J. E. Wright
      Doris S. Corbett

PIONEER



88 Pioneer Life

The perfect adaptation of an ax helve to comfortable use in
the hand resulted in a beautiful object, for the handle had to
be so sensitively adjusted to the shape of the palm that with
constant use there was as little jar as possible from the thou-
sands of heavy blows. Other things gave boys and men the
opportunity to indulge their sense of the beautiful with the
knife. Latches and long, heavy hinges of hornbeam were carved
and decorated for use on shed and house doors. For doors and
lids of closets and boxes, there were wooden knobs and but-
tons to be made, and in the cupboards stood many a carved
bowl. Powder horns were also carved in intricate and beautiful
designs.

Girls had their distinct share in the little industries of the
clearing. About the hearth they were kept busy with skillet
and spoon, stirring and turning and mixing. They helped bake
the johnnycake. They peeled turnips and potatoes. They
helped with the washing at the pond or at the hollowed log
trough and with the milking and churning. Such tasks might
be shared by boy and girl alike. But the frontier girl had her
own domain, in which she was as supreme as a princess. At
spinning, weaving, and knitting her fingers were as skilled
and delicate as her brother’s with his barlow knife. Stockings
for all the family, mittens and shawls for winter, a pot holder
of tow to protect her mother’s hands from handles that grew
hot over the coals, these she knitted at the cabin hearth or on
the doorstep in the first cool autumn days. Sometimes the
young women and girls gathered in the larger rooms of block-
houses, with their wheels and looms, to sing and talk together
at their spinning and weaving. The truck patch was their

E

7

§Z£

BUTTER TRAY AND PADDLES

Growing Up on the Frontier 89

special care, too. From spring to fall, while the men did the
heavier field work, the girls helped their mothers with weed-
ing, hoeing, and gathering the vegetables. And when the field
crops were ready, if helpers were scarce or the harvesting had
to be hurried in the face of threatening storms, they even
helped bind sheaves and pile the hay into haycocks. But their
usual harvest chore was carrying lunch to the men and boys
in the fields.

Boys as well as girls wove shot-pouch straps, belts, and garters.
A boy could make the necessary simple loom and could weave
a belt in a day. A piece of wood about four feet long, an inch
auger, spike gimlet, and barlow knife—nothing else was needed.
A belt could be bartered for one day’s work, or for the making
of a hundred rails.

At the fall killing, or butchering, both boys and girls helped
to cut up fat or to chop sausage meat and mincemeat. At the
cheese-making they helped prepare the rennet to thicken the
milk, squeezed the whey from the curd through bags, and
managed the lever of the cheese press.

As in rural communities of the present day, winter was a
period of comparative idleness for the men and boys. In most
districts the roads did not permit sleighs, but rolling on the
crust of the snow after a thaw and freeze and sliding on the
frozen streams were popular with the youngsters. Released
from labor in the fields, they were not willing to retire as soon
as darkness came. But the light furnished by the candles or
saucers of grease was hardly sufiicient for reading the book or
two the more fortunate family might possess. So in the winter
evenings they huddled around the hearth and retold tales from

LARD
LAMP

90 Pioneer Life

history and legend and sang songs of love and adventure. The
winter season also brought Christmas to some groups of set-
tlers: the Germans, the Virginians, the Catholic Irish, and the
other non-Presbyterian groups. The Presbyterian Scotch-Irish
did not celebrate Christmas. From the little that is known
about holiday festivities, we infer that then as now it was a
time of mirth and gifts, especially for the children. Among the
Germans the Beltznickel Man, a member of the community
disguised in a panther skin with trailing tail, black bearskin
cap, and mask, romped with the children and filled their stock-
ings with apples and nuts.

After the snow and ice had disappeared, members of scat-
tered mountain communities were more accessible to one an-
other and could visit in parties on Sundays to sing hymns and
songs. Fishing also furnished diversion, and although with the
pioneer it was necessary as a means of procuring food, it was
nevertheless one of his favorite sports. Efforts were well re-
warded, since the rivers of western Pennsylvania abounded in
fish, many of them unusually large; the perch sometimes
weighed five and one-half pounds and the sturgeon measured
four and one-half feet. Therefore, it is not surprising that fish-
ing was a popular pastime for young and o1d—for the small
boy who caught minnows with pin hooks as well as for his
elders who angled for pike and catfish.

And for more exciting occupations in spring and summer the
boys helped clean out snake dens by firing them or by shooting
the occupants.

Sometimes a boy was left in complete charge of cabin and
clearing while his parents made journeys, perhaps several weeks

Growing Up on the Frontier 9 1

long. john Reynolds writes of his being left alone on such an
occasion and his manner of recording the time that passed till
his father’s return: “Each day I cut a notch on the door cheek,
and on Sabbath one of double size. Thus I kept tally of the
days and weeks, and often counted the notches to pass the time
which hung so heavy.”

An important part of the boy’s education came through his
mimicry of calls of birds and beasts. Imitation of the call of
the wild turkey decoyed that wily bird. By imitating the bleat
of the fawn he led the doe to her death. To recognize such mock
calls warned him of Indians who used them to signal one an-
other for an attack. So by sportive competition the young pio-
neers were trained in a woodland art that not only aided in
obtaining food but also protected the family and community
from their most dreaded enemy.

For the same reason boys early learned to shoot a rifle, and,
when the supply of powder permitted, all members of the
family were trained in marksmanship. The boy was taught to
aim at a mark by resting his rifle on a log or stone or against
the side of a tree, so that the force of the explosion would not
throw the bullet out of line. The young frontiersman prac-
tised so diligently with his rifle and took so much pride in
its use that it was not uncommon for a boy thirteen years old
to be able to hit a mark as he ran.

An arrow from the bow of a young brave would not have
found its mark more surely than one shot from the bow of a
pioneer lad. The more expert succeeded in bringing down
birds in flight. And with what diligence a boy must have prac-
ticed throwing the tomahawk! He strides five steps backward

  

POWDER HORNS
Q.

000

  

92 ‘ Pioneer Life

from the tree, strikes the ground with the edge of his toma-
hawk, raises and hurls it. It makes exactly the given number
of swift turns in the air and plants itself firmly in the tree. Like-
wise the same trained eye measures the distance of seven and
one-half steps, and the tomahawk strikes the tree with its blade
up. His keen eye and trained hand can land the tomahawk in
any position he chooses.

When so many pioneer parents could not write even their
own names and could not have read them if some one had
written them, one wonders how so many of the children be-
came not only literate men and women but doctors, lawyers,
professors, ministers, or writers as well. The parents were eager,
however, that their children be educated. The pioneer cared
a great deal for the future and for the future citizens of the
country he was reclaiming from wilderness. Every chance that
offered education for the children was seized, and as chance sel-
dom offered, it was often created. Inasmuch as education is not
merely learning to read and write, but is also learning to think
and feel rightly about life, much of the training of young
people on the frontier came from sources other than school-
rooms and books. The constant useful chores performed about
the cabin gave children skill in many tasks. They, like their
parents, were trained by the conditions of frontier life to be
alert, resourceful, and courageous in hardship; and countless
influences bore on their sensitive natures—the quiet of forests,
the beauty of the seasons and wild life, the knowledge of wood-
craft, the tales told round the cabin hearth. True, they were
exposed early to vice, and many crude ideas were implanted in
young minds from constant association with crude persons.

Growing Up on the Frontier 9 3

But there were also the visiting minister, the occasional visit
of the doctor, and the pious and the educated members of the
community, whose concern for schooling was strong.

Usually the first teacher was the pioneer mother, who by the
light of the hearth, made a little brighter by chips thrown on
the fire, drew her children to her knee and heard them stumble
through their first letters and words. Often the only book in
the cabin was the Bible. Sometimes a primer could be bor-
rowed, dog-eared, torn, mended, and finger-smudged from use
in other cabins. When enough settlers had gathered in a com-
munity, a minister who lived near might be prevailed on to
gather the children together in a vacant cabin, or a cabin might
be raised for a schoolhouse. Sometimes a widow or an elderly
spinster knew the rudiments of reading and numbers. Men, of
course, were preferred, for the teaching of frontier schools was
diflicult and dangerous. One case is known of Indians attacking
a schoolhouse and murdering and scalpingimaster and pupils.

