Baker Tents?

[satx78247]

Does anyone KNOW for sure when "the baker-style tent" was first used?
(I've seen references to "something similar" in various articles/books claiming from 1820-1900.)

yours, satx

 

[tenngun]

The general reply I've seen on this is Baker =baker,and the tent design came from the first world war as a tent for bakers. Sears woodsman tentalways looked to me like a baker, and Im thinking this was late 1840s. Painting of cooks voages often show makeshift tents on the beach made of sails that look just like a baker set up, and to me the half faced camps painted by Miller look like bakers but seenm to be brush and mixed. I've no doubt somthing like a baker goes back to Africa 1/2 a million years ago, but I use a wedge because no one has yet told me I cant prove they used them.

 

[satx78247]

The main reason that I'm asking is that there is a description of an "open-faced shelter" mentioned in a WBTS "letter home to MS" that sounds like "a baker". - I just don't know.

THANKS, tex

 

[tenngun]

The first positive discription of a tent with sewn on sides and a roof that stops at a panal makes a back wall that I know of is Sears woodsman tent.I no longer have a copy of it so cant look it up but I think it was late 1840s. Half faced camps go way back, and a lean to with makeshift side tied on or just spread aganest is always possible....a rose by any other name. I doubt that sailmakers on the cooks voyge mentioned above would have done anything more then tack on a side. Like dimonds it stands to reason they were used. Like dimonds we have no proofe it was ever used. A term like half faced tent could many any sort of one side open stucture including a wedge with one side lifted, or a brush,wattle or log slanted lean-to with a canvas roof.

 

[satx78247]

A "half-faced tent" could mean nearly anything, except a tent closed up on all sides.

THANKS again, satx

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Ok there is the "half-shelter tent" which is just that, half a walled tent, but no awning. There is the "Baker-tent" which is the half-shelter, with the awning sewn to the ridge.

The only objection, really, is that a Baker or a half-shelter tent, has sewn in sides... while it's perfectly allowed for a camper to erect a shelter-half, and then attach sides from the supporting poles. What we today call a "shelter half" or a "Lean-to" are mentioned in Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe if I am correctly remembering what I read the other night.

LD

 

[crockett]

Marcy in his book Prairie Travel (1850 "ish") speaks about half shelters. Marcy was stationed in the West for 25 years so he was pre-1840 but whether the gear he speaks about is pre-1840, that's harder to figure out. It might have been that certain wedge tents used in the military were in two parts, joined at the ridge and two men would each carry a shelter half. As such, just one shelter half, if used alone, makes a lean-to type shelter.
The 1837 Miller paintings of the mountain men show a few blankets draped in trees, etc. as a sort of lean-to but I've tried to figure out when a lean to tent made of canvas first was used and haven't been too successful in getting an answer.
The pre-1840 mountain men made semi dome half shelters made by bending over poles into a hoop form but to the best of my knowledge these pole frames were covered with animal hides, not a canvas lean-to tent.
William Drummond Stewart speaks about old teepee covers being cut down to make a "mini tepee" about 7' tall. You see these in a few paintings, I think Catlin. You can tell the difference because a tepee has a door and smoke flaps and the "mini-tepee" as a split in front that goes all the way to the top. On my "to do" list is to get a large canvas drop cloth and make one of these mini-tepees- I think it would be pretty easy to do- I just haven't found time yet. Marcy speaks about these as well. They are to some extent an open shelter. Marcy said they were commonly used by the old mountain men.

 

[tenngun]

In a lot of ways we are pushing the envolope of hc. Today a camp is a family affair, somthig not seen in the old days very often. Back then a man travaling would sleep out under the stars, hole up in a clif face, or throw up some sort of brush shelter. If he was going to stay, like at rendezvou, for a few weeks, he would throwup somthing from the natural enviorment."Tents"refered to in historic jornals may often have been naught but a square of canvas, buff robe or the blanket on a half wedge as painted by miller.
The military did put men under regulation tents, Often 6 to a wedge.Plum-martin records just spreading the tent tarp like over his mess.
Women would only be camping if traveling from one place to another, and for the sake of domestic bliss her man best get her under a real roof ASAP.
If we could show a date that the very first Baker was made, and it was after our time, would it be any less hc then a civilan in a milatary wedge. I set my wedge up on some bark on cedar poles so it looks more like I made it on site, but a real ozark deer hunter cr 1820 probably would not have carried any sort of cut to fit tentage. I doubt that any longhunter or MM carriered anything more then a tarp at most, and the 'tents'written about were just tarps and pack covers.

 

[Luke MacGillie]

Regarding Baker tents specificly, the tentsmiths website has a little bit to say about them.
http://tentsmiths.com/period-tents-baker-tents.html

Regarding what a Mountian Man camp looked like, we dont have to guess, descriptions of actual people who where there survive.


