Basic Gear of the Mountain Men

hi this is cody frontierlife.net i just wanted to shoot a brief video today talking about some of the basic gear that mountain men would have carried in the early 19th century so if you're interested in that stick around [Music] okay so as we get started here the first thing i want to talk about is that the gear that i have here is not all of the gear that trappers would have used in the 18 20s 30s and 40s um you know there were there were lots of different people that did it in lots of different situations and they would have had gear that fit them uh their needs and their situation so all i'm going to show you today is kind of a good basic um kind of a basic outline i guess of of the gear that that trappers would have used lots of the the stuff the information that i've got on this comes from carl p russell's book firearms traps and tools of the mountain men it's a great resource for those of you that are interested in the lives of of mountain men and trying to learn about it as accurately as possible you know russell goes into really good detail on all of the different tools that they that they use knives hatchets traps firearms you name miscellaneous stuff you name it he's got it so this is an absolute great book for anyone interested in the topic so now let's go ahead and start getting into the gear so any talk about gear of the mountain really needs to start with a conversation about firearms these guys had to have firearms they were essential to their way of life without them they were pretty helpless this here is a replica 50 caliber hawking it's a rifle the guys would have had rifles or smooth bores and those uh guns would have had either percussion caps like this one or they would have had flint locks guns are great but they got to have all the tools to uh to shoot them and that's where all these things come in so here you have a powder horn i made that out of a bison horn that carries a gun powder keeps it dry back in the back there you got a powder measurer now let me go ahead and grab that let's just make sure that as i load it up i get the same amount of powder in the gun every time it helps my gun be a little bit help my each shot be a little more accurate right here i have lead i have a ladle and i have a mold and that's for running ball because mountain men didn't buy cartridges like we have uh they had to buy the material the raw materials and then they had to make everything themselves if you're interested in that i have a video on my channel about how to do that here i have uh some 49 caliber balls i have a issue 49 caliber because i use a 0.1 patch um with 0.49 lead balls and that makes 0.5 which is 50 caliber so and then here i have a little bag to keep those those bullets in pretty neat little um i got the idea from james hansen's book rocky mountain sketchbook and it's just a nice handy way to uh to store them got a bone right there and then i carved this little stopper so it works pretty good and then here is just a little um oops too many there don't get too many these just carry my caps all right because there's a percussion cap gun so that makes the gun go off so that is the shooting gear now we'll move on to some of the other stuff okay so now we'll take just a minute and talk um you know pouches i guess and uh one thing that was pretty common during the 19th century was a market wallet and all this is a piece of canvas it's sewn on the top and bottom and sewn up the middle holes left in the middle so when you shut it um twist it shut like that you know nothing falls out i got a video on how to make these on my on my youtube channel this is where i like to keep my tinder and uh my punk wood and stuff like that that i get i also carry a possibles bag it looks awful similar to a purse but it's not it's a possibles bag and in this you keep everything you could possibly need this is where all my shooting gear goes it's not my firearm and also my fire kit and this is one of those essential things that a guy has to have oh it's real simple just a container with a fire steel rock and then some char and you're good to go as long as you got your tinder so that stuff there is uh takes care of all that you got kind of the kitchen right here this is just a kettle for boiling water making stew and stuff like that making coffee right there you can just make a tripod string this up put it over the flames and you're good to go it's really light and so it's really really useful tin cup drinking water drinking coffee all those things tea those things those guys would have had and then a salt horn you combine that with a good a good knife and that's basically your kitchen setup right there uh just a touch of knives just a second um lots of different types of knives were available to them they did like these butcher style knives um like this so uh with that we'll go ahead and move on to the next thing so some other items that would have been really common mountain man gear would have been like like this uh tomahawk here and they could have had a tomahawk they could have used axes or hatchets there's lots of different options available but most guys would like to have something some kind of cutting tool like that another thing that i wanted to throw in here just because i don't think a lot of people really talk about it think about it would have been a file these show up a lot in the trade inventories that went out to rendezvous and having a file would have been really useful might not be what you would take you know if you were just taken off on foot and we'll talk about that here in a minute but um because just because it is heavy but if you had the horses and you had room for the gear you definitely take it that's one thing i wanted to talk about is that i don't have any horse gear here and you know mountain men they definitely would have used horses a lot uh to transport themselves in their gear over vast distances that they needed to in the west um i haven't made any investment in that period correct horse tack so i uh i don't i didn't bring any horse stuff on this but they definitely would have used a lot of horse gear as well so now moving on to materials they had several different options available and i just wanted to talk about just a few that i'll take with me when i go to the woods basically anytime so this is a silk scarf and i wear one of these all the time they're really nice and they got a lot of different uses especially for guys in the woods and then they bought a lot of just extra material too this is just a little red flannel uh that i had and that i threw that in with the gear because you know you could use that for lots of different things not just to make clothing and then talking about material another thing that they would have bought a lot of were these hudson bay blankets these are 100 wool blankets these are the point blankets um and this is the this is a hudson's bay blanket that's made by the company uh so this is historically accurate this is authentic uh they come in different sizes and you can see and move this stuff quick just you get an idea here um i have the different points on them this is a four pointer one two three four i don't know if you can see those um and that just tells you the size this is a pretty big one um 100 wool and they showed up in lots of the trade inventories and then canvas would have been another material um that that the guys had access to um as well and i would count as part of their gear okay so that's a pretty good kind of basics gear of the mountain men i'll give you an idea what they would have been working with now i did mention that i didn't i don't have any horse gear and the horse and the mountain men were pretty inseparable so i wish that i had some of that historically accurate stuff i don't uh everything i got is modern um so i didn't want to bring it uh but you when you imagine their gear you got to imagine having horse gear as well and then something that i don't that i didn't bring because again i don't have the historically accurate stuff is traps um those guys would have had about a half dozen beaver traps a piece and then they would have brought some caster as well all the traps i have they're all modern um i do all modern trapping so so yeah so those are some things that are lacking but as far as just you know staying alive going camping in the woods or whatever this is the stuff that they if they had this they'd be all right so um gives you kind of a basic idea of what they have so if you're interested in this and you want to start kind of putting your little kit together it's a great way to go out and experience the woods use the same tools that they use and then you can practice some of the same skills that they practiced and be carrying on that tradition so hopefully you found this interesting like to see your thoughts in the comments below and thanks for taking the time to watch this this is cody from frontierlife.net you

Channel: Frontier Life

Views: 97,947

Rating: 4.9072905 out of 5

Keywords: gear of the mountain men, mountain men, frontier, outdoor gear, primitive camping, living history

Id: 6PzntzVodNk

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020