Originally Posted by
kyratshooter
Mac, the term "bushcraft" was not popular in the '80s. Not here anyway.
It might have been popular in Britain, but it did not originate there either. The British like the term because they do not have a woods, they have one bush, and they have to share it.
Bushcraft was a term first used in Australia. It seemed their bad guys would run hide out in the "bush" of the outback. They would hide out there for years. They were called "bush rangers", which had no connection to the army or boy scouts. The term was first used in the 1880s and was brought into contact with the other colonial nations during WW1, and especially WW2. It spread to GB and and Canada from that use.
That is where Mors picked up the term, being a Canadian and only a boy back then. BTW, Mors used the terms "bushcraft knife" and "survival knife" interchangeably. Check out some of the "survival knives" he has made over the years for use by students. They are made from chiseled down saw blades with broomstick handles and copper wire rivets!
The actual term used in GB before that was "fieldcraft" and in the U.S. it was "Woodcraft".
If you go back past the internet you will discover that there were three primary books promoting the outdoor experience and the use of knives in the outdoors. One book was Woodcraft and Camping by Nesmuck and the other was Camping and Woodcraft by Kepart. Yea, strange coincidence. Both men had their own preferences in gear and promoted specific combinations of tools for life in the woods. And they were promoting long term life in the woods, off grid life we would call it, not weekend trips. Their belt knives are now famously, and generally badly copied, and sold by the thousands. Nesmuck called his a hunting knife, Kepart usually referred to his as a utility knife. They both preferred good pocket knives for most jobs. Most people on the internet can not tell you which type pocket knife either man carried.
The Boy Scout Handbook was number three and it also had specific advice on knives, their appropriate sizes and uses. You could get a merit badge from them.
Your vision of combat, survival and "bushcraft" blades did not appear or become popular in the '80s either. That was the work of warfare over the millennia. The first people to manufacture uniform and standardized combat knives were the Romans. They took the design of the Spanish personal protection dagger and modified it, then produced them in mass and issued them to the legions. It was called the pugio.
But strangely, one of the most found items in the digs of the Legion camps are the cheap bone handled friction folders carried by every man, woman and child of antiquity.
Combat knives have been made, modified and improvised since men have been in conflict and the American frontiersman fought his way from sea to sea using a variety of edged tools, mostly commercial butcher knives.
The other mass produced "combat knife" best known to the world is the K-Bar. Like the Romans, the U.S. forces wanted a uniform, mass produced knife built to specs and cheap enough to issue to troops.
What you think of as a "combat knife" was primarily the creation of a man named Bo Randal. He made custom knives for men that were returning to combat during WW2. I say returning due to the fact that he took his design from the troops that had already been in combat, had been home on convalescent leave, and were heading back to Europe and the Pacific.
He found that they preferred one of two styles; the #1 combat and the #2 combat. They are both still in the Randal line up and you can google them. I have seen many of them carried in some very dangerous places, but mostly they were used as status symbols, because the average GI in combat could not afford a custom made combat knife.
You will also find in that catalogue shows an offering called the Astronaut survival knife. It has a big blade and a hollow handle and it was offered in the 1960s. Yea, the Rambo knife was first made for NASA.
But that was not the origin of the survival knife as named specifically. That was the work of the U.S. Army while looking for tools for their pilots. They came up with a blade called the Air Force Pilot Survival knife during WW2. It looked nothing like what Rambo carried.
The U.S. Airforce Survival Knife is the most widely used survival blade in the world. How do I know? Because for more then 50 years the Air Force placed one under the seat, in the survival kit stashed there, in every combat aircraft in the AF. It was also issued and one of the two knives used by the Air Force survival training school up in the Rockies. That knife had been used by around 2,000,000 air force troops in their survival school over the years.
As a strange turn of notice, that AF survival knife uses a blade first used by the Marble company in their "Woodcraft" series. They parkerized the blade and added a serrated back edge useful for ripping open the aluminum skins of aircraft. Oh yes, it has a blood groove too. That blade was designed in the 1930s, as a big game knife, and is still available.
Funny there, how the largest military in the world REPURPOSED a hunting and woodcraft knife for use as the worlds most popular survival knife. The repurpose worked well enough to last around 60 years before they made the drastic change of making the handle of soft nylon. Last I saw you could buy one at Walmart.
Yes there are different knives for different purposes, but most sportsmen do not use the purpose built knife as it was intended. Most game is not skinned in the field. That is done after the trip home and often after the game has hung properly for two weeks. That is also when the game is laid on a table and broken down and processed using a series of saws and butcher blades, not your name brand skinner or hunting knife.
It is only on the internet where people of the "more recent generation" have to put everything is a box, and leave it there. Our nation was founded by men and women that carried a butcher knife on their belt and used it to make shelter, process game and fight off enemies. The modifications came as the knives where resharpened with files and flat stones as the handles wore and the blades snapped and were reground on the nearest rock.
Strangely enough, you can still buy those blades, made from the same steel used to make the K-bar. They are nearly identical to the blades that have been dug up at Jamestown, from 1607, and at Tellico trade factory from the 1760s. Jim Bowie used one at the "sandbar fight" and hundreds of mountain men used them to set traps, fight and survive in the Rockies. They went west on the Oregon trail and no where in the list of required supplies was there mention of a survival knife, combat knife or hunting knife. You simply had to know how to use the knife you had.
So in your EDC (another term for what we used to find in most women's handbags) you have what you think are "good knives", unoffensive knives. Who told you that? Why would you care?
Why does everything have to have a box to be in? The knife, the tent, the vehicle, the gun, even the generation. Separate everything, put it in the proper box, decide which is good and which is bad, then eliminate what you decided was bad even if you have no real knowledge to work with other than Instagram posts and a YouTube video!
Works for "cop killer" ammo, assault rifles, weapons of war, zombie knives (for the British), people called "survivalists" or "preppers", or possibly just "that generation".
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