Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Which era in American history would you choose to live in?

I think that and having survived it to be able to prosper after as the nation did as a whole would have been a sweet spot in American history. My grandmother’s first boyfriend was called to fight in WWII they engaged right before he left with plans to marry as soon as he got back. He was killed in 1943 and my grandmother eventually married my grandpa in 1947. So but through a quirk of fate and history I wouldn’t be here.

This time right here and now. I just hope we deal well with the time given us. It's been said America won't be defeated from without, but from within. I hope WE can turn the current onslaught of the latest flavor of marxism within our borders and leave a better world for our decedents.

The current one shifted back a couple of decades.

Wouldn't mind having been born about 1930. As a young kid you wouldn't know or care much about the Depression since you wouldn't have any prosperous time to compare it to. Too young for WWII except to help out on the Home Front with your Boy Scout troop. Enter the work force around 1950-1952 and get a good life long job with the aerospace or automobile industry or if you're really forward thinking - and I would be - become one of those new fangled "computer programmers" working for IBM. Maybe get to work for NASA during the 60's and 70's.

Live your adulthood in the height of the American Empire and hopefully have died in my sleep at age 88 or 89 during the Trump administration.

There'd be economic ups and downs and social changes over the years but overall a good time to have lived.



Plus I'd know to bet everything on the Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl, Secretariat in 1973 and buy all the silver I could find for $8-10/ounce in 1979. Put all of those proceeds into the Microsoft IPO in 1986 and it's all hookers and cocaine after that...

Right now. Life wasn't worth living until we got the 6.5 Creedmoor.

More importantly I wouldn't have wanted to be stuck with nothing but muzzleloaders. Life wasn't worth living without breech loading repeaters.

TheLastLemming76: For the Mule Deer Hunting I would loved to have been a Hunter in the 1940's and early 1950's.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Jim
That mirrors my grandparents lives. Both of my grandpas just missed WWII. One hired in to General Motors after the war and the other to Dow Chemical. Both left small scale farms for an easier life in small suburbs. One from the thumb of Michigan and he never looked back and the other from up North in Alpena that missed rule living and eventually retired back up North. I spent a lot of time as a kid fishing, learning to hunt, roaming the woods, and burning through bricks of .22 ammo up North. Both were great men and lived great lives.

Same question across most of the 1st world and what gets a lot of votes is the 1950's-1990's. ww2 done, depression recovered, anti-biotics and decent medicine and surgery, equal rights, any man can afford an education or become president, job promotion by merit, a single income buys a house and supports the family, less than half the current incarceration rate, always some new discovery happening, we really believed we'd be living on jupiters moons by the year 2000, and it wasnt crazy thinking, we went from steampower to space flight in just a few decades after all, back then science meant BIG changes, not just different sized cellphones each year and Musk unveiling bullet proof toasters.

I remember reading about the Mule Deer hunting in the 80’s and how the deer weren’t as naive as they once was. That would have been a great time too. I was always fascinated by the West and still love it. Even the rolling prairie and foothills are beautiful. If not for a girlfriend or two in my early 20’s and having no connections I would have relocated out there. I wouldn’t trade my life now for the world but the western states are special. Both from a cultural standpoint and resources one. I have vivid memories of reading old G&A mags and dreaming about what we’re exotic calibers to a Michigan kid. The .264 Win Mag, 25-06, 257 Roberts and Weatherby ect.

Yep.

I yearn to have ridden a horse into any one of many, many Idaho mountain meadows and observe a herd of cattle peacefully grazing there before any fences broke the scene, and well before hundreds or thousands of homes infested the areas.

But honestly, I never could have lived to see such things. I would have been dead at least three different times before I hit 20 years of age had I been born a couple or three decades earlier.
Heart issues at birth
Staff infection in my ears at six years
Appendicitis in my teens

Yes, all things considered, it is a good time to be alive.

Same. A nasty ear infection as a young kid and a bad reaction to the chicken pox would have done me in before 20.

