A) I'm pretty sure that there is a period account of a fight between a white and an Indian from sometime in the 1790s that mentions a knife hung from a shooting bag. Unfortunately that is all that I remember - I saw it a very long time ago and while the date stuck in my mind the rest I have forgotten.
Having said that, there is a very practical reason not to do so - if the knife sheath is attached to the shooting bag then one has to be wearing the bag to keep the knife handy. Unless they were under threat of imminent attack I doubt pioneers wore their shooting bags while working around the farm, as they would get heavy and in the way, and they would have needed their knives regularly. (There is another account that mentions a man, who when getting set to go hunting, went to get "the butcher knife" from his wife. Apparently they had only one in the family. I expect he had a folder as well, but the account does indicate that not everyone had multiple sheath knives available.)
I use a razor knife at work all the time, and while it nominally lives in my tool pouch I often end up depositing the heavy pouch somewhere and slipping the knife into a pocket. I expect that a similar dynamic was in play for someone out mowing hay or hoeing weeds and needed a knife handy for odd jobs.
B) I believe that the Native neck knives and sheaths had religious significance and where usually dedicated scalping (function, not design) or war knives. I think that they used other knives (often folders) for mundane purposes.
C) Doddridge is writing with a specific purpose in mind: To inform those young frivolous whippersnappers of how his father's generation lived. Self-sufficiency and plain living are his theme, and he is going to play those up for all they are worth. His comments about awls probably should be taken more as a critique of a generation that couldn't mend their own shoes than an indication of how every frontiersman carried his awl per se.
So, yeah, read his descriptions of frontier living as an oblique explanation of why he disapproves of his granddaughter's desire for a set of soft dancing shoes. :wink:
