1820, or so, and you were 24. A mountain man. How would you go about the life, what would the gear be?

hummmmmmmmm

1820 in what now is Utah.........?

be a tough livin' fur sure......

Run down to Bass Pro shop, pick some cshit out.

First I need to find Hatchet Jack so I can get a Hawken rifle.

Chances are I wouldn't have survived all the childhood diseases I had to even see 10 years of age.

I'd have 3 less teeth.

Slow!

Yup, a pair of flinter 50 cal pistols and a damn sharp fighting Bowie knife.

My gear would be 3 sqaws. Someone needs to know how to survive.

Well it wouldn't be called a Bowie knife, because old Jim likely hadn't come up with the idea yet.

Most MT men worked and trapped all year to blow there money at rendezvous...much like the oil boom guy today nothing new just human nature...me I did many oil booms and walked away with some good dough......I would like to think I would have done the same in 1820...first stop would be st Lou's as that was where to get outfitted....would have to have a hawkin and a good knife...as for other gear I have no idea but it would have to be of the best quality available...your life depends on it...

I thought 1820's thru about 1860's Bowies and flint/percussion pistolas ran strong until the mighty Colt 45 six shooter put em all outta business.

You may be right but the Bowie knife was made for Jim Bowie, not sure when but I doubt it had gained much fame even if it did exist by 1820.

i'd be a lipan apache in south texas

Make it 1823. I sign on with Ashley. I am 17 years old. My rifle is a 62 caliber trade flintlock smoothbore. I carry a butcher knife and a small hatchet. I use a flint and steel to start my cooking and camp fires. I wore homespun until it wore out and then got deerskin breeches and a shirt from some Shoshone we traded with at Fort Kiowa. My gear is all my own except for the traps. I have an epishmore and a blanket that was issued by Ashley when I signed on in St, Louis. I survive the up river fights with the Arikara and have a fair trapping season. Hugh Glass is known to me, as is Bridger.

When we return to Ft. Kiowa near present day Chamberlain I leave Ashley and hook up with other free trappers. We head west into the present day Wind River range and we are at the first rendezvous in 1825. I don't miss any of them except the last one in 1840. We joined up with Bridgers brigade and I spend the rest of my life in the fur trade. Trapping for a time, then clerking for the fur company, then hauling furs in and supplies out for a few years. My travels take me from the Missouri river to Taos and back a few times. I go to Westport three times. As the trade dwindles I take up Buffalo and work the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains for a time. In 1840 my current rifled flintlock that replaced my smoothbore gives way to a rifled percussion gun with a hook breech. It is 53 caliber and a powerful weapon in the mid part of the 1800's. I become a scout for the Army in the 1850's and after that I live out my life near Fort Laramie. I pass from this earth in 1870 at 65 years of age.

My best living was from 1830 to 1840 when myself and a couple of long term trapping associates lived with a band of Shoshone Indians in the area around present day Cody Wyoming.

A top-notch canoe.

I'd head back to Louisiana, drink Mint Juleps on the porch and watch the 'help' pick the fields.

10-4, well, if the Bowies weren't available I'd have a coupla throwing boot hatchets and axes to go with my pistolas and long rifle.

The most famous version of the Bowie knife was designed by Jim Bowie and presented to Arkansas blacksmith James Black in the form of a carved wooden model in December of 1830. Black produced the knife ordered by Bowie, and at the same time created another based on Bowie's original design.

The Bowie became famous after the Sandbar Fight in 1827. Jim had a history before then with a knife, a couple of involved Jean Lafitte's boys.

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....

Probably as a bunch of overweight, bickering fools.........

I'd winter in Taos, and make my way north in summer to MT trapping along the way, head back south in fall. The indians really didn't spend much time in the high country, so that's where I'd try to be. Among the other equipment, I'd get a buffalo hide before November, and having a squaw along the whole way would be much better than not having one. About mid 1840's, go check out California and the American river.

I used to think this was the epitome of living. Free to roam and take what you wanted and what your skill could provide. Now though, antibiotics and Aleve sound better than pain and infection.

Just about all of the men who did this and were successful in the long term started before the age of 22. Kit Carson and Jim Bridger were around 16 when they were making their start.

And to think that Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, and James Clyman lived into their 80's, Kit Carson into late 60's if I remember right...Those were the real men of steal. Or, just to tough/mean to die

I grew up in the Denver area too and spent hours in that museum when it was located south of the State capital building on 14th Avenue. Those dioramas were the thing I remember the most about the place. The Indian camps, the mountain men, Bent's fort, early Denver. It is a shame they are no longer available to the public.

I don't recall that they had Bridger's rifle but do remember it as being Mario Modena's. It was in a case with his possibles bag and some other stuff and I read once that the possibles bag was stolen out of the case. Bridger's Hawken rifle is in a Montana museum. It is the one he gave to Peter Chien when Bridger retired from the mountains and went to Missouri to live out his days on his daughters farm near Kansas City.

