Minomaaso apaakozigan!

Minomaaso apaakozigan – That burning kinnickinick smells good! I have been busy with a million things and on top of it, I have been a bit melancholy and unmotivated. This said, I would like to post some fun snippits from my most recent article in the Journal of the Early Americas. This article was on tobacco and smoking, but for this blog posting, I will just throw some fun things on Kinnickinic out there. For more on this...

Converting new to old… trap conversion

Traps are not cheap, and proper forged historic traps are down-right expensive. Few guys are making historic traps, and cost of materials and the labor to make them is high. Additionally, my trap-maker, Allen Harrison, has been fighting fire bans in all this dry weather and has been unable to forge. Anyway, this has led us to many discussions on ways a person can get together some traps in a reasonably inexpensive way to run...

Bison Loads Examined

In my post about hunting the bison, I mentioned that I was shooting appr. 100 gr. of 3Fg powder with a .595 roundball (chewed up with a rasp) and wadded with prairie grass. The “chewed ball” idea is one that I gained from discussion with David Hobbes about 10 years ago at Ft. Ticonderoga. For more info on the idea, check out Nate Kobuck’s blog post here. This proved to be a fairly accurate load both in...

Bison Hunt

It has always been a dream of mine to hunt Bison with flintlock.  This dream was official added to the bucket list a few years ago as I read journals of men in the Great Lakes fur trade hunting them and explaining their importance to the fur trade (many excerpts of these journals have been mentioned in past posts). Even here in Wisconsin, buffalo were hunted and much more of Wisconsin was prairie than most people think....