If school was held in a room of an early courthouse, as it was
in Washington, much labor and worry was saved. But there
were times when pupils studied in the woods and recited in the
cabin of the schoolmaster or mistress. The schoolhouse, how-
ever, was usually the “waste” cabin in a community, one
deserted by its owner. If a schoolhouse could be built it was
generally the ordinary cabin of logs, with broad puncheon
floors, iron stove or stick and mud chimney, split logs for seats,
pegs for the hats and sunbonnets and the home-made lunch
baskets, and with the window openings covered with the usual
greased paper. Along the wall by the windows were fastened
boards on which the advanced pupils did their writing. Just

WILD CHERRY

94 Pioneer Life

inside the door, by a tow string, hung a paddle, one side marked
“In,” the other side marked “Out.” When a pupil left the
room he turned the paddle to read “Out,” and when he re-
turned, he reversed it. A law was passed by the state in 1790
providing for a school or schools in every county, but for many
years such institutions were rare, and one school in a county
could be reached by very few pupils.

Although a minister might be found who could give some
time to teaching, most children could not profit from such
good fortune. Their foundation for the study of medicine, or
law, or simply of newspaper reading was more often given
them by a vagrant type of man who wandered into the com-
munity and, before many months had passed, disappeared
under suspicion: a strolling Yankee, a questionable Irishman,
or sometimes a roving Virginian—unkempt fellows who could
teach spelling, reading, writing, and ciphering as far as the rule
of three, beyond which they could not go. Of grammar, geogra-
phy, and “definitions” they usually knew nothing. One out of
many could quote a dozen lines of Latin poetry that he had
picked up somewhere and of which he gave amazing transla-
tions. Most of the frontier schoolmasters had one talent of con-
siderable social value: they could play a flute or a fiddle at the
raisings and bees, and so could afford the cabin settlement some
degree of extra service.

Schooling went “by spells,” according to whether a teacher
had come into the valley and whether the season brought little
or much work to be done about the farms. A summer term was
sometimes provided for younger children who were not needed
in the fields or for odd jobs, and a fall term for older boys and

Growing Up on the Frontier 95

girls who, during the summer months, worked in the truck
patch, tended the cows, and helped in the grain fields and at
grinding. Tuition was paid at the rate of a dollar and a half to
two dollars for a term of three months, although those who
could not pay were provided for by a poor fund. Many a log
schoolhouse saw assembled on its seats youngsters of four and
five among strapping fellows and girls, fully grown, who had
not found schooling possible when they were younger.

The three R’s—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic——was the aver-
age curriculum on the border. If a minister sat at the desk and
held sway with the rod and the ruler, a little Latin and mathe-
matics might be squeezed in for exceptional pupils. Occasion-
ally some master came along who could take pupils beyond the
rule of three, through the double rule of three, through prac-
tice, tare and tret, interest, decimals, and common fractions.

School was opened by the master calling out “Books!” Then
the hubbub began. All pupils studied and recited “out loud’’
their spelling, reading, and multiplication tables, and the test
of good reading was loudness and speed. The New England
Primer, the New Testament, Dilworth’s Spelling Book, and
the Western Calculator furnished the meager knowledge that
the pioneer youngster carried away from his schoolroom. This
was made fast in his mind by frequent thrashings with birch
rod or cat-o’-nine-tails. The hornbook, a single sheet of primer
protected by a transparent sheet of horn, was in general use on
the frontier, although it had long ago become old-fashioned
in better schools in the East. The “setting of copy” for lessons
in writing and penmanship was one of the most important tasks
of the schoolmaster, and a boy who after six weeks at school

96 Pioneer Life

turned into a fairly good penman was considered remarkably
clever. It was a day to be remembered when the frontier child
began to write “a joining hand and capitals,” and soon he be-
came of service to his neighborhood in the writing of letters
and business and legal papers.

As in other frontier occupations, school supplies came from
what materials were available. Lessons were written with char-
coal on smooth shingles. Unruled paper and pencils were also
in use. Maple bark, sumac, or white oak bark yielded ink. From
goose quills the schoolmaster made pens for his students, and
it was often his greatest accomplishment. As a reward for doing
his lessons well a pupil might be allowed to make the pens.

Recess was unknown in frontier schools. But noon was a
period of games in the “camp” or playground adjoining the
schoolhouse, or in the sugar maple grove or the meadow across
the creek. Many a homespun pair of breeches was ripped by
climbing tree trunks in quest of birds’ eggs. Many a knee was
skinned and shin barked when two boys raced each other up
the trunk, one on each side of the same tree. Black snakes were
poked out of their hiding places under the worm fence by
means of a stick, their backs were broken, and the limp bodies
were hung over the fence to die with the sinking of the sun
behind the hill crest. Girls were not excluded from the noon-
time games. Black man’s base, three-cornered cat, town ball,
and paddle ball enlisted every pupil in uproarious activity. At
times a passing stranger on horseback interrupted the fun. It
was the custom for boys, on entering the schoolroom, to re-
move their hats and make a bow; the girls curtsied. And when
a stranger passed along the road boys and girls drew up in line

Growing Up on the Frontier 97

and performed as a group the same friendly and respectful
salutes.

The annual barring out of the master at Christmas as a
challenge to distribute the season's treat was long looked for-
ward to. The unlucky pedagogue, arriving at the door after his
long tramp through snow that reached to his knees, found the
door of the cabin school closed, the latch string within, and the
pupils hilarious on the other side, toasting their shins at the
open fireplace while he shivered and knocked for entrance. If
he had brought with him a well-laden basket, his entreaties
were shortly answered by the door swinging open and an on-
rush of excited pupils. He took his place at the desk and from
the basket laid out great pieces of gingerbread to be distributed
when the excitement died down. He then dumped the remain-
ing contents out, and polished, rosy-cheeked apples rolled over
the floor to be gathered with shouts and laughter by scrambling
boys and girls. The gingerbread was passed round, and the
school settled down to sums and noisy repetition of multipli-
cation tables mingled with spelling and reading. One incident
is recorded of the master’s turning the tables on pupils who
had barred the door on him. When they refused to allow him
to enter he set off into the woods, dragged a great log to the
schoolhouse, and laid it across the doorsill. Then he laid an-
other and another against the unyielding door until the shouts
and laughter within died down as the pupils learned what was
happening. He was about to make off through the deep snow
homeward when relenting cries stopped him; the victorious
master removed the logs, the door swung open, and he entered
to start the day’s session.

 

MOUSE TRAP

Pioneer Life

In Western Pennsylvania

98 Pioneer Life

When the frontier boy and girl had picked up what odd bits
of knowledge such schools and schoolmasters could offer they
took up the regular tasks of farm and home. Boys often learned
a trade. Girls had little choice but to perfect the usual home-
making tasks of cooking, spinning, weaving, caring for the sick,
and other wifely occupations. Childhood was not long on the
frontier, and youth was little different from manhood and
womanhood. Marriage came early, and with marriage a new
cabin home began its own strenuous task of civilizing another
corner of the wilderness.

Young people of the frontier were not excluded from higher
branches of learning such as their cousins in eastern cities could
study. Children of the more prosperous settlers were sometimes
sent to eastern schools. Others who wished to pursue classical
and mathematical studies, or those subjects leading into the
professions of medicine, theology, and law, found opportunity
to do so in their own district. Young men could read law or
medicine in the oflices of lawyers and doctors who had settled
in the towns. After 1780 the Reverend John McMillan, the
Reverend Thaddeus Dodd, and the Reverend Joseph Smith
set up cabin schools for teaching classical and mathematical
subjects. Then in 1 789 an academy was opened at Washington,
Pennsylvania. In 1791 the courthouse in which it was housed
burned down. A lot was offered at Canonsburg, and there in
1794 the Canonsburg Academy and Library Company was
chartered, which later became Jefferson College. Washington
Academy was reopened meanwhile. Some seventy years later
these schools united to form Washington and Jefferson College.