According to Jeremiah Johnson, or was that Bear Claw, I'd have to get me a full time night time woman so that I wouldn't be lonely.

The high country outside of Taos, in the winter, could be called "inhospitable"

Any TARDIS, no matter how obsolete, to get me to any point and place in time in humanity's future that didn't SUCK IT quite so got damn HARD.

A full can of injun repellent!


DMc : )

Good luck with that one, IIRC the Hawken brothers were still back in Illinois or wherever, Again IIRC the golden age of the classic plains rifle was in the late 1830’s through the 1850’s, after the shinin’ Mountain Man years (same thing is true of Green River knives). So I dunno if the Hawens were making many half-stock big bores yet. That 1803 Harpers Ferry .53 cal contract rifle was way ahead of its time.

The bad news is Jim Bowie wouldn’t stick them two guys in the Sandbar Fight fer another seven years. The good news is that ANY big and clumsy knife, carried as a weapon rather than for utilitarian function, could be and was called a Bowie Knife, but communication being slow the way it was, Bowie Knives didn’t really go viral until the 1830’s. I dunno how many were carried by trappers, a regular 5” to 7” English trade knife was like about 1/10th the cost and far lighter to carry, and folks would still die if you stuck ‘em with one.

I would go on the advice of Hugh Glass, the same guy who was tore up by a grizzly. A few years after that famous 100 mile crawl his party was attacked by Arikaras and this time he was left with only the clothes on his back, not even a knife, with a 200 mile walk ahead of him is . He happened to be wearing his buddy’s coat at the time and said later , when he reached into his pocket and found a flint and steel ( fire), his worries were over. Anyhoo.... the ‘Rees finally got Hugh the next go round but seems like he wanted to go out that way.

Carry them heavy pistols if ya want but each cost nearly as much as an equivalent longarm and won’t feed you out there like a good rifle will, which is why rifles outnumbered pistols like 20:1 in that era. Now for me, I’ll take a rifle, with wedges and one of them snazzy hooked breeches so I can lift the barrel out to clean the gun. Since that late 18th Century at least it had been settled that .53 or thereabouts was the most efficient roundball rifle caliber. OTOH that means a heavier barrel, burning more powder and getting significantly less cast balls fer every pound of lead I’m packing. So I’m gonna go with a .50.

I’ll start with flint and steel.
Three or four trade knives.
A “squaw”-sized ‘hawk ( the most commonly-carried size)
.50 cal longrifle ( long barrels just look better) with mold, shooting bag, horn etc etc.

......and let’s not forget......

....a crapload of trade beads so I can get laid.....

Others’ MMV.

All academic fer me anyhoo since appendicitis woulda taken me out before my teens.


Birdwatcher

What's the footgear?

Almost forgot; a good sewing kit is worth it’s weight in gold out there, and can keep you shod (moccasins) after your shoes wear out. Bare feet are lethal.

....and what, I’m supposed to grow a beard? Beards may look cool in Frederick Remington paintings more’n fifty years later, but in 1820 beards are ranked way up there in terms of coolness with skid marks on yer boxer shorts today, which is why hardly anyone has ‘em in surviving portraits. So ya, I don’t need a toothbrush (I mean, who does that?), but I gotta have a straight razor, that or a lot more beads take yer pick.

What was the typical diet for a mountain Man?

Mine would be wool and moccasins.

Whatever he could catch!

I beg your pardon, sir. Jeremiah Johnson had a beard.
But, that squaw made him shave it.

Meat, berries in season, and any woman he could trip and flip ;]

Get back to about 1720. (Or earlier) And we'll talk. Too damn many people this side of the big river by 1820.

Go ahead Bob, talk. Talk about 1720, that was before even my time.

You beat me to it, Bob. True story.

Leave La Rochelle 1713 land at Fort Maurapas in the land of the Alabimons. Over land to the village of Abita Houma. Catch boat north on the. Ig river to the rouge up thru the land of the Tunica. Past the rapides to Postes des Nachitos Boat hauls skins of bear Grease and honey back to New Orleans. I stay! Just in time to hook up with Louis Juchereau de St. Denis bound for the spanishe garrison and settlement at San juan Bautisra on the Rio Bravo del Norte. Guided by one of the native tattooed Talon brothers, survivor of the lii-fated Las Salle expedition almost 20 years earlier. He knows the language and the country.

Clothes are trade wool leggings and breech cloth. Dark blue dyed linen shirt. Old troupe de La Marine long sleeve veste. Twined hunting pouch. French Fusil ordinaire. 7 pounce Bucheron and a small hachette. Fire kit. Pucker toe tunician mocs. Finger woven sash. "Dog hair" blanket wrapped in a finger woven tumpline. Head gear a linen rag. Cooler weather an old
Sailors tuque.

The Plains Indians thought all facial hair was so ugly they even plucked their eyebrows, which is why they don't have 'em in period portraits and photos.

When I used to speak to elementary school kids 3 or 4 classes. 60-70 kids. This was always first thing I told em. Look around. Realize out of all them in the room. Mebbe 10 saw 20th birthday!

