Mad about Science: Tools of the ‘frontier’

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

It was brutal to live in the 1800s. Cholera was nearly as prevalent as the common cold. Elevating your family from poverty meant packing up everything you owned and trusting in the navigational skills and good intentions of complete strangers over a 2,000-mile trek. Not only surviving but thriving in this time period meant that the people of the “frontier” needed to use every tool to its fullest potential. 

It’s easy to hoard specialty tools in life today. We can 3-D print tool holders and store them in our stationary shops. In those former times, a broken axe meant the difference between life and death.

Imagine packing everything you own into the back of a Chevy Tahoe, except that Tahoe was powered by horses and made of wood. Pioneers had an extremely limited amount of space and tight weight restrictions on what they could bring. This meant that people had to calculate their load down to the pound, or risk dooming their entire family before the journey even began. No pressure — your road trip has a high certainty of being lethal if you forget your socks.

Considering every pound had to count, one of the pioneers’ most valuable tools was also among their heaviest. Cast iron Dutch ovens weren’t just a novelty, they were a necessity for the frontier family. Weighing in at nearly 20 pounds, these pots were specially designed to be rugged and utilitarian while also being large enough to feed a family of six. Dutch ovens in the 1800s weren’t often designed with domed tops like modern cookware. Instead, they would often have a concave top designed for holding hot coals so that bread could bake evenly from all sides. For a frontier family, a damaged or lost Dutch oven was almost certainly a death sentence and great care went into maintaining them.

There was virtually no cooking role the Dutch oven couldn’t perform. They could make stew, bake bread, roast meat and render fat for soapmaking. The lids could even be flipped to serve as a griddle for pancakes, bacon or fish. Caring for cast iron was the same in the 1800s as it is today, though seasoning the pot didn’t start with oil from the grocery store. Animal fat had to be rendered and spread across the pot to preserve its non-stick properties.

How did 19th century travelers get the animal fat they needed in the field?

The hunting knife was the greatest survival tool. A well-made rifle was to be marveled at, but it wasn’t much good without a knife that could slice off a pelt and butcher a wild beast.

The hunting knife was a deeply personalized tool forged from high carbon steel. The handle was often made of hardwood or ungulate antler and curved to fit the grip of its user. The perk of using antlers was adding a natural grip to the handle so that the blade wouldn’t slip when covered in blood. There were no hospitals in the wilderness, so slipping and cutting your hand wrist-deep in an animal’s abdominal cavity was almost certain to result in joining your prey in death.

Blades had to be specially forged. They needed to be rigid enough to hold an edge, but flexible enough to not break off when cutting through sinew and cartilage. Reforging a knife in the wild would have been virtually impossible, requiring a wielder to return to a military fort or outpost to procure a new blade. This could be an impossibility in the depths of winter, which meant a blade needed to be reliable for months, even years on end.

The knife itself was only half the equation — wielders needed to understand how to maintain the knife and how to alter the angle of its edge in order to perform specific tasks. A knife was likely used for multiple tasks throughout the day, from butchery to preparing wood for traps and even as a surgical instrument for cleaning up a wound in preparation to sew flesh neatly back together. It had to be cleaned and oiled between uses to prevent rusting.

The knife was an important component of an even greater tool for those on the trail: the medical kit. The first aid kit of the 1800s was markedly different from the one in your bathroom today. Laudanum was derived from opium and used as a painkiller. Improper use of the compound could lead to addiction and overdose — since it was essentially morphine — but that didn’t stop some people from using it on teething babies to ease their pain.

Ipecac was another mixture found in medical kits, taken to induce vomiting in someone who had been poisoned. Poisoning on the frontier was less Machiavellian and more foolhardiness, as people would eat things they shouldn’t in the endless pursuit of science and quelling hunger.

Many tools from those old-time medical kits persist in contemporary kits, including needles, sutures, bandages, gauze and scalpels. Absent from today’s kits are the bone saws of the 1800s. Frontier families needed to have an understanding of human anatomy in order to deal with afflictions from the minor to the critical. Feeling your stomach churn at the sight of a scraped knee is silly when you must figure that more than a few parents likely had to amputate the fingers, toes or even limbs of their children after they took a tumble during particularly tough roughhousing sessions.

Stay curious, 7B.