Securing Supplies or “Possibles”
Today we call them necessary supplies. Soldiers might call them “gear” or “rations”. In the early days of the mountain man they were “possibles” because there was a good possibility you would need them to survive and if you didn’t have any there was a good possibility you would not --- survive that is. Some time ago an agent, commenting on one of my stories, wrote that he had “never heard of a log cabin built high in the trees.” He was commenting on a stores cache I had described in a story and I couldn’t believe that anyone who had read historical history, history, or any story depicting mountain men and homesteaders had not heard of a permanent storage cache or understood a description of same. But then, once I had given it some thought I realized that there are very few such s...