Oops. I forgot a horn pulverin for fusil

Ya well, since this ain't happenning anyway, I'm bringing a crapload of vaccines, fer the Indians.

'Cause if I don't, 90% are gonna get sick and die and then after the risk of your whole family getting massacred by Injuns is gone, everywhere is gonna be filled up with people "eating hogs when they could be feeding on elk"

Beards are ok if you wish. Matter of fact the good capitaine wrote in his journal that beards are the only way he can tell the difference between his own men and "les sauvages" since they all dress alike!

Mangeur de lard!!!! LOL!

You can take a Frenchie seriously if ya wish.....


Anyhoo, Alfred Jacob Miller had his young men with scrawny beards in the famous painting "The Trapper's Bride"....



....and he was there at the rondy. Original period razors can be had for only about $30 on ebay, I have a couple, one easily dated from Sheffield, the other from Belgium, harder to place but stylistically correct, both blades in great shape. If I had to shave with either of 'em I'd do it about once every week, or maybe just before going to town I dunno. I do know if I had a razor I could make money shaving the other members of my party....

...which wouldn't include the women, who didn't have much use for razors back then.

No, I concur with you Birdie on your 1820's beard statement. Heck even earlier amongst the colonial english. Beards were rather frowned upon.

Here I was not too long back at the Alamo with THE Pedersoli



I tell folks the most farb thing about my whole getup is the beard. IIRC it was the Germans who brung beards to Texas in a big way, not just Texas either, but that I represent San Patricio Irish (who, being definitely not Protestants and on good terms with their Tejano neighbors, came down on both sides in Texas once the bullets started flying).

I also tell the women yes, you will be married in your teens, no you wont be missing school since we don't send you anyway and yes (tho not under Mexican Law) you, the kids and everything else in your marriage is the property of your husband, and yes you will spend your whole life looking after children and are likely to die in childbirth. If they don't like all of that I tell 'em to wait another eighty years and they can vote too

The good news for women?...... ....they don't have to shave......

Birdy, your statement on sewing reminded me. Henri Joutel, while trying to reach de Tonti's post among the Quapaw at the mouth of the Arkansas, (post La Salle assassination) traded a small steel sewing needle he had hidden in the cuff of his surtout to a Caddodacho for a spanish riding horse!

I be knocking the bottom out of Runningmoon , I would also have a bunch of Newhouse traps, after I set them ...I'd be rite back
on Runningmoon !

Depending on which side of the family I guess.

My adoptive father's family hails from Southern Indiana, specifically Harrison county, Boone twp.

Fishing the Ohio and farming I guess.


If on my biological side.......schit....living in an igloo and gnawing on a dead seal I suppose.

Supply and demand, the free market at work

The story goes it weren't Jim's idea, but his brother Rezin. This was back in the days when the Bowie brothers were making a fortune swindling folks, drawing up fake titles to land and selling them, lying through their teeth for money. Criminals tend to hang around dangerous people, the Bowies were no exception. One night in a hotel in 1827 one of the other bunch of dangerous guys tries to shoot Jim but the pistol misfired and Jim got away. So his brother, has the family blacksmith (a slave) hammer up a wicked maybe 9" blade pronto. Most likely straight-backed in form, single edge, no clip point, minimal or no crossguard if this blade were anything like later knives known to be carried by the Bowies. Not much at all like what Bowies "had" to be like in later years, that fixed identity maybe being a result of marketing strategies and product-labeling courtesy of the the Brits, who made most of the Bowie knives carried in America.

A couple of weeks later, on that sandbar in the Mississippi a couple of the other set of dangerous people tries to kill Jim again: two pistol balls and a stab from a sword cane. Unfortunately for them, Jim, uncommonly tall and agile, gets back up and whips out that big knife. OK, one criminal got shot and stabbed and in turns stabs the two guys who attacked him. Not all that big a news item really but in 1827 newspapers were springing up all over, and always looking for a story that would make folks buy the paper. Took a couple of years but Jim Bowie knives caught the popular fancy and became a fad. By 1839, so many promising young men had been killed in drunken brawls by Bowie knives that three states; Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia, AKA Redneck Central, actually outlawed them.

Anyways a few short years later the Bowie brothers had to flee Mississippi when wanted for 17 counts of fraud. So they moved to East Texas and engaged in the enormously profitable enterprise of smuggling African slaves into North America via Cuba and Galveston Island, making the equivalent of four million dollars over a few years. Muscled out of that trade by the New Orleans merchants (who put in their own guy to manage that trade; an obscure young Georgian West Point dropout named James W. Fannin), Bowie moves west again to San Antone, seeking to make another fortune.

I'd be robbin' banks.........Pair of pearl handled Colts.

You would be living in the future not 1820, Colt revolvers were not patented until 1836.

drover

1820? I'd be headed for South western Missouri. Grab me some of that free land and farm, hunt & fish.

But wait - My ancestors already did that.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mostone/misc/history.html