Hunting Ginseng in Appalachia

since i've been writing about appalachia for so long i frequently get emails from people inquiring if i know someone that they'd like to talk to you know people think that i i must know something about it since i've been doing it for so long but sadly most of the emails come from media organizations that are looking for like for example they want to know if i know any rogue sheriffs in my area or do i know anybody making illegal moonshine or maybe do i know anybody poaching animals illegally well i don't know any of those things there's no rogue sheriffs where i live and there's nobody making illegal moonshine that i know of unless they might make it for a personal use or something but not not in the way that you think of moonshine or selling it you know and if i did i'm not quite sure that i would tell someone i don't even know about my neighbors you know what they were doing anyway that's sad that that's when it comes to appalachia that's what people want to promote they want to they want to find something sensational i call it like the the cardboard cut out that's often held up um as a picture of what appalachia is and it's just not true it's not what it is appalachia's just like everywhere else there's good and there's bad and there's all kinds of people and you know it's pretty similar to the rest of the united states or even the world a lot of times i just ignore those emails every once in a while i'll write back and say no i don't know any rogue sheriff but i know two boys who grew up in a hauler in appalachia and had full ride scholarships to yale would you like to know more about them of course they never want to know more about them they're just looking for the sensational the dramatic like i said but when you see those type of shows on tv a lot of times they are maybe about moonshine about other things but there's also one about ginseng hunting and it's really any kind of reality tv that's the purpose in it it's dramatic they want to make it the most dramatic so that people watch it but i got to thinking about that one because all my life i've heard people talk about ginseng hunting or saying hunting like some people call it and my older brother steve he hunted ginseng when we were little or young i was little he was probably a teenager but he doesn't do it anymore today but i got to thinking about jen saying this is the time of the year those ginseng hunters would be getting ready gearing up for for hunting and um and also thought of other kind of wild craft things that people used to hunt for money for extra money spending money my husband calls it folding money but people hunted moss and they sold that they sold galax a lot of different things and it was a at a certain time of the year that they would sell those things but the fall of the year seems like it was a time that several of those things were when they were in demand and when it was the right time of the year just to hunt on like for ginseng that's the time of the year that you would want to hunt it but so i got steve to talk to me about ginseng and i'll show you that in just a minute but first i was going to read this little piece to you this is a book folk medicine in southern appalachia by anthony cavender it's a really good book about all kinds of folk remedies and just tradition and documentation about different things when it comes to medicinal remedies and of course ginseng that's what most people are familiar with the plant in a medicinal way it's in here too but i thought this was really interesting he says prior to world war ii root digging was a vital part of the local economy in southern appalachia it was a way to supplement one's income and for some residents years ago it was the only means of obtaining cash u.s department of agriculture promoted plant collection as a way for the poor to improve their income in the 1920s and 1930s the agency prepared and distributed through its extension agents pamphlets and monographs designed to educate people about how to identify gather and properly prepare plants for sale to cro crude drug dealers excuse me this initiative continued until the late 1960s over the years the demand for crude drugs declined due to the increased production of synthetic drugs causing many dealers to go out of business today some of the small tributary dealers struggle to stay afloat they point to a shrunken pool of cheap labor as a problem and blame welfare programs for dimension people's incentive to collect plants nevertheless root digging remains a vital part of many southern appalachian communities according to a study done by appalachian science in the public interest more than half of the certified 178 000 pounds of wild ginseng collected in the united states in 1994 came from the states of kentucky west virginia and tennessee collectors received an average of 450 dollars a pound which amounted to a little over four hundred thousand dollars infused into the local economy in communities like coal river west virginia ginseng also called sangin has a long history is an integral part of the local culture and represents an intimate harmonious relationship between the people and the environment as much as an economic activity for some the pursuit of saying and other herbs is a therapeutic activity in itself a 90 year old woman from eastern tennessee said when i fell down in the dumps i go singing this way of life as well as the presence of ginseng goldenseal and other plants is