PFODJ Ep 5 Moved from the Pay Channel

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

as we explore the woodsmen of the past and look at the equipment and accoutrements they carried and how they utilized that gear we'll move forward now from the 1750s into later era post Revolutionary War pre Civil War and that was when the fur trade era truly began there were lots of long hunts and things like that in the 1760s that are recorded where men went out working for different trade companies and different traders to harvest deer and buffalo both for the British garrison and for what was called the deer skin or the red deer skin and a red deer skin was a summer deer skin you would scrape the hair side off scrape the guts side off and let that turn to rawhide and that was considered a green deer skin and that was a highly valued trade item of the mid 1700s along with buffalo beef that would be traded to places like the British Garrison's and things like that along the frontier so not only did we have the woodsmen who was providing meat for his family on a daily basis you also had the woodsmen who was making a living off the land he was working for someone else or working for it himself in some cases like some of Daniel Boone's parties on long hunts to bring back a deer hides to sell them to make money to provide for their family so the accoutrements and things that they carried with them mostly by pack train of horses would be what they needed to carry for the long term for their survivability and for their sustainability as we move forward in history you had the same things going on post Revolutionary War but now you got into the point where things were being trapped more prominently there were traps that were carried during the 18th century that are recorded for beaver traps per man per horse things of that nature from historical ledgers but beginning in the early 1800s 1820s to 1830s the fur trade really started to boom especially with things like the beaver when we think about the fur trade era the first thing that comes to mind is the beaver the beaver and beaver trapping our icons of the fur trade era in truth the beaver and the popularity of the beaver from making felt that hats from the guard hairs in Europe was very short-lived compared to many other sources of fur from different animals the raccoon far surpassed the beaver as far as being exported in sheer numbers and the value over time of that animal paid to trappers right here in Eastern woodlands in the Ohio Valley of Illinois Indiana and Ohio William Hamilton Gibson's book camp life in the woods was geared toward the trapping campaign he wrote about the gear and accoutrements that needed to be carried by a small party or an individual who was going to trap to make money the reverse side of that coin George Washington Sears or Nemec was the pioneer of ultralight camping in the same time period he was slight of stature only being 5 foot 3 and about 115 pounds he was also not of the best health so he had to carry items that were light and weight that he could carry over distance to do what he called tramping one of the things that's so interesting to me about the latter part of the 19th century and I'm talking post-civil war to pre 1900s is that you had a great melding of cultures at that point where you had the Industrial Revolution in full swing so you had people who were escaping the hustle and bustle of city life by recreational camping recreational hunting fishing and things of that nature and you also had the die-hard woodsmen who was still trying to make his living off the land by trapping so it's with this cultural melding that we can learn we can learn what was carried and what was necessary for us to live off the land in that time period but we can also learn what was taken in the woods that was considered only necessities for an enjoyable trip of camping or tramping Hamilton Gibson wrote in the context of the expeditionary trapper he understood that larger tools would most likely be needed because larger materials would need to be processed over time for more permanent structures for trapping for bearing trapping stakes for processing large firewood and things of that nature whereas George Washington Sears was a recreational tramper who kept a small camp small fires only warming fires or fires throughout the night and he wasn't planning to stay long-term most of his camping did not take place in the dead of winter whereas trapping would take place during the winter months so the two different mentalities of equipment were very different but both born out of necessity one thing that we see when we look at historical writings and documentation is that almost all woodsmen prefer to carry some type of axe some smaller some larger if they had the means of conveyance like a pack train of horses canoes wagons and things of that nature they would carry a larger felling axe if they were on an expeditionary journey like a trapping expedition they would carry a slightly larger trappers axe if they were walking the foot it may be a smaller hatchet type axe and sometimes in the 1700s early 1800s they would carry what was called the tomahawk and the tomahawk is different than an axe so let's look at those right now so what I have here are two cutting implements approximately the same size this head is a little larger on this trappers axe and the handle is a little heavier this is what was considered a tomahawk the tomahawk would give the woodsman great advantage over an axe or hatchet of the same size because the handle was easily removable it gave him a multifunctional tool that he could used for skinning or scraping as well as a wedge because the handle was easily put into place and taken out it could be easily replaced if broken or damaged the tomahawk was also used as a defensive weapon along the frontier you

