American Survival Blog

Foraging wild edibles is a skill every survivalist should continuously work to develop. No matter how deep your larder is or how productive the micro farm in your backyard is, utilizing nature’s bounty will be necessary to extend the life of your stored foods and add nutritional value to the crops you are (hopefully) growing.

Dale Martin’s The Trapper’s Bible is one of the best resources you can own for learning to harvest wild game. It is also available in a Kindle edition. For wild plants things are more difficult as every region of the country will have different environments that produce very different flora depending on the seasons. Thus a survival library will need to be tailored to where you live. Because you never know what the future holds  being familiar with general foraging techniques and knowledge is a good idea and it is here that online resources truly shine.

One of the best websites I have found so far is the excellent Eat the Weeds. “Green Deane” offers physical classes and keeps a great archive but where Eat the Weeds really shines is the more than one hundred videos featuring the harvesting and use of many common plants that is available free to the public. They can be accessed on the site or through the Eat the Weeds YouTube channel and I urge everyone to check it out.

I should start by saying I happen to be a fan of the .410 even though there are many limitations to its performance when compared to 12ga, 20ga or even the once again popular 16ga. But the scrappy little .410 bore is no more limited than the .22  which has long been known as an everyday survival workhorse cartridge. The problem the .410 runs into is that most people compare the .410 to other shotguns only in terms of amount of lead thrown and “knockdown” power. While the .410 certainly cannot throw lead like a 12ga and should not be anyone’s first choice for a combat shotgun the erstwhile survivalist would do well to remember that guns are tools that will be used for more than killing hordes of looters/zombies/U.N. Blue helmets that populate the day dreams of too many survivalists.

I was reading a post on the excellent site The Survivalist Blog about bug out guns where the author made some really good points, and the comments were the usual mixed bag of commonsense, armchair gunfighting, and pure fantasy that serves only to confuse survival newcomers. The most commonsense advice I saw in those comments and anywhere else is this: carry what you are comfortable with that is suited to your circumstance. Vague to be sure, but it is a general guideline that you should keep in mind when purchasing any weapon. It was this principle that lead me buy a New England Firearms Survivor shotgun in .410/.45 nearly a decade ago. With Taurus’ Judge revolver creating a renewed interest in the .410 for self defense (which has led to the availability of .410 buckshot loads to the public) the .410 deserves some serious thought for a good survival arm or bug out gun.

My reasoning for not dismissing the .410 out of hand if you’re looking for a good survival arm has to do with the characteristics of the .410 itself, which is often where the main criticism of the round comes in. I am not claiming you should or shouldn’t make the .410 your main weapon in your survival battery, but it is a tool that has some benefits for realistic survival scenarios: (more…)

I’m a big fan of the The Nutnfancy Project channel on YouTube. There are literally hundreds of reviews of gear that are interesting and useful though I preface any endorsement of book or video instructions or reviews with the caveat that you should never take anything anyone says as indisputable fact. But TNP is a nice way to see gear you may want to purchase in action, and they have some decent survival training tips.

TNP has a three part video opus on urban survival that I think makes some good points and is something you should check out. I’m posting the first here but the rest are already posted on their page. There’s some jargon (like SAWC which means “Space/Size And Weight Constraints”) but don’t let that overwhelm you, there’s some good grist for the mill here:

An interesting albeit flawed penetration test conducted by YouTube outdoor sport celebrity Heather LaCroix which seems to indicate that .22 magnum ammunition doesn’t outperform .22 long rifle cartridges by wide enough margins to justify the higher price. I was particularly impressed with the ease with which a 36 grain Winchester High Velocity penetrated sheet metal. The rub comes when the .22s are fired into a row of paper back books at close range and the 45 grain Dynapoint .22 mag doing 1550 fps just barely outperforms the little Winchester which not only weighs almost 10 grains less but leaves the barrel 270 fps slower.

Like I said a bit surprising although I’d be curious to see if using round nose ammo gave different results. I’d still be uncomfortable shooting a raccoon or coyote with a .22 LR (something people claim to do with .22 magnums all the time) but I think this just makes me rethink the usefulness of the .22 Mag in those situations, especially given the economics. 500 round bricks of .22 LR are still under $20 whereas people are slapping down around $12-15 bucks for 50 in my neck of the woods. The magnums are still significantly cheaper than centerfire handgun ammunition, but not cheap enough to make the small boost in power worth spending extra money per round.

Of course shooting through paperbacks is not what we use guns for. The .22 mag still discharges much more energy into a flesh and blood target which is why rabbits and such game shot with the round suffer wounds that waste a lot of meat. This is also a strike against the .22 Magnum in my opinion. The hyper velocity .22 LR ammo being produced these days will do anything a .22 Magnum can do cheaper, and other rounds will pick up where the .22 LR leaves off. I assume people interested in the pelts of animals too big of the .22 LR may like the Magnums but I have heard of professional trappers putting down almost everything on their ‘lines with a .22 LR to the back of the head from a pistol. For predator hunters the .22 Hornet teamed with a pistol in .22 LR seems more utilitarian than the .22 Magnum.