currently threatened by the destruction of the hardwood forest commons areas by mountaintop mining and i would just say not just mountaintop mining probably just by the encroach of people as people as there's more people and more forest area has to be claimed for housing and different things you know everything that comes along with where people live anyway that was really interesting i think all of appalachia probably has that's part of their culture not just the southern appalachians where i'm at but the hunting of ginseng and like i said moss and gaylox and those other things that was a way for people to make extra money spending money maybe that they wouldn't have or maybe hard cash money you know when pap was a boy he told me that uh the most his family would have cash actually cash in a year might be about forty dollars that was it because most of the things that they acquired they did through barter you know through trading that was just the way it is cash was not king in those days like it is now anyway i hope you enjoyed this little talk and i hope you'll enjoy seeing my brother steve talk about it and if you will share this video with anybody you know who might be interested in gin singing or singing and we're by no means experts so please any information you can share or stories or if you know someone that still hunts ginseng it's much more complicated today because the government you have to have a permit and there's i think you can still hunt it on government land with a permit but you definitely have to there's more regulation involved in it today than there was in in days gone by but then there's not as many people hunting it i don't think today either and probably not as many places to hunt it i think the main thing though and you'll hear steve talk about this is that of course there was the money everyone needs money and you know and especially some extra money if you could make some extra on the side kind of have a side hustle even today we like to do that but uh was that it it give them away the the people that hunted sang and it wasn't just men it was women too like the one we heard in the in the what i read it give them a way to be close to the land to be out and about in the woods you know a kind of a solitary thing or maybe with a friend that they were hunting saying and just something that they they could fellowship together but being out in the great outdoors there's just nothing like that it really is a bomb for your soul anyway i hope you enjoyed the video i hope you enjoy hearing steve talk about it if you've not subscribed to our channel please do that and please share this with your friends and neighbors but mostly just stop back by as we celebrate appalachia today we're talking to steve wilson steve's my older brother and we're going to talk about ginseng i remember when we were growing up i remember that steve would often go hunt ginseng so when i wanted to decided i wanted to do a video about it he's the first person i thought of so i remember you hunting ginseng but steve you're older than i am who taught you how or how did you because i don't think daddy went with you how did you how did you get involved in it no uh a good christian man named floyd hughes he taught me how to hunt ginseng and i used to go with him and he'd show me what it looked like and where to look for it on the mountain and what kind of terrain and he's he's really the man that got me started when i used to dig ginseng so did you do it were you interested in doing it to make money or to be out in the woods or both or both you could make a little spending money and it was enjoyable it's just peaceful and quiet out in the woods when i would dig ginseng back them days we wouldn't start till the 15th october and uh you just dig it up into the first good frost or maybe the first of november um it was a little for spending money but mostly for fun and just to be out in the woods just to see if you could find it was it pretty plentiful around here in those days we're in western north carolina yeah pretty much uh the deep dark popular hollers was the best and uh real good shaded areas always 99 of time on the north side of the mountain you might find a little on the south side of the mountain where a bird had eat the seed and then flew over but all the good ginseng's always on the north side so i since i don't know anything about it did floyd teach you i've heard people say that you shouldn't dig it unless it's a certain size and then that you should make sure you don't take it all or that you replant the seeds we'd never dig anything that wasn't at least a three prong we dig the three prongs and the four prongs and we would never dig it uh it comes up in the spring but we wouldn't dig it in the spring because it the berries wouldn't ripe enough to to seed out and start another plant and that's why we would always wait to october so the berries were red so when it fell off in the ground it would bring up another plant later if you dig it when it first comes out of the ground in the spring the berries as according to my understanding they wouldn't reproduce so that's why you won't wait till the fall season were there a lot of people in this area that that hunted ginseng not too many of them days just a few uh older guys mostly and you dig some on the government in them days and some on private land you didn't have to have a permit or anything that was before the forest service became involved in it and it's just kind of