In the 1950s when I was a child many streams were still safe to drink from. So, I was taught by my father whenever we were in the wilds a few different ways to do this. In the first way you lay down next to the water and just suck water up with your mouth and drink directly from the river or stream. The second way I always preferred was to cup your hand (which I still often do even at a sink in the bathroom when brushing my teeth to rinse my mouth out afterwords). When you cup a hand and fill it with water I always liked this the best from drinking from streams or rivers in the 1950s an early 1960s. But, by the late 1960s it was recommended that people didn't do this anymore most place because you didn't want to get giardia or worse from cattle and deer going in streams and sometimes people who didn't care also. But, wherever there is a faucet I will usually cup my hand still to rinse my mouth with whatever water is at hand. But, I don't drink the water from any fawcett for years now and only actually drink bottled water or water from a reverse osmosis tippet. So, I ONLY rinse out my mouth now from brushing my teeth from any faucet except for a reverse osmosis tippet at this point or bottled Spring water at this point.
Then when I went to Nepal in 1986 I realized that people wash their rugs with soap in the streams (Tibetan Rugs that are usually about 3 feet by 6 feet which were commonly used then in the 1980s still with intricate designs on them. Also, many people uneducated would go to the bathroom in the streams as well both number 1 and number 2 so the stream would carry the waste away from their living location and not cause disease or problems where they were and this sort of thing has gone on for thousands of years at that point.
So, it wasn't surprising at all that well water needed to be boiled to be safe to drink for me and my family for at least 5 minutes time to kill anything in it that might be harmful for humans. So, we bought a kerosene stove there in Dharamshala, India to sterilize the water before making tea or drinking it. Also, the Green Hotel where we stayed had hot showers but the rooms were not heated and we were there in the winter time so it was between 20 and 30 degrees Fahrenheit most of the time when we were there especially at night. So, heating our rooms was necessary to feel more comfortable then in early 1986 in the Winter there in January then. But, the smell of kerosene was difficult but we were used to reading by kerosene lamps on my 2 1/2 acres then too in our A-Frame house in Mt. Shasta, California that could shed about 10 feet of snow safely without any work because of the steepness of the roof. But, the most we ever had at one time was 7 feet of snow.
So, when I grew up in the 1950s you could still drink from many mountain streams at that point which was what people did going back thousands of years in the western parts of the U.S.
But, you always had to be careful of water because there are places especially in the desert with names like "Bad Water" which when people drank from the water they died while settlers moved from Eastern States to Western ones.
Within the last 10 years I met a lady who was drinking from the McCloud River (near McCloud, California on highway 89) because someone told her it was okay. I told her I wouldn't do that because there are cattle in the river upstream from where she was. Hopefully, she or her child or husband didn't get giardia from doing this.
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