After doing this blog off and on for a time, I occasionally will get asked for advice from people trying to put together their first "authentic" kit or I'll receive questions about improving on what they have. Frustratingly the advice is rarely followed and after some discourse the person asking will ghost me after I've told him that I can't recommend buying the thing he wanted to buy or making the thing he wanted to make.
But a question was posed to me recently in a way that I hadn't thought much about. Unless you've been at this for awhile, research can be daunting. In my experience some folks have an intuitive ability to find good and solid sources and interpret them and others don't. Don't know why this is, but I see it all the time. The question was "If everyone is looking at the same documentation, why does it get interpreted so differently. How is one guy right and the other guy wrong?" Welcome to Protestantism...er, wrong topic. We all have preconceived ideas and notions. But I wanted to take a moment to demonstrate how research moves forward to those who maybe haven't been at this for very long and wonder what all the fuss is about when it comes to documentation.
In the 1980s through the 90s, a fellow named Mark Baker took the living history world by storm with his experimental archeology and through his work we really got our first glimpses into a more skills based approach to living history. Not merely dressing up for a parade or to shoot in the primitive area at Friendship but dressing and going out into the wilderness and putting the knowledge, skills, equipment and clothing to the test. This style of living history took on the term "trekking". Mark based his clothing and accoutrements on his research into Morgans Hunters of the 1760s and tried to document what he did to those men. His attempts were good but in a time when the sources available were more difficult to find than simply googling it, some of his choices would be harder to document today or rather the research and our knowledge of 18th century garments have exploded since the dawn of the internet and better access to source material.
It should be noted that Mark Baker was not the first to do this stuff, but he was the first to document his experiences in articles and books and so he was the first person to have a wide audience watching him do this stuff.
Mark was a pioneer for this hobby. The problem was that most people didn't want to actually examine the source material. They were content to say "Mark Baker did it" and that was all the proof or documentation they needed. It's sort of like when you copy files on computers. You make a copy of the original, then a copy of the copy and then a copy of the copy of the copy and so on until eventually it degrades so badly that it's unrecognizable. That's essentially what people did. There are still guys out there today that have diverged so far from what even Mark was doing that Marks old Muzzleloader articles look current.
As you examine the ledgers, paintings and sketches, archeology and extant garments from the 18th century, it becomes more clear that while people like Mark were on the right track, there was still so much to learn. And so others have taken up the mantle and through more thorough investigations different conclusions were brought to light. A consensus starts to be built as more eyes are laid on the source material.
Below we have two versions of the same person. The first is a person who read some Mark Baker articles, walnut dyed a shirt, rolled his sleeves up over a shirt underneath because he saw Mark Baker do it. The second image is a person who read the actual ledger books and saw the items being bought by Morgans hunters combined with sketches and drawings and archeological evidence from the period and made a more informed choice. Looking at one aspect will never give you the full picture.
The person who posed the original question added "How can some people be wrong? Surely they are searching and studying as well." Unfortunately in my experience most folks don't research and study. They just want to have some fun, wear some old timey clothes and go to the woods. Nothing wrong with that either. But, it's all about the approach one takes and the goals one has in mind.
If you don't enjoy the research part, I would suggest trusting those who can show you on paper, evidence for what they are doing. If somebody says "I saw someone else do it", then I'd try to steer clear of whatever advice they might give.
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