[Illustration: AN EARLY FERRYBOAT.]
By the use of the steamboat and better roads it was possible in 1820 to go from New York to Philadelphia between sunrise and sunset in summer, and from New York to Boston in forty-eight hours, and from Boston to Washington in less than five days.
THE RUSH TO THE WEST.—After the peace in 1815 came a period of hard times. Great Britain kept our ships out of her ports in the West Indies. France, Spain, and Holland did their own trading with their colonies. Demands for our products fell off, trade and commerce declined, thousands of people were thrown out of employment, and another wave of emigration started westward. Nothing like it had ever before been known. People went by tens of thousands, building new towns and villages, clearing the forests, and turning the prairies into farms and gardens. Some went in wagons, some on horseback; great numbers even went on foot, pushing their children and household goods in handcarts, in wheelbarrows, in little box carts on four small wheels made of plank. [9]
Once on the frontier, the pioneer, the "mover," the "newcomer," would secure his plot of land, cut down a few trees, and build a half-faced camp,—a shed with a roof of sapling and bark, and one side open,—and in this he would live till the log cabin was finished.
THE LOG CABIN.—To build a log cabin the settler would fell trees of the proper size, cut them into logs, and with his ax notch them half through at the ends. Laid one on another these logs formed the four sides of the cabin. Openings were left for a door, one window, and a huge fireplace; the cracks between the logs were filled with mud; the roof was of hewn boards, and the chimney of logs smeared on the inside with clay and lined at the bottom with stones. Greased paper did duty for glass in the window. The door swung on wooden hinges and was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside, which was raised from the outside by a leather string passed through a hole in the door. Some cabins had no floor but the earth; in others the floor was of puncheons, or planks split and hewn from trunks of trees and laid with the round side down. [10]
[Illustration: CORN-HUSK MOP.]
PIONEER LIFE.—If the farm were wooded, the first labor of the settler was to grub up the bushes, cut down the smaller trees, and kill the larger ones by cutting a girdle around each near the roots. When the trees were felled, the neighbors would come and help roll the logs into great piles for burning. From the ashes the settler made potash; for many years potash was one of the important exports of the country.
In the land thus cleared and laid open to the sun the pioneer planted his corn, flax, wheat, and vegetables. The corn he shelled on a gritter, and ground in a handmill, or pounded in a wooden mortar with a wooden pestle, or carried on horseback to some mill perhaps fifteen miles away.
Cooking stoves were not used. Game was roasted by hanging it by a leather string before an open fire. All baking was done in a Dutch oven on the hearth, or in an out oven built, as its name implies, out of doors. [11]
Deerskin in the early days, and later tow linen, woolens, jeans, and linseys, were the chief materials for clothing till store goods became common. [12] The amusements of the pioneers were like those of colonial days—shooting matches, bear hunts, races, militia musters, raisings, log rollings, weddings, corn huskings, and quilting parties.