The book of camping and woodcraft; a guidebook for those who travel in the wilderness

Front matter

nam:

THE BOOK OF CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT

THE BOOK OF CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT

Foreword

I Outfitting .

II The Sportsman's Clothing .

III Personal Kits

IV Tents and Tools V Utensils and Food

VI A Check-List — Packing Up

VII The Camp ....

VIII The Camp-Fire .

IX Marksmanship in the Woods

X Dressing and Keeping Game and Fish

XI Camp Cookery

XII Pests of the Woods ,

XIII Forest Travel. Keeping a Course

XIV Blazes — Survey Lines— Natural Signs of Direction XV Getting Lost — Bivouacs xi 1

194 . 207

XVI Emergency Foods — Living off the

Country , . . . .217 vii viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGB

XVII Edible Plants of the Wilderness . 232

XVIII Axemanship — Qualities of Wood and

Bark 256

XIX Trophies, Buckskin and Rawhide . 277

XX Tanning Pelts — Other Animal

Products ..... 290

YYT Accidents: Their Backwoods Treatment 30C

ILLUSTRATIONS

Nearer the Fire the Shadows Creep Frontispiece

In Still Waters

A Proud Moment .

Real Comfort in the Open .

Starting a Lean-to Shelter

The Fixed Camp ....

A Good Day's Shoot

An Ideal Camp-Fire

The Camp in Order .

Crude, but Comfortable

Down the Snow-white Alleys

The Old, Old Story

But a Good Day's Luck Lands Them

A Stray Goose Wanders Near

Where Lurks the Lusty Trout ,

Facing page

. 20 . 32 , 46

. n , n

FOREWORD

MY one aim in writing this little book is to make it of practical service to those who seek rest or sport in the wilderness, or whose business calls them thither. I have treated the matter of outfitting in some detail, not because elaborate outfits are usually desirable, for they are not, but because in town there is so much to pick and choose from. Thereafter, the body of the book is mainly given up to such shifts and expedients as are learned in the wilderness itself, where we have nothing to choose from but the raw materials that lie around us.

As for camps situated within easy reach of towns or supply-posts, every one, I suppose, knows best how to gratify his own tastes in fitting them up, and prefers to use his own ingenuity rather than copy after others. Real woodcraft consists rather in knowing how to get along without the appliances of civilization than in adapting them to wildwood life. Such an art comes in play when we travel "light," and especially in emergencies, when the equipment, or essential parts of it, have been destroyed. I am not advising anybody to travel with nothing but a gun and ammunition, a blanket, a frying-pan, and a tin cup; but it has been part of my object to show how the thing can be done, if necessary, without serious hardship.

Woodcraft may be defined as the art of getting along well in the wilderness by utilizing nature's storehouse. When we say that Daniel Boone, for example, was a good woodsman, we mean that he could confidently enter an unmapped wilderness, with no outfit but what was carried by his horse, his canoe, or on his own back, and with the intention of a protracted stay; that he could find his way through the dense forest without man-made marks to guide him; that he knew the habits and properties of trees and plants, and the ways of fish

xi xii FOREWORD

and game; that he was a good trailer and a good shot; that he could dress game and cure peltry, cook wholesome meals over an open fire, build adequate shelter against wind and rain, and keep himself warm through the bitter nights of winter — in short, that he knew how to utilize the gifts of nature, and could bide comfortably in the wilderness without help from outside.

The literature of outdoor sport is getting us used to such correlative terms as plainscraft, mountaincraft, and even icecraft, snowcraft, and birdcraft. This sort of thing can be overdone; but we need a generic term to express the art, in general, of getting on well in wild regions, whether in forests, deserts, mountains, plains, tropics or arctics; and for this I would suggest the plain English compound wildcraft.

In the following chapters I offer some suggestions on outfitting, making camps, dressing and keeping game and fish, camp cookery, forest travel, how to avoid getting lost, and what to do if one does get lost, living off the country, what the different species of trees are good for (from a camper's viewpoint) , backwoods handicrafts in wood, bark, skins and other raw materials, the treatment of wounds and other injuries, and some other branches of woodcraft that may be of service when one is far from shops and from hired help. I have little or nothing to say, here, about hunting, fishing, trailing, trapping, canoeing, snowshoeing, or the management of horses and pack-trains, because each of these is an art by itself, and we have good books on all of them save trailing.*

* This would seem an impossible subject to treat in a book; but any one who reads German may come to a different conclusion after studying a work by Eugen Teuwsen and Carl Schulze, entitled, Fahrten und Spurenkunde (Tracks and Trailing), published in 1901 by J. Neumann of Neudamm, Prussia. This describes the tracks made by the red deer, moose, fallow deer, roebuck, chamois, wild boar, hare, rabbit, squirrel, bear, wolf, dog, fox, wildcat, badger, otter, woods marten and stone marten, polecat, various weasels, and of the capercailzie, black-cock, hazel-grouse, moor-hen, quail, pheasant, curlew, bustard, crane, stork, heron, swan, wild goose, and wild duck. The text is accompanied by capital woodcuts, mostly life-size. An excellent series of illustrated articles on trailing American game, written by Josef Brunner. appeared in Field and Stream, 1906-7. I hope it will soon come out in book form.

