When that sound was heard, the berry pickers raced
for the fort. The wild fruits--strawberries, service berries, cherries,
plums, crab apples--were, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer's
meager diet to be left unplucked out of fear of an Indian attack.
Another day would see the same group out again. The children would keep
closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of the young girls
would be more subdued, even if their coquetry lacked nothing of its
former effectiveness. Early marriages were the rule in the Back Country
and betrothals were frequently plighted at these berry pickings.

As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us by
travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in his battles with
wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of both wilderness and
Indian upon him. His countenance and bearing still show the European,
but the European greatly altered by savage contact. The red peril,
indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and
children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings,
were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and
love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to
the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting
grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's
family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. The Indian
peril trained the pioneers to alertness, shaped them as warriors and
hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into
clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in
the protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common
enemy.

Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested
by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations suffered by farmers and
stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to
Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly, depended.
Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came in time for the frontiersman
to collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live
stock and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At
others, the tap of the "express"--as the herald of Indian danger was
called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily,
ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had
surprised th