For the 18 guys living in the mountains, I guess water might have been less of a problem - other than hauling and storing. For the rest of the world, more of a

For the 18 guys living in the mountains, I guess water might have been less of a problem - other than hauling and storing. For the rest of the world, more of a problem. 18 guys? I think you vastly underestimate the mountain area population. Not everybody lives in Kansas/Nebraska. In America, all rivers and streams are not safe to drink without sterilizing. Even in the mountains. That's TODAY. Not when people USED to get its water for free. And I seriously doubt "all rivers and streams" in the US "are not safe to drink without sterilizing". Sounds more like over-protection to me... Any folks here near safe rivers/springs to chip in? "Like free"? Sounds like a guy that doesn't garden or farm. I'm actually from a rural area and we used to have potatoes, tomatoes, olives, cucumbers, oranges and grapes wine, IN HOUSE. And we weren't even farmers, just something almost everybody around those parts with some available land did. Potatoes for example were just in a patch of land 600 sq feet wide, but we didn't have to buy any. As for olives trees, we had (have) around 50 of those -- the most exhausting thing was beating on them or scraping them to have the olives fall down on special plastic nets, and that took like a week at most. Produce isn't ever free. It takes an infrastructure of manure, land, water, labor and sanitation to exist at all. And nobody that gardens comes away without blisters. The free part comes from the fact that people were doing those things ANYWAY. That was part of their everyday life -- and for those that weren't, it was dead easy to get some, even without buying (there would always be some relative, friend etc to give them some produce).