free society any longer. In fact with property tax which is only slightly less onerous than income tax you are at best never the owner of your land. Merely a lease tenant.

Even if you live like these blokes on TV the best you can ever hope to be is a mere shadow of what someone who lived 75 to 150 years was. Yes we have cars , jets, the Internet and what essentially amounts to a whole society that has been permanently indentured to the government from the time we are old enough to earn a paycheck till the day we die in front of the TV.

Good Post. Sad and true. Reading that really made me feel trapped. you COULD go 'off the grid' and try homesteading, but like you said, if they catch you, you're arrested or thrown off the land, etc.

[4thIDvet]

Good post Sharpshooter... So very true..
I live in the middle of one million acres of National and State forest down here in Florida.
With the current depression and bad economic times were in..
People, down on their luck, were moving into the forest and setting up camp.
The Govt. stepped in and put sand piles blocking every un-numbered road.
Hell like the American Indian said.
"All your doing is living on it till you croak. Then the next guy takes over."

[Sharpshooter]

If anyone watched last night.. Eustace got a tax lien on his property.... The show also spoke to the fact that he struggles being able to pay the bill because of his subsistence lifestyle.

[Sprat]

no matter how far you go back in to the woods the Tax man will follow,

breaking down in the Alaskan wilds un-armed??? that does not sound wise

Poor Tom no deer!! but he will be eating Beaver for the winter??? heck I did that my sophmore year in college!! come to think about my junior & senior years too

in response to
Yep the history channel went from the 'Hitler Channel' to the social engineering channel.
wonder when it will be called the Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot channel each killed 4 times as many of their own peoples than Hilter ever did, Stalin killed more Jews than Hilter
yet this what we see and hear all the time
I should note I am not excusing the atrocities of Hitler

sprat