What does it take to go back in time? A lot of dough or a good sewing machine
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Katherine Bish
How’s this for irony: Living like an impoverished frontiersman is kinda pricey. A love of hunting and an interest in history drew Larry Schleicher to the American Long Rifle Association—a group of colonial-era reenactors—20 years ago, but the cost of keeping it real came as a bit of a shock. “If you’ve got a lot of money, you can go out and buy everything,” he says, “but I don’t have that kind of budget.”
Channeling the resourceful 18th-century gun builder and hunter he sets out to portray, he made most of his gear himself. Schleicher, who will make camp this month at southwestern Illinois’ Fort de Chartres with his fellow fans of simpler times as part of the ALRA’s national gathering, let us in on what it took to achieve that authentic look.
In preparing his gear, Schleicher got pretty handy with a needle and thread—or sinew, as the case may be—but he admits to using his wife’s sewing machine to make this linen hunting shirt. And that green color? Most guys dye their clothes with walnut hulls, but Schleicher wasn’t crazy about brown. “I cheated,” he says with a laugh. “I used Rit dye.”
A guy’s gotta eat, so in case he has trouble bagging a deer, it’s always good to have some munchies on hand. That’s what this haversack is for. Schleicher waterproofed the canvas himself—with beeswax. “You have to get it soaked into the material, though,” he says. “And if you do it 18th-century style, you build yourself a fire in the back yard to heat it up—and hope you don’t set the whole thing on fire.”
In keeping with the “back to basics” theme that runs through most of Schleicher’s gear, these center-seam moccasins are barely a step up from corn-husk sandals. They usually don’t last long—they’re made from single pieces of elk hide, wrapped around the foot and stitched shut—but like a true frontiersman, he improvised and added a leather sole. “So if I wear out that outer piece of leather, I can cut it off and stitch on a new piece.”
A professionally made flintlock would have cost a fortune (“Some of these guns being produced now, if you don’t know your history, you’d swear you were holding an original,” Schleicher says), so he drew upon his woodworking skills and built one himself—and it works. “But,” he says, “I generally don’t dress in my 18th-century clothes when I deer hunt with it.”
When you’re living off the land, gun maintenance ranks right up there with other survival musts like breathing. And with its lead mold, cleaning jags and spare parts, this little pouch is like a leather Dremel for rifles. Schleicher made it out of deer hide, but he skipped the authentic process that called for tanning it with the animal’s brain. “I dyed it to the color it would have looked,” he admits.
OK, so he couldn’t do it all by himself: Schleicher enlisted a friend from The Trappers of Starved Rock, a historical preservation group based in St. Charles, to build his powder horn. “It’s a pretty fine art,” he says. Metal horns didn’t come into vogue until the early 1800s, so Schleicher’s is made of a bull horn.
