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Every inch of Brenda’s
Puryear office is a conversation piece, filled with trophies
from various states and countries plus awards and accolades
she has earned over the years as well as a bow-shop where
she fashions her own arrows and tunes her bows.
Brenda Valentine is a woman with a
mission, born and bred to take up her bow and spread the
news that the way of life of our ancestors remains, and that
it’s a lifestyle everyone can enjoy, regardless of age,
race, or gender.
From meager means, Brenda--slight of build but every inch
wired with determination—has risen to the top ranks of
hunters worldwide and is among the best known, in some 15
years as a professional becoming known as “The First Lady of
Hunting®.”
Hunters have likely seen her in action on Bass Pro Shops’
“Hunting”, that airs on the Outdoor Channel, or the Men’s
Channel’s “Whitetail Adventures with Brenda Valentine”, of
which Brenda is both host and executive producer. Both shows
air 52 weeks a year—which she says is “unheard of for
hunting shows”— plus she will co-host W.L. Gore’s “Extreme
Hunting Adventures” on the Outdoor Life Network in its
soon-to-begin series.
She is also an acclaimed author, photographer, and highly
sought after seminar speaker, to touch only briefly upon her
accomplishments. In pursuit of what to her is more than
sport, she has become a worldwide traveler, as well, having
hunted in six countries, not to mention almost every region
of the continental United States.
But she got her start in West Tennessee, not far from her
home in Puryear, where she lives with husband Barney, who
has worked for the Paris Board of Public Utilities for 35
years, and not far from her two daughters (Melissa and
Scarlet) and four grandchildren, all of whom are the heart
of her endeavors.
Growing up in the wilds of Buchanan on a farm at least a
mile away from the nearest neighbor, hunting was a natural
part of the rural lifestyle that was characterized as well
by hard work, and lots of it.
Brenda credits her late father, David Johnson, with her
early start in hunting, though photos in her popular book,
“Hunting Misadventures”, proves her mother, the late Sarah
Ealey, was an able hunter in her own right.
“Being the oldest, he started me out hunting,” says
Brenda, who was in the woods by the age of four or five.
Brenda was the firstborn of four children: next came Tressia
(now Tressia Barksdale who mans the local E-911 program),
Johnny, and Leissa (co-owner of the Henry Auction.)
Living on the farm meant working in tobacco and cotton,
not to mention a big garden designed to feed the burgeoning
family. There were also hogs, milk cows, mules,
horses—“everything; we did it all,” says Brenda, thinking
back to days when farming wasn’t focused on a single crop or
breed.
She attended school in Buchanan, too, in the days before
consolidation. Then, basketball was the mainstay of schools
too small to field a football team, and Brenda excelled in
the sport.
“I really liked basketball—I was real competitive,” says
Brenda. “I liked it and the horses: hunting was just a means
of putting meat on the table.”
And she excelled in her chosen profession as proprietor
of Brenda’s Hair Shop in Paris for over 20 years, a trade
she declares helped her prepare for the course her life
would eventually take as she broadened her hunting skills to
include bow-hunting. In fact, she says, regarding her former
profession, “I always enjoyed it, and I miss seeing some of
my customers I’d been knowing and seeing for years and
years, but I don’t miss standing on my feet all day.”
Her natural people skills, honed early on through a
variety of beauty-shop clientele, stands her in good stead
in her travels, whether she is hunting or—conversely to
standing on her feet all day—sitting for a ten- or 12-hour
stretch signing autographs during seminars.
Her hunting skills had developed through her adult years
into a passion that followed a natural progression from guns
and muzzleloaders to bows and arrows (one of many anecdotes
humorously related in “Hunting Misadventures.”)
Brenda and Barney Valentine
try to imagine life during the Bonanza Creek gold rush
heydey at the site of one of the few remaining original gold
mining camps in the Wrangle Mountains of Alaska. The photo
opportunity came in a few moments away from the hunt during
their May 2005, two-week camping and horseback excursion
into the remote area in search of grizzly bear.
Originally a means to stretch the hunting season,
Brenda’s adventure with archery whetted her competitive
spirit and she progressed through local, previously men
only, 3-D competitions, to one formal, field archery
tournament before plunging into the state championships,
winning the first of many state titles in her first attempt.
