By preliminary, I mean I hope readers will be kind and,if I say things that are wrong they will help me to get it right.  Anyway, here it is:

 The “Trapper” pattern pocket knife emerged in the 1920’s and quickly overtook the Barlow as the leading American pocket knife form.  Although no pattern for pocket knives or for just about anything else emerges “whole cloth” or totally new, the Trapper seems to me to come about as close to that as possible.  It is not difficult to see the ancestry of the Toothpick pattern in the Spanish Navaja, the background of the Lady Leg (or Kate) in the Laguiole or the ancestry of the Sodbuster in the simple folding knives of ancient Rome but the Trapper seems a constructed pattern rather than an evolutionary one. 

An earlier example of this more “constructed” than evolutionary development is the Corsican “Vendetta” pattern which was developed by knife makers in Thiers, the French knife making center in central France - certainly far nearer Paris than Corsica.

The Vendetta which is a beautiful knife and quite simple was created in Theirs and then marketed in Corsica fairly early in the Nineteenth Century.  It was characterized by a tear shaped handle sometimes decorated with a blood thirsty quotation about revenge and the hope that the wounds made by the knife will be fatal. The Vendetta was given a distinctive long bolster with a sharp angle in it forming a finger rest or guard. Adopted by Corsicans, it quickly became and remains one of the essential souvenirs of a visit to Corsica. 

Like, the Vendetta knife with its nearly ex novo form and applied romantic associations, the Trapper, though not completely dissimilar to earlier jackknives appears without clear precedent and it too involves the application of romantic associations. But in the case of the American Trapper, the associations are not related to killing one’s fellows but going after fur bearing animals whose pelts were the object of important trade and provided the livelihood of many an early American. As the pattern does not emerge until the 1920’s, however, it seems quite a stretch to think that it was really intended for trappers rather than the far larger and growing general market. The trapper idea certainly adds a bit of romance - specifically of the early days of the settling of America.

The form of the the Trapper pattern is quite complicated involving delicate serpentine lines beginning at a traditional jack knife bolster and eventually after curving twice culminating in a somewhat  over scaled rounded end customarily but not always decorated with a bolster. This somewhat bulbous end is where the tips of the blade, or more commonly, the tips of two blades nestle. This relatively large curved end reminds one of the bulbous ends common in Colonial flatware and the ball ends of folding knives based on Oriental sources and imported to America through the mid nineteenth century. But in the Trapper the bulb or the ball at the end of the handle is flattened out.

The curving lines of both the top and bottom edges of the Trapper handle are reminiscent of the curved upper edge of the Laguiole and the classical Navaja but are more complex. 

By far the most common version of the Trapper includes two blades on a single axel. One blade is a clip form. Typically, he Trapper clip blade upper curve is slightly elongated but not so elongated as the so called “California” clip characteristic of the Laguiole and the classical Navaja. The second Trapper blade is a so-called “spey” blade.

The spey blade is the more “romantic” of the two as it calls to mind the speying of cattle on the ranch or at the farm. This association is emphasized when the blade is marked, as apparently it sometimes was, with the instruction that it is to be used to cut flesh. 

Because of these associations, it is noteworthy that the popularity of the Trapper rose in direct proportion to the growth of highly mechanized, comprehensively organized huge corporate ranching and farming during which the use of a folding spey blade in the field was decidedly diminishing and fast becoming a distant memory of another society now deceased.

More recently, the romantic association of the Trapper has been broadened from its origins in the early American fur trade, pioneers and explorers and from its association with cowboys, cattle ranchers and American family farmers to include “Grandpa”. If there is one knife pattern associated with ones ancestors, it is the Trapper.

But if there is something just a tad artificial about the development of the meaning and tradition of the Trapper pocket knife pattern, it is certainly one of the most successful patterns of all time and has now proved so durable and so well loved that whatever its early development it had become by the latter 20th century a very genuine part of American culture. Now it is a pattern resonant with the very real history of Americans from the pattern’s inception in the 1920’s if not the original marketing idea of early American woodsmen.

First of all, the Trapper is practical.  Large enough to be a working as opposed to a “Gentleman’s” knife, two bladed (in case one gets dull or breaks), slender and easy to carry but hefty enough to feel like a tool. Good looking if not of ancient pedigree, the Trapper is a practical, great jack knife. 

Despite our American pride in practicality, the fact is that practicality isn’t enough for the level of sustained success the Trapper has enjoyed for nearly a hundred years. There has to be more to it and there is.

Though not so emphasized by modern knife marketing, there shouldn't be many Trapper aficionados who do not feel some kind of kinship with the farmers and ranchers who suffered the dustbowl depression of the nineteen thirties. If there was a knife to accompany Steinbeck’s characters, his books and his stories, it would, I think be the trapper.  

Up, down and around Appalachia, across the plains and far out west the knife that accompanied migrating populations, that rested in the pockets of old time ranchers and farmers who suffered the demise of the traditional American ranch and farm, the knife of Prohibition and its moonshiners, the knife indeed of grandpa and now, great and great great grandpa for millions of Americans who were not always on top and too often at the bottom of an upside down economy was at least to the extent any knife predominated, the Trapper.  What it lacks in pedigree it has in real cultural power - and it has it in spades!

So while it may be that the Trapper has little or nothing to do with trappers and the early american fur trade it seems to commemorate, it has a better and more relevant pedigree.  It is about Americans whose rural occupations were  sacrificed to growth and modernization, about the people of the countryside whose living was lost when mega projects like the TVA took away their towns, its about trying to survive an economy brutally inhospitable to the less educated, the less privileged and the merely hard working, honest people who don’t want to be or aren’t suited to be great entrepreneurs or corporate executives.

From Barlow to Trapper is the story of America until the new horizon of service economies, global labor markets, terrorism and the rest - the era of the Tactical knife.

Perhaps Trappers can be thought of as the American Opinel - not because trappers look like Opinels but because Opinels developed as a peasant’s knife in the hills of Savoie, before Savoie became the land of internationally renown skiing resorts for the world’s wealthy - when it was the Appalachia of France and the land of the Savoyard peasant - before the farmers were dispossessed of their land and livelihoods and essentially expelled to become the underclass of modern industrial cities in the name of progress and the beneficial elimination of the peasantry.  The Opinel is not a great knife merely because of its practicality as practical as it is - or even because of its design though its design is recognized even by the Museum of Modern Art as great design.  It is a great knife because it stands to remind of what is gone - of the ostensible progress that has been made in the age of the global economy. Perhaps the Trapper is best understood as America’s Opinel reminding us of our grandparents and, if you are young enough, our great grandparents lived through and maybe a little bit as a commemoration or memorial to the fur traders who inhabit a highly romanticized view of early American life.