ns 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 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, 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 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.

Winter after winter, the Williamses heard the wolves howling round them
in the woods, and this music was familiar to the ears of all the Ohio
pioneers, who trusted their rifles for both the safety and support of
their families. 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 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 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 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, 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