Others used a tinder horn, this could be used like the tinderbox and was a good alternative if you did not have a tinder box/tinderbox.
“This induced me to resolve not to travel more by land without my gun,
powder and shot, steel, spunge and flint, for striking a fire…”
~Patrick Campbell, Canada/New York, 1792
~Patrick Campbell, Canada/New York, 1792
"There was Dry leaves and
sticks under our shelter. I stoped the tuch hole of my gun with tallow and then
did ketch fire and we made up a fire and Dryed our selves."
Westward
Into Kentucky, Daniel Trabue, 1779:
"There happened to be an
iron pot and an ax on board--- they cut off a piece of the boat rope, and
picked it to oakum, and putting it in the pan of a gun, with some powder,
catched it on fire, which with some thin pieces cut from the mast, they kindled
in the pot, and then cut up their mast, seats, &c. for fuel, and making a
tent of their sail, wrapt themselves as well as they could;"
From
The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1765
“Fierce
winds and blowing snow reduced the men to huddling among large rocks, unable
even to start a fire.”
Samuel
Hearne, Canada, 1770.
“Fire making is a simple process with the
mountaineers. Their bullet pouches always contain a flint and steel, and sundry
pieces of “punk”-a pithy substance found in dead pine trees-or tinder; and
pulling a handful of dry grass, which they screw into a nest, they place the
lighted punk in this, and closing the grass over it, wave it in the air, when
it soon ignites, and readily kindles the dry sticks forming the foundation of a
fire.”
Ruxton,
1848.
“…rain began hammering down so heavily that, one hundred miles from the nearest trees, and with nothing available but moss, nobody could start a fire.”
Samuel
Hearne, 1770.
“In the woods we
were under some disadvantage, having no fire-works”. Journal of John Woolman, 1720-1742.
Sounds like some grim times.
ReplyDeleteCertainly seems to have been a time of steep learning curves with their very lives at stake.
ReplyDelete