HISTORY CHANNEL Mountain Men

[Bullmoose]

I saw about 15 mins of the H-Channel of "Mountain Men"??? Did anyone see it all, made in 1999??? Looked good, but wanted your thoughts

 

[Kentuckywindage]

i taped it a couple years ago. Watch it darn near every day.

 

[Slamfire]

I've seen it several times. I sometimes wonder where the History Channel gets their "experts", some are expert, and others are pretty lame.

 

[JiminTexas]

I've seen it on a couple of occassions and I liked it. I did watch the whole thing today and enjoyed it a lot. I found that it was pretty much accurate historically. I'm no expert though and I'm sure that there are some on this forum that will take exception to a few deviations from the accepted "truth". I was particularluy impressed with the way that they treated Kit Carson. They emphasised the fact that he was not a true "trappper/mountain man". I have put this on my repeat list of things that I would want to watch again.

 

If Kit Carson is not a "true" mountaim man then what is the definition of a "true" mountain man according to the show? Sounds like they had a bunch of baloney in the documentary.

 

[graybeard]

Caught part of the show. Lost interest when the "mountain man" demonstrating a rifle poured a charge straight from the horn into the barrel. Television is entertainment, not history. graybeard

 

[Black Hand]

...poured a charge straight from the horn into the barrel. Television is entertainment, not history. graybeard

This is a modern question of safety. The gun was probably loaded from the horn, hand or measure in the past.

 

[brubincam]

MISSED IT

 

[Black Hand]

MISSED IT

Well, you didn't miss much. The first time I saw it, I very nearly turned it off. So much of it was based on the Hollywood Mountain Man, but it does include some actual history (at least as interpreted by the "experts" at the History channel). Admittedly, most wouldn't know any different......

 

[mrbortlein]

Television is entertainment, not history. graybeard

So, were you entertained? We know for the most part that not many people of the time were literate enough to keep good records. So we must look past the :bull: and try to enjoy what's left. Which brings to thought, how much bias is history based upon. No one can agree on too many things. I believe that people's thoughts about history should be like their thoughts on religion: their own and don't try to force others to think or believe the exact same way that you do.
mrbortlein

 

Twenty seven years old, huh? Maybe ya should listen to the Ol' Graybeard. :hmm: And, of course, read and study a lot. :wink:

There are an awful lot of powder measures hanging off of old bags and horns not to have used them. Charging from the horn was an emergency measure. Those old boys weren't stupid. They used these guns every day and used them well. :hatsoff:

 

[Ohio Joe]

Caught part of the show. Lost interest when the "mountain man" demonstrating a rifle poured a charge straight from the horn into the barrel. Television is entertainment, not history. graybeard

If I remember right, later in the program they show a mountain man blowing off his hand when loading from the horn without a powder measure...

Now, some place on this site are some short blogs you can click on and one blog has a feller showing three different ways to load your flintlock.

1. The way we accept today, using a powder measure and patch and ball...

2. Using powder measure and quick start bullet block to load from...

3. Loading from the horn with no powder measure and no patch under the ball...

He does all three of these very quickly... Personally if I were to show someone quick loading, I think I would have did number '3' above first, with no shots ran through the barrel until that first one which would be number 3...

However, I'm not an idiot and I like my hand so I think I will stay with the powder measure and not show anyone how to quick load without a powder measure, and not be around anyone who does practice this...

Just my thoughts...

The blog was found on this site that was posted here on this forum.
[url] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl_oWZqNzj8[/url]

after going to this site above, you should do a search for; Shooting my flintlock

It's not quite the way I remember it, but it's bad enough!

 

[JiminTexas]

Kit Carson was never a trapper. He traveled through the mountains, but never made his living as a trapper according to the documentary. The documentary was about the fur trade and the men who worked it and what they did when the fur trade played out. That is how Kit Carson got into the discussion. Many of the trappers became scouts or guides for pilgrims headed west. Kit Carson was a great guide and explorer, not a trapper and that is what they were trying to say.

 

[longshot47]

Kit Carson was never a trapper. He traveled through the mountains, but never made his living as a trapper according to the documentary. The documentary was about the fur trade and the men who worked it and what they did when the fur trade played out. That is how Kit Carson got into the discussion. Many of the trappers became scouts or guides for pilgrims headed west. Kit Carson was a great guide and explorer, not a trapper and that is what they were trying to say.

