Life in a Log Cabin.

“I know of no scene in civilized life more primitive than such a cabin hearth as that of my mother.  In the morning, a buckeye back-log, a hickory forestick, resting on stone and irons, with a johnny-cake, on a clean ash board, set before the fire to bake; a frying pan, with its long handle resting on a split-bottom turner’s chair, sending out its peculiar music, and the tea-kettle swung from a wooden lug pole, with myself setting the table or turning the meat, or watching the johnny-cake, while she sat nursing the baby in the corner and telling the little ones to hold still and let their sister Lizzie dress them.  Then came blowing the conch-shell for father in the field, the howling of old Lion, the gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull clatter of pewter spoons and pewter basins, the talk about the crop and stock, the inquiry whether Dan’l (the boy) could be spared from the house, and the general arrangements for the day.  Breakfast over, my function was to provide the sauce for dinner; in winter, to open the potato or turnip hole, and wash what I took out; in spring, to go into the field and collect the greens; in summer and fall, to explore the truck patch, our little garden.  If I afterwards went to the field my household labors ceased until night; if not, they continued through the day.  As often as possible mother would engage in making pumpkin pies, in which I generally bore a part, and one of these more commonly graced the supper than the dinner table.  My pride was in the labors of the field.  Mother did the spinning.  The standing dye-stuff was the inner bark of the white walnut, from which we obtained that peculiar and permanent shade of dull yellow, the butternut [so common and typical in the clothing of the backwoods farmer].  Oak bark, with copper as a mordant, when father had money to purchase it, supplied the ink with which I learned to write.  I drove the horses to and from the range, and salted them.  I tended the sheep, and hunted up the cattle in the woods.” [Footnote:  Do., pp. 90, in, etc., condensed.] This was the life of the thrifty pioneers, whose children more than held their own in the world.  The shiftless men without ambition and without thrift, lived in laziness and filth; their eating and sleeping arrangements were as unattractive as those of an Indian wigwam.

    Peculiar Qualities of the Pioneers. 
    Native Americans did Best.

The pleasures and the toils of the life were alike peculiar.  In the wilder parts the loneliness and the fierce struggle with squalid poverty, and with the tendency to revert to savage conditions, inevitably produced for a generation or two a certain falling off from the standard of civilized communities.  It needed peculiar qualities to insure success, and the pioneers were almost exclusively native Americans.  The Germans were more thrifty and prosperous, but they could not go first into the wilderness. [Footnote: