I appreciate everybody’s patience these past couple of months as I’ve been experimenting with different adjustments to The Practical Woodsman. For example, you’ve seen me introduce a new logo, and then you’ve seen various adjustments made to that logo.
Another new change I wanted to let all of you know - especially my Locals friends - is that I’m doing away with “Podcasts” and “Exclusives” and combining them into simply The Practical Woodsman Show. I think this will simplify things for everybody a lot.
Things were different back when I was offering an audio-version only of The Practical Woodsman and uploading to the podcast platforms. It made sense then for me to split up the two different show types of Podcasts and Exclusives, because I could save certain things for video and other things for discussions only. Now that I’m not doing any shows that are meant to be listened to only, there’s no longer any reason to continue splitting up my shows that way.
Along with this change, please know that I have changed the numbering system for my videos. All the videos that used to be “Podcasts” and “Exclusives” are now numbered in sequence together and simply called “Episodes”. So moving forward you’ll simply see The Practical Woodsman (Show) Ep. 122, Ep 123, Ep 124, and so forth. I’ve already gone back in time and made all of these changes, as well as update every single one of the thumbnail images of these videos.
I really think I’m nearing the end of any updates for this year - and hopefully for several years to come. I appreciate y’all being along for the ride!
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