Before February, 1787, a log house in Pittsburgh had given

Growing Up on the Frontier 99

to the field in which it stood the familiar name of the “academy
lot.” In the log house for some time past young men had been
taught the higher branches of learning. Now on the twenty-
eighth of February, 1787, this school was chartered as the
Pittsburgh Academy (which developed into the University of
Pittsburgh) to teach Latin, Greek, English, and the “Mathe-
maticks.” Before long, penmanship, bookkeeping, and French
were added to the curriculum. Here came the sons of the fore-
most men of the town, supplied with their own quill pens and
their own candles for evening classes. And more than that, they
made their own books by binding together the sheets of paper
they had filled with notes at the dictation of their professors.
Here, too, came young ladies, although at different hours from
those at which the young men attended, and they entered and
left by different doors. Nor did the young ladies and young
gentlemen mingle in any other way at the academy. But the
young ladies were taught by the same professors English, his-
tory, and French; “the Mathematicks,” however, were con-
sidered too strong for their tender minds.

In 1794 a newspaper advertisement by the Reverend James
Dunlap and William Littell, Esq., announced their school in
Fayette County, where they taught “Elocution and the English
language grammatically, together with the Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew languages, Geometry and Trigonometry, with their
application to Mensuration, Surveying, Gauging, 8cc., likewise
Geography and Civil History, Natural and Moral Philosophy,
Logic and Rhetoric.” Here “boarding, washing, 8cc., may be
had at reputable houses in the neighborhood, at the low rates
of ten pounds [$26.67] per annum.”

1 oo Pioneer Life

Thus educational facilities were improved little by little in
spite of discouraging conditions. Pioneer children, through the
determination of their parents and of other foresighted men
and women, were able to obtain the fundamental, and later the
broader, benefits of education.

 

jigging It Off

IX

HERE came a late spring day on the frontier when a man
Tand his wife, hoeing barefoot in their truck patch, raised
their heads to listen to a strange sound. Somewhere back in
the woods an ax was being swung against the trunk of an oak
tree. Some one, not knowing how near he was to a cabin, was
clearing a space for his own. A neighbor had arrived on the
border.

Before the harvest was gathered enough cabins had been
built within a day's tramp of one another to make a neighborly
settlement. It had even been given a name. “Over at Evans’,”
people down the creek would say, “there’s another cabin
buildin’.” “Up by Evans’ town,” a man carrying his grist from
the mill would tell the miller, “I shot a bear on my way down
here.” Then, “Evanston folks are havin’ a frolic, I reckon,”
the blacksmith would say as he shod a horse bearing a whiskey
jug slung from its saddle.

No longer need the first settlers wish for a neighbor with
whom to talk about what could be done for the cow that was
sick or for the thumb that was festering. The frontier woman
could now walk in one morning to one of several neighbors to

101

1 02 Pioneer Life

help with a day’s candle pouring. There were neighbors now
to gather at intervals for a “praying” meeting. There were
enough to make pioneer tasks easier by collective helpfulness-
to clear a newcomer’s land and put up the walls and roof of
his cabin by nightfall; to make light of the corn shucking; to
help in the fulling of the new weft of linsey just taken from
the loom; to collect at night and make haste with the “bilin’ ”
of the pails of maple sugar.

There were young people, too, who met once in a while

for a kissing party. There was an occasional “marryin , or a
“buryin’.” Even the burial ceremony was an occasion for com-
panionship as well as for offering help and solace. The new
family from over the ridge would be there, and some friends
from the south branch. Not the briefest hour for companion-
ship could be missed on the frontier.

General gatherings were still rare before the border was
thickly settled, and bad roads often made attendance impos-
sible, but border people crowded their pleasures into what
hours they could snatch from their tasks. The long days of hard
work were forgotten then in uproarious fun. The corn-stalk
fiddle, the flute, or an old fife brought over the mountains
carried the tune for rough voices shouting old Jacobite songs
once sung in Scotland and Ireland or the Rhineland songs of
the Germans. Rough jests and jokes were bandied. Great brag-
ging went on, and tall tales of adventure. Stories of witches and
goblins brought chills and bated breath. Everyone joined, men,
women, and children, in jigging it off, jigging care out of the
window and dark spirits out the door.

Sports sometimes collected the people for a festive occasion.

 

jigging It Off 1 03
Usually late in the fall, after the harvest, a merry group as-
sembled in a clearing or in the stockade to watch the men and
boys compete in the arts of war and hunting. The mountains
echoed their shouts and the reports of the rifles as they engaged
in contests that demanded unbelievable skill. They ran races,
vied in jumping hurdles or narrow streams, and, spurred by
the cries of the spectators, engaged in wrestling matches. The
excitement and pleasure of the day might be heightened if
an argument arose or a long-standing feud came to a crisis that
could be settled only by fists. As quarrels were common even
in the simple society of that day, certain established rules
governed fighting that reveal the vigor and fierceness of these
people who had survived the rigors of the wilderness. Although
weapons were banned, fighters were permitted to use not only
their fists but also their feet and teeth. No damage that could
be done by these means was forbidden, even the gouging of
eyes.

Seldom did such a day end without some hatchet-faced brag-
gart, pock-marked and huge-fisted, leaping from the crowd to
a stump and bellowing his challenge. Perhaps he had spent
some months boating from Brownsville to Pittsburgh or on
down the Ohio to Wheeling, and in the rough river company
had gathered their picturesque lingo. Hungry for a good rough-
and-tumble and conscious perhaps of the power of such lingo
to astonish his hearers, he indulged in it now in his challenge:

“I’m a Salt River roarerl I’m a ring-tailed squealer! I’m a
reg’lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip’! WHOOPI I’m the
very infant that refused his milk before its eyes were open,
and called out for a bottle of old rye! I love the women an’ I’m

1 o4 Pioneer Life

chockful o’ fight! I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alli-
gator and the rest 0’ me is crooked snags an’ red-hot snappin’
turtle. I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin’ an’ every lick I
make in the woods lets in an acre 0’ sunshine. I can out-run,
out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an’ out-fight, rough-
an’-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river
from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an’ back ag’in to St. Louiee.
Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics,
an’ see how tough I am to chaw! I ain't had a fight for two days
an’ I'm spilein’ for exercise. Cock-a-doodle-dool”

Certain games that could be played at the rare social gather-
ings furnished entertainment the year around. Corn kernels
served as checkers and were also used in a game called “Fox
and Geese.” A lively frolic called “Hurly-burly” was a favorite.
Two people went round and secretly appointed each member
of the group to perform a certain act. This girl was to pull a
young man's hair, another to tweak an ear or nose, another to
trip some one, and so on. When all had been told what to do,
the leader cried, “Hurly-burlyl”, and the confusion that fol-
lowed gave the game its name.

Drop the handkerchief was a game likely to be played by the
younger children on the edge of the party. The words of the
song were not always the same. One form, much like the mod-
ern version, follows:

Wiskit-a-waskit,

A green leather basket;

I wrote a letter to my love,
And on the way I lost it;

Some of you have picked it up,
And put it in your pocket.

jigging It Off 105

I have a little dog at home,
And it shan’t bite you,

Nor you, nor you, nor you;
But it shall bite you.

Among the young folks the event anticipated most joyously
so called because in all the games,

I)

was the “kissing party,
either as a penalty or as part of the play, each girl was kissed by
some one of the boys. These games were musical and vocal,
usually performed to the strains of a fiddle. When all the guests
had gathered and the cabin was swarming with giggling girls
in blue and green linsey and noisy boys in buckskin hunting
shirts, the fiddler struck up a tune, a young blade was dragged
to the center of the floor, and the play began. The others joined
hands and circled about him singing:

King William was King ]ames’s son,

And of that royal race he sprung;

He wore a star upon his breast,

To show that he was royal best.

