I have always had a fascination with early American history, mainly the early west and the mountain man era. Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Liver Eating Johnson, John Coulter, Jedidiah Smith, etc. This interest has evolved into black powder shooting and interests in Historical Trekking. Most of the time, I walk around in moccasins. I tend to think I’ve been born in the wrong century.

What interests me about Nessmuk is the era. It was the time of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, when intellectuals were rediscovering the woods and sharing what they found through their writing.

George Washington Sears writing under the name Nessmuk, wrote several letters to Field and Stream in the mid 1800s on the Adirondack lakes area. He also wrote one of the first bushcraft books in America. His philosophy was on the simplicity of wilderness travel and going as lightweight as possible.

I found three articles through the web on Nessmuks tools and became interested enough to purchase his woodcraft book and collected writings, from Amazon books.

What I found gave me a pleasant surprise. Not so much in terms of bush craft skills but in the way people lived, their expectations of life and the way they perceived the woods around them. Seeing a time in history, through someone else’s eyes due to their writing.I became a Nessmuk fan, and ordered my own versions of the Nessmuk trio of tools.

Nessmuk Articles

http://www.zianet.com/jgray/nessmuk/woodcraft/title_page.html

http://robroy.dyndns.info/books/gws/N.HTM

http://www.oldjimbo.com/Outdoors-Magazine/Nessmuk-and-his-Tools.pdf