SP1: If your area was not sustainable in 1880’s probably not going to be sustainable in a grid down.
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About the Author: NC Scout
NC Scout is the nom de guerre of a former Infantry Scout and Sergeant in one of the Army’s best Reconnaissance Units. He has combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a series of courses focusing on small unit skills rarely if ever taught anywhere else in the prepping and survival field, including his RTO Course which focuses on small unit communications. In his free time he is an avid hunter, bushcrafter, writer, long range shooter, prepper, amateur radio operator and Libertarian activist. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via his blog at brushbeater.wordpress.com .
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GUNS N GEAR
Good comments!
In Ohio we are home to Amish and Mennonite communities who have lived in the 1880s since day one! Yeah, sure–they look at you as “the English,” with a certain hesitancy–BUT, once you prove yourself to them (help them with their work, allow them to hunt your land, befriend them) they will befriend you.
Helped a local Amish Family out, and when I needed to plant 20,000 hardwood seedlings on my place–the word went out along the grapevine. BAM! 30 Amish “clan” members appeared, all husky, strong males, and made the chore not only doable, but pleasant! Sixteen-year-old ‘MEN’ who worked in their Dad’s sawmills, furniture shops, and grain farms who knew HARD WORK.
It was my old Pappy’s mantras: “One hand washes the other,” and “treat others as you wish to be treated.”
I’d buy the Amish some sweets–chocolate was their fave–and they would swap me out great Swiss cheese, corn, oats, eggs, whatever was available. Cash? They had no need of it! Looked at the green paper like it was from Mars! Friendship, honesty, reliability, decency–THAT was their coin of the realm with them.
Connectivity….start to “form up” now. Get that web started.
We have those symbiotic relationships in PA too. Great Christian folks cant be beat for neighbors and my area is blessed with some of those folks. Not neat enough but some…lol
R
Do not become too discouraged by the state of your area in the 1880’s. Even then taxes and mortgages were as much the determining factor of IF someone kept their homestead. Taxes and Mortgages needed to be paid is currency. While a family may live well on the land if they can not pay the taxman or bank it’s of no consequence.
This should also be the primary focus of today, no matter how well you can water, feed, cloth and “survive”, all is list if the taxman or bank,’s terms cannot be satisfied.
You see this on shows like “Homestead Rescue’ in which some family with good intentions and lots of ignorance set up in an isolated, ‘safe’ location but which has no water readily available, whether ’cause it’s the desert, or in the mountains but with any water needing a very deep and expensive well. Other live in areas that flood out too easily, or have no ready access to good land or wood. Lots of West Texas is like that – still large areas with very, very few people that are far off evacuation routes, but anybody who retreats out there had better really know what they are doing and have enough money and skills to compensate, e.g. greenhouses, water catching and storage, and some ways to naturally heat in the winter months.
That always makes me laugh. People think they are going to homestead and raise a garden or livestock without any water. You gotta be 10 kinds of STUPID to do that, no common sense or any planning at all…. ONE COW requires 10-30 gallons of water per day. PER DAY. The reason people are on those shitty tracts of land is very simple- the land is CHEAP. You can buy crappy land all day for $200 an acre- Why? Because it’s WORTHLESS LAND. Everyone wants to go live in the woods and not go to work 9-5, “escape the rat race”…. and that’s great- but it COSTS MONEY and many of the people doing it think it’s the solution to the fact that they are poor to start with— it’s not. I dunno if you watch Yellowstone or not but the evil developer lady had a hell of a line about this fact- “Montana is poverty with a view”.
Its true for the entire “redoubt”.
And magically they are paying $10,000 an acre now for scrub brush.
Total waste of time and money. It’ll cost $40,000 just to run utilities. And that’s a cheap estimate.
Those are good thoughts. My location in deep south Texas is extremely hot and humid most of the year. Summer begins around mid April and ends mid November, with a few weak cool fronts at the tail ends. The good news is rarely ever snows here, with hard freezes (24+ hours or longer duration) spaced mainly decades apart. So deep cold is not present and have a long growing season. Moderate rain, but droughts often occur. Good natural sources of plant life, but a lot has been removed for ‘Civilization’. Too, research is required to not only know what to gather but when and how to gather.
Which leads to the bad – very few natural water sources. Very few year round streams, some lakes but depending on rain fall, may or may not be present. A very high water table (often less than 10 feet deep), made of mostly saline water would have to be distilled. Without electricity to pump, shallow wells and sources of firewood to do this will be required.
It was sparsely inhabited in old times. Our area would be tough to live in without electricity at pointed out in excellent video. Thank you for pointing this out.
Ragnar Benson laid this all out over 30 years ago in his Survival Retreats book. His test for a Retreat area was pretty simple- if the area supported large numbers of Indians, it was a good place to be. If not, you don’t want to live there. A pretty easy test.
Yup.