Gordon Eastman

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2011

The earliest record of the Eastman family out West dates back to the 1800’s. Since then six generations of Eastman families have called this home. Gordon Eastman grew up hunting and living in the wilderness outdoors. The Eastman family knows the outdoors as closely as a layperson would know his backyard.
 
Gordon Eastman is today considered not only a pioneer in the outdoors filming industry but also in big game hunting. Gordon created a new genre of films as early as 1957, while guiding in Alaska. In those early years he produced a landmark documentary “Hunting Alaska Today”. For many years from his base in Jackson, Wyoming, Gordon personally toured the West and Midwest with his outdoors movies and lectured to packed auditoriums wherever he went.
 
Gordon showed the general public the wonders of far off lands like Alaska, Canada and Wyoming and their unique big game animals. During this time the Canada government invited him to be the first to document the opening of the Northwest Territory to white man hunting. This film is a classic revealing the untapped vast big game resource of the north. This endeavor caught the eye of Walt Disney and he hired Gordon to help film Disney productions like Run Appaloosa Run, One Day in Teton Marsh and several other wildlife films. But longing for the wilds of the north, in 1966 he again struck out on his own to film in the backcountry of British Columbia and the Yukon. This produced several features for the big screen, “High, Wild, and Free” and the wolf epic “Savage Wild.” Gordon, himself, directed these films, wrote the scripts, photographed, edited and also narrated them for the theater audiences. In 1969 “Savage Wild” was in the running for the best documentary of that year.
 
Gordon Eastman was a strong believer in ethical hunting practices and he set the highest standards of fair chase hunting for the Eastman generations who are following in his footsteps.  
 
In the 80’s Gordon transferred all this 16mm films to the video format. During the 80s and 90s, he filmed and produced over 30 more western big game hunting and western fly-fishing titles for the next generation of hunters. In those years Gordon had sales of over 20,000 videos per year making him the biggest producer of hunting videos of this time.
 
Today hunters consider Gordon’s son, Mike Eastman, to be a living hunting legend. Mike spent half a century big game hunting, guiding and filming not only in Wyoming but up in the northern providences of Canada and Northern Tanzania, Africa. In 1987 Mike created and published Eastmans’ Hunting Journal and Eastmans’ Bowhunting Journal magazines. Today the magazines have over 100,000 subscribers and they aspire to practice the ethical fair chase hunting that Gordon had instilled into Mike.
 
Then in 1999 using Gordon’s outdoors hunting documentary style, Mike began producing a long running TV series on trophy big game hunting. Today this popular Outdoor Channel TV series continues to promote Gordon’s strong ethics of fair chase and ranks among the top ten outdoors shows on TV-a great tribute to Gordon’s love and respect of the outdoors, which continues to influence the younger generations today.
 
Gordon pass away March 13 1997 survived by his wife Mary Lou Eastman, three sons Mike, Brad, and Rod Eastman and a daughter Maria Eastman. 

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