What are some ways to make moccasins I have made more water resistant?
My wife used to make some great stuff with pine tar, beezwax, and bear fat. The pine tar was a pretty good sealer and it also changed the smell so that every dog around wouldn’t follow you trying to lick your feet. It was really great for leather work boots
If the mocs are home tanned deer or even moose they would get a bit stretched out from that treatment. Mocs are just not generally real great wet weather foot wear. Your best bet actually is to wear rubbers over your mocassins when the ground is wet.
What about the inuit mukluks? ai saw a movie called “The Snow Walker” (which, by the by is a great film, see it) where an inuit woman sews a pair of leather boots that are fully water-proof, in order to cope with the boggishness of spring and summer in the tundra. How to do this is beyond me, though.
The waterproof kamiks are made of seal skin that are prepared in a way to make them the most water resistant. They are also sewn with a technique that makes the seams watertight. It’s not like just any kind of leather with some sealer smeared on it.
That’s a great movie too. “Four stars” “Two thumbs up” and all that stuff.
They may have taken a little bit of creative license with the portrayal of how she was able to make such nice stuff so quickly and with limited material to work with.
Huh. I wondered about this when I saw Atanarjuat/the Fast Runner–I thought maybe some of those larger animals who live in the sea might have hides with special magic for keeping water on one side of them!
I watched something on sperm whales the other day that said their hides can get up to fourteen inches thick. Whoa. The better to dive really deep and hold a soft body together? And withstand getting banged up by giant squid suckers?
I wonder about the seam-sewing trick? I waterproofed mine w/sno-seal, which had a nasty solvent smell but helped a lot, although the seams still give the game away in boggy areas.
Pine tar, eh? How does that differ from pitch or sap? And I wonder what other kind of fat would compare closely to a bear’s? Us city folk can only dream of bear grease. . .
So I was in an all day and all night tracking class and my deer skin mocs (made from a very thin deer skin that was chemically tanned) held up quite well.I rubbed a few layers of Snow Country Bee Care stuff on them the night before.Most of the day my feet were dry untill after around 7 or 8 hours i started to notice wet feet through my 2 layers of wool socks.When I finally changed into some boots the socks were really only saoked around the toes and around the heel where the seams were not sewn very tight.The next pair I make will be Buffalo or Moose skin and I will try to sew the seams tighter and aim to get them further up on the moc so the seam is not touching the ground so much.Anyone know of a good way to seal the seams up?I found a chemical sealer but I would prefer a natural alternative.
A while ago I bought a book called ‘Spirit of Siberia’, that discusses mainly the boots worn by natives there, including the peoples of the coastal Far East who use fish skins to make water-tight boots. It would be good to have if you deal with colder and wetter areas where good footwear is more essential to life than it is in warmer temperate areas (the Scots after all used to go barefoot in the winter, and southern Patagonians went though it with little clothing at all I’ve read, so unless your winters are colder or snowier than that, you needn’t fear so much for your survival for lack of footwear knowledge or skill).
Yarrow dreamer.
Pine tar is resin that is “rendered” out of pitchy pieces of pine. The process is basically; split some pine from a real pitchy butt of the tree into kindling size pieces, then heat them up until the resin in them liquifies and runs out, without actually burning the wood. The liquid pitch that comes out is the tar. I think what is different about this from just the pitch that you can collect that is dried on the trunk of the tree is, the rendered pine tar has other things in it, more terpines maybe, that give it different qualities. It doesn’t set up as hard as the straight pitch off the trunk of the tree.
Adding the beeswax allows it to stay even more “workable”
Store bought lard (pig fat) would be a useable substitute for the bear fat.
Some references to mocassins in wet weather and clothing in general.
Paul Kane, in Wanderings of an Artist records meeting Indians traveling on the ice and snow barefoot- “and when they sit down to rest they put them (moccasins) on and wrap their feet in fursâ€Â
Man In the Primitive World an introduction to anthropology (E. Adamson Hoebel)
P. 245 clothing & ornament Wissler noted that “…in Eastern North America moccasins were discarded when walking in the rain, in wet grass, or upon moist ground.â€Â
Twenty Years Among Our Hostile Indians by J. Lee Humfreville,
“During winter storms when the Indians were compelled to go about their camps in the performance of necessary duties they frequently did so barefoot, as their moccasins and leggings became saturated with water or snow in a short time, and when in that condition were cold and disagreeable to the wearer. They preferred to keep their footwear dry even at the expense of temporary discomfort. Both men and women frequently carried their moccasins and leggings in their hands after having been caught in a cold rain or snow storm. Sometimes during the cold weather they wore sandals made from the flint hides of some animal as a protection to the soles of the feet.”
From: Alexander Henry (Elliott Coues, ed.) NEW LIGHT ON THE EARLY
HISTORY OF THE GREATER NORTHWEST: THE MANUSCRIPT JOURNALS OF ALEXANDER HENRY AND DAVID THOMPSON, 2 Vols. (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1965):
Vol. I, p. 371 [July 24, 1806, 20 or 30 miles south of Big Hidatsa
Village, traveling with a trading
party of 500 Hidatsas & Mandans going to visit a village
of Cheyennes:]
At seven o’clock [A.M.], just as the vanguard had gained the summit of
one of those high, rocky hills, it began to rain hard. Our old general
ordered a halt, and his eldest son went the rounds repeating the order. All
covered themselves as well as they could, some with their robes, others with their saddle equipments but many of the young men, who had neither robes nor saddles, and were dressed in their fineries, which would have been spoiled if wet, preferred to undress entirely, and gave their friends their things to keep from the
rain.
p.395 [July 26th, on the homeward journey] “During the night we had a
terrible rainstorm of thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain,which ceased at sunrise, but not until everyone of us was wet to the skin; the men’s robes and leggings, and the women’s shifts were in a sad state. Soon after the rain ceased a tremendous pelting and beating commenced, which at a distance might have been taken for several hundred men threshing wheat. This operation over, all the leather articles were well rubbed with white clay, which I am told, prevents them from getting stiff or hard in drying; for this purpose they always carry some of this clay with them.â€Â