FOREWORD xiii

I have preferred to give full details, as far as this book goes. One's health and comfort in the wilds very often depend upon close observance of just such details as breathless people would skip or scurry over. Moreover, since this is not a guidebook to any one particular region, I have tried to keep in mind a variety of conditions existing in different kinds of country, and have suggested alternative methods or materials, to be used according to circumstances.

In the school of the woods there is no graduation day. What would be good woodcraft in one region might be bad bungling in another. A Maine guide may scour all the forests of northeastern America, and feel quite at home in any of them; but put him in a Mississippi canebrake, and it is long odds that he would be, for a time,

Perplexed, bewildered, till he scarce doth know His right forefinger from his left big toe.

And a southern cane-cracker would be quite as much at sea if he were turned loose in a spruce forest in winter. But it would not take long for either of these men to "catch on" to the new conditions; for both are shifty, both are cool-headed, and both are keen observers. Any man may blunder once, when confronted by strange conditions; but none will repeat the error unless he be possessed by the notion that he has nothing new to learn.

As for book-learning, it is useful only to those who do not expect too much from it. No book can teach a man how to swing an axe or follow a trail. But there are some practical arts that it can teach, and, what is of more consequence, it can give a clear idea of general principles. It can also show how not to do a thing — and there is a good deal in that. Half of woodcraft, as of any other art, is in knowing what to avoid. That is the difference between a true knot and a granny knot, and the difference can be shown by a sketch as easily as with string in hand.

If any one should get the impression from these pages that camping out with a light outfit means little xiv FOREWORD

but a daily grind of camp chores, questionable meals, a hard bed, torment from insects, and a good chance of broken bones at the end, he will not have caught the spirit of my intent. It is not here my purpose to dwell on the charms of free life in a wild country; rather, taking all that for granted, I would point out some short-cuts, and offer a lift, here and there, over rough parts of the trail. No one need be told how to enjoy the smooth ones. Hence it is that I treat chiefly of difficulties, and how to overcome them.

This book had its origin in a series of articles, under a similar title, that I contributed, in 1904-6, to the magazine Field and Stream. The original chapters have been expanded, and new ones have been added, until there is here about double the matter that appeared in the parent series. I have also added two chapters previously published in Sports Afield.

Most of these pages were written in the wilderness, where there were abundant facilities for testing the value of suggestions that were outside my previous experience. In this connection I must acknowledge indebtedness to a scrap-book full of notes and clippings, the latter chiefly from old volumes of Forest and Stream and Shooting and Fishing, which was one of the most valued tomes in the rather select "library" that graced half a soap-box in one corner of my cabin.

I owe much, both to the spirit and the letter of that classic in the literature of outdoor life, the little book on Woodcraft by the late George R. Sears, who is best known by his Indian-given title of Nessmuk. To me, in a peculiar sense, it has been remedium utriusgue fortunes; and it is but fitting that I should dedicate to the memory of its author this humble pendant to his work. Horace Kephart.

Dayton, Ohio March, 1906.

THE BOOK OP CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT

Chapter I Outfitting

"By St. Nicholas I have a sudden passion for the wild wood — We should be free as air in the wild wood — What say you? Shall we go? Your hands, your hands!"

— Robin Hood.

TN some of our large cities there are professional out- ■*■ fitters to whom one can go and say: "So many of us wish to spend such a month in such a region, hunting and fishing: equip us." The dealer will name a price; you pay it, and leave the rest to him. When the time comes he will have the outfit ready and packed. It will include everything needed for the trip, well selected and of the best materials. When your party reaches the jumping-off place it will be met by professional guides and packers, who will take you to the best hunting grounds and fishing waters, and will do all the hard work of paddling, packing over portages, making camp, chopping wood, cooking, and cleaning up, besides showing you where the game and fish are " using," and how to get them. In this way a party of city men who know nothing of woodcraft can spend a season in the woods very comfortably, though getting little practical knowledge of the wilderness. This is touring, not campaigning. It is expensive; but it may be worth the price to such as can afford it, and who like that sort of thing.

