Me personally I'm a fan of the Firefly version of ye olde west thymes. I'd fight the Reavers in a second.

Shiny. Let’s be bad guys.

I spent a lot of time driving back and forth across this country and I used to look at the terrain and think about what it would have been like with a wagon. Especially leaving Reno and going up Truckee the old Donner party route, that must have been brutal with a wagon.

quote:

Originally posted by sigspecops:
could you imagine the boredom?

I’ve long been struck by pictures of the crowds at public events such as political rallies, parades, and even executions (usually hangings) in the 19th century and even the early twentieth. Things like membership in fraternal organizations were also far more popular than today. When the highlight of a normal day’s entertainment was to sit on the porch (in good weather) and watch the foot and horse traffic go by, those other events would have been popular draws.

But how much actual boredom was there?

I want a cup of tea today and what do I do? Fill the cup from a faucet, put it in the microwave, wait a couple of minutes, dunk the teabag in the hot water for a brief brew. I usually have a quart of green tea made up in a Pyrex container with water that was heated on an electric stove and which took no more effort than turning a dial.

In those days, though? Let’s start with getting the wood that will be used in the stove. Unless one was wealthy enough to pay to have it delivered, that was a major project in itself. And don’t forget: transportation was by horse, possibly to someplace that required more than a day to get to. Then no chainsaws. And after it was home, chopping the logs to be usable in the stove. Then getting the fire going and waiting an extended period for the water to get hot enough. And speaking of the water, where did that come from? Not from a faucet in the house. And the tea? Not via an Internet order.

Oh, yeah: the horses. You didn’t just lock them up in a garage overnight. They were expensive and required a lot of care. If you didn’t have one, you walked, and travelling three miles in an hour is moving right along.

That’s just one minor example of what was involved in just simple daily life. When I was a kid in the late 1950s my grandparents in Minnesota still didn’t have indoor plumbing, and all heat, including the kitchen stove, was wood fired. I still remember the chore of drawing water from an outdoor manual pump and carrying it into the house in buckets. But that was a major convenience as compared with getting water from a (hopefully) nearby river and hoping it wasn’t downstream from someone’s outhouse.

When my father was stationed in France during the same period, we had plumbing, but house heating was by coal—a step up from wood for several reasons, but it still had to be put in the furnace, lighted, and the ashes removed periodically.

I could go on and on, including the fact that many jobs required working 10 or more hours a day, six days a week. People didn’t know what they didn’t know, but boredom was probably less of a burden for most of them in those days than we might imagine.

Need water? Seal in the pump goes bad?

You need the seal and enough water to prime the pump or you die.

7 to 12 kids just to keep the everyday task of a farm going.

You have to sleep in the attic to keep the woodland creatures from eating a child.

Think I'll stick with growing up after modern conveniences and before itty bitty screens were everywhere.

quote:

Originally posted by fischtown7:
I spent a lot of time driving back and forth across this country and I used to look at the terrain and think about what it would have been like with a wagon. Especially leaving Reno and going up Truckee the old Donner party route, that must have been brutal with a wagon.

A must see documentary, quite sobering.

Knott's Berry Farm is enough for me.

Now That I think about it, Knott's Berry Farm used to be a lot better.

.....So..... How about a time machine for Knott's in 1979?

Re: “Imagine the boredom,” and echoing what Sigfreund posted.

I don’t believe so. Just surviving was a full time job. I believe most men worked from dark to dark just to sustain a family—and their wives and kids right along side them.

Imagine reading anything back in the day, particularly by candlelight.

I’d probably be dead or at least light a limb. Got a staph infection in my last thirties and had a helluva time going through antibiotic therapy for several week. In 1890 it would have been amputation or death.

quote:

Originally posted by Citadel:
In 1890 it would have been amputation or death.

Not necessarily. They had some fairly effective modalities back then (and further back):

Plant based therapeutics - Some are used today to treat antibiotic resistant pathogens.

Iodine - Still used today as an effective antiseptic.

Heavy metals - Silver was the most commonly prescribed antibiotic prior to the discovery of penicillin. It is still used today in certain things for that purpose. Lewis and Clark carried mercury tablets. It is no longer used, but was up until the 70s in formulations such as Mercurochrome and Merthiolate. Fun fact: The latter is how archeologists were able to find their campsites as mercury does not break down and is expelled in poop. Find the latrine, find the campsite.

No, medicines were no where near as effective as today, but they generally worked for the time.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
They had some fairly effective modalities back then (and further back):

I have read many medical history accounts and I’m curious about that statement because it’s not something I’ve run across. Any links to support it?