something to do to make a little spending money and have a little little piece a little fun i enjoyed it until i got more poisonous keep me up so there i've heard about some people who tried to grow it around their house by bringing those berries home yeah there was a few that did that and i had a few plants years ago and i had to move them because of having the road cut in where my house is uh an old man showed me a trick uh and a lot of locals knew him he was a world war ii veteran he dug lots of ginseng these days his name was rob cook you could take the red berry and put it in a wrap it up tightly in a leaf put it in your freezer and a little plastic bag like a ziploc bag and let it stay for two weeks and it would come up the next that spring if you didn't according to my understanding it would take until the next season for that seed to come up and rob told me that what it's doing is tricking the seed into thinking it went through a winter i remember him telling me that and i thought that was funny but uh that's he had some of the biggest ginseng beds i'd ever seen of wild replanted ginseng it don't bring as much when it's been transplanted they call it but once you put the seed out then it's not really transplanted so it's just as good as digging on the side of the mountain if you plant it from the seed were there some people though that like you said primarily most people sounds like did it for enjoyment but were there people that have really dedicated their time to it to trying to see how much money they could make or to supplement their income yes there were some men i knew uh some hughes uh not floyd but some other huge men who would dig uh 35 years ago they they would have four five six pounds of dried ginseng in fact i went to their house one time with some other men to see about a actually trading on a dog and a hunting dog and they had the most dry ginseng i'd ever seen i think there was about 10 or more paper or grocery bags full of level full of dried ginseng it's the most ever seen and i think they got about between five and six thousand dollars that season for their ginseng was it hard to find someone to buy in in this area did everybody sell it to the same person in those days there was about three buyers there was a couple of men at marvel north carolina that bought it uh and a man at topton who still buys it uh ronnie mason bought ginseng a guy named bill watson and another guy named clyde coffey they bought ginseng you didn't have to have a license or permit or anything to sell it to them then i don't know if they had to have a license or not in those days it brought 75 to 150 175 dollars a pound it takes about three pounds of green to make one pound of dry that's a lot so back in those days with all those older men i'm sure you heard some good stories you got anything you could tell us i remember floyd tell me one time that he he had dug and dug and dug and he uh the man that sort of helped me get started he put his ginseng in some pie pans aluminum pie pans and put them in the oven and his wife didn't know it was in there so she got up and turned the oven on probably gonna make a cake or make biscuits or something and uh they smelled something or she did and she burned all his ginseng up and he was very upset but it really was not her fault he said he didn't tell her that it was in there or she had forgot so it's all destroyed i always thought that was funny but yet heartbreaking too the way i always drive mine i put it in some pie pans and put it in the back windshield of a car the front windshield on the dash where the sun could shine through and dry it slowly like that that's fine yeah that'd be very sad yes he was even telling me the story he was aggravated yeah yeah so like you said you don't hunt it anymore today but a lot of things have changed since then now you you're not allowed to hunt it on the park or government land without a permeability and they only sell so many permits per area and they record those numbers so uh on each permit so if you go to sell ginseng uh now to a dealer he's going to ask you did you dig this on private land or government land if you say government land and each permit is only good for so much by the way on that government area you better have that permit and you better have that number if you dig it on private according to my understanding it's still legal and you don't have to have a a permit you think as many people probably even less people hunt it today as when you were a boy i would say it'd be a toss-up i would say probably a little bit less today it probably you're more just absolutely dedicated hardcore ginseng hunters that knows how to find it quick but it's just not as enjoyable to me once the government got involved and then once became i became so allergic to poison oak i just couldn't go any more without getting poison oak all over um probably a lot of for a lot of people the only thing they know about ginseng maybe they've heard of it as a medicinal remedy for something but the other way if they wanted to find out about it one of the first things if you do a google or something or you search on youtube that comes up is this one of the tv shows reality tv shows with ginseng hunters fighting over their patches and outlaws and all that kind of stuff you never run into that i don't believe any of that that's just dramatization it's just for entertainment there's there's nobody that can hire a bunch of men to dig insane for them and make a living