Woodcraft and Camping
This is the book that launched a thousand camping trips. George Washington Sears, writing under the pen name Nessmuk, was the original lightweight camping prophet, a 19th-century outdoorsman who proved that you don't need an army of porters to find wilderness worthiness. He wrote for the overworked, the city-weary, the soul that needed trees instead of streetlights. The advice here is practical and specific: how to pack so your knapsack doesn't break you, what gear actually matters, how to build a fire that catches and a shelter that holds. But beneath the instructions beats something more radical. Sears believed outdoor recreation was medicine, that meaningful rest required getting far enough from civilization to remember what silence sounds like. This book has been teaching people how to leave comfortably since the 1880s, and the reason it still works is simple. The woods haven't changed. Neither has the need.
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“For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd”
— George Washington Sears
“When the mountain streams are frozen and the Nor'land winds are out; when the winter winds are drifting the bitter sleet and snow; when winter rains are making out-of-door life unendurable; when season, weather and law combine to make it "close time" for beast, bird and man, it is well that a few congenial spirits should, at some favorite trysting place, gather around the glowing stove and exchange yarns, opinions and experiences.””
— George Washington Sears
“Progress? Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had better be decided sixty years hence. And, just what has happened to the obscure valley of Marsh Creek, is happening today, on a larger scale, all over the land. It is the same old story of grab and greed. Let us go on the "make" today, and "whack up" tomorrow; cheating each other as villainously as we may, and posterity be d”
— George Washington Sears
“clear; fold the cloth snugly and put it in another vessel, pour the solution on””
— George Washington Sears
