Butcher Knives a Frontier Standard.wmv

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http://www.thepathfinderschoolllc.com

Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bushcraft,Knives,Traditional

Video Transcription

even good

back in the woods morning guys Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining me back here for another video this morning what we're going to talk about today a little bit is we're going to talk about knives knives are a very touchy subject anywhere on the internet just like guns are but what we're going to talk about today is I want to show you the three typical knife profiles or designs that we're really used as a mainstay along the frontier from 1700 basically through the mid-1800s and I want to show you what those typical knife designs were talk about the companies that made them talk about some of the traders that carried them how many of them they carry which ones were traded with the Indians which ones weren't which ones were used on a daily basis why they were designed the way they are and also what we can bring forward from that or what has been brought forward from that in history that we see that those designs are still being used today and they're just been modified a little bit so let's talk about that today and we're going to start off with let me go to the table here and when I got on the board and I hope I don't go too fast for you I'll try to keep my drawings the best I can I'm not an artist by any means so we'll just have to do the best we can okay guys um Jean Hickman wrote a very good article about knives from 1700 to the mid-1800s because he was trying to do a reenactment or trying to do a portrayal of Lewis and Clark so he called around to a lot of companies in England that supplied knives for US trade during his 1700 to the mid 1840s to understand what knife would have been typical for them to carry and what he's found out in his research is there were really three profiles that were very typical along the frontier that were shipped over here from England by companies like Sheffield and also made by companies like Wilson and those two companies are named in several historical journals of the knives that were used and traded with the Indians as well as sold by merchants and mercantile along the frontier the first one is called the butcher knife and if you picture a butcher knife from today like a Green River or something like an Old Hickory very very similar subtle changes that we'll talk about in a few minutes the second one was called the French and this knife also went by several other names French trade knife is the most common the third style knife was called the cartouche and I can't find anything on the internet that tells a translation of that word to something else so I assume it's just a type of knife but it was very similar to what you see today as a fancy kitchen knife if you picture a steak knife without the serrated blade that would have been a cartouche all of these knives very typically had basically slab handles on them some of them were full tang some of them were not basically the full tang ones were a little more expensive those were not typically the ones traded to the Indians typically they were given the cheaper stuff that was non full tang so they could have had some type of a right-tail Tang in them or a small slab style tang like this or they could have been full tang design like what you see today one of the important things to understand about knives back in that period was they didn't have the same attachment devices that we have today for attaching knife handles to a knife so even if they had a full tang knife with slabs on both sides they didn't have these great big brass rivet pins in them that we use today and screws and things like that so typically they would have anywhere between 3 and 6 pins in the handles that were made of brass or iron so you have 1 2 3 4 5 or sometimes 6 evenly spaced pins in that handle and I'll kind of show you a typical design like that in a few minutes for a knife I've got on the table the other thing to understand about the butcher knife is is that in the 1700s until the mid 1800s or early 1800s the knife design basically was the handle was the same width as the blade so what you see today in different handle designs and things like that that contour away from the shape of the blade are not typical what was found on the frontier most of them had a handle the same width as the blade the butcher knife widened out a little bit the nose toward you know the I want I don't want to say mid eighteen hundreds but by 1825 1830 and it's starting to widen out we'll talk a little bit about that when it comes to Nesmith here in a few minutes because I think his knife design very much came from the butcher knife and we'll talk about that we'll also talk about why the butcher knife was designed the way it was and what's so good about a butcher knife for its intended purpose which was butchering game and that's what they all use their knives for well self-defense or butchering game they didn't use these for carving they use small class folding style knives and there's hundreds and hundreds of dozens of those in trade journals throughout the 17 1800 s of both folding knives and what they call class knives to be used as a whittling tool these were for self-defense or for skinning game pretty much period now the French style knife and the butcher knife both were known on the frontier in different time periods at different places as a scalping knife and the reason they were called a scalping knife basically was because they were sold into the Indian trade so they called them a scalping knife but typically from what I've read in historical journals the butcher knife was much more common along the frontier and much more commonly sold to Indians then the French trade knife was at least once the frontier started to move west past Illinois prints knives were also very common in Eastern woodlands as was the butcher the cartouche really is third I see I see the cartouche being advertised a lot of places as the typical woodland knife of the period and it's really not according to the journals that I've read the cartouche is a very distant third as far as general design goes and importation of that knife to be sold into trade the French knife and the bunch of knife far exceed that the butcher knife far exceeds the French knife once you get into periods of Western development so we'll talk about that in just a minute as well okay so real quick guys um we'll talk about some historical references on things too but I want to kind of walk you through these knobs really quick and kind of show you what I'm talking about without the funky pictures that I draw on the board first of all understand that none of the knives on this table really would depict a period style knife mainly because most period style knives of the 1700s - at least the mid 1800s would have had just a slab handle that basically was Square and the corners were shaved off to make it more like an octagon shape so this knife here is very typical of the profile of a butcher knife of the 1700s it's a little bit on the thick side most of theirs were about 5/32 this one's probably close to 3/16 but not quite but it has two pins here and it would have had five more like this knife has five it has one two three four five and again it has a rounded handle not a square handle so it's not really indicative of what knife they would have carried although the blade profile of this french trade knife is very indicative of the blade profile of a french trade knife or what was sometimes called a scalpel or a scalper excuse me but the butcher knife was more often referred to as a scalper and if you look you know there are scalpers were described in historical journals as any cheap butcher knife that was traded to the Indians so that tells me that this was more of a typical scalping knife or what they call a scalper then this was this was more often called the Frenchman the French trade knife or basically a French kitchen knife and that is the profile design blade and everything else that the Pathfinder knife was designed after if you look at a Pathfinder knife next to that knife they're almost identical in blade profile and design the Pathfinder has a little bit longer handle on it because I felt this one was a little bit short it has a little bit thicker blade on it so that it could be used if it had to be for one tool option whereas this one's made out of a saw blade so it's very thin very much more typical of what they would have had back then to work with or what they would have used was a very thin blade there's a ticket right there crawling across my handle I have to take care of him real fast here there you go okay this knife over here would have also been very typical of what they would call a French design in that it was straight across and didn't have any dip in it some of the knives had a little bit of a dip in them some of them didn't most of them were straight forward like this this one dips a little bit and it's also typical of a combination French style knife and a butcher knife this knife is an S Mac and you can see that it's very reminiscent of a butcher knife and I think there's a reason for that that we'll talk about in a second in 1826 the ledgers from Jedediah Smith who was a traitor along the frontier he ordered certain things for his trading operation one of the things that he ordered was a knife and he only had one type of knife in his inventory and he had dozens and dozens of these knives and he called them the butcher knife that was what they were called sometimes they were numbered sometimes they were listed in inches as far as how long the blade was but it was referred to as a butcher knife and I would say that it was just style design most likely Lewis and Clark when they took their epic journey they bought four dozen butcher knives and they're specifically called out as butcher knives they bought four dozen of them for their journey again like I said some of them were full tang some of them were half tang or excuse me partial tang a rattail tang it would just depend on the maker of the knife and what the use for that knife was in an 1830 trade invoice shipped by steamboat on the upper Missouri River there are accounts of number26 three four and a seven-inch butcher knife and both of those knives were carried on that steamboat in 50 dozen quantities in 1730 sir excuse me in 1837 the Fitzpatrick and company inventory lists eighty four dozen scalpers which again could have been a knife like this or could have been just a cheap butcher knife

