Life nowadays is just so much easier than it was a century or more ago isn’t it? We might think that we have it tough, but the reality is that we have technology at our fingertips that caters to our every whim.

It wasn’t always that simple of course. The older generations had things much tougher and less comfortable, and probably the toughest of all were the cowboys from the Wild West.

We call it the Wild West for a very good reason: life was very hard, very dangerous and your chances of living to a ripe old age were rather slim. Things were nothing like the Western genre of movies, it was a constant struggle against the elements, hostile wildlife and other people.

So cowboys learned the hard way how to survive, and they made sure they always carried with them these life saving items:

1. A good knife

The first thing that any cowboy had was a good knife. They didn’t have hatchets, machetes, wire saws and multi-tools like we carry in our bug-out bags today. Their only tool was a knife. So it was important to have a good one. This would usually be a mid-sized sheath knife, which was used for everything from cutting wood to skinning game.

Few had a honing stone, but the cowboys would often sharpen their knives on whatever stones they could find. A good chunk of granite or a piece of sandstone — it didn’t matter. Either one became a honing stone in turn.