How to survive as a Jamestown frontiersman

Jamestown was the name of the very first English colony in North America which was originally established as a fort in 1607. This small town started off as a venture by the Virginia company of London who had support from the crown to spread the interest of the nation and increase its wealth through trade. Originally it was only men who were allowed in the colony due to the dangers they faced from the Native Americans, but it didn’t take long for people to realize how profitable crops like tobacco were and over the next few decades, thousands of people flooded to this new world to make a life for themselves.

(Jamestown was located on a piece of land surrounded on three sides by water, which made it great for shipping and defending, but easy to surround and set ambushes for the settlers that only had one way to go.)

Even though so many people were coming to the new colonies that had been established, the majority of the continent was still very much unexplored and was firmly in the hands of the various Native American tribes that were there first. New lands mean new riches, but going out into the wilds of something the size of North America meant having to do it as a long-term and permanent job, and these people were known as the frontiersmen.

The frontiersman of the Jamestown colony had a much harder time doing their jobs because Britain hadn’t established a power base on the continent yet. There were armed guards and the colony could produce a militia of several hundred people if needed, but this meant next to nothing in a land of that size, so if you had to go out into the unexplored wilderness, also known as the frontier, then you would be left alone and completely unsupported.

This led to anyone who was good at the job becoming an expert in survival, mostly because they had no choice if they wanted to stay alive. Unfortunately, not many people at the time were able to write, and people out on the frontier often didn’t bother to keep detailed records of their activities, so the information we have on them comes from fragmented sources.

Weapons of the frontiersman

Below is a picture of a matchlock musket, the first “real” type of firearm that was invented in the late 14th century. After this the wheel lock was invented in 1509, and the first versions of the flintlock started to appear around the beginning of the 1600s, but were still a long way off from being mass-produced or affordable. The matchlock musket was really, really bad as a firearm but it was all they had available, and was the only way for a hunter to bring down large game.

The gun itself weighed around 5kg and could fire one shot per minute by someone who was trained with the weapon. It also had to have a slow match, which was a slow burning fuse constantly lit in order for the gunpowder in the flash pan to ignite, which meant having to either walk for many miles burning through countless fuses, or having to start a small fire to light the fuse before you can shoot, not something that’s preferable when hunting. After their matchlock musket, a bag of round lead balls for ammo and a flask of gunpowder, there was little spare weight to carry things like a sword or spear, and so knifes and small hatchets became the most commonly carried weapons.

What clothing did a frontiersman wear?

During the earlier days of colonization, the British continued to grow flax to make into lined as the best areas for growing cotton still lay uninhabited to the south. Leather was available in limited quantities and often made into jackets to go over linen trousers and a shirt. Wool was a very scarce material during the earlier days of the colony because of the limited grazing ground they had and the threat of Native American attacks on their livestock, so linen and leather were the only things available to most people.

(The “Wild west” type of frontiersman that people recognize were still well over 100 years away)

Food of the frontiersman

After the colony became established, it began to produce three main food crops which were beans, corn and types of squash like pumpkins. Many of the people who grew food weren’t especially good at it, and to save room they would grow corn in rows, plant the squash vines on the ground, and then plant beans right at the base of the corn so it could use it to climb up for support as it grew.

(This is hardtack, a piece of bread that has been baked several times to remove all the moisture, giving it a very long shelf life, it would have been the only way to carry corn other than in dried grain form)

Beans and corn were the only foods that Jamestown produced that could be dried and would be safe to eat for a long time. Many of the meals eaten by the frontiersmen of Jamestown would have consisted of nothing more than boiled beans with corn and whatever they could gather from the wild. The lands surrounding the town were rich with wild game like deer and hogs, but the falling out between the towns governor and the Native Americans made it impossible to even leave the fort for long periods of time. All the foods and flavours associated with the frontier like salt pork, jerky, molasses and nutmeg were still a long way off from being produced and during the earlier years, farm land to provide crops were usually nothing more than an allotment style garden, with the main farm land reserved for growing cash crops like tobacco.

Life of a frontiersman

Life would have been short and very dangerous. There were numerous Native American tribes close to the fort and their attitudes towards the settlers constantly changed, but because they had been there for much longer than the settlers, they knew the land and all the best placed to set an ambush. When it was possible to get out into the wild, dried beans, corn and probably some dried fish or beef would have been taken, supplemented by anything in the wild they could gather or shoot.

(The settlers only had short periods of friendship with the various native tribes, mostly because they kept killing them and stealing land, leaving a frontiersman to sometimes have to evade entire tribes just to get out into the wild.)

Their job was to simply scout out the lands and find anything of value it has to offer. The Native Americans didn’t really bother to mass produce and mine metals, mostly because they didn’t have any use for them, which meant there were huge natural mineral veins just waiting to be mined. High quality farm land, new areas for other settlements, valuable minerals and mapping out the territory were the mains goals of the frontiersman. Normally when a frontiersman found something of value, it would attract more people to the job and many unskilled townsfolk would head out into the wild looking for a vein of gold or silver, only to find themselves starving to death or getting injured and stranded.