Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Just Say, It was 1820

Nice, I happen to have a Bagwell Damascus Bowie in it's sheath right behind me on the couch, Bill measured me and built it to my body type/size, it's a spooky looking sombuck and it's 11-1/2" blade is razor sharp.

Horses, mules?

I would be SOL! In most ways, pretty healthy, fairly athletic, at least close to average intelligence... but blind as a bat, without corrective lenses. Have “never” been able to read the “E” at the top of the chart. Maybe could have been a farmer! memtb

You could have been a Dairyman, had an old neighbor man when I was a kid blind as a bat, he had a nice dairy, nice cows [8 or 10] and seemed to get it all done with ease.

I'd be home. But too much of that new fangled stuff folks would be using. Heck, some folks would even be using river water to run the bellows on the forge.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it either. Heck, I just made it past 5, as it was
.

I'd head back east. Knowing what I know now, I could probably invent light bulbs, breech loading rifles, internal combustion engines (maybe) and some other stuff, and get rich.

Since I didn't watch TV and read by flashlight under the covers, I won't need specs. 36 inch full stock rifle .54 caliber, pistol to match, flinters, extra flints, blankets, possibles, axe, knife, shovel, good wide brim hat. Wool britches and shirt. Mackinaw coat. A bunch of traps. Salt, Since it is 1820 tobacco. Bible. This is all packed in on 2 horses I hired so I don't have to take care of them. A squaw, maybe. Probably have companions for protection and help.

I grew up on the old Colorado History Museum dioramas that were carved during the depression. Scenes of trappers living in cabins in winter, Indian camps, the whole shebang. They had stools built in so we little guys could climb up to see. I still have most of them memorized. Now they are not all on display all the time, supposedly because they are not all accurate (politically correct?). The things are museum pieces in their own right.

I also remember the gun section, glass cases with both sides visible. And, as I remember, Jim Bridgers rifle in a different case with possibles. I remember one possible bag having a glass vial of cyanide the trapper could bite if captured by Indians. And a real headdress complete with scalp locks from the girls killed in eastern Colorado. I would have to look up the details on that.

In the Civil war display there was a Colt with balls visible in the chambers. I was too young and naive to really understand what I was looking at. Now I wonder if it was capped too.

The Western history has always fascinated me. I have to get back down to whatever they pass off as the history museum to see what has moved

Both....

This...

Well, for starters, I would have been dead in the first few days of life due to an RH incompatibility. If somehow that didn't happen, I'd have died at age 3 from a strep infection. In fact, every member of my immediate family would have died before they'd reached breeding age from appendicitis, impacted wisdom teeth, pneumonia, measles, influenza, etc. The only member of my line not to have had life-threatening illnesses is Angus. He's 19. I'm the first one in my line for 3 generations that hasn't had an emergency appendectomy.

Putting that aside, I'm a German on one side and Welsh on the other. Germans back then generally had different motivations. Therefore, if I'd found myself west of the Mississippi, my first objective would have been to take in the sights and then go find a nice burgeoning German community like Cincinnati, Covington, or Dayton and get there as quick as I could. Along the way, I might stop in New Madrid, MO. KYHillChick's French/Indian mother's side was there in 1820. I might find a sturdy Acadian half-breed for a wife. Since her kin and mine were chummy back there in New Madrid, I might have been introduced to Henry Miller Shreve, who was running the Washington up and down the Mississippi and Ohio back in those days. He's kin too. I'd figure out a way to get a job in his steamboat operation, or at very least figure out how to get a free ride up river in style with my new wife for a honeymoon.

Since my grandfather picked Mt. Healthy Ohio as a place to hunker down, I'd look for land there. Back then it was called Mt. Pleasant. The old farmstead is still there. I'd pick up 300 acres near the banks of the West Fork and start to work being a good German farmer, and with what I profitted from the operation, I'd put into establishing a mill on the banks of the West Fork (later known as Mill Creek) and increasing my investments in steamboats and later railroads. I'd also start partying at the local Scheutzenfests, where I'd chum it up with the guys who would later build the insurance empires that dominate the local financial community-- then and now. The ground is good for a vineyard, so I'd work that angle too-- nothing like free wine to loosen tongues and get the scoop on ground floor investments. When I was fat and happy and had a monstrous pile of sturdy sons and daughters, I would arrange a trip for us all out West to take in the marvels and let my wife visit her kin.

By the time I died of gout and liver disease in the 1880's, I would have 100 grandchildren and the largest collection of German shooting irons in the county and trophies covering the interior of the house from the hunting trips out West, the North Woods, and the regular trips to visit the relatives in Germany.

Yes, delicious!

Me, I'm 35 years old. Selling all my chit for what I can get and be a trekkin' back to St Louie for some good food, good whiskey and good poontang. I've had enough of this rough neck crap to last a lifetime (which I've already exceeded). I think I'll just settle down right there in the middle the Ozarks. Truly, God's Country!

You know Bob, you ain't so bad,---------- fer a Texacian.

This time of year, the Anishanebek of Northwestern Ontario would have been spread very thinly, in small family groups, all across the Boreal Forest, on their traplines. Lots of dried fish and caribou as well as pemmican stored away. Travel right now during freeze up would have been tough and dangerous but soon dog sled and snowshoes would allow long distance travel.

I wonder though--how in hell, without a chain saw, did they put up enough firewood?

I'd run to Cabela's in Thornton CO.

Not tough enough to be a 1800's trapper. Have you ever read Crow Killer, even the tough guys had to have a ton of luck on their side to make it to 30 years old. Tough life.

I've got a buddy whose an MD and his comment on these types of conversations was always to never wish you were born before penicillin. Back then my people were watermen over on the Eastern Shore of MD. Seems like as good a way to make a living as any back in those days.

That is fairly close to what Jim Bridger did. Lived out his final years on the banks of the Missouri.

I'd been thinkin about how the folk 100 years down the road would think about my life in 1820.
Imagine what the folk will think of US in 2120....