Go choose your east, go choose your west,
Go choose the one that you like best;

If he's not here to take your part,

Go choose another with all your heart.

The boy in the center made a snatch at a buxom girl, and
pulled her into the center of the circle with him. The singing
grew louder:

Down on the carpet you must kneel,
Just as the grass grows in the field;

Salute your bride with kisses sweet,

And then rise up upon your feet.

1 06 Pioneer Life

At this point the girl was kissed soundly by her companion to
the accompaniment of giggles and guffaws. The play continued
until every girl had stood in the center of the circle and had
been kissed.

Sometimes the play was reversed. A shy girl, her blushes
heightened by firelight, her fingers hiding themselves in the
folds of her linsey skirt, her long braids over her shoulders, was
pushed protesting into the circle. A new song began:

There's a lily in the garden
For you, young man;
There's a lily in the garden,

Go pluck it if you can.

Encouraged by whispered hints and prods in the back, she
pointed a shy finger at some lanky giant in red plaid shirt and
bear-greased hair. For a few breathless whirls in his crushing
arms her feet flew from the floor, her skirts and black braids
swayed, and she scurried back to the circle of laughing com-
panions.

To clapping of hands and stamping of feet the song went on:

There he stands, the great big booby,
Who he is I do not know;

Who will take him for his beauty?
Let her answer, yes or no.

Here was the moment long dreamed of by some saucy lass who
had watched this fellow at the stockade, concerned too much
with rifle and shot to feel her grey eyes upon him. She had car-
ried him water and chunks of venison steak without even a
“thank you.” Here was her moment. She was the one who

jigging It Off 107
would choose him, flaunting her pale-haired beauty and the bit
of blue ribbon her mother had hoarded for so long.

Song after song came from the playing groups, the old words
and tunes of the Scottish and English folk songs that found
voice for a time in the western wilderness about the Ohio and
Monongahela rivers before they were carried on down the
Ohio to the Kentucky mountains. The frosty night wore on,
while the young couples, unheeding the wind and snow whis-
tling around the corners of the cabin and the crackle of falling
logs in the chimney, swung about the circle in laughter that
often drowned out the words:

Oh, sister Phoebe, how merry were we
The night we sat under the juniper-tree,
The juniper tree, I, oh.
Take this hat on your head, keep your head warm,
And take a sweet kiss, it will do you no harm,
But a great deal of good, I know.

Then the rhythm changed and the clapping and stamping
came quicker:

If I had as many lives

As Solomon had wives,

I'd be as old as Adam;
So rise to your feet

And kiss the first you meet,
Your humble servant, madam.

A rough screech from an old codger in the corner, whose mem-
ories had been roused by the evening, rose over the din of the
youngsters:


1 08 Pioneer Life

It's raining, it's hailing, it's cold stormy weather;
In comes the farmer drinking of his cider.

He’s going a-reaping, he wants a binder,

I’ve lost my true love, where shall I find her?

Dancing, of course, was a form of amusement heartily en-
joyed by these buoyant people. Whenever occasion permitted
any number of them to be together, a tune was struck up on
the fiddle, and soon the floor of the cabin creaked and groaned
with the scraping of feet. Knowledge of only a few simple
dances had traveled across the mountains. The square set and
the three and four-handed reels were forms in which all took
part. In the heat of the evening, when the party was in full
swing, they pranced through the furious pace of the cut-out
jig or the Irish trot, the stamping almost overwhelming the
shrieking of the fiddle. When the dancers, tired from their
exertions, had retreated to the wall, one young dandy who
was able to outlast his fellows would leap into the center and
break into swift and startling figures of a jig of his own con-
trivance. In this way a party of pioneers frequently stamped
and swayed to the tune of a fiddle the night through. Often
the moon had gone down and the stars had disappeared before
the crowd, in couples and in groups, shouting and still singing
the merry tunes, groped along the roads and trails to their dis-
tant cabins.

Purely social gatherings, however, were not frequent. Rais-
ings, marriages, and various seasonal tasks such as harvestings
offered the chief opportunities for amusement. If a new strip
of forest had to be cleared, the neighbors were notified, and a
chopping and logging frolic was announced. In the same spirit

jigging It OH 109
of cooperation and with the same facility for lightening a task
by making play of it, flax was pulled, corn husked, and apples
pared for apple butter. Frequently the girls and women made
merry while they spun flax, wove linsey and woolen cloth, and
knitted stockings by gathering with their spinning wheels and
looms in the spacious rooms of the blockhouses, where they
cheered one another with song and sprightly conversation. And
what hair-raising tales these pioneer women had to relate;
Indian raids, midnight butcheries, Captivities, and horse steal-
ings were all within the range of their experience.

One of the hilarious events of the harvest season was the
shucking party. Dr. Daniel Drake describes such an affair:

“When the crop was drawn in, the ears were heaped into a
long pile or rick, a night fixed on, and the neighbors notified,
rather than invited, for it was an affair of mutual assistance.
A sufficient number to constitute a sort of quorum having
arrived, two men, or more commonly two boys, constituted
themselves, or were by acclamation declared captains. They
paced the rick and estimated its contractions and expansions
with the eye, till they were able to fix on the spot on which the
end of the dividing rail should be. The choice depended on
the tossing of a chip, one side of which had been spit upon; the
first choice of men was decided in the same manner, and in a
few minutes the rick was charged upon by the rival forces. As
others arrived, . . . each fell in, according to the end that he
belonged to.

“The captains planted themselves on each side of the rail,
sustained by their most active operatives. There at the begin-
ning was the great contest, for it was lawful to cause the rail

( l -15: ‘

TIN DINNER HORNS

4!.

1 1 0 Pioneer Life

to slide or fall toward your own end, shortening it and length-
ening the other. Before I was twelve years old I had stood many
times near the rail, either as captain or private, and although
fifty years have rolled away, I have never seen a more anxious
rivalry, nor a fiercer struggle. It was there that I first learned
that competition is the mother of cheating, falsehood, and
broils. Corn might be thrown over unhusked, the rail might
be pulled toward you by the hand dexterously applied under-
neath, your feet might push corn to the other side of the rail,
your husked corn might be thrown so short a distance as to bury
up the projecting base of the pile on the other side:—if charged
with any of these tricks, you of course denied it, and there the
matter sometimes rested; at other times the charge was re-
affirmed, then rebutted with ‘you’re a liar,’ and then a fight,
at the moment or at the end, settled the question of veracity.

“The heap cut in two, the parties turned their backs upon
each other, and making their hands keep time with a peculiar
sort of time, the chorus of voices on a still night might be
heard a mile. At the close the victorious captain, mounted on
the shoulders of some of the stoutest men, was carried in
triumph around the vanquished party amidst shouts of victory
which rent the air. Then came the supper, on which the wo-
men had been busily employed, and which always included a
‘pot-pie.’ Such was one of my autumnal schools, from the age
of nine to fifteen years.”

Among the German settlers a common frolic was the schnz't-
zen, which consisted of paring about two bushels of apples for
the apple butter “bilin’.” The young men and women of the
community gathered early in the evening to begin their task,

jigging It Off 1 1 1
and soon their fingers were working nimbly as they vied among
themselves in the speed and neatness of paring and quartering
the apples. As they worked they sang border ballads, told tales
of witches, talked of strange characters of the border, and gos-
siped about their community. Later they were served with
pies, cakes, and cider, and, when the apples were all pared,
finished the evening with jigs and reels. Sometimes the boiling,
or stirring, as it was often called, took place on the same eve-
ning as the schnitzen. In this case the guests gathered outdoors,
where the great iron kettle filled with cider and quartered
apples hung over a fire. They stirred two by two, a young man
and a girl taking turns, while the rest wandered off in pairs
under the autumn starlight.