She won several regional titles as well before, in 1991,
picking up the 1991 IBO team national championship.
By that time she had already attracted the attention of
first sponsor, PSE (Professional Shooting Equipment) when,
in 1986, she paid a visit to the longstanding but now
defunct sporting goods store, Uncle Lee’s, in Paris.
“Robert Chilcutt was manager,” she recalls. “I was just
in there buying a bow and a sales representative was calling
on him and he got to hear I was winning a lot of
tournaments. Later, they came out and brought a contract for
me to represent that company.
“Every week, I was on the road traveling. Scarlet and
Melissa were young—they just trooped along with
me—especially Scarlet; she had her own bow.”
Her travels increased when, in 1992, Browning requested
her endorsement followed a few years later by a call from
Bass Pro Shops, who approached her about becoming a
professional hunter on their team.
“And I’ve been on the team ever since,” says Brenda, a
decade later.
In 1996, Brenda’s world was routed as her mother, always
a champion of her maverick daughter’s meteoric rise in the
hunting world, from her deathbed encouraged Brenda to pursue
her dreams with all her heart.
“She said, ‘Don’t put off anything; if you’ve got a
dream, do it,” Brenda relates, her words coming straight
from the heart. “’Don’t think, ‘One of these days...’ She
just encouraged me to step out there and do what I wanted to
do and so I did.”
Brenda sold her shop just after her mother’s death and
pursued her dream with a gusto that has grown with the
realization of her responsibility as an inspiration for
women—and children—everywhere.
“The hunting way of life is being threatened by so much
competition from things like soccer and computers, because
people don’t depend on it for food all the time,” Brenda
explains. “I work really hard to pass on that way of life so
more kids will realize where food comes from and learn about
game management. I focus on telling kids the truth about
hunting and animals; that it is an honorable way of life.
They get so many negatives that I work real hard to promote
the position that hunters are good and decent people, not
bloodthirsty like some may think.”
Not just a pretty face with a talent for archery, it
doesn’t take long in talking with Brenda to realize she’s
done her homework. She’s a knowledgeable gal who enjoys
sharing with others the facts of life about hunting.
“Through our license sales and taxes on guns, bows, and
ammunitions, the excise tax is what pays for conservation,”
she shares. “It’s hunting and sports that pays for
conservation through the Pittman-Robertson Act.”
In fact, some estimates conclude that, since 1937,
hunters have contributed over 4 billion dollars toward
conservation efforts through the excise tax, with annual
contributions reaching into the hundreds of millions of
dollars.
She’s been approached about a signature line of ladies’
clothing and recently began endorsing a new line of
breathable camo face covering for hunters by Peel-Scape,
adding to her endorsements of Bass Pro Shops, Gore Tex
fabric, Mossy Oak camo, Trophy Rock mineral block,
ThermaCELL mosquito repellent, and Parker Compound Bows.
“I won’t endorse it if I don’t use it and unless it’s
something I believe to be useful to me in the field,” she
declares, “because it hurts your credibility if you promote
something that’s no good: so, it has to be what I think is
the best or I won’t mess with it because it’s not worth it
to jeopardize your name.”
Brenda also strives to introduce more women into shooting
sports and hunting, many of whom want to learn more about
the sport in order to share a hobby with their husbands or
who, as single moms, are keen on providing their children
with outdoor adventures.
“Once they get out and do it, they find out it’s fun and
want to do it on their own,” she says. “We’ve lost a
generation, but if we can get them out to experience the sun
coming up or get a big string of bass or crappie or that
first deer, we’ll see a lot more, because it’s an honorable
way of life. If I can educate women and kids and non-hunters
to what it’s about, then I’ve served a purpose.”
To that end, last year, she spent over 200 days on the
road, including, in May, a grizzly hunt in Alaska in which
she was accompanied by Barney.
“He goes with me two or three times a year,” she says,
but with her focus on the job as crews film hunts to share
with television audiences, it’s not quite a vacation.
The Alaska trip was rugged, every day of the two-week
trip spent packing on horseback, chopping out the road ahead
and with just one change of clothes that was washed out in
the river. The troupe slept on the ground and cut enough
wood to cook their meals.
