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