LITMIR.BIZ

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their rifles; if a breach was made, there was still the blockhouse

       left, the citadel of every little fort. This was heavily

       built, and pierced with loopholes for the riflemen within,

       whose wives ran bullets for them at its mighty hearth, and 25

       who kept the savage foe from its sides by firing down upon

       them through the projecting timbers of its upper story;

       but in many a fearful siege the Indians set the roof ablaze

       with arrows wrapped in burning tow, and then the fight

       became desperate indeed. After the Indian War ended, 30

       the stockade was no longer needed, and the settlers had

       only the wild beasts to contend with, and those constant

       enemies of the poor in all ages and conditions—hunger

       and cold.

      They deadened the trees around them by girdling them

       with the ax, and planted the spaces between the leafless

       trunks with corn and beans and pumpkins. These were 5

       their necessaries, but they had an occasional luxury in the

       wild honey from the hollow of a bee tree when the bears

       had not got at it. In its season, there was an abundance

       of wild fruit, plums and cherries, haws and grapes, berries

       and nuts of every kind, and the maples yielded all the 10

       sugar they chose to make from them. But it was long

       before they had, at any time, the profusion which our

       modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and

       in the hard beginnings the orchard and the garden were

       forgotten for the fields. Their harvests must pay for the15

       acres bought of the government, or from some speculator

       who had never seen the land; and the settler must be

       prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after

       all his toil into the hands of strangers. He worked hard

       and he fared hard, and if he was safer when peace came, 20

       it is doubtful if he were otherwise more fortunate. As the

       game grew scarcer it was no longer so easy to provide food

       for his family; the change from venison and wild turkey

       to the pork which early began to prevail in his diet was

       hardly a wholesome one. Besides, in cutting down the 25

       trees he opened spaces to the sun which had been harmless

       enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now sent up

       their ague-breeding miasma. Ague was the scourge of

       the whole region, and it was hard to know whether the

       pestilence was worse on the rich levels beside the rivers, or 30

       on the stony hills where the settlers sometimes built to

       escape it.

      When once the settler was housed against the weather,

       he had the conditions of a certain rude comfort indoors.

       If his cabin was not proof against the wind and rain or snow,

       its vast fireplace formed the means of heating, while the

       forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At first he dressed 5

       in the skins and pelts of the deer and fox and wolf, and his

       costume could have varied little from that of the red savage

       about him, for we often read how he mistook Indians

       for white men at first sight, and how the Indians in their

       turn mistook white men for their own people. The whole 10

       family went barefoot in the summer, but in winter the

       pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin and buckskin leggins

       or trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the

       waist and fringed where it fell to his knees. It was of

       homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, 15

       and out of this the dresses of his wife and daughters were

       made. The wool was shorn from the sheep, which were so

       scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except

       by the wolves, which were very fond of mutton but had

       no use for wool. For a wedding dress a cotton check was 20

       thought superb, and it really cost a dollar a yard; silks,

       satins, laces, were unknown. A man never left his house

       without his rifle; the gun was a part of his dress, and in

       his belt he carried a hunting knife and a hatchet; on his

       head he wore a cap of squirrel skin, often with the plume-like 25

       tail dangling from it.

      The furniture of the cabins was, like the clothing of

       the pioneers, homemade. A bedstead was contrived by

       stretching poles from forked sticks driven into the ground

       and laying clapboards across them; the bedclothes were 30

       bearskins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out

       with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare,

       and if the earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the

       grass which was its first carpet. The cabin had but one

       room, where the whole of life went on by day; the father

       and mother slept there at night, and the children mounted

       to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder. 5

      The food was what has been already named. The meat

       was venison, bear, raccoon, wild turkey, wild duck, and

       pheasant; the drink was water, or rye coffee, or whisky,

       which the little stills everywhere supplied only too abundantly.

       Wheat bread was long unknown, and corn cakes 10

       of various makings and bakings supplied its place. The

       most delicious morsel of all was corn grated while still in

       the milk and fashioned into round cakes eaten hot from

       the clapboard before the fire, or from the mysterious depths

       of the Dutch oven buried in coals and ashes on the hearth. 15

       There was soon a great flow of milk from the kine that

       multiplied in the pastures in the woods, and there was sweetening

       enough from the maple tree and the bee tree, but

       salt was very scarce and very dear, and long journeys

       were made through the perilous woods to and from the 20

       licks, or salt springs, which the deer had discovered before

       the white man or the red man knew them.

      The bees which hived their honey in the hollow trees

       were tame bees gone wild, and with the coming of the

       settlers some of the wild things increased so much that 25

       they became a pest. Such were the crows which literally

      

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