British Red said:
US guys should carry bowies....anyone got a spare coonskin cap
Red
Red, actually mine is deerskin and rabbit fur.
I used to get 'eskimo' wisecracks from friends I'd go hunting, fishing, and backpacking with about my trapper hat I'd wear in cold weather. Then I gave a few out for Christmas one time and the wisecracks stopped because now you'd have to kill these guys to get their rabbit fur trapper hats away from them.
Stuart said:
what do you use this sword for?
Well, North America has a lot of wide open country, some of it extremely rugged, wild, and remote. There are many places where you might as well be on the surface of the moon for all of the help you can get from the outside world. When you are standing there, right at the intersection of 'no' and 'where', and you can't just hop into a vehicle and drive to a nice, warm motel, suddenly that 'big' knife starts looking smaller, and smaller, and suddenly it doesn't look so oversize anymore.
In many of the wilder parts of this continent, Mother Nature can kill you if you are not careful, sometimes with surprising speed and efficiency, so you need all of the extra edge you can get. Generally, the further north you go in the US or Canada, in the bush you tend to see more and more knives with blades in the 9" range in everyone's hands. With people who hunt a lot, like the Inuit, even the ulu's get big, with curved, semi-circular blades as much as 6" wide.
For example, if a blizzard is coming and it's coming in fast, and it would take you a day or two on foot, or more, to get out of the area, you need to make a very good shelter very fast. That 9" blade is suddenly the difference between life and death. Yeah, you can built a shelter against serious weather with a 4" knife - eventually.
A knife like that also will split and chop wood at a level which a 4" knife cannot approach. There's just only so much you can do with batoning a 4" blade, and if you have to baton a 9" bowie, you can split some serious wood. For cutting pine boughs for shelter and bedding, a 9" bowie cannot be matched by either a hatchet or a 4" knife as it acts like a mini-machete.
Bushcraft skills excel with a 9" knife. You can make walking sticks, digging sticks, shelters, etc, at a speed and conservation of energy and effort that you cannot match with a smaller knife.
In the American west, in many places there are cacti and other vegetation that are extremely useful, often edible, but have serious spines, needles, thorns, barbs, etc. You cannot use a 4" knife on that stuff. You need to maintain your distance while working with them or you can seriously injure your knife hand. The smallest knife I'd use on cactus in the Southwest is a 6" Rapala filet knife, and even then I still carry a bowie, a khukuri, or an 18" machete.
A big bowie like that isn't that big once you get used to it. Many of you probably have butcher knives in your kitchen with blades just as long. Especially when you choke up on the blade, you can get some fairly fine work done with such a knife, often with surprising speed.
Often a big knife like that is used as a butcher knife, especially if you have to take apart an elk or a moose. Even smaller animals, like mule deer, are not that small. I view rabbits as being what you eat when you are really hungry and you can't get real food. If you can nail one in the dead of winter, when there is snow on the ground, they are often fairly parasite free, but rodents out here carry more diseases than a Calcutta whorehouse.
I'll usually have a smaller knife with me when I'm packing a bigger blade like my bowie, often a lockback folder like a Buck 110, or more lately my Kabar Mule. However, a small fixed blade is easier to clean when you have critter gunk all over them, and so I have a few smaller fixed blades that I'm rather fond of, mostly designs made by Buck or Western.
A small knife is handy for the initial critical cuts, like cutting around the anus, removing the gonads, and slicing open the gut. Some people I know carry a retractable, box cutter style razor blade knife for this part of dressing out game. However, for taking the animal apart, a 9" knife can make things a lot easier, faster, and lots more efficient. But, if you have to, you can do it all with that 9" bowie, just like you could do it with a 9" butcher knife.
If you are truly living off the land, you want to kill bigger critters anyway, because it is a lot more efficient for energy expended while hunting and it is a lot more efficient use of your ammunition. One .308 or .30-30 cartridge expended into an elk or a mule deer is a more efficient use of ammo, gram for gram, and for your body calories expended during the hunt than shooting some mangy rabbit with a .22 long rifle caliber weapon. Also, bigger critters have fat on them that smaller animals like rabbits often don't have. Men have died of 'rabbit starvation' in the winter because they had no fat in their diet, even though they had plenty of rabbits to eat. To try and truly survive off of rabbits, nutritionally you have to eat pretty much everything but the feces, fur, and bones.