But, aside from the expense of this kind of camping, it seems to me that whoever takes to the woods and waters for recreation should learn how to shift for himself in an emergency. He may employ guides and a cook — all that; but the day of disaster may come, the outfit may be destroyed, or the city man may find himself some day alone, lost in the forest, and comft CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT

pelled to meet the forces of nature in a struggle for his life. Then it may go hard with him indeed if he be not only master of himself, but of that woodcraft that holds the key to nature's storehouse. A camper should know for himself how to outfit, how to select and make a camp, how to wield an axe and make proper fires, how to cook, wash, mend, how to travel without losing his course, or what to do when he has lost it; how to trail, hunt, shoot, fish, dress game, manage boat or canoe, and how to extemporize such makeshifts as may be needed in wilderness faring. And he should know these things as he does the way to his mouth. Then is he truly a woodsman, sure to do promptly the right thing at the right time, whatever befalls. Such a man has an honest pride in his own resourcefulness, a sense of reserve force, a doughty self-reliance that is good to feel. His is the confidence of the lone sailorman, who whistles as he puts his tiny bark out to sea.

And there are many of us who, through some miscue of the Fates, are not rich enough to give carte blanche orders over the counter. We would like silk tents, air mattresses, fiber packing cases, and all that sort of thing; but we would soon "go broke" if we started in at that rate. I am saying nothing about guns, rods, reels, and such-like, because they are the things that every properly conducted sportsman goes broke on, anyway, as a matter of course. I am speaking only of such purchases as might be thought extravagant. And it is conceivable that some folks might call it extravagant to pay thirty-five dollars for a thing to sleep in when you lie out of doors on the ground from choice, or thirty dollars for pots and pans to cook with when you are "playing hobo," as the unregenerate call our sylvan sport.

Nor can we deny that a man with an axe and a couple of dollars' worth of cotton cloth can put up in two or three hours as good a woodland shelter as any mere democrat or republican needs between the ides of May and of November; and if he wants a portable tent he can generally buy very cheaply a second-hand army one that will meet all his requirements for several sea-

OUTFITTING 3

sons. Tin or enameled ware, though not so smart nor so ingeniously nested as a special aluminum kit, will cook just as good meals, and will not burn one's fingers and mouth so severely. Blankets we can take from home (though never the second time, perhaps); and a narrow bed-tick, filled with browse, or with grass or leaves where there is no browse, in combination with a rubber blanket or poncho, makes a better mattress than the Father of his Country had on many a weary night. A discarded business suit and a flannel shirt, easy shoes and a campaign hat, are quite as respectable in the eyes of woodland folk as a costume of loden or gabardine, and they do not set one up so prominently as a mark. Grocery boxes make good packing cases, and they have the advantage that they are not too good to be broken up for shelves and table in camp. As for duffel bags, few things are more satisfactory than seamless grain bags that you have coated with boiled linseed oil. Such a bag, by the way, is a good thing to produce now and then to show your friends how ingeniously economical you are. It helps out when you are caught slipping in through the back gate with a brand-new gun, when everybody knows that you already possess more guns than you can find legitimate use for.

If one begins, as he should, six months in advance, to plan and prepare for his next summer or fall vacation, he can, by gradual and surreptitious hoarding, get together a commendable camping equipment, and nobody will notice the outlay. The best way is to make many of the things yourself. This gives your pastime an air of thrift, and propitiates the Lares and Penates by keeping you home o' nights. And there is a world of solid comfort in having everything fixed just to suit you. The only way to have it so is to do the work yourself. One can wear ready-made clothing, he can exist in ready-furnished rooms, but a ready-made camping outfit is a delusion and a snare. It is sure to be loaded with gimcracks that you have no use for, and to lack something that you will be miserable without.

It is great fun, in the long winter evenings, to sort over your beloved duffel, to make and fit up the little boxes and hold-alls in which everything has its proper place, to contrive new wrinkles that nobody but yourself has the gigantic brain to conceive, to concoct mysterious dopes that fill the house with unsanctimonious smells, to fish around for materials, in odd corners where you have no business, and, generally, to set the female members of the household to buzzing around in curiosity, disapproval, and sundry other states of mind.

