HOUSE-BUILDING.
There was a change in the programme of daily labor, when the corn was in the ground. At odd times the settlers had gone over to the wood-lot and had laid out their plans for the future home on that claim. There was more variety to be expected in house-building than in planting, and the boys had looked forward with impatience to the beginning of that part of their enterprise. Logs for the house were cut from the pines and firs of the hill beyond the river bluff. From these, too, were to be riven, or split, the “shakes” for the roof-covering and for the odd jobs of work to be done about the premises.
Now, for the first time, the boys learned the use of some of the strange tools that they had brought with them. They had wondered over the frow, an iron instrument about fourteen inches long, for splitting logs. At right angles with the blade, and fixed in an eye at one end, was a handle of hard-wood. A section of wood was stood up endwise on a firm foundation of some sort, and the thin end 127 of the frow was hammered down into the grain of the wood, making a lengthwise split.
In the same way, the section of wood so riven was split again and again until each split was thin enough. The final result was called a “shake.” Shakes were used for shingles, and even––when nailed on frames––for doors. Sawed lumber was very dear; and, except the sashes in the windows, every bit of the log-cabin must be got out of the primitive forest.
The boys were proud of the ample supply which their elders had brought with them; for even the knowing Younkins, scrutinizing the tools for woodcraft with a critical eye, remarked, “That’s a good outfit, for a party of green settlers.” Six stout wedges of chilled iron, and a heavy maul to hammer them with, were to be used for the splitting up of the big trees into smaller sections. Wooden wedges met the wants of many people in those primitive parts, at times, and the man who had a good set of iron wedges and a powerful maul was regarded with envy.
“What are these clumsy rings for?” Oscar had asked when he saw the maul-rings taken out of the wagon on their arrival and unloading.
His uncle smiled, and said, “You will find out what these are for, my lad, when you undertake to swing the maul. Did you never hear of splitting rails? Well, these are to split rails and such things from the log. We chop off a length of a 128 tree, about eight inches thick, taking the toughest and densest wood we can find. Trim off the bark from a bit of the trunk, which must be twelve or fourteen inches long; drive your rings on each end of the block to keep it from splitting; fit a handle to one end, or into one side of the block; and there you have your maul.”
“Why, that’s only a beetle, after all,” cried Sandy, who, sitting on a stump near by, had been a deeply interested listener to his father’s description of the maul.
“Certainly, my son; a maul is what people in the Eastern States would call a beetle; but you ask Younkins, some day, if he has a beetle over at his place. He, I am sure, would never use the name beetle.”
Log-cabin building was great fun to the boys, although they did not find it easy work. There was a certain novelty about the raising of the structure that was to be a home, and an interest in learning the use of rude tools that lasted until the cabin was finished. The maul and the wedges, the frow and the little maul intended for it, and all the other means and appliances of the building, were all new and strange to these bright lads.
Making “Shakes” with a “Frow.”
First, the size of the cabin, twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, was marked out on the site on which it was to rise, and four logs were laid to define the foundation. These were the sills of the new house. At each end of every log two notches were cut, one on the under side and one on the upper, to fit into similar notches cut in the log below, and in that which was to be placed on top. So each corner was formed by these interlacing and overlapping ends. The logs were piled up, one above another, just as children build “cob-houses,” from odds and ends of playthings. Cabin-builders do not say that a cabin is a certain number of feet high; they usually say that it is ten logs high, or twelve logs high, as the case may be. When the structure is as high as the eaves are intended to be, the top logs are bound together, from side to side, with smaller logs fitted upon the upper logs of each side and laid across as if they were to be the supports of a floor for another story. Then the gable-ends are built up of logs, shorter and shorter as the peak of the gable is approached, and kept in place by other small logs laid across, endwise of the cabin, and locked into the end of each log in the gable until all are in place. On these transverse logs, or rafters, the roof is laid. Holes are cut or sawed through the logs for the door and windows, and the house begins to look habitable.
