Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year. E. C. Hartwell
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