___________________________

Now this'll thicken the stew:
Happens so that one of the books I'm reading; 'Blood and Thunder', by Hampton Sides, speaks about Carson, the 'trapper'. Chapter one reveals that in 1829, a 19 year old Carson accompanied Ewing Young and aproximately 40 'Taos fur men', as a 'trapper', on a trapping expedition into the tributaries of the Gila river.
Further mention is made that....'trapping held his [Carson's] interest for the next dozen years'.
Granted, this is drawn from an historical narrative, but Sides references volumes of credible source material, occupying 26 pages of copious notes on research.
Who knows.........? :v
Longshot

 

[tg]

I watch this everytime it is on the tube just for enjoyment and do not look for any historic value, there was not a very strong historical editing factor involved in this production. I believe this is the one that shows the Hugh Glass story, and shows him crawling off and shows the loops in his cartridge belt in 1820 I think :shocked2:

 

[Desert Ratxx]

I'm with you tg, I try to catch it as well. I'd love to be able to plan for it so I can tape it. I like to put stuff like that one when I'm working on projects for the background. I had to break down and get Jeremiah Johnson and the Mountain Men on DVD cause I wore the tapes out making mocs, bags etc.

 

[whiskey]

My over all impression of the show was POOR!
As I remember the clothing looked more like hollywood mountainmen than the real thing. One so called expert showed an example of brick tea as I recall. Brick tea wasn't used in the western fur trade and is completly incorrect for western mountain man stuff. To me the shows appearence resembled a modern rendezvous with all the incorrect things instead of an accurate portrayal of the times.

 

[jasontn]

i read an article on that movie in a western magazine. fromwhat the article said it was done 90% by actors, mostly doing a loose interertation and using whatever left over movie props they could find. Rex Allen Norman did part of, hes written in muzzleloader mag for yrs and did a chapter in the books of buckskinning nad id say his was the only near historical part of the show. i agree with you guys it is a good pass time to watch while i make stuff often wondered if others did that too.
jason

 

[redwing]

Whiskey you win the Blue Ribbon on this one. Most of this was filmed at the Ft. Bridger Rondy about 97' or 98'. Many of the fellows in this I have known or know yet. Some of them have passed on. One of the Hawk Throwers was at the "Meet Me On The Bear rondy" last week-end.
They were asked to do things by the film crew that they were against but money talks. The Ft. Bridger Rondy can draw as many as 40,000 visitors and 200 traders each year. The Rondy is the 2nd largest event in Wyoming after Frontier Days in Chey. Yes it looked Rondy, cause it was. :grin: :wink:

 

Kit Carson was never a trapper. He traveled through the mountains, but never made his living as a trapper according to the documentary. The documentary was about the fur trade and the men who worked it and what they did when the fur trade played out. That is how Kit Carson got into the discussion. Many of the trappers became scouts or guides for pilgrims headed west. Kit Carson was a great guide and explorer, not a trapper and that is what they were trying to say.

Where do they get this stuff? Yet another reason why I don't watch TV. This medium has a tendency to try to reduce everything into 10 second sound bytes and history is a damned poor discipline to reduce to that level. Is anything well represented in 10 seconds? Even 30 minutes is a short time. The world might be a better place if we were still getting around on horseback. Maybe we wouldn't always be expecting quick fixes and quick answers.

Kit made a living at trapping for more than a decade and he's as mountain as they come. It sounds to me like someone skimmed over Marc Simmons' recent book about Kit and his 3 wives and thought it was the definitive biography on him. Its a great book that really delves into the sort of man that Kit was by looking at his relationships, but it gives little time to his years as a trapper. There were a lot of reasons Kit became an American icon, but having Fremont and Brewerton as press agent was a relatively small part of it. He may not have been a big man on the outside, but on the inside Kit was 6'10' and 325lb. You'd have to go a long way to find a man who was more deserving on his later status. Anyway, there are a lot of those old fashioned square thingees with words all over them that are excellent resources on Kit and his time in the mountains. He was one of a rare fraternity among trappers who rose above the engagee status, which was sort of indentured servitude. It took some knowledge and skill at trapping to do that.

Sometimes I think its unfortunate that many of our early historians in this field were from a time that was still so heavily impacted by the period of western expansionism and Manifest Destiny. I do not fault people like Dale Morgan, Henry Carter and others as historians, but they always had a tendency to look at the long-term political effects of a person's life and the lives of the trappers as a group. These guys simply didn't live like that. They didn't go West with the intention of opening a frontier. They did it for money, adventure and the shear h*ll of it. This attitude among historian puts emphasis on the latter part of these men's lives when they were struggling to make a living because everything they'd known had just gone down the tubes. The fact that men like Carson and Bridger in their later years went on trapping 'vacations' to relive the old days even though there was no market for the fur gives credence to the fact that they would rather have the old ways back and were forced into their roles as explorer, scout, guide, NDN agent, etc. In short, no one stayed a career trapper, but I think most of these guys wished they could've.

Please don't take my irrational soapbox railing against the evils of TV and the now-generation above personally. I'm just finding myself fast approaching curmudgeon status and struggling to deal with that reality.

Sean