# Circle the wagons



## skip.knox (Jul 2, 2017)

Practical questions plague me today.

Picture a wagon train consisting of ten wagons. Average four people per wagon. Each wagon is 12' long when unhitched. How do we camp?

The math is easy. Ten 12' wagons gives us a circle that is 120' in circumference and about 38' across. This lets me begin to picture the space. We have forty people who need supper, and one campfire in the center of this isn't going to cut it. I can give them a little more room by putting three feet between each wagon, but that only comes to 47'. This is big enough we can't camp just anywhere--trees, streams, boulders, etc. And we don't want too much space between wagons or wolves can come in. And bugbears.

Anyway, it's supper and sleeping that concern me here. One campfire per wagon? No way we can fit ten campfires into this space and still have room for people. So now we share campfires, which means we share cooks and we share food. You see how the practicalities have implications for social interaction? I can fudge some. Maybe three wagons carry supplies, cutting down on the number of people.

Anyways (plural of anyway), how many camp fires are needed to feed forty people? And yes, I could have added that without the preamble. Prologue. First chapter. ...


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## psychotick (Jul 2, 2017)

Hi,

Not sure I can answer your question, but I thought circling the wagons was done purely in case of Indian attack so people had things to hide behind as they shot back. And I don't think they would normally have done it otherwise. Also the wagons may be twelve feet long, the yokes on each wagon are probably another eight to ten, so not sure how that figures into your calculations.

As to how many fires - how much wood do they have? How big is the fire? What's its purpose - warmth, light or cooking? You could probably get away with one large one if it's only for warmth and light. Or you could have a dozen small ones, one for each wagon. Up to you really.

Cheers, Greg.


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## Demesnedenoir (Jul 2, 2017)

And throw in where the draft animals are kept to keep them safe from bugbears! Much of this is upto you, but I've no doubt you could find historical info on wagon trains... lots of teamwork there, shared cooking fires and supplies would be expected, I think. You might even be able to contact Mormon reenactors who do wagon trains, no doubt a historian there could likely offer some guidance on the social sharing side. I've a decent working knowledge of the west, but never needed to research wagon trains. Now a cattle drive I might be able to find better info right off, LOL. With cattle drives, one chuckwagon could handle quite a few cowboys. Also, consider that a lot of food is going to be preserved, dried beefs and biscuits and whatnot.


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## CupofJoe (Jul 3, 2017)

With 120 people, I'd expect some form of dedicated cooking facility. Maybe not a Chuck wagon exactly but a cooking pit or two with large pots, bread ovens and the like. And at night I'd expect one small fire be kept going, unless the fires are needed for warmth. A dozen fires running all night for no real purpose would be a lot of material collected and burned. 
I have a memory that in the American wagon trains, the usual formation for an overnight stop was more along the shape of parallel lines, with the draught animals on the outside [most of the time] and the "living space" between the wagons.
Boer settles learn to make an enclosure of thorn bushes that they cut and made on site. The Kraal would be large enough to surround them or at least the draught animals and any gaps between wagon. It wouldn't stop a determined assault but it stopped sneak attacks and animals looking for an easy meal [or just curious]


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## Rkcapps (Jul 3, 2017)

with that many people too, wouldn't someone need to dig a latrine? Obviously outside the wagons... may give opportunity for someone to be alone and attacked...


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## Vaporo (Jul 3, 2017)

I don't know. A 47' diameter space is pretty big. A someone who has cooked on a fire often, I can tell you that cook fires do not take up that much space. Fires need fuel, so they either have to carry wood with them or gather it in situ. Probably a bit of both. Carry firewood around in the wagons for a backup and/or kindling, but use gathered wood when possible. Either way, doing twelve fires seems like it would take an awful lot of wood. I think that a single fire being run by an experienced cook could get the job done well enough.

Normally, when I cook over a fire it takes at least 30 minutes to get the fire burned down to where I can cook directly over it. I cook for 5 people, which normally takes another 15-30 minutes. However, I'm not really in a hurry, plus I'm usually not taking advantage of all available cooking space. Plus, if I weren't cooking directly over the open flames and were cooking in a pot or pan, I wouldn't really need to wait for the fire to burn down before I could start. So, let's say it takes 30 minutes for the cook to prepare the meal, then 5 minutes to get a good fire going. He'll probably want to serve some kind of stew or something similar, so let's say he's cooking in a large pot. We have a 5-gallon pot here at our house, which I imagine would be just about right to enough to serve 40 people at about a pint of stew for each. Maybe a bit meager for someone who's been walking or riding all day, but they'd be on rations anyways, so what are you going to do? I know from experience that it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to bring that 5-gallon pot to a boil over a fire, and then the cook wants the stew to just simmer right below the boiling point for about half an hour (Ideally to make _really_ good stew, you'd let it set for even longer, but we're on rations and in a hurry here. We just need something that's satisfying enough to keep morale up). So, that's puts my estimate for total preparation time (from scratch) right at around an hour and a half to two hours with a single fire.