The fulling bee was a picturesque festivity for the neighbor-
hood, one that possessed more folk quality, perhaps, than any
other of the bees that enlivened community life. After cloth
had been taken from the loom it had to be shrunk and thick-
ened and softened. This process was known as fulling and is
little heard of now because it is taken care of in the mills,
before we buy the cloth. For the fulling party, or “kicking” bee,
the floor of the cabin or of the largest room was cleared and
cleaned. The material to be fulled was saturated with home-
made soft soap and hot water and spread in proper thickness
in the middle of the floor and surrounded by a circle of closely
placed seats. On these the men and boys sat barefoot, with their
trousers rolled above their knees, and grasped a stout rope that
reached from hand to hand around the circle. At the word
“Go!” all feet struck out at the soft mass of wet cloth, and the
bee was on. Kicking and stamping, faster and faster, the fan-

CAULDRON

1 1 2 Pioneer Life

tastic dance went on in the firelit room. The group stopped
now and then for breath, for the cloth to be turned and re-
folded, or for fresh soap and water to be poured on. As the
suds foamed and splashed and the cloth was flung and tossed
and stamped underfoot, the shouts and songs and jests went
on, with sometimes a slip that landed one of the fullers with a
splash and a thud in the foaming, sudsy mass on the floor.

All these gatherings took the place of labor-saving devices of
later years, for by gathering in all the hands of the neighbor-
hood the labor was lightened and performed in much less time
than one person or family could possibly have done it.

By far the gayest, the most anticipated, and the most purely
social gathering of the border was the wedding. For the wed-
ding frolic the settlers donned their best linseys and buckskins,
laid aside their labors, forgot their terror of Indians, and, freed
from the loneliness and isolation of their daily lives, indulged
in merrymaking and revelry that sometimes lasted several days.

The celebration that accompanied the marriage of a pioneer
couple in no way foreshadowed the hardship and danger of
the life they were destined to live together. This life began
early, for the bride was usually between fifteen and eighteen
years old, and the groom, eighteen to twenty-one. Marriage on
the frontier was very desirable for the woman. Her need for
protection caused her to seek a husband early, and, if she be-
came a widow, to remarry. This same urgent necessity for mar-
riage was probably responsible for the wife’s legal subjection
to the husband. Until 1848 the common law of England pre-
vailed, which decreed that the wife belonged to the husband
and had no separate legal existence unless she committed a

jigging It Off 1 1 3
crime. She could not dispose of her personal property, which
on her death passed to her husband. However, laws affecting
the possession of property were of small concern in the meager
existence of the pioneer couple. These marriages, entered into
with so much revelry and continuing through the hazards and
privations of those days, were, on the whole, congenial.

The wedding celebration began with the procession of the
groom’s party from his cabin to the home of the bride. This
usually covered a considerable distance, and the young men,
dressed in their best leather breeches, leggings, and linsey hunt-
ing shirts, the tails of their coonskin caps flapping, gathered
early, since the wedding ceremony always took place at noon.
Until the procession started, their horses had to be watched
carefully, or some one not invited to the wedding might cut
off the tails, the manes, or the foretops. As the party proceeded
in double file over rutted roads and along forest trails and
streams, it was hindered by fallen trees and mock Indian am-
buscades, the pranks of the wedding jokers. Within a mile or
two of the bride’s home, the groom’s party drew up in a start-
ing line and, at a given signal, galloped off pell-mell over mud,
rocks, and stumps in a wild dash to reach the bride’s cabin. As
the foremost rider neared the clearing, he gave an Indian
war whoop and burst into the cabin yard amid the cheers of
the assembled guests. The others followed, whooping and
laughing as they came and the celebration began in earnest.

Everything was ready. Under the trees tables were spread
with the wedding feast—venison, turkey, roasted bear meat,
corn pone, honey, cabbage, all heaped in wooden bowls and
trenchers. Treasured pewter plates the family had brought

 

COFFEE MILL

1 14 Pioneer Life

over the mountains might be in use for the occasion; there
were a few iron forks, knives, and tin cups—not enough to go
around, of course. Women bustled about iron kettles over open
fires. The girls adjusted their linsey skirts and kerchiefs as
the young man dashed into the yard. Children shrieked and
tumbled about. The fiddler, his grizzled head cocked over the
strings, screeched a tune above the hubbub, and the newcomers
quickly snatched partners from among the waiting maidens
and joined in the jig.

When the sun stood directly overhead, the bride was made
to stand beside the groom under the appointed tree. The
music and dancing stopped; the guests, still laughing and noisy,
gathered around the bridal pair, and the person who per-
formed the ceremony did his best to lend solemnity to the
occasion. If a minister or a justice of the peace could not be
found in the locality, the wedding was performed by the father
of the bride and was confirmed by the first itinerant preacher
who wandered to that part of the frontier.

The ceremony over, the crowd, jostling and shoving,
crowded around the tables for the feast. The merrymaking
was now in full sway, and above the laughter and the pranks
played upon the bride, the fiddler screeched his tunes inces-
santly. A young fellow, watching his chance, snatched off one
of the bride's moccasins and made away with it; whereupon
her “waiters,” three or four young men appointed to wait upon
and protect her during the merriment, set off after the thief.
The chase and scuffle that followed provided hilarious enjoy-
ment for the onlookers.

The wedding festivities usually continued all night. When

jigging It Off 1 15
the tallow dips were lighted in the cabin, the crowd gathered
inside to begin the dancing with the square set, which was
followed by reels, and finally ended in the cut-out jig. The
dancers chained and circled, and the stamping of the feet grew
louder. Voices grew boisterous. Songs rose and fell with the
dancing.

A toast was proposed to the young couple: “Health to the
groom, not forgetting myself; and here's to the bride, thump-
ing luck and big children.” This was indeed a wish for luck
and prosperity, because children in the pioneer family were
needed. The sons became the helpers of their father, in farm-
ing and hunting; and the girls aided their mothers in garden-
ing, spinning, and other household duties. The toasts and
feast over, the young guests “threw the stocking,” to discover
who would be the next bride. A stocking, rolled into a ball,
was given to the girls, who, one after another, stood with
her back toward the bride, and threw the stocking over her
shoulder at the bride’s head. She who succeeded in touching
the bride’s head or cap was the next to married. The young
men repeated the performance by throwing at the groom’s
head. Then the guests gayly bade the bride and groom good
night. Gradually the dancers became fewer, the laughter less
boisterous, the rhythm of the fiddler’s tunes less rapid, and in
the grey light of dawn the guests, many with their mocassins
worn through, set out on their various ways homeward.

But the festivities occasioned by frontier marriage did not
end with the wedding. The neighbors and relatives again
gathered for the house raising. The men and boys formed a
party of choppers to clear a spot in the forest. And while they

CANDLE STICK

1 1 6 Pioneer Life

set the logs and laid the floor, the women spread the feast tables.
If work progressed rapidly it was possible to hold the house-
warming the same evening; the fiddler struck up his tune, and
the new home was heartily “initiated” with another frolic that
lasted the night through. When the last notes of the fiddle had
died away and the last departing guest had disappeared down
the forest trail, the young couple had possession of their small
cabin, there to begin life together. Another bit of the forest
was cleared; one more bulwark against Indians was erected;
a new white family had begun its fight for existence; and
civilization had edged a jot deeper into the West.

"Indians in the Valley!”

X

IME after time during the forty-year period after the be-
T ginning of the French and Indian War in 17 54 fear and
panic gripped the settlements. Bands of Indians swooped down
on unprotected cabins to ravage and kill, to burn crops and
cabins, to scalp, tomahawk, or take captives. Frantic, the set-
tlers called for aid from the East. After Braddock’s tragic defeat
near Fort Duquesne in 1755 the provincial government took
action; up to this time the assembly had been controlled by
the peace-loving Qhakers, but they finally withdrew from the
assembly and left it in the control of those who favored the
prosecution of the war. A chain of frontier forts was erected
along a two hundred mile line between Easton, in Northamp-
ton County, and the present Fulton County, near the Mary-
land line.