The settlers on the Republican Fork cut the holes for doors and windows before they put on the roof, and when the layer of split shakes that made the roof was in place, and the boys bounded inside to see how things looked, they were greatly amused to notice how light it was. The spaces 130 between the logs were almost wide enough to crawl through, Oscar said. But they had studied log-cabin building enough to know that these wide cracks were to be “chinked” with thin strips of wood, the refuse of shakes, driven in tightly, and then daubed over with clay, a fine bed of which was fortunately near at hand. The provident Younkins had laid away in his own cabin the sashes and glass for two small windows; and these he had agreed to sell to the newcomers. Partly hewn logs for floor-joists were placed upon the ground inside the cabin, previously levelled off for the purpose. On these were laid thick slabs of oak and hickory, riven out of logs drawn from the grove near by. These slabs of hard-wood were “puncheons,” and fortunate as was the man who could have a floor of sawed lumber to his cabin, he who was obliged to use puncheons was better off than those with whom timber was so scarce that the natural surface on the ground was their only floor.
“My! how it rattles!” was Sandy’s remark when he had first taken a few steps on the new puncheon floor of their cabin. “It sounds like a tread-mill going its rounds. Can’t you nail these down, daddy?”
His father explained that the unseasoned lumber of the puncheons would so shrink in the drying that no fastening could hold them. They must lie loosely on the floor-joists until they were thoroughly 131 seasoned; then they might be fastened down with wooden pins driven through holes bored for that purpose; nails and spikes cost too much to be wasted on a puncheon floor. In fact, very little hardware was wasted on any part of that cabin. Even the door was made by fastening with wooden pegs a number of short pieces of shakes to a frame fitted to the doorway cut in the side of the cabin. The hinges were strong bits of leather, the soles of the boots whose legs had been used for corn-droppers. The clumsy wooden latch was hung inside to a wooden pin driven into one of the crosspieces of the door, and it played in a loop of deerskin at the other end. A string of deerskin fastened to the end of the latch-bar nearest the jamb of the doorway was passed outside through a hole cut in the door, serving to lift the latch from without when a visitor would enter.
“Our latch-string hangs out!” exclaimed Charlie, triumphantly, when this piece of work was done. “I must say I never knew before what it meant to have the ‘latch-string hanging out’ for all comers. See, Oscar, when we shut up the house for the night, all we have to do is to pull in the latch-string, and the door is barred.”
“Likewise, when you have dropped your jackknife through a crack in the floor into the cellar beneath, all you have to do is to turn over a puncheon or two and get down and find it,” said Sandy, coolly, as he took up two slabs and hunted for 132 his knife. The boys soon found that although their home was rude and not very elegant as to its furniture, it had many conveniences that more elaborate and handsomer houses did not have. There were no floors to wash, hardly to sweep. As their surroundings were simple, their wants were few. It was a free and easy life that they were gradually drifting into, here in the wilderness.
Charlie declared that the cabin ought to have a name. As yet, the land on which they had settled had no name except that of the river by which it lay. The boys thought it would give some sort of distinction to their home if they gave it a title. “Liberty Hall,” they thought would be a good name to put on the roof of their log-cabin. Something out of Cooper’s novels, Oscar proposed, would be the best for the locality.
“‘Hog-and-hominy,’ how would that suit?” asked Sandy, with a laugh. “Unless we get some buffalo or antelope meat pretty soon, it will be hog and hominy to the end of the chapter.”
“Why not call it the John G. Whittier cabin?” said Uncle Aleck, looking up from his work of shaping an ox-yoke.
“The very thing, daddy!” shouted Sandy, clapping his hands. “Only don’t you think that’s a very long name to say in a hurry? Whittier would be shorter, you know. But, then,” he added, doubtfully, “it isn’t everybody that would know which Whittier was meant by that, would they?” 133
“Sandy seems to think that the entire population of Kansas will be coming here, some day, to read that name, if we ever have it. We have been here two months now, and no living soul but ourselves and Younkins has ever been in these diggings; not one. Oh, I say, let’s put up just nothing but ‘Whittier’ over the door there. We’ll know what that means, and if anybody comes in the course of time, I’ll warrant he’ll soon find out which Whittier it means.” This was Oscar’s view of the case.
“Good for you, Oscar!” said his uncle. “Whittier let it be.”
Before sundown, that day, a straight-grained shake of pine, free from knot or blemish, had been well smoothed down with the draw-shave, and on its fair surface, writ large, was the beloved name of the New England poet, thus: WHITTIER.
This was fastened securely over the entrance of the new log-cabin, and the Boy Settlers, satisfied with their work, stood off at a little distance and gave it three cheers. The new home was named.