January/February 2015, Muzzleloader, pages 13-18
End Notes: Of Lions and Men
Muzzleloader magazine has become my favorite periodical. For straight American history without all of the political correctness and hero worship of the Left and the Right, you can’t beat this magazine. Much of the content is devoted to historical crafts which is an aspect of history that event-based and character-focused books generally ignore.
In his Doin’ It Yourself column T.C. Albert uses a rare book originally published in the early 1800s and reprinted by Dartmouth in 1954 as an example of poor preparation for a hunt. The book was The Hunters, or the Sufferings Of Hugh and Francis In The Wilderness, A True Story. After a brief history of the book and the origins of Dartmouth College, the author narrates the main points of the story, in which two teenage students get permission from the school to go on a weeklong hunt for moose. He then describes how to make a longknife sheath so that you don’t end up with your own knife through your leg like poor Hugh.
The story of the hunt was gripping, as it turned into an all winter ordeal in which Francis—an Indian—cares for Hugh through the winter, eventually carrying him home. The spunky kid killed 4 moose with an axe, using snow shoes to run them down!
The craftsmanship aspect is the meat of the article and was very informative for a fiction writer dealing with the colonial period. A general point of interest with this and other Muzzleloader articles, that had numerous expressions here, was the intimate long term interaction between whites and Indians. For hundreds of years these very different societies interacted and influenced each other, with much of what we think of as American culture emerging from the process.
T.C. Albert finishes the article by summarizing the fates of Hugh and Francis and providing the reader with some clear illustrative photos of the sheath that, if worn by Hugh, would have robbed us all of a fascinating view to history.
