It is possible that, sometime, Indians had burned their captives there. In fact there is no doubt of it. It must have been the work of Indians. We may go back in our imaginations to the time, when the place where the city of Detroit now stands was an Indian town or village, and ask its inhabitants if they knew who were burned twelve miles west of there on a creek, they might not be able to tell. We might ask the giant Indian of the sand hill, if he knew, and he might say, "I had a hand in that; it was in my day." But we have no medium, through which we can find out the dark mysteries of the past. They will have to remain until the light of eternity dawns, and all the dead who have ever lived are called to be again, and to come forth. Then the dark mysteries of the past which have been locked up for centuries will be revealed.
CHAPTER XII.
THE INSIDE OF OUR HOUSE—A PICTURE FROM MEMORY.
As I have been led away, for some years, following poor Indian in his belief, life and death, and in doing so have wandered from my story, I will now return to the second or third year of our settlement. I described how the body of our second house was made, and the roof put on. I now look at its interior. The lower floor was made of whitewood boards, in their rough state, nailed down. The upper floor was laid with the same kind of boards, though they were not nailed When they shrunk they could be driven together, to close the cracks. The chimney was what we called a "stick" or "Dutch chimney." The way it was built; two crooked sticks, six inches wide and four inches thick, were taken for arms; the foot of these sticks were placed on the inner edge or top of the second log of the house, and the upper ends laid against the front beam of the chamber floor. These sticks or arms were about six feet apart at the mouth of the chimney. Father cut a green black oak and sawed off some bolts, took a froe, that he brought from York State, and rived out shakes three inches wide and about an inch thick. Of these and clay he laid up the chimney. It started from the arms and the chamber beam. After it got up a little it was like laying up a pen. He spread on some clay, then laid on four sticks and pressed them into the clay, then spread on clay again, covering the sticks entirely. In this way our chimney was built, and its size, at the top, was about two by four feet. It proved to be quite a good and safe chimney.
[Illustration: "THE HOUSE BUILT 1836.">[
The last thing before retiring for the night, after the fire had burned low and the big coals were covered with ashes, was to look up chimney and see if it had taken fire. If it had, and was smoking on the inside, father would take a ladder, set it up in the chimney, take a little water and go up and put it out. This was seldom necessary, as it never took fire unless the clay cracked in places, or the weather wore it off.
When there was a small fire in the evening, I could stand on the clay hearth and look through the chimney at the stars as they twinkled and shone in their brightness. I could count a number of them as I stood there. Father drove into a log, back of the fire place, two iron eyes on which to hang a crane; they extended into the room about one foot. Around, and at one side of these he built the back of the fireplace of clear clay a foot thick at the bottom, but thinner when it got up to the sticks; after the clay dried he hung the crane. It is seen that we had no jambs to our fireplace. Father sometimes at night would get a backlog in. I have seen those which he got green, and very large, which were sometimes twenty inches through and five or six feet long. When he got the log to the door, he would take a round stick as large as his arm, lay it on the floor, so that his log would come crossways of it, and then crowd the log. I have seen him crowd it with a handspike and the stick would roll in opposite the fireplace. He would tell us children to stand back and take the chairs out of the way. Then he would roll the log into the fireplace, and very carefully so as not to break or crack the clay hearth, for mother had all the care of that, and wished it kept as nicely as possible. When he had the log on to suit him, he would say, "There, I guess that will last awhile." Then he would bring in two green sticks, six or eight inches through and about three feet long, and place them on the hearth with the ends against the backlog. These he called his Michigan andirons; said he was proud of them. He said they were wood instead of iron, to be sure, but he could afford to have a new pair whenever he wanted them. When he brought in a large fore-stick, and laid it across his andirons, he had the foundation for a fire, for twenty-four hours.
On the crane hung two or three hooks, and on these, over the fire, mother did most of her cooking. As we had no oven, mother had what we called a bake kettle; this was a flat, low kettle, with a cast cover, the rim of which turned up an inch or two, to hold coals. In this kettle, she baked our bread. The way she did it; she would heat the lid, put her loaf of bread in the kettle, take the shovel and pull out some coals on the hearth, set the kettle on them, put the lid on and shovel some coals on to it. Then she would watch it, turn it round a few times, and the bread was done, and it came on the table steaming. When we all gathered around the family board we did the bread good justice. We were favored with what we called "Michigan appetites." Sometimes when we had finished our meal there were but few fragments left, of anything except the loaf, which was four or five inches through, a foot and a half across, and four and a half feet in circumference.
Later, mother bought her a tin baker, which she placed before the fire to bake her bread, cake, pies, etc. This helped her very much in getting along. It was something new, and we thought it quite an invention. Mother had but one room, and father thought he would build an addition at the west end of our house, as the chimney was on the east end. He built it with a shed roof. The lower floor was made of boards, the upper floor of shakes. These were gotten out long enough to reach from beam to beam and they were lapped and nailed fast.
This room had one window on the west, and a door on the east, which led into the front room. In one corner stood a bed surrounded by curtains as white as snow; this mother called her spare-day bed. Two chests and a few chairs completed the furniture of this room; it was mother's sitting room and parlor. I remember well how pleased she was when she got a rag-carpet to cover the floor.