The American Tale of C. Dale Petersen

“Guys, you gotta help me.  C. Dale Petersen is after me.  You gotta help, I’m…I’m so scared…”

~Rambo

When the America Fun Fact of the Day staff goes on manly-adventure-excursions, or “Manventursions” as we refer to them, we usually have a break in the program right after “extreme skydiving” and right before the jalapeño peppers eating contest so we can silently reflect on how manly and awesome we are.  J

ohnny Roosevelt, our editor-in-chief and the grandson of Teddy, regales us with stories of celebrity sexual conquests (Jessica Alba and Kathleen Turner on the same night, and Kathleen still had moves) and unbelievable feats of strength (he straight up knocked out Arnold Schwarzenegger in a game of Knuckles Roulette).  Our accountant talked about how he went to jail for murdering an elephant in a public zoo.  However, our photoshop guy ruined the mood when he kept bitching about how we never use photoshopped pictures, and just steal shit off of google images, which was the opposite of manly.  So we fired him.  With fire.

“YOUR JOB IS SO EXPENDABLE, BILLY!”

After the embers cleared we all had a great laugh until we stumbled upon a plaque that proved that, no matter how hard we try, how many Midget Tossing records we hold, or how many geriatric three-ways we pull off, we can never be manly enough.  Because we had seen true manliness, and all else seemed like a cheap imitation in comparison.

We are referring to C. Dale Petersen, a man so manly that if you ever said his complete first name out loud, your hand would spontaneously turn into a bouquet of dicks.

To recap the plaque pictured above, C. Dale Petersen ran into a royally pissed of Grizzly Bear.  C. Dale Petersen, who adhered to his personal credo of “Do not fuck with C. Dale Petersen,” rammed his fucking arm down the bear’s throat. And, at risk of using excessive italics, we must point out the fact that he then bit into the bear’s jugular vein to make it pass out before bashing it in the head with a stick to DEATH.

To recap.  This.  Throat.  Stick.  To death.

These actions are so manly they just gave Burt Reynolds a sex change operation.

Sadly, little else is known about C. Dale Petersen.  Amazingly enough, there is not even a Wikipedia page for him, though there is one for masculinity.  So, America Fun Fact of the Day sent our field reporter, Buzz Aldrin, into the woods to track down the story.  Aldrin, our most grizzled and well respected employee/former astronaut, covered himself in bacon and honey, waiting for a bear to approach.

plan worked- when a bear invariably caught his scent and attacked, C. Dale Petersen leapt into action, his well advanced age never slowing him down.  After spitting out the last of the bear’s blood from his mouth, Aldrin was able to get the full scoop on C. Dale Petersen, who, despite being well older than 90, still had a perfectly intact memory.

This is his story.

C. Dale Petersen was born in 1914, just outside of Jackson, Wyoming.  Like most great American heroes, his birth was no typical one.  His father was a lumberjack by trade, who was known throughout the state for his tendency to chop down trees without the use of an axe.  He generally accomplished this by pushing trees over, though he required a running start for some of the bigger trees.

His mother was the most beautiful woman in Wyoming, and her lush, full beard was the envy of every housewife within one hundred miles.  When she went into labor, nature sent a pack of wolves into their house to stop the future hunter from wreaking havoc on woodland creatures for decades to come.  Petersen’s mother calmly snapped each of the wolves’ necks, before laying on her back, aiming, and launching the infant C. Dale Petersen at the pack leader.  Lightning ominously cracked in the distance, and all C. Dale Petersen and his parents could do was laugh as they sat down for a delicious wolf dinner.

When you say, “Oh shit!” C. Dale Petersen yawns.

C. Dale Petersen soon moved to the Yellowstone national park, building huts out of moose carcasses to keep himself sheltered during the winter months.  For years, Park Rangers would search for his constantly moving home in an attempt to procure a vial of his semen, which was said to ward off bears and pumas.  Occasionally, the wives of the rangers would touch the vial, casually asking, “what…eww, oh my God, is this what I think it is?”  This would instantly impregnate the women, and the subsequent illegitimate children they would give birth too were so manly that even the girls were born with rich beards.

Though C. Dale Petersen lived a solitary life, and never married, he took many famous and beautiful lovers.  In the 1940’s, when a young Lauren Bacall went hiking through Yellowstone, she encountered C. Dale Petersen, and their subsequent torrid affair ruined her for other men, who could never live up to her impossibly high expectations as she begrudgingly settled for a marriage with Humphrey Bogart and a relationship with Frank Sinatra, them being the manliest men she was able to meet, though each was still roughly 1/38^th of the man C. Dale Petersen was.

In the 1950’s, Marilyn Monroe, who had learned of C. Dale Petersen through Bacall, went to the woods to seek out the man.  After two wild nights of passion, she woke up in his bed made primarily of Grizzly skulls to find that C. Dale Petersen had moved his entire house from around her while she slept, and had disappeared into the night.  Distraught at losing her one true love, she settled for marrying Joe DiMaggio and having an affair with JFK.  Historians are split on the classic question of “who would win in a fight, JFK or C. Dale Petersen,” though most agree that if the two joined had ever joined forces, America would encompass the entire planet, and probably Mars too.

In the 1960’s, Audrey Hepburn was his carnal partner, and the 1970’s he met a young woman named “Bo Derek” right before she was launched to fame.  While C. Dale Petersen did not mind the occasional female companion, it did get in the way of his one true passion in life.

Killing goddamned Grizzlies with his goddamned bare (ha!  Puns…) hands.

Pictured:  Nature’s killing machine

Also pictured:  Fucked with the WRONG guy

Though he was ashamed to admit it, as a younger man C. Dale Petersen actually used a small pocket knife to kill Grizzlies.  He does not make excuses for this fact, and he told Buzz that, “I was a bit of a pussy back then.  Hell, I was eight, and I didn’t have the balls to take out a Grizzly with my bare hands?  I’m ain’t proud of it, but I’ve spent my whole life making up for it.”

And make up for it, he has.  By his calculations, he hunts and kills roughly 3 grizzlies a day, even as a 96 year old man.  He once took a break from Grizzlies, as they were becoming scarce in Yellowstone, and would stalk buffalo so he could rip the still beating hearts from their chests. Park officials were concerned about the rapidly declining buffalo population, however, and flew in thousands of Grizzlies to the park to ensure that C. Dale Petersen could quench his daily blood lust.

C. Dale Petersen is not just a skilled hunter and devout enemy of mother nature, however.  He often gives back to the community, donating stripped down bear carcasses to low income neighborhood schools, who often write glowing letters back to thank him, saying things like, “What the fuck are we supposed to do with bear bones?  Please stop!”

He also has set up an outreach program to teach at-risk youth how to kill bears with their bare hands.  Of the five children, aged 10 to 12, that have participated, only 4 have been eaten, a success rate nearly twice as good as the best rival philanthropic bare-hand-bear-hunting program in the area.

And so, C. Dale Petersen is still going strong, spending much of his time sitting on his various thrones of bones (there’s one for Grizzlies, one for Black Bears, One for Bald Eagles, and several chairs made of various assorted Wildcats), and he dreams of nothing but murder.

Bearskin rugs too.  Murder and bear rugs.

We at America Fun Fact of the Day were sad to see Buzz Aldrin quit his job as the AFFotD field reporter to live with C. Dale Petersen in the woods and learn the ways of the hunt, but we are thankful that he mailed us what he learned about this giant among men.  The information on this article was carved into the rib cage of a Grizzly, apparently Buzz’s first successful weaponless bear kill.

Godspeed, Buzz.  And God bless, C. Dale Petersen.