There were few forts west of the Alleghenies up to the middle
of the eighteenth century, but as the frontier line advanced it
was marked by stockades and blockhouses; sometimes they
were official forts garrisoned by the government, but more
often they were settlers’ forts thrown up for immediate pro-
tection. Between 1756 and 1763 more than two hundred forts

117

The Way of the Frontier

ROM a sky as blue as the chicory in the grass, sunlight fell

across a clearing and reached golden fingers back among
the trees. The clearing itself, its leaf-molded surface, was
marked with fresh-cut stumps and littered with yellow flakes
and chips that the ax had cut from the trunks piled roughly to
one side—trunks not yet trimmed of their branches and freshly
pointed from the blows of the ax.

On one of the stumps in the clearing sat a man and his wife.
The sleeve of his linsey hunting shirt was ripped, his brown
leggings were half hidden by the blue folds of her full, rough
skirt, and his feet in their scuffed shoepacks braced the ground
for support as if he was ready to spring erect at a sound. His
hunting shirt, held close about his waist by a belt and lapping
over double in front, hung with its red fringe almost to his
knees. At his elbow stood his rifle. His other hand steadied the
ax, and from the polished edge of its blade the sun struck light.

Such figures were part of the everyday picture of pioneer life
in western Pennsylvania. The settler and the woman who made
his cabin a home must often have paused, in many a clearing
in the forests that covered the western end of the state, to look

1

1 1 8 Pioneer Life

and blockhouses were built in the western country. Fort Ligo-
nier and Fort Bedford were erected in 1756, Fort Pitt was
erected in 1759, and in the same year Fort Burd in the south-
west. After 1 777, several Revolutionary forts were constructed
—Fort McIntosh at the mouth of the Beaver River and Fort
Armstrong at Kittanning among them. The construction of
these forts was made necessary because of the hostility of the
Indians who, for the most part, had taken the side of the
British. The Revolution in western Pennsylvania was not car-
ried on by marching armies of blue-coats and red-coats but was
a struggle between, on one side, bands of Indians equipped
and led by the British, and, on the other side, starving and
poorly equipped companies of American regulars and hastily
organized bodies of settlers.

The important forts of the West were built according to
the plans developed by military experts. Such a fort was usually
square or five-sided with an arrowhead-shaped bastion at each
corner. The walls were sometimes of earth faced with brick or
stone and sometimes were mere log stockades. Inside the walls,
near the top, were parapets or platforms, on which riflemen
could stand; casemates, or bombproof shelters for the cannon,
were built close to the curtains, as the walls of the fort between
the bastions were called. Storehouses, barracks, magazines, and
wells were located at convenient places within the fort; a draw-
bridge that spanned a deep moat led to the outside world. The
bastions often enclosed brick or log blockhouses that rose far
enough above the walls to enable riflemen to pick off skulking
redskins that could not be seen from lower positions.

Outside the fort there was usually a village composed of

“Indians in the Valley! ” 1 1 9

traders’ cabins and sutlers’ stores, and when there was no dan-
ger of attack a number of the garrison were sometimes housed
in outside barracks to avoid crowding within the fort. The
near-by forest was cut away to prevent besiegers from finding
shelter in it, and for the same reason, whenever there was dan-
ger of a siege, the outlying cabins were razed or burned. Fertile
spots near the forts were planted in corn and garden truck to
aid in provisioning the garrisons, for it was difficult to trans-
port suflicient food from the East to supply the hundreds of
soldiers who were needed to defend the posts. The garrisons
of the important forts were usually British or American regu-
lars, although at times the province or state furnished a militia
contingent.

The settlers’ forts were usually ruder, less elaborate affairs
than the military forts. The earliest type in remote places was
the cabin fort, simply a large cabin to accommodate neighbor-
hood families seeking refuge. It was sometimes equipped with
a projecting second story, with openings in the floor of the pro-
jection to guard against Indians concealing themselves against
the walls below. Narrow portholes were cut in the mud be-
tween the logs.

In more densely populated districts stations were built to
shelter larger numbers of people for a longer time. A number
of cabins placed on the sides of a square were united by a
line of logs thrust upright in the ground so as to present a

 
 
 
   
 

continuous wall on the outer side. The doors of the cabins
opened into a common square on the inner side. Frequently
an underground passage was dug from the yard of the fort to
an outside spring. In some places the cabins were separated

AT TAC K

  

\_/

1 20 Pioneer Life

from one another by log partitions. The roofs sloped inward
for protection. At the angles of the fort blockhouses jutted out
over the outer walls of the cabins and the stockades, with open-
ings in the projecting floors. Entrance to the fort was by two
large swinging gates made of thick slabs; they opened inward
and were placed at that point in the walls nearest the spring, if
there was none within the enclosure. Blockhouses and outer
cabins were furnished with loopholes, and there were firing
platforms built along the stockaded portions.

Around such forts were to be found the rangers, the type of
pioneer who developed with a new order of life, when settlers
were less isolated and had drawn together and adopted a system
of defense. Rangers were organized into companies to serve
for a limited time during periods of crisis. They also served as
a kind of internal police within the settlements. Up to this time
the idea of a fighting organization had not occurred to the set-
tler. In the early years of settlement political organization and
government--oflicials, taxes, and such things-had not yet been
established. It was not long, however, until the frontiersman
learned the necessity of acting together with his neighbors, of
merging part of his personality in the community. Then the
ranger as a type appeared.

The ranger was a kind of scout, a man who knew Woodcraft
and the tactics of Indian warfare. He was an army in one in-
dividual. He carried his artillery on his shoulder. He was his
own commissary, carrying his rations on his back and replen-
ishing his empty haversack with the rifle as the need arose.
He not only was a match for the Indian in the Indian’s mode
of warfare, but he also had the advantages of organization. In

“Indians in the Valley! ” 1 2 1

ordinary times-in times of quiet sowing or harvest, that is-
he might be a farmer cultivating his own small clearing. He
might be a trader collecting at various posts loads of peltry and
furs. But in times of sudden raid or when messages were to be
sent to a distant settlement or fort he was a voluntary soldier,
serving in a company or individually, and to him fell the de-
fense of the frontier.

Every border man was at some time a lighter. The frontier
was won by the rifle and the ax, and the rifle. was not the less
important of the two. If a pioneer could not afford a rifle, the
ax itself became his weapon, or the scythe, or any other imple-
ment that could be wielded defensively against a tomahawk
or scalping knife. But in every cabin where a rifle could be
afforded it held the place of honor on pegs or buck’s horns
over the chimney piece, where it could be reached in that
second which on the frontier so often decided life and death.
At any moment of the day or night might come a thump on
the door from a warning hand, and the low call, “Indians!”
Then the frontiersman and his wife caught up their children
and the fewest possible necessities and scurried through the
woods to the nearest station or fort.

It was on the American frontier, rather than in Europe, that
the rifle was first used to advantage. Here reloading speed
could be sacrificed to accuracy and range. It replaced the old
smoothbore musket in hunting and war. Braddock’s British
regulars used the smoothbore at close range. Many of the In-
dians and the French in the engagement used rifles from cover.

The loading of the early rifle was a slow process, although an
ingenious one. At first, a wooden mallet tamped the bullet into

FRONT IERSMAN

1 22 Pioneer Life

the muzzle of the barrel, and an iron rod jammed it into place,
smashing it into the grooves of the barrel. Later on, the bullet,
weighing about half an ounce, was made just a trifle smaller
than the barrel and was wrapped in a bit of well-greased rag or
deerskin called a “patch.” This patch prevented the leakage
of gas from the explosion of the charge and thus gave greater
speed and accuracy to the shot, which no longer had to be
pounded “out of round” in order to be gripped by the rifling of
the barrel. A light hickory rod served to push it into place.

