My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and overhauling them one day I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old grist-mill, whistling and wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the “Spanish Student” there, and the “Coplas de Manrique” and the solemn and ever-beautiful “Voices of the Night.”

There were other books in those barrels which I must have read also, but I remember only these, that spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with Irving, and led me to attack seriously the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.

But neither these nor any other books made me discontented with the small-boy’s world about me. They made it a little more populous with visionary shapes, but that was well, and there was room for them all. It was not darkened with cares, and the duties in it were not many.

We had always worked, and we older boys had our axes now, and believed ourselves to be clearing a piece of woods which covered a hill belonging to the milling property. The timber was black-walnut and oak and hickory, and I cannot think we made much havoc in it; but we must have felled some of the trees, for I remember helping to cut them into saw-logs with the cross-cut saw, and the rapture we had in starting our logs from the brow of the hill and watching their whirling rush to the bottom. We experimented, as boys will, and we felled one large hickory with the saw instead of the axe, and barely escaped with our lives when it suddenly split near the bark, and the butt shot out between us. I preferred buckeye and sycamore trees for my own axe; they were of no use when felled, but they chopped delightfully.

VII

They grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had all the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. Yet no atoll in the far Pacific could have been more satisfactory to us. It was low and flat, and was half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall iron-weeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the spears and darts for our Indian fights.

The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called Western Adventure, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. I have wondered often since who wrote or compiled that book; we had printed it ourselves in D——, from the stereotype plates of some temporary publisher whose name is quite lost to me. This book, and Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made our State a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our own life in the log-cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade;” of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day with undaunted spirits. With our native romance I sometimes mingled with my own reading a strain of old-world poetry, and “Hamet el Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio.

VIII

When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cut-worms which swarmed in the upturned sod. I have no recollection of really enjoying any of the visionary red-cores and white-cores which had furnished us a Barmecide feast when we planted their seed, and so I suppose none of them grew.

But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear their slopes of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length. Neither could the cornfield beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.