you can't do that they couldn't make enough to to justify you couldn't pay them it's just it's it's this drama to say it's just for entertainment yeah and that's not reality um for example in the days when you and floyd were hunting it in those days i'm sure sometimes you might have run into somebody but there was no hard feelings it was just that people wasn't you know right i've run into men in the woods and a lot of times they would have a lot of them back in them days would have a sock tied onto their belt and they would have their ginseng in it or they might have a uh kearns bread bag we used to get a loaf of bread in they might have it in that and have it rolled up in their pocket and they we never encountered any ill feelings or uh anything we just talk to them a minute and go on and they'd go on and uh like i say i believe a lot of that that was on tv about that is it's just for drama really um of course like you said as we all get older things change but it's it seems like that's one of the dying um arts or whatever of wild crafting ginseng and galax and all the other stuff that people used to um moss for chris around christmas time florist would buy moss and stuff like that yes i've been told that people still they call it pulling moss and a man on uh shooting creek used to buy a lot of moss and then uh i believe some people used to buy lady slipper roots and uh another plant that they some people calls ice weed i don't know much about that but they used to buy it but i don't think it brought near the money that uh ginseng did but i think it also went to medicinal uses yeah it's just not as common which is kind of sad people uh don't live as close to the land as they did right and even in mine in your childhood and we're not that it's not that we're ancient but even then things have drastically changed since those days yeah yes that helps the few ginseng hunters that are left but on the other hand all the government intervention and the encroachment of more and more homes hurts it you have less and less area to dig in but you you probably have less people who know what ginseng really is and how to recognize it but you're fortunate that you have those memories of those those old guys that taught you how to how to ginseng yeah i do i enjoyed it and i just always tried to watch out for a snake and other than that i remember one time i was didn't say nothing and i seen a buyer a small buyer he never saw me but i saw him uh it's always tried to keep in mind about buyer and poison oak which gets me nowadays and uh i just had uh you just keep your eye out for things in the woods maybe bees nests stuff like that you know but it was real enjoyment for you just to be in the woods i loved it i loved finding the excitement of finding a big four prong uh i never found a five prong ginseng plant i always heard people talk about them i never saw one but i did see a root one time that weighed eight ounces i did see a root that was humongous and the plant was uh almost waist high and there was a big disagreement about it when the man went to sell it because uh the the buyer said it had been transplanted and it was parked tamed insane and part wild and he refused to buy and i don't what the man ever did with the root but it was the biggest ginseng root i ever saw in my life it was about this long and about that big around it actually looked like a big curved cigar it was unreal but i i really did i enjoyed my time in the woods and i wouldn't take nothing for the way i was raised for my christian upbringing and forgetting to spend time in the woods it's just peaceful and relaxing it's kind of like wading in a trout stream and the water is rushing around your uh legs it's peaceful and it helps you forget all the troubles and trials in the world and it helps me realize that there's no way under the sun that all this evolved that god made this world the way it is and he's he's the reason for this beauty and i love the like i say it's still exciting to find a big four prong or a bunch of ginseng three prongs four prongs out in the woods and dig that route throw them red berries in the back in the hole and go on to the next one i love that and i love the idea of thinking you know maybe some old timer back in 1800s i used to think about that he may have came through here and he may have dug some ginseng maybe some indians dug it and they chewed the root you know i knew a man years ago his last name was ray he used to choose insane ever a few days he said it helped his stomach just chew on a root but i wouldn't take nothing for my time in the woods and i think that is something that the modern generations kind of got away from knowing how to survive how to fish how to hunt and live off the land and uh i don't care if i was a richest city boy on earth i wouldn't take nothing for my country roots and my country upbringing in the mountains

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 24,874

Rating: 4.9653678 out of 5

Keywords: Appalachian Mountains, Appalachia, Wildcrafting, Ginseng plant, hunting ginseng, ginseng seeds, how to plant ginseng, foraging, ginseng prices, hunting ginseng tips, hunting ginseng root, where to find ginseng in the mountains, best place to find ginseng, tradition of hunting ginseng, ginseng in North Carolina, ginseng leaves, growing ginseng, wild ginseng, fall of the year in Appalachia, Appalachian traditions, sang hunting

Id: BTP9fUxxqaE

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020