One of the very best ways you can prep is to watch a documentary called Frontier House. It was made many years ago for public broadasting and can be found in public libraries or purchased.
[link to www.pbs.org]

In that reality experiment, they took non-preppers with few agrarian skills, and put them in Montana for a period to see if they could make it. They had various tools that a pioneer family might have as they arrived, or that they could purchase from local suppliers.

It really would be far more difficult in reality, but watching the episodes shows you what you could reasonably expect to have to do day-to-day. It also shows the stress of living under those circumstances, and the issues of sanitation, malnutrition, boredom, lack of sex, lack of romance, muscle soreness, harvesting from animals, lack of abundance, etc that would occur. We would be blessed to have as many tools and supplies as those folks in the series.

There also was a great series on living in the Yukon and trapping and moving from primitive shelter to shelter and occasionally foraging from the land. Can't remember the name, but I think it was this one.
[link to dsc.discovery.com]

Seems like there was a female tough old bird that went along too.

People think about bugging out and living off the land, a very unrealistic impossible long term solution. These videos will help you contemplate about the difficulties you are up against in making it. Only a third of people who trekked out West managed to stay. Many died of various causes, or lost it all simply because they couldn't handle it.

There was an enormous abundance of resources and species and skills in those days by comparison, and far lower population density, so you have to consider all of that