Not long after ‘The Atacama Crossing 2010’ I jumped into the “The Call of The Wild”. I felt like starting a new project was the perfect excuse for buying a new knife. I’ve purchased many a knife over the years. Some were good, others where “beauties” and quite a lot of them were worthless.

A long time ago I fell in love with the NESSMUK knife and the philosophy of the man behind this design. Luckily I came across Matt Lesniewski of ML KNIVES www.mlknives.com  Matt makes blades the same way or same tradition of an EARLY AMERICAN BLADE SMITH, and he spends as much time as possible in the woods hiking and hunting.   After talking to him I immediately felt he puts 101% into every blade he touches. He definitely takes  pride in his work! So he is the guy, currently working on my new knife.

 “Nessmuk” was the pen name of George Washington Sears, one of the most influential outdoor writers and pioneer conversationalists of the nineteenth century and perhaps the strangest canoeist of all time.  Sears was a leading contributor to Forest and Stream Magazine in the 1880s, whose writings popularized ultralight canoeing and inspired thousands of self-guided Adirondack tours. His most famous works Woodcraft and Camping have since been combined and are still in print today. He was also one of the earliest and most outgoing environmentalists, and the effects of his pioneer efforts are still being felt today. He spiritedly defended the outdoors, writing in one of his letters that he had “a liking for adventure, intense love of nature in her wildest dress, and a strange fondness for being in deep forests by myself.”

At the age of 8, he was sent away by his father to work at American Textile, but ran away and fell under the influence of a young Narragansett Indian named “Nessmuk,” from whom his penname derived. Nessmuk taught Sears the life of the outdoors, including how to fish, hunt and camp. At 19, he began a career as a commercial fisherman and sailor, embarking on a whaling trip out of Cape Cod Bay for three years. Upon returning, he spent the next five years traveling the country, writing in his book Woodcraft and Camping that he “taught school in Ohio, bullwhacked across the Plains, mined silver in Colorado, edited a newspaper in Missouri, was a cowboy in Texas, a ‘webfoot’ in Oregon, and camped and hunted in the wilderness of Michigan” before settling down as a shoemaker in 1848 in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania where he would spend the rest of his life.

In Wellsboro, Sears began to build his reputation as an outdoor writer with perhaps his most famous writings being accounts of three Adirondack featherweight canoeing trips in the early 1880s. The accounts resulted in his 10-year association with Forest and Stream (later to be called Field and Stream). These voyages were made in featherweight canoes which have inspired the use of the same canoes today.

Sears advised his readers to “Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest material for health, comfort and enjoyment.” He did so as a result of both his woodcraft philosophy as well as his own fragile stature, standing barely over five feet four inches tall and weighing about 110 pounds.  Nessmuk described these cruises in 18 articles published in Forest and Stream and later published in 1962 as The Adirondack Letters of George Washington Sears Whose Pen Name was Nessmuk.  

Nessmuk’s contributions to the world of woodcraft and conservationism are innumerable. One of the world’s first conservationists, he repeatedly criticized Pennsylvania’s lumbering practices, both for their negative effect on the trout populations and for their destruction of pine forests. He also joined in dozens of lawsuits against bark tanning and lumber companies and wrote hundreds of scathing letters, many of which are still in print.