To be sure, even though a man rigs up his own outfit, he never gets it quite to suit him. Every season sees the downfall of some cherished scheme, the failure of some fond contrivance. Every winter sees you again fussing over your kit, altering this, substituting that, and flogging your wits with the same old problem of how to save weight and bulk without sacrifice of utility. All thoroughbred campers do this as regularly as the birds come back in spring, and their kind have been doing it since the world began. It is good for us. If some misguided genius should invent a camping equipment that nobody could find fault with, half our pleasure in life would be swept away.

There is something to be said in favor of individual outfits, every man going completely equipped and quite independent of the others. It is one of the delights of single-handed canoeing, whether you go alone or cruise in squadron, that every man is fixed to suit himself. Then if any one carries too much or too little, or cooks badly, or is too lazy to be neat, or lacks forethought in any way, he alone suffers the penalty; and this is but just. On the other hand, if one of the cruisers' outfits comes to grief, the others can help him out, since all the eggs are not in one basket. I like to have a complete camping outfit of my own, just big enough for two men, so that I can dispense a modest hospitality to a chance acquaintance, or take with me a comrade who, through no fault of his own, turns up at the last moment; but I want this outfit to be so light and compact that I can easily handle it myself when I am alone.

OUTFITTING 5

Then I am always "fixed," and always independent, come good or ill, blow high or low.

Still, it is the general rule among campers to have "company stores." In so far as this means only those things that all use in common, such as tent, utensils, tools, and provisions, it is well enough; but it should be a point of honor with each and every man to carry for himself a complete kit of personal necessities, down to the least detail. As for company stores, everybody should bear a hand in collecting and packing them. To saddle this hard and thankless job on one man, merely because he is experienced and a willing worker, is selfish. Depend upon it, the fellow who "hasn't time" to do his share of the work before starting will be the very one to shirk in camp.

The question of what to take on a trip resolves itself chiefly into a question of transportation. If the party can travel by wagon, and intends to go into fixed camp, then almost anything can be carried along — trunks, chests, big wall tents and poles, cots, mattresses, pots and pans galore, camp stove, kerosene, mackintoshes and rubber boots, plentiful changes of clothing, arsenals of weapons and ammunition, books, folding bath-tubs — what you will. Anybody can fit up a wagon-load of calamities, and hire a farmer to serve as porter. But does it pay ? I think not.

Be plain in the woods. In a far way you are emulating those grim heroes of the past who made the white man's trails across this continent. Fancy Boone reclining on an air mattress, or Carson pottering over a sheet-iron stove ! We seek the woods to escape civilization for a time, and all that suggests it. Let us sometimes broil our venison on a sharpened stick and serve it on a sheet of bark. It tastes better. It gets us closer to nature, and closer to those good old times when every American was considered "a man for a' that" if he proved it in a manful way. And there is a pleasure in achieving creditable results by the simplest means. When you win your own way through the wilds with axe and rifle you win at the same time the imperturbability of a mind at ease with itself in any emergency by flood or field. Then you feel that you have red blood in your veins, and that it is good to be free and out of doors. It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need in order to be perfectly happy.

Let me not be misunderstood as counseling anybody to "rough it" by sleeping on the bare ground and eating nothing but hardtack and bacon. Only a tenderfoot will parade a scorn of comfort and a taste for useless hardships. As Nessmuk says: "We do not go to the woods to rough it; we go to smoothe it — we get it rough enough in town. But let us live the simple, natural life in the woods, and leave all frills behind."

An old campaigner is known by the simplicity and fitness of his equipment. He carries few impedimenta, but every article has been well tested and it is the best that his purse can afford. He has learned by hard experience how steep are the mountain trails and how tangled the undergrowth and downwood in the primitive forest. He has learned, too, how to fashion on the spot many substitutes for " boughten " things that we consider necessary at home.

The art of going "light but right" is hard to learn. I never knew a camper who did not burden himself, at first, with a lot of kickshaws that he did not need in the woods; nor one who, if he learned anything, did not soon begin to weed them out; nor even a veteran who ever quite attained his own ideal of lightness and serviceability. Probably Nessmuk came as near to it as any one, after he got that famous ten-pound canoe. He said that his load, including canoe, knapsack, blanket-bag, extra clothing, hatchet, rod, and two days' rations, "never exceeded twenty-six pounds; and I went prepared to camp out any and every night." This, of course, was in summer.

