Marketing departments are pretty cagey about how to get folks interested in a product. Lately, if you stick the words heritage or heirloom to anything from T-shirts to top hats — it sells. Funny, because we outdoor folks have a great respect for the past and the trappers who came before. But have you ever wondered about the setting methods used three or more generations back? Times change, but fur is fur and there is still something to learn from how our predecessors laid out a line.
COMPLEXITY LEADS TO …
For anyone looking into older sets, it soon becomes clear that many were time consuming, involving multiple steps with such detail that I can’t image the poor half-frozen fellow getting it all straight and true. Fur trapping was serious with every pelt needed for hard cash. Sets had to work and it was popular to have complicated methods guaranteed to never fail. But one advantage the trapper of the past had was time, which enabled them to work on detailed sets.
Another reason no one minded spending time on a set was because many trappers never had much to work with. Steel was expensive and often hard to come by. An old fellow told me his father chased fur all his life and never owned more than 15 steel traps. With few tools, it was alright if a set took an hour to prepare. Add to this the fact that many fur targets we take for granted were a rare catch, if even available, 130 years back. Trappers worked hard for a few