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## Queshire (Jul 3, 2017)

An average of four people for ten wagons? 40 people? That's only 1 classroom's worth of people (modern day, not western genre classroom) I reckon you can handle that with one fire, though maybe a large one?

Sharing a fire sounds like it'd make sense. For story reasons I could see going on a wagon train with people that you're suspicious enough of that you wouldn't trust them to share a fire with them, but that'd be pretty rare.

Food would depend on what sort of wagon train it is. If it's the sort of caravan run by a specific company with a caravan master and all that I could see food being included. Other than that, I could see sharing food on a sort of informal barter system / friendliness, for example, you know that if you need help fixing a broken wagon wheel that guy will help you with it so you don't have a problem sharing some dinner with him.

I imagine most wagons would have some supplies of food with them, maybe even a good chunk considering that food is kind of important, however it's not just food you're moving.

One possibility would be to have a designated chuck wagon carrying the majority of the caravan's food, but that's a lot of trust to put into a single wagon. I think it would require a degree of formality, whether by having the wagon train be run by a specific company or basically treating the wagon train as a miniature town.

You're going to want some space in between the wagons in the circle. I mean.... just trying to imagine how they would try to steer the wagons into an unbroken circle I can't figure it.

I don't think you need to worry about wolves or other wild animals. The fire and general level of activity would keep most of them away. Predators generally favor circumstances where every advantage is in their favor. They go after the wounded, sick and old, prey that's off on their own. Lone predators instead of pack predators would be even more cautious. Even a prey animal will struggle and there's no point getting a bite when you get injured in the process.

I can't say the same about monsters like Bugbears.

Still, even if you have gaps between the wagons then if you have ranged weapons you can peek out from behind the wagons and fire a shot through the gap while if you're going melee it would funnel the monsters through the gaps between the wagons which would be useful.

If they can just jump / surge over the tops of the wagons, well, you're pretty much screwed.


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## skip.knox (Jul 3, 2017)

@CupofJoe: forgot about the Boers. Thanks for that! And you are right that some sort of formation would be common mainly to keep out or at least discourage critters.


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## skip.knox (Jul 3, 2017)

Thanks for the feedback--I knew I could count on the crew.

I'm going to go with the parallel lines. If they camp near a river or stream, the form might be an arc, with the stream forming one side. Circles are still possible--the precedent I had in mind were the Taborite war wagons during the Hussite wars, though their formations were specifically military--but I like the parallel lines. 

I also like the notion of a chuckwagon and one or possibly two cook fires (I was thinking specifically about food, not warmth; wasn't clear there, sorry). I'm definitely going with the idea of specialty wagons.

Since you didn't ask, this is the context. They are wagoneers. Elves who combine into caravans (karwans) that are part extended family, part business enterprise that persists across trading seasons, though individual wagons can and do move between karwans. Elves in Altearth live in widely scattered small communities. Part of the role of wagoneers is to conduct trade and ferry news between these communities. The wagoneers also are the main point of commercial contact between the elf communities and humans and dwarves. 

All that inclines me to make the wagoneers familial and communal, far more so than an American West pioneer train. I wanted the logistics so I can move my main character in and out of that environment in a satisfying way. Among other things, your comments gave me the idea of a "guest wagon" specifically to house outsiders who might accompany a karwan for one reason or another.

Thanks again. Drinks for everyone!


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## Queshire (Jul 3, 2017)

On the idea of a guest wagon; even when they don't have guests the beasts pulling it would still require food, water and care all of which costs money. I have to think that they would need to either regularly bring along passengers or have some other use for them when they don't have guests to justify it.


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## Michael K. Eidson (Jul 3, 2017)

skip.knox said:


> ... And we don't want too much space between wagons or wolves can come in.



If you're worried about starving predators coming into the camp and making off with insufficiently supervised infants or food stores, you'd want to block the predators from coming in _under_ the wagons, which would be the more likely route into the camp, since the wagons would provide them cover as they sneak in. Unless your wagons sit a lot lower than the wagons you see in television shows of the old west in the US.


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## skip.knox (Jul 3, 2017)

Medieval wagons generally were not low to the ground either. But I think I agree with an earlier post that said the general commotion of human (elf) activity would keep most predators from coming inside. Unless it was a hard winter, of course.


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## Michael K. Eidson (Jul 5, 2017)

^That's why I said "starving predator." A gut gone empty for too long is a strong motivator.


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## Russ (Jul 5, 2017)

If you are interested in non-American or South African examples of wagons used in this way, just google Hussite use of wagons in war.  

Fascinating and effective.


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## TinyHippo (Jul 5, 2017)

Go to the nearest hardware shop and buy a 47' rope. Lay it out in a circle and invite 40 friends. See how many fires you will need to feed your friends.. Pretty sure this is bring out better answers than us forummers do


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## skip.knox (Jul 5, 2017)

If I had 40 friends, I'd be an entirely different sort of person. All my virtual friends would fit in there, though; plus, they feed themselves!


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