Steven Rinella brings survivalist skills to trace America’s greatest mysteries

“In the life I’ve spent in the outdoors, hunting, fishing, and traveling, I’ve become aware of not only really interesting aspects of American history but also outdoor mysteries,” said Rinella, the longtime host of MeatEater, the popular outdoor series that started on the Sportsman Channel before moving to Netflix seven years ago.

Rinella said Hunting History will dive into those mysteries with an outdoor lens no one has ever used.

“We wanted to do a show that lets you dive into some of these burning questions that come up in the world of the outdoors, as well as the things that lent themselves to exploration from someone who has developed a level of competency in wilderness travel,” he said.

The charismatic and wildly popular outdoorsman whose MeatEater brand includes multiple podcasts, bestselling cookbooks, children’s books, and campfire podcasts said some of the mysteries he takes on are really old, original American histories. “Like the Roanoke Colony, what happened to them? What mistakes were made?” he asked of the unsolved fate of the English colonists who established the first permanent English settlement in North America.

“And what happened to the first ship ever built on the upper Great Lakes that is still missing?” he said of the holy grail of missing ships, Le Griffon, which was built in 1679 and disappeared on its maiden voyage, never to be seen again.

Rinella said he spent his time not just in research rabbit holes but in the very places where these mysteries happened, all in an effort to try to solve or at least look at what happened in different ways. The native Michigander said they didn’t just rely on experts and historians but his own survival skills, placing himself in the very spot of the mysteries he was chasing to offer the viewer hands-on experiences and to shed more light in each episode.

He admitted that, in many instances, his perspective on the historical mysteries, such as the Donner Party that became trapped at Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847, changed as he placed himself in history.

“These mysteries that really intertwine with outdoor adventure made it a prime opportunity for me to jump in on it and explore the mysteries but then offer a perspective about what might’ve happened,” Rinella said.

“When digging in on what went wrong with the Donner Party, most Americans know it as this original horror story. But to dig into it, I had never put it together that half of those people were children,” he explained.

Rinella said people get a lot of mileage out of the cannibalism storyline, “but ultimately, they did everything they could possibly do to keep their families alive.”

Rinella and his team stayed in the Donner Pass and tried their best to recreate what they experienced accurately. “We slept in the same type of structures they had to make. I came out of it having more of a sense of reverence than a sense of it being a horror story, like reverence for the sacrifices. And I’ll tell you, most of the children lived,” he said.

Through his MeatEater multiplatform empire, Rinella has become a revered outdoors evangelist. His travels to far-off places to track and hunt animals and then prepare exquisite meals from his hunts have inspired a cohort of young and old who never previously considered the possibilities of an outdoor existence of hunting and foraging. It was a movement born during a pandemic that turned many people’s daily lives upside down.

Born with wanderlust and a profound curiosity to understand people, Rinella is a natural fit for this History Channel series. He said the show will showcase archaeologists, historians, and, of course, an expert cast of outdoorsmen and women, including himself, to immerse the viewers in the adventure.

“It was a ton of fun to work on. It was very different from the MeatEater shows. In those shows, the story was very much in pursuit of a personal quest. In this show, I’m moving into an area where things are occurring almost of national significance at times, and things that involve real life and death scenarios for people, and they have long, long ramifications to these occurrences,” he said.

That was something he said that profoundly intrigued him.

“You start to realize the personal element of it with the lost colony of Roanoke, grappling with the fact that one of the primary people trying to find that colony was looking for his daughter and granddaughter,” he explained.

“There are things in American history where you look and you lose sight of how personal it was for someone at the time and the suffering of people. There is a different level of something much more at stake when you start talking about these parts of history,” he said.

Rinella said he really enjoyed the personal analysis portion.

“There is also a real meat-and-potatoes delivery of a narrative because you’re needing to explain something that’s quite factual,” he said.

His objective in the storytelling part of it is to set the atmosphere of the time. “Where was the country at the time this occurred? What was the national dialogue around these events? And then lay that all out so people understand the history and understand what you’re talking about,” he said.

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Rinella said that in asking these questions, you’re fulfilling a lot of obligations to the audience, primarily being entertained but also educating them about the country’s past. “Every episode we do, we go to a place of stunning natural beauty where nature is showcased, where nature is the thing that holds rain on that landscape and really offers that up in a beautiful way,” he said.

With each episode doing all those things at once, the unique series promises to be one that expands not just Rinella’s expansive fan base but that of the History Channel as well.