- How settlers made fire starters.

Lighting a fire isn't always simple, and when you want a fire, you want it now.  That's true of the barbeque as much as the home hearth.

We use fire starters these days, but they're nothing new.  In the days of the pioneers and settlers they were called kindlers.

You easily can make your own, in the time honored way.

These instructions are from the Home Mechanic book of 1896.

All you need is tar, resin, sawdust and charcoal.

We don't use tar and resin much anymore but they are readily available.

Tar is also known as pine tar and you can get it from sporting goods shops, veterinarians and hardware stores.  Use the hardware stores since they sell it in larger volumes at cheaper prices.  It's commonly used as a treatment for wooden patio furniture.

Resin you can buy online, or just collect yourself.  It's the sap of pine trees, also known as pitch.

If you are going to collect pine resin look for the white sap that pines use to heal their own wounds.  Looking around the areas where the tree has been injured in the past is a good place to start.  When fresh it is white and creamy.  As it ages its surface can turn black and it hardens, but if you break it open you'll see it's still white on the inside.

To make your kindlers:

"Take a quart of tar and 3 pounds of resin, melt them, bring to a cooling temperature, mix with as much sawdust, with a little charcoal added, as can be worked in; spread out while hot upon a board, when cold break up into lumps of the size of a large hickory nut, and you have, at a small expense, kindling material enough for a household for one year."

Be careful when you are heating the resin and tar, they can ignite.  So do it slowly and gently and try to keep flying embers out of the mix.

You'll improve on this recipe if you make balls of the kindlers when they are still warm to the touch and soft enough to shape.  Then roll them in sawdust.  They are cleaner to handle that way.

After all this you'll need to get the resin off your hands. It sticks like nobody's business.

An old wives trick comes to the rescue.  You can rub pine resin off your skin using butter or margarine.

The old wife in question was my Grandmother.  She brought up five kids in Washington State and had more grandchildren than I can count on three hands, so she knew something about cleaning up sticky pine-pitch fingers.

Other how-to and DIY from the pioneers and settlers can be found at Pioneer Handbooks.

Even if you aren't the type to make your own fire starters, you can still hit the Facebook Like button below and save this how-to from disappearing into history

It's easy enough to do and a great way to keep this knowledge alive.