Many medical practices before the early 20th century were simply hokum and based on appearance and placebo effects rather than actual effectiveness. There were obvious exceptions, and not everyone developed infections and died when suffering a compound (open) fracture without an amputation, for example, but it was more common than not. And many died because the amputation site became infected. If there had been any sort of effective way known (and accepted*) to reliably prevent infections, the mortality rate would have been much lower.

One account I read contended that President McKinley died from the bullet wound he received precisely because of the medical “treatment” he received, and that was in the 20th century.

I asked the AI Gemini how mercury was used to treat syphilis, and how effective it was, and the response was very enlightening as just one example.

* Using antiseptic methods to prevent infections was first widely accepted in Europe during the 19th century, but the methods were initially strongly rejected in the U.S. when their developers and practitioners tried to promote them here.

Even the Hollywood version didn't look very attractive to me.
Hot and dusty and then the Indians would show up to cause trouble.
A shot of Whiskey before dentistry or surgery? No thanks.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:

...A shot of Whiskey before dentistry or surgery? No thanks.

Yeah, but at least you wouldn't drive home drunk after surgery in the 1800's.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Gustofer:
They had some fairly effective modalities back then (and further back):

I have read many medical history accounts and I’m curious about that statement because it’s not something I’ve run across. Any links to support it?
END QUOTE

sigfreund, you and I have many similar interests, you get into them way deeper than me. So that being said, I'm no expert on early medicines, I do come across "general comments" from time to time, but no real specific cases.
quote:
Beside Rush’s pills, over thirty different drugs were brought. Some of these included laudanum, opium, calomel, and mercury–then the standard medicine used in the treatment of syphilis.
end quote

https://www.history.nd.gov/exh...sclark/medicine.html

This guy used mercury a lot,
Benjamin Rush:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush

On a different note:

The Apaches used several different plants, again, just general info. no specific cases.
They did not have a cure for small pox, pretty much wiped them out.
Some plants the Apache used:
AI Overview
Apache traditional medicine relied heavily on the abundant, diverse flora of the American Southwest. Healers used native plants to treat everything from minor wounds and colds to severe inflammation.Common medicinal plants and their applications include:

Ponderosa Pine: Used as an antibacterial dressing. The sticky pitch and peeled inner bark were applied to cuts and stab wounds to act as a natural bandage and promote healing.

Ocotillo: The roots were ground up and used in bathing to reduce pain and swelling.Rabbitbrush: Crushed and boiled to make a tea for stomach issues or applied directly as a natural poultice to heal sores.Sage: Boiled to make a soothing tea used to alleviate headaches, coughs, and sore throats.Yarrow: A versatile vulnerability (healing plant) used as a topical remedy to treat rashes, burns, and general swelling.


I would prefer the kewl drugs today over the goofy plants used back then .

Part of the common mythos about primitive, err… less-technically sophisticated cultures is that they knew things about medicine in general that we moderns are just now rediscovering—if at all. And some of that belief is no doubt true.

If physicians in the U.S. in the late 19th century refused to accept that antisepsis in surgical or obstetric practice could help prevent infections and other diseases, or that another doctor was so skeptical of Pasteur’s germ theory of disease that he supposedly drank a cholera culture to prove him wrong, why would they believe that indigenous peoples could possibly know anything about medicine that was superior to their own knowledge?

That said, for every possible example of aboriginal Americans’ knowing a useful treatment that wasn’t adopted by the invaders, there are literally countless modern counterexamples of things they knew nothing about and had no effective way of treating. And by “modern,” I’m referring mostly to the explosion of medical advancements in the West in the past century or so, and which has only accelerated over time. When I was a kid 70 years or so ago, my father told me that pouring molten pine pitch into a serious cut would help prevent infection. That’s no doubt true, thank you, but I’ll still rely on sterile dressings, antiseptics, and if necessary antibiotics if at all possible.

As for mercury being found today in old campsites, yes, in the old days the element was prescribed for any number of ailments, real and imagined. The fact that people were taking it, though, doesn’t prove that it was a good idea in the vast majority of cases any more than the universally-accepted practice of blood-letting dating back centuries—and which may have helped kill George Washington—was a good idea. Lest we forget, the average life expectancy in the West hasn’t continually increased because we’re eating more McDonald’s hamburgers than wild-caught fish and plant roots.

I’m not saying that our ancestors were totally ignorant of good medical practices or that everything they did and believed was wrong, but a large part of it was, and they often survived despite what they did and believed, not because of it.