I didn't need to see Mike's canvas outfit... been researching and formulating design ideas for a tripod structure. I didn't know that cotton like wood swells naturally when wet to keep water out.
Cool stuff Mike.
Kent, I was simply blown away by the amount of prep time and probable expense yourself and others put into this event. Rolling in late and leaving early as we did, me and the missus had very little to do but enjoy the gathering. I hope to get to help more next year.
On the reenacting thing, to give some background I would say it really took off in the 70's with the Jeremiah Johnson generation. Over the years though research has steadily improved such that what was common thirty and forty years ago would be considered hopelessly "farb" today. The rise of the internet and the free exchange of information has accelerated this process by a quantum leap.
Specific to tents, somehow I have lost and cannot find again a really good link to a War Department report from the 1840's. What had been happening in prior decades was that cotton production had been taking off in the South, and cloth manufacturing taking off in New England, such that by then cotton duck had become cheaper than linen.
The report evaluated the performance of cotton as tentage and wagon tarps and found that while cheaper and lighter, cotton rotted more easily, shrank and swelled excessively, and wasn't as strong. The point of this being that, by 1840, cotton duck was still a new thing. During the decades of the Santa Fe trail, as best I can determine American wagons were hauling thousands of pounds of printed cotton fabric for trade in New Mexico, but were using linen tarps to cover those wagons.
Prior to 1840 linen tents and tarps are far more correct. Most everybody knows this nowadays, and Panther Primitives will even make you a linen tent or tarp at a considerable premium when they can get the fabric, but cotton is still an accepted re-enactorism. As stated earlier, cotton is a bit more period-correct in Texas because the Mexicans had long been using it.
Anyhow, the last word in period correctness is probably one of these; a simple, hand-sewn linen tent. You can park this ANYWHERE and out-cool just about everyone, but IIRC, the materials alone cost nearly $400. It does give a pretty good idea of what common tents back then actually looked like all the way through the Fur Trade era.
http://frontierfolk.net/phpBB/viewt...mp;p=390653&hilit=linen+tent#p390653![[Linked Image]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/frontierfolk/linentent_zpsdff086dd.jpg)
A lot easier in time and trouble just to go with a plain old cotton painter's tarp.
Here's a link to a thread I posted about my tent set-up over on a muzzleloading board...
http://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/fusionbb/showtopic.php?tid/281937/...and a good link a guy provided on that thread specifically on pitching 12'x15' tarps as tents using just one or two poles
http://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/f...post/556124/hl/tent/fromsearch/1/#556124If the above links don't work (the guy who runs that forum is funny about that) google on this and it will bring them right up.....
Sherwyn-Williams tarp in actionBirdwatcher