I had considered buying a .22 handgun myself but when I started itching for my .327 Federal Magnum I found that other rounds I could feed it like the .32 S&W Long were still widely available and figured that the little .32 filled the niche for a .22 handgun close enough (except for the expense) that I put the money I would have spent on a .22 rig into a few boxes of watermelon killing .32 S&W Long. I don’t see how a .22 Magnum could be more indispensable than the underrated and inexpensive .22 LR so I’m going to agree with  Heather and her husband Jeff on this one.

Imagine yourself in a rapidly de-industrialized America (or Europe, Canada whatever) due to financial collapse exacerbated by food shortages, disease and a chaotic world exploding in the wake of American power receding. Maybe solar storms or an E.M.P. have knocked out the grid, or cap-and-trade has created energy shortages like we see in places like Venezuela and are beginning to see in Europe. Imagine that supermarkets are empty, refrigeration is unreliable and there is no guarantee that things will ever get back to normal. What would you do?

For many survivalists, myself included, the solution is “prepping” for such a scenario. This involves stockpiling long lasting foods and perhaps water if there is no other way to ensure supply. Those are short term solutions however, completely unsustainable for a lifetime. In the long term many survival minded people learn hunting, trapping and fishing skills. This is a sure way to starvation if it is your only option to put food on the table for you and your family as anyone who has ever been hunting or fishing will tell you. A better option is to supplement those skills with the art of growing food and foraging for wild plants. All together you now have a recipe for a short and brutish life much like that of ancient man when he still lived as a hunter-gatherer. Doable but hardly ideal.

Man is a social animal for a reason: our needs are more easily met when we cooperate in large groups. We need an economy to truly live a sustainable lifestyle; we will need to trade with others for things which for one reason or another we will not be able to produce ourselves. In short the best case scenario for a survivalist is to be enmeshed with a large group of people living in an area they are invested in securing who all produce various things that they will trade internally and on occasion with outsiders.

Producing things people will trade for is the ideal for long term sustainability after a collapse. Much has been written on how to avoid looters by looking like you have nothing to loot. Many survivalists are planning on spending years, maybe decades, hiding in bunkers with a select group of fellow survivalists. This too will end badly for many as anyone who can envision several well armed families living in close quarters and sharing finite resources will conclude. Those who survive any coming collapse will do so by being able to produce things others need, not share things from a collective and steadily depleting collective pantry. Food would be the most valuable resource of course, although a good seamstress or carpenter will likely be able to get by. What we are talking abut is wealth in the old sense of the word, not acquired through business deals or wise investment but through production.

Eggs, for example, are a kind of wealth. Many suburbanites have begun keeping their own hens for economic reasons (they save money on eggs) but we see more and more that a person with  small flock of chickens is doing something most Americans have little experience with – producing actual wealth. Even survivalists often don’t fully understand this idea, explaining why people who think America is about to descend into a new dark age think one ounce gold coins (or worse, gold certificates) are going to pull them through while the rest of us starve. Gold and silver have their uses (one of which is enriching bloggers pre-collapse) but gold and silver represent wealth. They are not necessarily true wealth.

I’ll give you an example. I have two neighbors in the above worst of the worst case scenario. One has a veritable dragon’s hoard of one ounce gold coins each of which are now theoretically worth $10,000 in the new, desperate America. The other has a micro-farm consisting of a flock of chickens, a couple of milking goats and a large garden. Now let’s suppose that both want to get a couple of bowls of Rob Taylor’s famous five can chili or some homemade cough drops I mixed up in my spare time. What happens? Do I make change for a $10,000 gold coin? Or do I take a small basket of eggs for a batch of chili with a home made cough drop lagniappe? Sans a banking system to standardize currency bartering with precious metals is a risky proposition which is an idea I have put forward to before. This is not to say gold will be worthless, but it will be hard to trade with and if push comes to shove, harder to digest. Historically this has always been the case.

The first verse of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem reads:

Wealth is a comfort to all men;
yet must every man bestow it freely,
if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.

This line references the rune Feoh which represents wealth in general but its name literally means “cattle” which was the the measure of wealth the ancient Northern Europeans used. Those who study runes for religious reasons point out this understanding of wealth, as practical goods like livestock and furs, provides both historical and spiritual insight into the runic tradition. For the survival minded of any religion it is instructive to note that people who lived in a harsh environment of low technology and scarcity of resources, livestock was how people measured wealth and was the currency that common people traded with.

Of course, many people don’t have room for cattle or other sorts of livestock like goats which are increasingly popular. But depending on the laws in your areas and rules of your homeowner’s association if you happen to be unlucky enough to have one, almost everyone can own a few chickens or grow heirloom vegetables. These renewable resources have value to you and others. If you find no buyers for your eggs, goat’s milk, and Cherokee Purple tomatoes, you can still use them to provide comfort and security for you and your family which is literally what wealth is. Not so your gold hoard or your ammunition reserves. It is time for survivalists to have a fundamental rethinking of what wealth means and how we can acquire it in a post-collapse world.