ltivated, and harvested; live-stock to be housed and fed;
fences and barns to be built; pork, beef, grain, whiskey, and other
products to be prepared for market, and perhaps carried scores of miles
to a place of shipment.

All these things had to be done under conditions of exceptional
difficulty. The settler never knew what night his place would be raided
by marauding redskins, who would be lenient indeed if they merely
carried off part of his cattle or burned his barn. Any morning he might
peer out of the "port hole" above the cabin door to see skulking figures
awaiting their chance. Sickness, too, was a menace and a terror. Picture
the horrors of isolation in times of emergency--wife or child suddenly
taken desperately ill, and no physician within a hundred miles; husband
or son hovering between life and death as the result of injury by a
falling tree, a wild beast, a venomous snake, an accidental gun-shot, or
the tomahawk of a prowling Indian. Who shall describe the anxiety, the
agony, which in some measure must have been the lot of every frontier
family? The prosaic illnesses of the flesh were troublesome enough.
On account of defective protection for the feet in wet weather, almost
everybody had rheumatism; most settlers in the bottom-lands fell victims
to fever and ague at one time or another; even in the hill country few
persons wholly escaped malarial disorders. "When this home-building and
land-clearing is accomplished," wrote one whose recollections of the
frontier were vivid, "a faithful picture would reveal not only the
changes that have been wrought, but a host of prematurely brokedown men
and women, besides an undue proportion resting peacefully in country
graveyards."

The frontiersman's best friend was his trusty rifle. With it he defended
his cabin and his crops from marauders, waged warfare on hostile
redskins, and obtained the game which formed an indispensable part of
his food supply. At first the gun chiefly used on the border was the
smooth-bored musket. But toward the close of the eighteenth century a
gunsmith named Deckhard, living at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, began making
flintlock rifles of small bore, and in a short time the "Deckhard rifle"
was to be found in the hands of almost every backwoodsman. The barrel
was heavy and from three feet to three feet and a half in length,
so that the piece, when set on the ground, reached at least to the
huntsman's shoulder. The bore was cut with twisting