American Survival Blog

I’ve long maintained that in a survival situation running a trap line for small game is much more efficient than actively hunting in terms of calories taken in vs calories burned. Dale Martin’s The Trapper’s Bible is my personal go to reference for survival trapping but I always keep my eyes open for simple, primitive traps that can be quickly deployed and easily checked in a survival situation.

This Pathfinder video shows a trap that may look complicated at first but is actually fairly easy to learn and set up so stick with it (at 4:30 or so when they start talking about a contest they’re running which may be over by the time you see this) and watch it a couple of times. It’s surprisingly easy to set up with some sticks and a knife and will produce meat if set in an active area:

In the comments someone suggested using thorns tied around the power stick to impale the critter to ensure it isn’t simply stunned. That sounds like good insurence to me.

As is the entire “Gold will save you from the apocalypse” movement. I’ve said before that if you believe that America is really going to collapse and chaos will rain then Gold is a Sucker’s Bet for Survival. Making money now and preparing for life in a second world country (at best) is the way to go and something tells me the people who run Cash4Gold (and the hundreds of affiliate marketers who pimp them) are thinking the same way.

Don’t get me wrong, gold is a great investment but it isn’t a preparation for TEOTWAWKI. You can make a lot of money with gold though. But not if you send your jewelry into Cash4Gold which routinely pays people less than a third of the value of their jewelry. This old article from Money Watch explains why this is just another scam:

Let’s say that your beloved bought you a one-ounce 14-carat gold necklace for $1,600. Does that mean Cash4Gold will pay you $1,600? Sorry, buster! It pays only for the gold content, not for the beauty of the jewelry. A 14-carat item is only 58.3% gold. An ounce of it is worth $644. (Gold is weighed in troy ounces, which are smaller than ordinary ounces.) Don’t expect a check for anything near that amount in the mail from C4G, however. Aronson told Florida Trend magazine that he pays only 20% to 80% of the spot price of gold. The more you send him, the greater the percentage you’ll get. Obviously, a one-ounce necklace is not much; so assuming you’d get only 20% of the value, about $128.80. (You can figure the melt-down value of your gold clicking over to www.dendritics.com/scales/metal-calc.asp.) In contrast, pawnshops and jewelry stores in one experiment paid 35 to 70% of the gold’s meltdown value.

The average consumer has no way of knowing any of this, however. At this writing, neither the C4G website nor its advertising or mailing packs disclose how much the company will pay for the gold it receives. Nor does it give any examples like the one I provided. In a FAQ down deep in its website, the company tells people that pawnshops or jewelers may pay them more. But its home page practically screams its promise to pay “25% more.” More than what? Maybe more than Scrooge.

In other words hold onto your gold chains and use them as bartering tools when the chips are down. In fact gold jewelry will perhaps be easier to use as a barter item post-TEOTWAWKI than the one ounce gold coin you purchased which will be worth more than any materials you’re trying to get. If the government starts confiscating gold they won’t be looking for your 14-carat bling so there’s another reason to keep hold of that necklace until you really need to trade it in.

If you want quick cash hit a pawn shop. Don’t fall for online schemes designed to play on your greed. Keep your gold and set up a Cash4gold affiliate website, which is frankly the only way you’ll ever make any money with that company.

Via Survivalblog comes this list of .pdfs that are mainly public domain works covering a variety of topics that will be useful to the survivalist post TEOTWAWKI. Farming, hunting, fishing, trapping, food preservation building heating and refrigeration devices, blacksmithing, gem mining, this forum thread has it all.

As we slip into second world status 19th century skills and technologies will become necessary to keep society running. My advice is to bookmark this thread, download the materials you want and print them out now. After the lights go out it’ll be too late. You also never know when a forum will remove links or disappear.

The Old Knowledge Database links thread.

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…)