Fur Trade Bed

Looking for thoughts/advice on what was the trappers beding. Besides blankets were canvas or oilskin bedrolls used?

bendback said:

Looking for thoughts/advice on what was the trappers beding. Besides blankets were canvas or oilskin bedrolls used?

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You do not mention period or area, but there is plenty of primary documentation for the use of canvas & oilskins for shelter in the 18th & 19th century. However, canvas bed sheets did exist & were used by the middling sorts.
Keith.

Blankets or robes - no canvas/oilcloth bedrolls that I can recall. Some were lucky to have a blanket....

Having a senior moment and can’t think of the name of the writer. But I recall in Wah Ta Yah and the Taos Trail how happy the writer was to get to sleep between sheets in a bed on a rolled out mattress in Taos.
Soldiers were at times issued bags that could serve as a mattress when filled with litter, but I don’t know of them in a MM or or frontier diary. Schoolcraft records making a bed under a bluff from litter.
They had to make some sort of beds beside just a blanket or a robe on the bare ground, but Schoolcraft the only one I can think of discribing it

tenngun said:

Having a senior moment and can’t think of the name of the writer. But I recall in Wah Ta Yah and the Taos Trail how happy the writer was to get to sleep between sheets in a bed on a rolled out mattress in Taos.
Soldiers were at times issued bags that could serve as a mattress when filled with litter, but I don’t know of them in a MM or or frontier diary. Schoolcraft records making a bed under a bluff from litter.
They had to make some sort of beds beside just a blanket or a robe on the bare ground, but Schoolcraft the only one I can think of discribing it

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Lewis Hector Garrard, Tenngun.

Yeah had to look it up after I posted.
Last time I read it to was a couple of years ago, maybe three

Osborne Russel wrote in his journal of using eshamores (spelling incorrect) aka horse blankets made of buffalo hides for his bed. I haven’t read it lately but I believe a wool blanket is also inferred. The wool blankets as I understand were much tighter weave then we see these days. This is during the hunt, winter Quarters was different I’m sure as they didn’t move around as much.

Le Loup said:

You do not mention period or area, but there is plenty of primary documentation for the use of canvas & oilskins for shelter in the 18th & 19th century. However, canvas bed sheets did exist & were used by the middling sorts.
Keith.

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Thanks All

Le Loup, The period would be generally between 1800-1840

I think it was Bill Williams that bragged aboutnever having more then one blanket. That suggest multiple blankets was common.
He did make his living as a trapper. So he had skins and robes and of corse saddle blankets.

tenngun said:

I think it was Bill Williams that bragged aboutnever having more then one blanket. That suggest multiple blankets was common.
He did make his living as a trapper. So he had skins and robes and of course saddle blankets.

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Yeah....and I think Ol' Bill had a reputation of .....enhancing (yeah....that's it....) the truth a bit, too.