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| Hudson Bay blanket coat photo by Steelbeard1 from Wikimedia Commons |
Carolyn Mulford worked on five continents as a
magazine editor and freelance writer before making the transition to fiction.
She divides her time between her first love, historical novels, and her last
love, mysteries. Her latest releases are Thunder Beneath My Feet, set
during the devastating New Madrid earthquakes, Show Me the Ashes, the fourth book in her Show Me series.
Learn more about Carolyn and her books at her website.
My teenager had to have a
blanket coat. Nothing else would do for her.
Lots of young women felt
that way last year when fall fashions arrived. But the blanket coats advertised
in 2015 were ponchos or ruanas rather than the original hooded, calf-length
wool coat. Worn by French-Canadian voyageurs
from the late 1700s, the warm, durable garment spread rapidly among American
fur trappers and Native Americans.
And it endured. Most
fashions and textiles have changed drastically in 200 years, but the frontier
blanket coats—particularly those made from the Hudson Bay Company’s white wool
blanket with short red, yellow, green, and black stripes—lived into this
century. Today those who value them for outdoor activities settle for used ones
or buy the blanket and make their own.
My teenager, fifteen-year-old
Betsy, wasn’t making a fashion statement in 1812. She needed the coat to
survive a three-week trek from a mild climate into weather so cold that the
Mississippi River froze from bank to bank.
Betsy is the resourceful,
courageous protagonist of Thunder Beneath
My Feet, a novel for tweens and teens set during the devastating
earthquakes centered near New Madrid, Upper Louisiana (Missouri) Territory in
1811-1812. Weeks of quakes, severe aftershocks, and shakes destroyed homes,
made the river run backwards, created lakes, and prompted most of the
population to flee.
Betsy stayed on her family’s
farm with her younger brother and four strangers until the shocks and shakes
posed more danger than a 200-mile walk north.
I’d placed her in this
historically accurate fix, so I had to find her a realistic way out. Her shawls
definitely wouldn’t withstand the cold and snow. She couldn’t walk and work
under the weight of the buffalo robe. She lacked the time and materials to make
a wool-lined buckskin coat. That left the blanket coat, which she could also
curl up in at night.
I’d seen the coats in photos
and a museum, but my 4-H sewing projects hadn’t included making a coat of any
kind. I remembered how frustrating it had been to put a sleeve in a blouse or a
dress. At least these coats had no buttonholes to contend with. Instead a sash
held the open front closed. Could Betsy make coats for herself and her little
brother?
I went to Google for advice.
To my surprise, links led me to information on making blanket coats, including
the original French-Canadian capote (cape).
One site said it took only three to five hours. A Californian who used a
pattern to make one for winter hiking warns that he’d spent three days, part of
that time practicing on an old blanket. Smart man. And he had no regrets.
Betsy had no pattern. She
borrowed a blanket coat to figure out how to size it by measuring with a piece
of yarn, cut the pieces with a knife and by tearing, and sewed together the
loose-fitting garment. Ease of construction and warmth far outweighed such
considerations as how it draped.
A traditional blanket coat
has only five or six pieces. The major one is the body, made by cutting
according to the wearer’s girth and height and folding that piece with the
edges overlapping several inches at the front. Betsy would have overlapped
folds on the shoulders and left a flap for the collar. The pointed hood, two
pieces sewn together, attached to that. The hood had to be big enough to go
over a skunk- or coon-skin cap.
A slit from each shoulder to
under the armpit allowed her to insert the broad end of the raglan-style
sleeves, ones long enough that she could turn down the cuffs to cover her
mittened hands. She would have used a multipurpose rope rather than a sash to
keep the front closed.
Making a blanket coat
remains relatively simple today despite our concern for fashion. If you want to
make a traditional or modified one, I recommend investing in a pattern rather
than winging it as Betsy did.
Thunder Beneath My Feet
Shy,
sensible fifteen-year-old Betsy takes charge of the family farm and her ten-year-old
brother Johnnie when their mother rides south to bring her sick husband home to
New Madrid, Missouri Territory. Four days later on December 16, 1811, powerful
earthquakes destroy homes and trees, flood and poison the land, and turn the
Mississippi into a river of death. Their neighbors flee the never-ending
quakes. Betsy stays to wait for her parents, care for the animals, and find the
family’s stolen money. She and Johnnie share a lean-to with four strangers—a
16-year-old French-Shawnee boy, a mute slave woman, a poor French tutor, and
his elegant Spanish wife. Their secrets hold them there as the quakes and the
cold threaten their lives.
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