In the days when game was plentiful and there were no closed seasons our frontiersmen thought nothing of making long expeditions into the unknown wilderness with no equipment but what they carried on their own persons, to wit: a blanket, rifle, ammunition, flint and steel, tomahawk, knife, an awl, a spare pair of moc-

OUTFITTING 7

casins, perhaps, a small bag of jerked venison, and another of parched Indian corn, ground to a coarse meal, which they called "rockahominy" or "coal flour." Their tutors in woodcraft often traveled lighter than this. An Indian runner would strip to his G-string and moccasins, roll up in his small blanket a pouch of rockahominy, and, armed only with a bow and arrows, he would perform journeys that no mammal but a wolf could equal. General Clark said that when he and Lewis, with their men, started afoot from the mouth of the Columbia River on their return trip across the continent, their total store of articles for barter with the Indians for horses and food could have been tied up in two handkerchiefs. But they were woodsmen, every inch of them.

Now it is not needful nor advisable for a camper in our time to suffer hardships from stinting his supplies. It is foolish to take insufficient bedding, or to rely upon a diet of pork, beans, and hardtack, in a country where game may be scarce. The knack is in striking a happy medium between too much luggage and too little. A pair of scales are good things to have at hand when one is making up his packs. Scales of another kind will then fall from his eyes. He will note how the little, unconsidered trifles mount up; how every bag and tin adds weight. Now let him imagine himself toiling uphill under an August sun, or forging through thickety woods, over rocks and roots and fallen trees, with all this stuff on his back. Again, let him think of a chill, wet night ahead, and of what he will really need to keep himself warm, dry, and well ballasted amidships. Balancing these two prospects one against the other, he cannot go far wrong in selecting his outfit.

In his charming book The Forest, Stewart Edward White has spoken of that amusing foible, common to us all, which compels even an experienced woodsman to lug along some pet trifle that he does not need, but which he would be miserable without. The more absurd this trinket is, the more he loves it. One of my camp-mates for five seasons carried in his "packer" a big chunk of rosin. When asked what it was for, he confessed: "Oh, I'm going to get a fellow to make me a turkey-call, some day, and this is to make it 'turk. ' ' Jew's-harps, camp-stools, shaving-mugs, alarm-clocks, derringers that nobody could hit anything with, and other such trifles have been known to accompany very practical men who were otherwise in light marching order. If you have some such thing that you know you can't sleep well without, stow it religiously in your kit. It is your "medicine," your amulet against the spooks and bogies of the woods. It will dispel the koosy-oonek. (If you don't know what that means, ask an Eskimo. He may tell you that it means sorcery, witchcraft — and so, no doubt, it does to the children of nature; but to us children of guile it is the spell of that imp who hides our pipes, steals our last match, and brings rain on the just when they want to go fishing.)

No two men have the same "medicine." Mine is a porcelain teacup, minus the handle. It cost me much trouble to find one that would fit snugly inside the metal cup in which I brew my tea. Many's the time it has all but slipped from my fingers and dropped upon a rock; many's the gibe I have suffered for its dear sake. But I do love it. Hot indeed must be the sun, tangled the trail and weary the miles, before I forsake thee, O my frail, cool-lipped, but ardent teacup!

The joys and sorrows of camp life, and the proportion of each to the other, depend very much upon how one chooses his companions — granting that he has any choice in the matter at all. It may be noticed that old-timers are apt to be a bit distant when a novice betrays any eagerness to share in their pilgrimages. There is no churlishness in this ; rather it is commendable caution. Not every good fellow in town makes a pleasant comrade in the woods. So it is that experienced campers are chary of admitting new members to their lodges. To be one of them you must be of the right stuff, ready to endure trial and privation without a murmur, and — what is harder for most men — to put up with petty inconveniences without grumbling.

For there is a seamy side to camp life, as to every-

OUTFITTING 9

thing else. Even in the best of camps things do happen sometimes that are enough to make a saint swear silently through his teeth. But no one is fit for such life who cannot turn ordinary ill-luck into a joke, and bear downright calamity like a gentleman.

Yet there are other qualities in a good camp-mate that are rarer than fortitude and endurance. Chief of these is a love of nature for her own sake — not the "put on" kind that expresses itself in gushy sentimentalism, but that pure, intense, though ordinarily mute affection which finds pleasure in her companionship and needs none other. As Olive Shreiner says : " It is not he who praises nature, but he who lies continually on her breast and is satisfied, who is actually united to her." Donald G. Mitchell once remarked that nobody should go to the country with the expectation of deriving much pleasure from it, as country, who has not a keen eye for the things of the country, for scenery, or for trees, or flowers, or some kind of culture; to which a New York editor replied that "Of this not one city man in a thousand has a particle in his composition." The proportion of city men who do thoroughly enjoy the hardy sports and adventures of the wilderness is certainly much larger than those who could be entertained on a farm; but the elect of these, the ones who can find plenty to interest them in the woods when fishing and hunting fail, are not to be found on every street corner.