Re: Frontier House - A Luddite Show?

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 08:02:28 MDT


spike66 wrote:
>
> > --- "S.J. Van Sickle" <sjvan@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> Humans are not ruminants. If we could digest
> >> cellulose, it probably would
> >> be easier to be pure vegetarians...but we can't.
> >>
> > YP Fun wrote: The typical Mexican meal that
> > includes rice, beans and a corn tortilla includes all
> > the required amino acids."
> > Whether you like to believe if or not all your
> > amino acid and other food needs may be acquired from
> > rice and beans.
> >
> Sure can. I wondered why they didn't allow the frountier house
> families
> to take a few hundred pounds of dried beans and rice. They had a
> water
> source where there were going, so the load capacity of the wagons
> would have been well spent carrying a couple million calories in dried
> foods, which would have been available in 1883.

I didn't notice the families even had wagons, which I found odd. What
happened to the traditional Conestoga?

I found the families food stores rather laughable, a couple dozen cans
of food. Families would not buy food in that manner during that period.
They'd buy barrels of food (at least the bulk staple items like flour,
oats, etc), not cans.

>
> The more I look at it, this pioneer house sim was fatally flawed, both
> by the families not being allowed to hunt and by their carrying the
> wrong stuff with them. They carried guns and ammo. What good
> were those if you couldnt hunt? They were forced to over-rely
> upon their own livestock as their only protein source.

And they were only allowed to bring in one major piece of period
equipment, and they certainly weren't provided any references to build
the sort of skills that would have been prevalent in the period. Now, as
much as the "Frontier House Experts" derided Gary Clune and his family,
his plan of making money from his distillery was actually rather smart.
A flaw in the sim, though, was that the fictional local population of
miners didn't actually exist, so he couldn't open his own saloon. In any
event though, he should have been making enough money from the still to
pay miners to cut wood for him (trading booze for wood) and buy food
from the store to make it through the winter.

If he had had a wagon, he would have had the transport capability to
engage in such trade rather easily.

Should we assume that the families just came out from the east on a
train?



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