Rifles were manufactured in the East, particularly at Lan-
caster, the actual birthplace of the “Kentucky rifle.” A man
paid fifteen to twenty-five dollars, the value of a small un-
cleared farm, for his rifle, depending on its style of mounting.
All border men devoted much time to repairing their rifles
and making accessories and bullets. The necessary accessories
to the rifle were the ramrod, the powder flask of metal or horn,
and the bullet pouch. The powder flask was an object of pride
and joy. It was usually made of cow or buffalo horn, the large
end closed with a wooden disk about a quarter of an inch thick,
kept in place by a close-fitting cap of metal. The tip of the
horn was cut off to permit the flow of powder. The horn was
often finely carved and painted and embossed with broad-
headed nails, and the leather strap by which it was worn was
likewise carved with curious and beautiful patterns.

The old flintlock rifle of legend and history was in use from
1700 until as late as 1850. A small pan of metal placed just
behind the rear sight and above the end of the barrel was con-
nected with the barrel by a very small hole. This pan contained
the priming powder. Attached to it and sloping down into it

FLINTLOCK RIFLES

 

“Indians in the Valley! ” 1 2 3

was a piece of rough-faced steel; in the final form taken by the
flintlock this piece of steel became a part of the cover that
protected the powder in the pan from wind and damp. The
flint was attached to a lever, which, when sprung by the trigger,
caused the flint to strike sharply on the steel over the priming
charge. The ignition of the priming charge was communicated
to the charge in the barrel through the hole in the bottom of
the pan.

Doddridge’s Notes, that pleasant classic of first-hand ac-
counts written with an authenticity that a present day writer
could only assume, gives an account of how settlers took refuge
in near-by forts:

“The fort to which my father belonged was, during the last
years of the war, three-quarters of a mile from his farm. . . .
I well remember that, when a little boy, the family were some-
times waked up in the dead of night, by an express with a report
that the Indians were at hand. The express came softly to the
door, or back window, and by a gentle tapping waked the
family. This was easily done, as an habitual fear made us ever
watchful and sensible to the slightest alarm. The whole family
were instantly in motion. My father seized his gun and other
implements of war. My stepmother waked up and dressed the
children as well as she could, and being myself the oldest of
the children, I had to take my share of the burdens to be
carried to the fort. There was no possibility of getting a horse
in the night to aid us in removing to the fort. Besides the little
children, we caught up what articles of clothing and provision
we could get hold of in the dark, for we durst not light a candle
or even stir the fire. All this was done with the utmost dispatch

1 24 Pioneer Life

and the silence of death. The greatest care was taken not to
awaken the youngest child. To the rest it was enough to say
Indian and not a whimper was heard afterwards. Thus it often
happened that the whole number of families belonging to a
fort who were in the evening at their homes, were all in their
little fortress before the dawn of the next morning.”

Frontier forts were not only places of defense but were also
temporary homes. Their occupants were not always garrisons
of soldiers and scouts. During sieges they became little towns
of one broad square—a kind of market place, drilling ground,
and playground, as well as a pasture field for stock—busy with
women in linsey gowns and kerchiefs and with laughing, tus-
sling children playing games in the sun.

Women did much of the work about the forts. In case of
attack they provided and served the men on duty with food
and water; they chopped spelt, a kind of loose-eared wheat
that grew on poor soil, for the cattle; and, with an armed cov-
ering party, they even ventured out to the spelt field beside the
fort to gather the grain. They did the washing, gathered fire-
wood, and cleaned the courtyard.

The small cabins packed with restless families were hardly
comfortable. And the courtyard was little better, for here was
herded the stock. Water became scarce, food supplies ran low,
and the continual danger of attack wore on the nerves of the
occupants. When it seemed safe, the families gladly returned
to their homes and the men went back to their fields and clear-
ings. But the anxiety of the women at such times became so
great that many of them preferred to follow the men and boys
to their work; they prepared dinner over a fire and kept a

“Indians in the Valley! ” 1 25

lookout for Indians, so that they might share the danger.
Forts were occasionally the scene of other than military
activities. At Vance’s Fort (now Coraopolis), in 1778, occurred
one of these scenes. Settlers living near the fort had been driven,
in the autumn season of Indian raids, into its walls for safety.
During the long days and nights of the siege, a young man,
Joseph Patterson, encouraged the settlers to huddle together for
worship while some of the men stood guard with their rifles. In
the smoky, ill-smelling fort he talked to the people tense with
anxiety of a greater danger than that without the fort, of the
danger of ungodliness within. He talked of a death more ter-
rible than that by the tomahawk, a death in sin, unrepentant
and unredeemed. Sometimes Patterson sat and talked with
only three or four men and women, huddled on stools by the
fireplace, while rushlights and pine knots sputtered. But in
the narrow confines of the room his voice reached others than
those gathered close to him-reached in fact all the company in
the little fort. The group of armed men fell silent. Danger and
the nearness of possible death drove home his earnest words.
Patterson prayed. He led a hymn. Men with guns in their hands
and women with sleeping babies in their arms joined with him.
“The Lord was there and his work went pleasantly on.”
Through such conferences the people derived comfort and
courage. More than one early church took root in similar
fashion, under the leadership of men like Patterson.
Frequently before a frontier family could reach the nearest
fort, before they could even leave their cabin, they were caught.
Torture was common, although sudden death from a toma-
hawk blow was more so. Captivity took hundreds of border

LANTERN

1 26 Pioneer Life

men, women, and children. Some did not survive captivity;
others returned after months or years either through treaty or
escape. Many children refused to return to their homes, so little
did they remember them and so firmly had they grown into
Indian ways. I

Captivity was a cruel experience, even for those who were
received into the tribes. The rapid marches through wilderness
forests; the prospect of death; the sight of one’s fellows, one’s
wife or husband or children, tomahawked or tortured before
one’s eyes was so appalling that those who survived often lost
their minds.

During the years when the Indians were making war the
settlers enjoyed little peace except in winter, when Indians
were least able to make their invasions into the settlements.
Having spent many summer days cooped up in uncomfortable
forts, the settlers hailed the approach of winter with joy, for
then they could remain in their cabins, which, drafty and smoky
as they might be and empty of the most ordinary comforts
known to us, were nevertheless home to the border men and
women. If their corn had been left to ripen by the Indians and
the potatoes had flourished, there was happy activity in gather-
ing and shelling corn, in potato digging, and in repairing the
farm tools and cabin for spring. The first frost and the first
snow flurry were really welcome, for they were like a lock on
the country to fasten it safely from marauding savages.

Then when the long, safe winter first promised to break into
spring, along toward the last week of February, or early in
March, the frontiersman and frontier woman again became
doubtful, restive, and expectant. They went about their work

“Indians in the Valley!” 1 27

with eyes and ears constantly alert for danger. For these first
spring thaws that began to open up the frozen lands were the
“powwowing Clays” that preceded the first Indian raids.

In the advancing pageant of migration there occurred more
than one dramatic retreat, when large numbers of settlers
scooped their goods together and swarmed back toward the
mountains and beyond them, where for a time they could rest
in safety from Indians harrying the settlements throughout the
western end of the state.

The summer of 1774, the time of Dunmore’s War, was a
remarkable one in this respect. The region west of the Monon-
gahela River was overrun by scalping parties marking their
way with blood and destruction. A number of forts, even in
the most remote sections, were attacked about the same time.
The southwestern section of the state was under a rain of bul-
lets and fire arrows. Panic seized the settlers, and the contagion
of terror spread like a forest fire. From almost every cabin, from
log fort after log fort, from villages and towns fled men
and women and children. They converged from every path
upon the roads leading east. Cabins stood open-doored after
the hasty departure of their occupants, tables were left set,
irons and pots stood on the hearth, and the coverlets from the
beds were used to wrap small treasures that could be snatched
up. Past their ripening cornfields and flax patches, past the
greening cabbage beds and turnips rows, families fled toward
the nearest fort, hoping to reach it by nightfall as a stage in
their flight. Thronging together at the Monongahela, more
than a thousand people crossed in one day at three ferries not
one mile apart.