17 dozen seven-inch butcher knives made by a company called Wilson and 16 dozen cartouche knives and the cartouche knife is the one I really don't have a good example of but like I said if you look at a typical steak knife a larger steak knife of today's industry that would be very reminiscent of the blade profile of a cartouche knife the sheffield company in England from 1700 1800 shipped hundreds of dozens of butcher knives what they call butcher knives in two or three different stock numbers which probably stood for the length to both North America and Africa for trade now as I said later on in the period you know around the beginning of the 1800s 1830 1840 1820s somewhere in that neighborhood the butcher knife widened out a little bit at the top and was made the blade wider than the thicker the width was bigger than the width of the handle that's where I think nesic came up with the design of his now-famous Nesmith style knife I think it was designed after a later period butcher knife Nemec was a very smart woodsman and he would typically only use tools that were designed for the purpose he designed his tools to be very purpose specific including the double bit accident he had made and when he designed his knife I think he designed it very specifically after a butcher knife because that's what he planned on doing with it he didn't use this knife forbit awning wood he didn't use this knife to process firewood he used a folding knife for carving that had two blades on it he used a double bit acts for his splitting and some of his skinning needs boning and things like that and then he used a butcher knife to do his butchering and I've butchered probably well over a hundred animals and I would have to say that the butcher style design is very purpose specific and I think it's important to understand that so that we know where knives come from and why they're designed the way they are and why they were so popular in you know times along the frontier and it's because they were designed for a specific purpose that they were going to be used for everyday those guys butchered animals all the time if you look at the design of a butcher knife it has this ring founded top on it that's very typical even of butcher knives today and I think the reason for that is is that when you stick that knife underneath the skin of an animal and you're cutting with it it tends to ride here higher as it goes along

the inside of the animal where the bone may be or where the muscle may be and it tends to act like a zipper to lift and split the skin open as it rides and I think that's exactly why Nemec designed his knife the way he did was because it would become like a zipper for opening up game and for skinning it out for food if you look at a French style knife like the Pathfinder or like this one it's not going to do that for you this point would tend to get caught if you weren't putting your finger underneath it or lifting it or assisting it somehow it doesn't have that ability to lift itself up off the muscle or the bone like a butcher knife does so this is more of a meat carving tool whereas this is more of a butchering tool and I think that's why the butcher knife was so popular along the frontier for so many years well guys I thank you for joining me today with this short discussion about knives from you know the 1700s to the mid eighteen hundreds I think it's important for experimental archaeology sake to look at the different profile designs of knives that were used why they were used in what their specific purposes were because if we're talking about sustainability or long term survival situations we need to understand that you use specific tools for specific tasks now there's nothing wrong with the one tool option in case I lose everything else but at the same time you need to make sure that that one tool option will do the things you needed to do as best it can that's why I designed the Pathfinder knife it's not the perfect knife for butchering but it was used for that purpose all over the frontier but again the butcher knife was designed for that purpose it will do other things well and you can buy them very cheap even to this day and a discount kit is what some people need in this day and age in this economy that we have and Old Hickory butcher knives can be had for a couple bucks in any thrift store all the United States and as long as you have the other accoutrements to go with them that are solid like an axe like a saw like a folding knife you can get away with you know some simple butcher knife like that very very easily I thank you for joining me for this video today I thank you for everything you do for me for my family for my school I appreciate your views and I thank you for the time you take to watch my videos and comment on my videos I'm Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school I'll be back to another video as soon as I can you