Amber · Youth, adventure, character
1821–1890
Go light; the lighter the better.
Shoemaker, canoeist, and woodsman: in 1884, under the name “Nessmuk,” Sears wrote the first book to teach not abundance in the woods but going light — a small kit, an open camp, and a fire built as it should be.
AMBER
New York, 1884: a Pennsylvania shoemaker who weighs little more than a hundred pounds writes down how to travel for weeks through the wilderness with twenty-six pounds of duffle. Knapsack, hatchet and knives, the shanty-tent, the camp-fire built as it should be, frogging and camp cookery, a ten days’ tramp alone across Michigan, and the ten-and-a-half-pound cedar canoe — Sears’ book is instruction and story in one.
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Born in Massachusetts in 1821, Sears grew up in modest circumstances, learned the shoemaker’s trade, and as a young man sailed on a New Bedford whaler to the South Pacific. He took the name Nessmuk from a Narragansett who had taken him into the woods as a boy.
He settled in Wellsboro in northern Pennsylvania and made his forest journeys from there for decades. Between 1880 and 1883 he cruised the Adirondack lakes in ever lighter canoes that J. Henry Rushton built to his specifications; the lightest, the Sairy Gamp, weighed ten and a half pounds.
Sears wrote for the “outers”: artisans, clerks, and small merchants who need one real rest a year and cannot buy it with guides, pack baskets, and forest hotels. His advice is plain: go light, build an open camp with a fire in front of it, cook simply, and shoot no more than you can eat.
He saw the plunder of his day and condemned it in bitter words — in a book that otherwise sparkles with dry humor and long experience.
Woodcraft was published in 1884 by the Forest and Stream Publishing Company and has been reprinted countless times since. His trio of a light hatchet, a sturdy sheath knife, and a two-blade pocket knife is still copied as the “Nessmuk trio.”
Sears died in Wellsboro in 1890. A mountain and a lake in Pennsylvania bear his name; the Sairy Gamp is preserved at the Adirondack Experience museum.