She was home just five days before leaving on her third
African safari, where she was granted special permit to hunt
giraffe by bow and arrow. A photograph of her taken with the
two-and-a-half-ton animal, she says, has garnered a lot of
interest.
“It fed an entire village,” she says of the animal that
is actually similar in physical makeup to deer and cattle,
common food animals in the western hemisphere.
Brenda poses with a giraffe
taken during a recent African safari. As gentle in repose as
the cattle that are the mainstay of many westerner’s diets,
the two-and-a half-ton animal fed an entire village.
Also last year, she hunted caribou in Canada (she’s
hunted in all but one of the ten Canadian provinces) and has
hunted in old Mexico for the past five years.
When hunting closer to home in a kid-friendly
environment, she often takes one of her four grandchildren
with her, such as a recent trip to Texas in which she was
accompanied by nine-year-old Jake, Melissa’s oldest. Her
younger son is seven-year-old Justin. Scarlet’s children are
Caleb, 5, and Sarah Cate, who is 2 1/2.
“When I was home for Thanksgiving, I said I’d take them
all hunting one at a time,” she smiles. “Their dads all hunt
and their mamas, too. They’ve just grown up in it and
they’re crazy about it.”
With only three or four states left before Brenda’s
coverage of her home country is complete, she’ll narrow that
gap in 2006 when she and Barney travel to Hawaii in March,
where she will speak at a banquet sponsored by the National
Wild Turkey Federation—for which she is the national
spokesperson for the Women in the Outdoors program—as well
as participate in hunting for turkey.
“We’ll be high in the mountains; it’ll be cold and
possibly snow,” she says, sharing that on remote Hawaiian
beaches wild hogs and wild goats also attract hunters.
“It’ll be a different face of Hawaii than most people see.”
Later this summer, she’ll be fielding seminars at Bass
Pro Shops in Atlanta, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Springfield,
Missouri, and Houston, Texas, before heading to Montana for
an elk and mule deer hunt, then on to Alberta, Canada, for a
week-long canoe trip, hunting for moose and bear.
“I’m taking a lady from Arkansas with me; she’s a
wildlife artist,” says Brenda. “Nearly every week, if it’s a
neat hunt, I try to make it where a friend who’s never
experienced hunting can go with me.”
Taken in January 2005 in
northern Idaho, this male mountain lion measured 7 ft. & 3
in. Once protected in some areas, the bulging population of
mountain lions have now become a threat to humans and
domestic animals as well as practically decimating herds of
mule deer and elk in many places.
She’ll be back in Canada for an elk hunt and again for
deer in November.
“That’ll be a cold one there,” she muses. “Most of the
time it’s raining, sleeting, or snowing—or hot as thunder
somewhere like in Southern Texas.
Then it’s Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas, Illinois, Texas, and
“who knows where” before the spring assignment to Hawaii.
“There is no off season,” she says, especially with
intercontinental travel. “We go straight out of turkey
season to bear and then Africa, because their winter is our
summer.”
With a hectic schedule that sometimes allows just three
or four hours of sleep and in which her chief form of
exercise (aside from the physical exertion if hunting)
seeming to be “running through airports,” Brenda considers
herself lucky.
“I’ve always been tremendously blessed with good health
and a lot of stamina and I attribute that to hard work and
eating regular country food,” says Brenda, who is also known
for her southern cooking. “I don’t feel any different than
when I was 18; I just get up and get my boots on.”
She admits, however, that with her non-stop schedule of
seminars and filming for three TV shows, “If my kids weren’t
grown and my husband wasn’t very supportive, I couldn’t do
it. I’m on the way to the airport every week: it takes a
tremendous amount of traveling and hunting to get enough to
air that many shows each year.”
For as long as there has been man on earth, there have
been animals to feed him, and hunters to bring in the kill.
While evolving society has made it easier to lose sight of
where food comes from—not from the grocery store, or the
warehouse that stocks it, but from the field, whether from
cattle, deer, or more exotic game—people like Brenda step
forward to remind the masses that there’s a great big
outdoors out there waiting to be explored.
“I think a lot of people hold back out of fear or
insecurity that it’s not the socially acceptable thing for
women to do,” says Brenda. “I guess that’s what Mama kept
trying to instill in me; if there’s something you want to
do, go for it.”
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