the axe on the other hand has a handle that comes up through the bottom of the head and doesn't go down through the top of the eye it goes through the bottom it's tapered and then wedged in place like this one is with two metal wedges now the advantage of the axis it was a more robust tool generally heavier duty even if it was the same size the head was generally a little bit heavier and the handle was made of stronger material or heavier material but again it was also made of wood so that it could be readily replaced if something were to happen to it in the woods this is two examples of larger axes considered to be a forest or cruising time axe and axe like this would have been easily carried if you had conveyance and could be very useful over the longer term for building shelter and processing larger amounts of wood the best thing that you can do to fit an axe to yourself if you're buying a larger style axe that you're going to carry is to check the length of the handle of that axe against your body and if you tuck that handle into your armpit and you can't cup the front of that acts like I am now that axe pretty much should be fitted to your body size there's not a lot of historical evidence pre 1800 to the mid-1800s of lone travellers carrying saws saws would have been used at areas where stationed camps and things like that were built where packed trains were involved but those were more cross cutting type saws you don't see the bow saws and things that I nature folding saws that we use today in use at that time now we know today that saws a are much safer to use than an axe they take less energy to use than an axe and they are lighter and more portable than an axe but the axe affords several main advantages over the saw it's easier to maintain and sharpen than a saw and it has much more versatility than saw in that it can be used for anything from fine carving and skinning to processing the smallest of tenders to the largest of campfire woods it can also be used with the hammer pole for nails steaks or even pulverizing nuts and meat to make foods like pemmican a large acts like this one has a lifetime tool if you can find one that is forged in the US or Sweden that will be the best actually can buy for your money and asked can be a dangerous tool as well and there's certain things that you need to remember safety wise when you're processing wood one thing that we always have to think about more processing wood with our axe is where that axe is going to fall if it were to miss so if we stand up and we mess is it going to drive into our leg on either side so the best thing that we can do is get on our knees and get the length of the axe so that if it misses or glances it goes into the ground on either side and chop our wood that way a small trappers axe like this one and I say small because this one is about 17 inches in handle length a typical hunter or trappers axe would be more of than 19 to 20 inch range but an axe like this one would fit very well into your bedroll would also slide down into a pack basket the tool like this would become the multi-tool of the trap it could be used not only to set up traps or construct traps but also to build cubbies and hides to dig trap beds if necessary then to make and drive the stakes to secure that trap in place and ultimately used to assist in a skinning process of his quarry the greater majority of information we have on trappers and trappers accoutrements prior to the Civil War comes from diaries and journal entries as well as tree house Ledger's and things of that nature there were really no books out there written on the subject of steel trapping and trapping in the fur trade per se we understand that the traps were made of metal and they were very heavy there are journal entries as far back as the 1760s talking about beaver traps made of metal that will carry four per man for a horse we also understand that the majority that time conveyance was used when a trapline was being employed because the traps were heavy and you had to carry multiples of these traps understanding that percentage was the game the more traps you had the more animals you could trap and the more chance you had of catching animals so carrying for traps per man back in the 1700s probably was a way of gathering meat sources and food as much as it was to further their income but later in the period in the 1820s and 1830s when beaver trapping became very popular they would carry many more traps than three or four per man now we also know that most of the trapping took place on horseback that we read about in journals and Diaries and stories and things of that nature so the lone trapper were the single man walking afoot we don't have a lot of information on what he would have carried I can tell you from personal experience that anything more than about a dozen steel traps along with the accoutrements you would need to stay in the woods for the amount of time to run a trapline for even a week can be very overbearing as far as weight goes it's fairly safe to say that the trapper would have supplemented