"Up to this period, we encamped without order, helter-skelter, just as it happened, allowing our horses to run loose night and day; but now, when we halted for the night, our camp assumed a somewhat martial appearance. The order of its arrangement was this, - a space of fifty yards square was marked out, one side of which was always along the brink of some stream. Four of our tents occupied the corners, and of the remaining four, one was placed in the middle of each side. The intervening spaces between the tents were barricaded by a breast”‘work formed of our baggage and horse furniture. The space within the square, was dotted with the iron heads of nearly two hundred hard wood pins, each one foot in length, and one and three”‘fourths inches in diameter, drove into the ground, to which our horses and mules were fastened. Each man was provided with a wooden mallet to drive the pins with, and when, just before sunset, all were put into requisition, such a din as they created, would be a caution to Paganini. Immediately after sundown, the words "catch up," resounded through camp, all hands flew to the horses, and all was noise and bustle for some minutes. Forty odd of us 'cordelling' our stubborn mules, - who the more you want them to go, the more they won't - into camp, with oaths and curses, not only loud, but deep - it was wicked, but, poor fellows they couldn't help it! - might have been seen, if one could for laughter have kept his eyes open, upon any such occasion. A few moments and all was quiet again, horses and mules securely fastened to their respective pickets, and the men at their tents, seated around kettles of boiled pork and corn, with pans, spoons, and grinders in motion. Keen hunger made us relish the repast, which else the very dogs had refused, - however all contented themselves as well as they might with such fare, looking forward with a sort of dreamy delight to the time when rich heaps of fat buffalo meat, should grace and garnish our encampments."

Life in the Rocky mountains, 1830-1835, by Warren Angus Ferris

Tent's really are Tents IMHO

 

[satx78247]

I wonder where "tentsmiths" got their information. - Do you have any idea?????

yours, satx

 

[Luke MacGillie]

Thoreau's journal that covers the 1853 period is available from Amazon.

It is pretty easy to see if you take a detached look at things that many of the old stalwart's of Buckskinning gear come straight out of books like Kephart's "Camping and Woodcraft" Folding and or socketed handle skillets, pack baskets, baker tents, these all played heavily into turn of the century camping books, and those folks who started us down this road used the available resources they had........

https://archive.org/stream/bookofcampingwoo00keph#page/42/mode/2up/search/baker

 

[tenngun]

Yes I have read this before , but what is the tent referee to . Are you seeing a wedge, wall tent, marquee, or shall we say it pryamid or baker? I don't know. I could see them carring a tent, but just as easy I could see two pack tarps tied in to a wedge without doors, or a square on an angle not going all the way to the ground , like just the roof of a baker. Wish there was a way to tell.
Nice post,I miss Bill Tyler, but even free trappers were much more milatary in their camps.

 

[Luke MacGillie]

I totally question everything, so we are kindered spirits in that regard, but I do really think in this case, a tent is a wedge tent, is a wedge tent.......

 

[tenngun]

:hmm: I think those could be wedges :wink:

 

[satx78247]

The reason that I asked about the source of "tentsmith" information is that a GLARING ERROR (to those of us who are interested in the first days of the BSA) in another area of that same source credits Dan Beard with inventing the "Forester" tent.

Dan Beard stated that he bought the first four Forester tents for The Sons of Daniel Boone from a "supply company in Philadelphia" used.
(It is believed by most historians of the BSA that Louis Comfort Tiffany paid for much of the first equipment to help start what was to later become the Boy Scouts in the USA.)

The major reason that I'm interested in the "baker tent" is that one of Mary Emily Martin's (Her Tsalagiyi name was, at least later, SPEAKS THE LEAVES) journal entries from October 1818 "sounds like" a "baker tent".= Some of us Tsalagi Nvdagi are preparing to "re-enact" a portion of THE LONG WALK in 2018-19.
(The major reason that our tribe knows about THE LONG WALK to TX of 1818-19 as we do is that Mary E. Martin was curious about everything and wrote many pages about "minutia" of the long trip to New Spain, for example what she had for breakfast each day.)

Mary was then 15YO, a new bride and a schoolteacher. She was also quite artistic and made many pen & ink sketches in her journals of people/things that she saw on the trail from GA to TX.
(Unfortunately, there are no sketches of tents.)

Note: I've been singularly unsuccessful, for about 15 years, in getting her journals/notes published, as I regard those "traveler's commentaries" important to Texas history, as well as to our tribe's culture/past.
People who are interested in reading the journals/diaries/notes that "Mother Mary" wrote have to go to our tribal office & get permission to see/read them.

yours, satx

 

[Luke MacGillie]

Warren Miller claims to have invented the Forester Tent, so there are plenty of competing claims to be perfectly honest...
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fassitt/canoe_mirror/miller/miller_22.html

 

[greggholmes]

this is from 1917 and it doesnt sound like they are anything new..

Link

this is from Track of the Wolf. I cant find the picture they mention yet..

"Once called a Baker's tent or Baker lean-to, this half-tent replicates an original lean-to shown in a French fur trapper's chalk print, drawn on the plains in 1836."

 

[Luke MacGillie]

I would really like to see this chalk print from 1836.

 

[satx78247]

ME TOO! = IF he can come up with that print, I'll have a Baker made for the 1818-19 event, to go on the oxcart.

yours, satx

 

[Ringel05]

The general reply I've seen on this is Baker =baker,and the tent design came from the first world war as a tent for bakers. Sears woodsman tentalways looked to me like a baker, and Im thinking this was late 1840s. Painting of cooks voages often show makeshift tents on the beach made of sails that look just like a baker set up, and to me the half faced camps painted by Miller look like bakers but seenm to be brush and mixed. I've no doubt somthing like a baker goes back to Africa 1/2 a million years ago, but I use a wedge because no one has yet told me I cant prove they used them.

The references I've seen state the baker got it's name from it's resemblance to the old "Yankee Baker", what we now call a reflector oven and at least can be dated back to the 1850s, most likely much further back. I'd love to see the drawing also. As for a tent, the number of poles needed to set it up would make this a long event tent unless one is used to setting up tepees......