Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year

by E. C. Hartwell

PIONEER LIFE IN OHIO

By William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) long held a position of leadership among American writers of prose. In his many years of authorship he produced novels, essays, criticism, plays, travel, and biography. For ten years he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly; and he was connected at various times with Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and other journals. His writings excel in the truthfulness of the descriptions.

It would not be easy to say where or when the first log
cabin was built, but it is safe to say that it was somewhere
in the English colonies of North America, and it is
certain that it became the type of the settler's house
throughout the whole Middle West. It may be called the 5
American house, the Western house, the Ohio house.
Hardly any other house was built for a hundred years by the
men who were clearing the land for the stately mansions of
our day. As long as the primeval forests stood, the log cabin
remained the woodsman's home; and not fifty years ago 10
I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most
prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log
cabins of a finer pattern than the first settler reared. They
were of logs handsomely shaped with the broadax; the
joints between the logs were plastered with mortar; the 15
chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled,
the windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well
hung. They were such cabins as were the homes of the
well-to-do settlers in all the older parts of the West. But
throughout that region there were many log cabins, mostly
sunk to the uses of stables and corn cribs, of the kind that
the borderers built in the times of the Indian War, from
1750 to 1800. They were framed of the round logs, untouched
by the ax except for the notches at the ends where 5
they were fitted into one another; the chimney was of
small sticks stuck together with mud, and was as frail
as a barn-swallow's nest; the walls were stuffed with moss,
plastered with clay; the floor was of rough boards called
puncheons, riven from the block with a heavy knife; the 10
roof was of clapboards, split from logs and laid loosely on
the rafters and held in place with logs fastened athwart
them.

When the first settlers broke the silence of the woods
with the stroke of their axes and hewed out a space for their 15
cabins and their fields, they inclosed their homes with a
high stockade of logs, for defense against the Indians; or
if they built their cabins outside the wooden walls of their
stronghold, they always expected to flee to it at the first
alarm and to stand siege within it. The Indians had 20
no cannon, and the logs of the stockade were proof against
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
blackened the fields after the settlers plowed, and which
the whole family had to fight from the corn when it was
planted. Such were the rabbits, and such, above all, were
the squirrels, which overran the farms and devoured every30
green thing till the people combined in great squirrel hunts
and destroyed them by tens of thousands. The larger
game had meanwhile disappeared. The buffalo and the
elk went first; the deer followed, and the bear, and even
the useless wolf. But long after these the poisonous reptiles
lingered, the rattlesnake, the moccasin, and the yet-deadlier
copperhead; and it was only when the whole 5
country was cleared that they ceased to be a very common
danger.

—Stories of Ohio.

1. Make a pen or pencil sketch of the log house Howells describes; of the bedstead. Help the class make a display board of printed pictures that illustrate the objects mentioned.

2. What were the hardships of pioneering? The pleasures? Make a list of modern household conveniences the American pioneer did not have.

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