Montana must have been different than Idaho. The depression left big game nearly extinct in Idaho. Dad and Uncles tell me that mule deer were just starting to recover in the early 50s. In this area we had generous seasons and two deer limits of either sex during the 60s.

My family ran cattle on USFS lands west of Cascade Id. They were in a great position to be aware of game populations. They first saw elk again in that area during the 60s. By the 90s elk population was booming in Idaho. Then the idiot leftists released the Canadian Grey Wolves into our herds.

Nah, I am not that fond of dog meat, gonorrhea, or syphilis.

From what I read and that’s all it is second hand reading many years ago but the mule deer population sprung back after the depression and it was a hay day for deer hunting for a decade or two. I’d imagine the popularization of modern cartridges, bolt guns, and optics played a role two.

Pretty much any time besides today.

Pneumonia before antibiotics would have killed me be fore I was 6, and appendicitis at age 13. I bet over half of us would not have made it to age 20. As I made my rounds I walked through many old rural graveyards. They had lots of kids buried in them. Probably were a lot more there without markers. There were a lot more people living out in those pine woods than there are now. A lot of fairly young women are represented in those graveyards also. Life was hard and money was almost non existent. Our family traded hogs for town goods, traded labor for sawed lumber, ground corn on halves, the only money they could earn was with the little cotton they could raise. But they understood the children needed to go to school and a lot of families scraping by in the late 1800s and early 1900s didn't.

I never thought about it, I guess I took it for granted but there’s nothing that would’ve killed me in my youth either 40 years ago or 140 years ago. I’ve been healthy as a horse.

Not to mention constant rain in Oregon once they got there. By all accounts the boys were eaten up with syphilis. I wonder if they brought it with them or got it from the Indian maidens.

First winter was a fuuckfest.

Folks have already beat me to the punchline. I too would have been dead before the age of 4 without modern antibiotics. My mother and father would have both died as well.

Grandpa survived a burst appendix at age 12. This was in Brecksville, Ohio before WWI. They cut him open on the dining room table. He spent the summer rolled up in a hammock unable to move.

All that aside, I think I'd like to see America in the early 1900's and perhaps a bit earlier-- just for a visit, mind you. I'd like to go to Brecksville and meet Elmer Ellsworth, my great-grandfather and have dinner at their table.

Other places and times?

I once had a dream of visiting a tavern and bumping into a young Benjamin Franklin. He could tell I wasn't playing straight with him when he asked where I was from. Without spilling everything, I got to tell him that he would succeed beyond his wildest imagination. I'd like to have that talk for real.

I'd like to visit my Grandfather as he was building his first million, perhaps as he was working on one of the home show houses he built inside Music Hall back in the 20's. They say he was a grand specimen. I only remember sitting on his belly shortly before he died when I was 3. They say he was a human mountain and a force of nature. I'd like to see it for real.

I'd like to see Cincinnati when it was still called Losantiville and it was just cabins in the woods with big oaks, beeches, and poplars all around.

Henry Miller Shreve built the first steamboat that went up the Mississippi all the way to Pittsburgh. He's one of my forebears. I hear he wasn't a pleasant man, but I would dearly love to shake his hand on the deck of the George Washington, going up the Mississippi and Ohio in 1817. I'd also certainly love to make the run from Louisville upriver and put in at Cincinnati for a few days.

I'd like to visit Great Grandpa Claude and go Muskie fishing with him on the Cuyahoga (before it burned) . He had an old door covered with heads. Some were big enough to fit your head in. I'd also like to spend some time bird hunting with him and Grandpa Whitey.

I'd like to be around for the VJ day celebration on Fountain Square.

I'd like to see a few Red's games during Frank Robinson's rookie year in '56.

I'd like to follow my Dad around Miami Beach, meeting up with Jackie Gleason for a drink or whoever.

I'd like to have been able to see Starfish Prime-- the biggest fireworks show ever.