Packing to Survive…

As a pioneer, if you were packing to leave your home for good and start over somewhere new, there was a lot of supplies that you needed! There were no grocery stores or convenience stores or drug stores along that vast stretch of land where you could stop and stock up on groceries and snacks! Yes, there were towns along the way, but it might take you a long time to get to them and they may not have what you needed when you did. Depending on how far you were going helped determine how much to take.

People realized that they were leaving civilization behind them. Civilization may lay ahead for them depending on where they were headed or it might not. So, the best thing you could do was go as prepared as possible and hope for the best! 

Here is an example of what you needed to bring from a pioneer named, Joe Palmer. He wrote a guide to help pioneers know what to bring to survive on the Oregon Trail. Keep in mind these amounts are only for one adult!

• two hundred pounds of flour
• thirty pounds of pilot bread
• seventy-five pounds of bacon
• ten pounds of rice
• five pounds of coffee
• two pounds of tea
• twenty-five pounds of sugar
• half a bushel of dried beans
• one bushel of dried fruit
• two pound of saleratus [baking soda]
• ten pounds of salt
• half a bushel of corn meal
• half a bushel of corn, parched and ground
• a small keg of vinegar should also be taken

If you were going on the Alaskan Gold Rush into the Klondike to strike it rich, here is the list of items you would need. Most people were not allowed to start out on the Klondike trail until they could prove they had all these provisions.