|
While traveling, there might be 40-100 or men with the pack train or in a fur brigade. A group of men of this size was much to unwieldy to be easily organized for cooking, drawing supplies, camp duties, etc. As a result, a number of "messes" would be organized consisting of generally 8-10 men, each mess with its own captain.
"On
the 18th [or 20th] of April we reached Lexington,
where we found our party camped in tents, awaiting our arrival. There the
sumptuous fares were all over. Mr. Campbell called me up and said,
"Charles, I will now assign you to your mess. I have a mess of nine
first-rate old voyageurs — French boys from Written by Charles Larpenteur in Forty Years a Fur Trader. At this time Larpentuer was a young man going on his first trip up to the mountains as a hired hand with the pack train Sublette and Campbell were taking to supply the Rocky Mountain Fur Company at the Rendezvous of 1833.
"A description of the formation of our camp may, perhaps, not be amiss here. The party is divided into messes of eight men, and each mess is allowed a separate tent. The captain of a mess, (who is generally an "old hand," i.e. an experienced forester, hunter, or trapper,) receives each morning the rations of pork, flour, &c. for his people, and they choose one of their body as cook for the whole. Our camp now consists of nine messes, of which Captain W.'s forms one, although it only contains four persons besides the cook." John Kirk
Townsend recorded the above description in his Journal
on April 29, while traveling with Nathaniel
Wyeth's pack train to the 1834 Rendezvous.
Back to Everyday Life
|