his traps his steel traps with makeshift traps off the landscape as well so he would not necessarily have to carry as many traps to be able to employ more traps as long as he had the woodsy knowledge to use the landscape to his advantage steel traps come in lots of varieties but the most reminiscent trap to what was used in the early 1800s the beaver trap would be what's called the double long spring and the double long spring trap has a spring on each side of the trap now many of the forged traps that I've seen from the period of the late seventeen or eighteen OOS or a single spring type trap and many of those are used even today and that's why they're called a single long spring or double long spring they either had a spring on one side of the trap jaws or both sides the older traps that I've seen generally do not have a one-piece spring like this one does generally the frame was extended out and one piece of spring steel came up over the top of the jaws where the eye is here that would push down to enable you to set the trap to break it down and we'll talk about that in just a minute period examples that I've seen look very similar to this other than the shape of the pan in that they have what's called a dog which is a levering device here that the jaw gets trapped underneath of to hold the jaw down and then you had a pan here with a notch that would lift up on to the dog just like this and the pressure of that jaw pushing up would hold tension on that to hold that pan in place and when the pan was stepped on by the animal it would release the dog and then release the jaw of that trap and this was called the strong jaw side the opposite side jaw was the weak jaw it had no tension on it whatsoever but when the spring rose up this I would close both jaws at the same time a trap like this that was large enough to capture a beaver would take quite a bit of hand strength in order to set and they didn't use trap centers like we have today to aid them in trap setting it was done with their bare hands and you would break the springs down which would let the jaws flop loose you would then move the weak jaw out of your way hold the strong jaw down moving the dog over the top and pushing the pan up underneath like this then when you let go you would center the pan and that trap would be under tension now this weak jaw would not open up all the way down and stay flat until you move these Springs forward toward the dog and that would allow it to lay flat and we want that pan to be fairly level in position and then this trap would be employed in or near the water traps like this one we're called foothold type traps they have been misnomer and called leg-hold traps for years and years but they were actually designed to capture the animal by the foot if you look at the distance between the pan and the top of these jaws and again this is a beaver size trap so if the beaver puts his foot in here and a beaver has a foot about this big around when he puts his foot touches this pan these trap jaws are going to close on his foot not up on his leg so using the correct size trap for the correct size animal is also very important the trap would then generally be tied off generally to what was called a drowning cable or drowning wire so that it would travel down a wire but could not come back up so that once the animal was trapped in the trap by the foot he would swim toward deep water and not be able to swim back up to the shallow water and the trap would drown the animal so the animal is not alive when the trapper got there most of these type traps would have been employed at den exits or dent entrances especially for beaver and then sometimes along the bank in some type of a false cubby that was kicked into the bank or dug into the side of the bank and baited with some type of food newer traps like this Minnesota brand 550 employ two coil springs instead of long Springs to close the ears and then close the jaws the improvements to traps like this are not only is a smaller end dimension so it can be carried in a smaller space to carry more traps but it's also made to be more humane on the analyst being trapped you can see that it has what's called an offset jaw and the jaw does not close all the way shut like the old-style steel traps so when it closes to the bone on the hand of the animal it stops at that bone it also has a thick cast jaw with wider surface area here so that when it does close around the animal it's not cutting into the animal because you have a wider space of surface area contacting the skin and a trap like this works exactly like the other style trap where you open the ears instead of compressing the springs you're stretching these Springs down by compressing these ears you would then open that strong jaw and hold it down with your hand pushing the dog over the top you would then go under the weak jaw and lift the pan up and now this trap is in a safe position even if I close this tray

when I closed this down you'll see that you'll hear it click and it has what's called a knight latching system and that's so if you're setting that trap at night you know where the pan is level now with the trap like this or any other trap the weak jaw is the key to safety when you're setting these traps as long as that weak jaw is up and out of the way even if you were to set off this trap it's not going to catch your fingers because your fingers are not inside the jaws of that trap they're underneath the weak jaw