A big knife like this is also a good weapon itself for hunting, especially if lashed to the end of a pole as a spear (stabbing type, a lance, not a throwing spear). In some places like the Southwest, one of the better animals for a food source is the javelina, a pig-like animal that travels in groups and can be 5 shades of mean. They are, however, quite tasty and not too difficult to spear if you really want one, have some serious balls, and are a skilled hunter.
The 19th Century American mountain men often said that they could tell right off a greenhorn to the American west by his knives. Either his main knife was too small, or he was packing too few knives. Those guys often had at least three three blades on them, not counting stashed in their gear - big knife (used as both a tool and a sidearm), often 9" - 10", often a medium knife of a skinner style usually about 5" - 6", a smaller patch knife of generally about 3", and often a hatchet or a tomahawk.
What I think blows by a lot of people without their realizing the significance of it is that many of the bushcraft legends, like Kephart and Nessmuk, tended to have done most of their bushcraft forays in the American
east.
In days gone by, travelers into the American
west found out quickly that not long after you crossed the Mississippi and Missouri rivers you started to enter a different world than the American east. The knives got bigger, rifles for hunting went from .36 to .50 and .54 calibers, and 1/3 of the mountain men didn't survive their first 24 months on the frontier.
In modern days, many even here in America forget this, but once you are on the ground and back to the primitive, the old realities hit home and you start to understand fast why our ancestors did many of the things they did, and used many of the tools that they did.
Now, some at this point are saying, "I have an axe." Cool, I try and pack one along too, even if it's just a hatchet, and I also take my axes seriously, putting a fair amount of care and effort into them. For serious, long term living in the American wilderness, having both a big knife and an axe is a major plus.
There is a story I read once about the travels of a guy named Deep River Jim, who lived in the era of Grey Owl and others, and he wrote books about it later in life. He was going down a remote river one day and he saw rapids ahead and he figured, due to circumstances, that he couldn't avoid them in time. He immediately threw his axe onto the bank from the canoe and then rode the canoe to it's destruction, losing most of his gear. He swam to shore, without much but a jackknife and a waterproof matchcase in his pockets. He backtracked up to his axe and then, with the axe, he proceeded to build shelter, collect food (porcupine), make a fire, and began planning for his walk out.
But, what if he hadn't quickly tossed his axe ashore? One of the advantages of a larger knife that you have on you is that it's always on you, and relatively quick to both deploy and re-sheath. You can say the same thing about a hatchet also, like my 3" bit Hudson Bay style Norlund hatchet I often carry around. I have it ground and sharpened that it's as much an ulu knife as it is a hatchet and I often use it in such a manner, like it was an ulu knife.
There's advantages to both a big knife and a hatchet, and I like both. However, I consider either a properly rigged hatchet or a big knife to be the proper
primary tool for the bush, not the 4" knife, which I look upon as an auxiliary tool, much like a traditional style jackknife.
I've almost always had handy a bigger knife or a hatchet on me when I've been in the bush, and I always have directly on me, even when I'm not in the bush, my Leatherman and before that, my Swiss Army knife, and both have good 2.5" to 3" blades and good wood saws.
Because of this, very, very seldom have I had to baton with a small blade, hence why most of the time the smaller, 4" variety auxiliary knife I carry is a 3-3/4" lockback folder, like a Buck 110 or a Kabar Mule. It's primary purpose is as a very sharp, small knife that is very compact and carries easily. It is not a maul for splitting firewood. If I have to, I know that the Kabar Mule is tough enough to baton with, but I prefer not to even try it with the Buck 110 unless I really, really have to.
My multitool is always on me, even when I'm not in the bush, and it has a nicely shaped, extremely sharp, 3" locking blade made of 154CM and in it's pouch is a magnesium firetool, a flat DMT fine grit mini-hone, and an EZE-Lap tapered rod diamond sharpener for the 420HC serrated sheepsfoot blade. If I have to, and circumstances were such, I could get by with just my multitool and a serious primary bush tool such as a hatchet, axe, or a bowie, and get by quite well in the bush, forgoing the small, dedicated 4" style auxiliary knife altogether.
