Prosthetic Conscience

Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties

Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties and How to Build Them, by D. C. Beard, was written in 1914 as a guide for Boy Scouts and outdoorsmen. This means it is in the public domain, since it was published before Steamboat Willie (the line at which our cultural progression ended). However, it is not available from Project Gutenberg. It is available in a reasonably-priced edition from The Lyons Press (with a foreword to establish copyright), and the Richland County Public Library has a copy.

The book covers, with clear descriptions and line-art, how to build a few dozen types of shelter. They are arranged in an order that includes simple to complex, temporary to permanent, and few tools required to many tools required. The simplest is a one-night bivy made from a felled tree and branch cover, and the most complex is a multi-room log house. In between are a wide range of structures that might provide adequate shelter for a few seasons or years, and which can be constructed using only native materials, and with no tools other than a hatchet or an axe.

The tone of this book is, to be honest, hilarious. Some of the humour appears to be intended; some of it is just because the author was writing at such a different time from us. It is full of stiff upper lip and old fashioned manliness, of the kind that predates and is infinitely superior to the macho posturing of today. A choice quote from the section on an “American boys’ hogan”:

The top of the ventilator should be protected by slats, as in Fig. 161, or by wire netting with about one-quarter-inch mesh in order to keep small animals from jumping or hopping down into your club-house. Of course, a few toads and frogs, field-mice and chipmunks, or even some lizards and harmless snakes would not frighten any real boy, but at the same time they do not want any such creatures living in the same house with them.

One other interesting feature, notable and admirable given the time the book was written, is that the author gives proper credit to the architectural skills of Native Americans. Most of the designs in the book are drawn from Native American models, from various regions, but mostly from the Northeast (bark cover), and the Southwest.

I want to discuss this book with some of the (quasi?)homeless anarchist youth today at FNB. At least one or two of them showed some enthusiasm at the idea, discussed last week, of building a camouflaged wattle-and-daub walled, thatch-roofed hut on a woodlot. One thing this book showed that I was grateful for, because I couldn’t find it on the Web, was the details of how to thatch a roof. It didn’t have anything on wattle and daub, but there are good descriptions of that elsewhere. We’ll see how that goes. Also, probably some guerrilla gardening today.

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