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KING PHILIP TO THE WHITE SETTLERS 61

Stranger, there is not room for us both. The Great Spirit has not made us to live together. There is poison in the white man's cup; the white man's dog barks at the red man's heels.

5 If I should leave the land of my fathers, whither shall I fly? Shall I go to the south, and dwell among the graves of the Pequots? Shall I wander to the west? — the fierce Mohawk, the man-eater, is my foe. Shall I fly to the east? -the great water is before me. No, stranger, here I have Io lived, and here I will die! And if here thou abidest, there is eternal war between thee and me. Thou hast taught me thy arts of destruction. For that alone I thank thee; and now take heed to thy steps; the red man is thy foe. When thou goest forth by day, my bullet shall whistle 15 by thee; when thou liest down at night, my knife is at thy throat. The noonday sun shall not discover thy enemy, and the darkness of midnight shall not protect thy rest. Thou shalt plant in terror, and I will reap in blood; thou shalt sow the earth with corn, and I will strew it with ashes; 20 thou shalt go forth with the sickle, and I will follow after with the scalping knife; thou shalt build, and I will burn, till the white man or the Indian shall cease from the land. Go thy way, for this time, in safety; but remember, stranger, there is eternal war between me and thee.

1. What reasons did Philip give for declaring war? To what extent were his reasons good?

2. What did he mean by "paper rights"; "a timid suppliant"; "poison in the white man's cup"; "arts of destruction"?

3. Edward Everett (1794-1865) was an American statesman, orator, and scholar. He served as a member of Congress, and afterwards was president of Harvard College. He was the leading orator of his day.

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.

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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, uns touched by the ax except for the notches at the ends where 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 10 puncheons, riven from the block with a heavy knife; the 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 15 with the stroke of their axes and hewed out a space for their 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 20 alarm and to stand siege within it. The Indians had 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, 25 whose wives ran bullets for them at its mighty hearth, and 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 30 became desperate indeed. After the Indian War ended, 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 the 15 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 5 forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At first he dressed 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 10 turn mistook white men for their own people. The whole 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 15 homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, 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 20 no use for wool. For a wedding dress a cotton check was 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 25 head he wore a cap of squirrel skin, often with the plumelike 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 30 and laying clapboards across them; the bedclothes were bearskins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare,

S. H. R. SEVEN-5

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