2 Pioneer Life

for a moment at what they had done. The long road they had
recently left led west no longer. They had reached its end. It
ran east now, from the clearing on the frontier’s edge. These
were moments when, tired but hopeful, they stopped to realize
not the struggle but the beauty, not the doubts but the achieve-
ments, not the weariness and hardship of the journey but the
rest and the promise of home. Now they could look, not at
thickset trees to be cut and the unfinished door or chimney of
their cabin, not at the rough-surfaced ground to be plowed and
the threat of storm in the sky, but at the sunlight in the clear-
ing as it fell on the scattered tree chips and the chicory flowers
at their feet, when the hand could be free of the rifle and could
relax on the haft of the ax.

These were the true pioneers, the man and woman who had
come out on foot, driving perhaps one lean cow or carrying all
their belongings on their backs. During the first year of their
life in the wilderness they ate mostly potatoes and slept on
clean leaves gathered in the woods. These first settlers found
seed so scarce that when a hen ate the melon seeds laid in the
sun to dry they cut open the hen’s crop and sewed it up again, so
as not to lose either the seeds or the hen. They were the kind
of men and women who would rather live in crude cabins set in
small and slovenly clearings than remain as indentured ser-
vants in the eastern counties and states; the kind of men and
women who worked on, half-starved for lack of proper food
because they had been tricked by land speculators into think-
ing they were going into a land of honey and milk; the kind of
men and women who had accepted the hard life of the frontier
because land in the East was scarce and expensive. These were

1 28 Pioneer Life

St. Clair, in a letter, told Governor Penn of his observations
along the Forbes Road near Fort Ligonier. “I am certain I did
not meet less than a hundred Families and I think two Thou-
sand head of cattle in twenty miles riding. . . . yesterday they
all moved into this place [Ligom'er].” Washington's land agent
also wrote, “If we had not had forts built there would not have
been ten families left this side of the mountains besides what
are at Fort Pitt.”

But the danger passed for the moment. Gradually the settlers
regained their courage. One after another of the families
moved back, and new ones came on. The frontiersmen once
more took up the work of settlement, although the forts were
still necessary and were frequently used from time to time,
until finally in 1794 Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Tim-
bers, in the Northwest Territory, removed the Indian menace
from western Pennsylvania.

Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms

XI

HE rugged, out-of-door life and simple diet of the early
T western Pennsylvania settlers might, to our modern view,
be considered a perfect prescription for good health. But this
mode of living was not an unmixed blessing. Their knowledge
of hygiene and of the prevention and cure of disease was very
limited. What they did know of these things was more through
instinct than science. They were subject to the effects of
exposure. A settler returning from the winter woods to his
cabin, wet, tired, and hungry, would sit before the fire to
dry his clothes or lie down to sleep in his clothes, wet as they
were, so long as his feet were stretched close to the fire. Warm
underwear was almost unknown, and waterproof jackets
and heavy overcoats were extremely rare. The unbalanced
nature of a diet consisting mainly of corn and meat showed
its effects in the jaundiced and pasty complexions of most
of the pioneers. No dentists were available to care for their
teeth. Illness and physical ailments were considered natural
and inescapable and generally the settlers could see no rea-
son for quarantine. The records of Yohogania County, how-
ever, reveal “that inhabitants of this county have leave to In-

129

1 30 Pioneer Life

noculate for the Small pox at their houses or such other con-
venient Places as they may think proper.” In cold weather the
sick and the well slept in the same almost air-tight rooms. Many
diseases were bred by the lack of sanitation, and various fevers
carried off men and women in their prime and rapidly filled
the newly laid out graveyards. Many children died at birth or
in the first year or two of their lives; only the fittest and luckiest
won through. In view of such conditions of ignorance and care-
lessness, it is remarkable that the settlers even survived, let
alone accomplished what they did.

The ague, known also as the “ager” and the “shakes,” was
so common that it excited no great concern. People merely
said, “He’s not sick; he’s just got the ager.” The sufferer en-
dured his symptoms as best he could—-yawnings and stretch-
ings, weakness and lack of energy, sweating, and cold chills
that increased until his teeth chattered uncontrollably. With
returning warmth came raging fever, with pains racking his
head and back. A spell of ague might last for weeks, chills and
fever coming close together or alternating one day with an-
other. Schedules of work, of courting, and of business were
arranged in accordance with the regular attacks. Cholera and
typhoid epidemics came and went with the seasons. Knowing
how unsanitary were the conditions of that day, we suspect that
most of their fevers were typhoid. The pioneers believed that
these diseases were caused by night air, decaying refuse, unripe
fruit, lack of sleep, grief, and worry. Contagious diseases such
as scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and chicken pox were con-
sidered unavoidable and necessary steps in the development
to adulthood. Children in good health were often deliberately

Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms 1 3 1

exposed to the milder diseases in order to get the sickness “over
with.” Erysipelas and skin disorders spread through communi-
ties. Pneumonia, or “lung fever,” was common and nearly
everyone suffered from rheumatism.

The means for fighting these diseases were tragic in their
inadequacy. Treatment was largely domestic and primitive,
and often superstitious and unsound. Not until the resources
of home remedies and theories had been exhausted was the
doctor called, if indeed there was one within calling distance.
The country doctor, willing and eager to help as he might be,
was limited in many ways. He frequently struggled through
uncut forests and battled with swollen streams to reach his
patients. A branch overhead or a hole underfoot might throw
him from his horse. When he at last arrived, his lore was per-
haps insufficient. His training had been obtained not in a medi-
cal college but as the apprentice of another doctor, whose
horse he had cared for and whose pills, as large as cherries, he
had rolled while he gathered what scraps of information he
could until he was ready to begin his own practice.

He placed his greatest faith in bloodletting and purgatives
and emetics. The treatments he used were often more painful
than the wounds and disorders he sought to heal, but they were
the only theories he knew. Thus, to relieve an irritation, he
sometimes threaded a horse hair through a fold of skin or kept
a pea or a bit of lint in an incision. A coil of corded cotton was
treated to burn slowly so that when laid on the skin it irritated
steadily. To cauterize a wound he seared it with a hot iron. To
cure a fever or delirium he first bled the patient until the
sufferer was near exhaustion; he gave an emetic of ipecac, a

MORTAR
AND
PE STLE

 

\SASSAFRAS

1 3 2 Pioneer Life
cathartic of calomel, and then opium to quiet the disturbed
internal organs. All this time the patient probably lay in a
close room and was denied cooling drinks. If he suffered from
the dumb ague, which was mostly fever rather than chills, the
patient was carried outside, laid uncovered on a piece of sack-
ing, and buckets of cold spring water were poured over him
until he had a “decided and pretty powerful smart chance of a
shake.” It is amazing that anyone withstood such drastic
though well-intentioned teatment.

The frontiersman relied on herbs and superstition for his
home cures. Almost all childish ailments were ascribed to
worms, for which the child was given scrapings from pewter
spoons and large doses of “pink and senna” or sugar and turpen-
tine. For older people all sorts of remedies were used. The local
“yarb and root doctor” (in nearly every community there was
some one considered skilled in the care of the sick and the use of
herbs) prescribed for fevers such remedies as snakeroot, sassa-
fras, dogwood, willow, white walnut bark peeled upward, or
a glass of pearlash and water. If no one was at hand to supervise
the bloodletting, pleurisy was treated with catnip and penny-
royal, butterfly weed tea, or brimstone, sulphur, and eggs. For
burns, what might seem to be the remains of an average dinner
was used in poultices of scraped potatoes, toasted turnips, and
corn meal with slippery elm bark.

Snakebite was dealt with externally through cupping, that
is, drawing the blood to the surface by means of a vacuum,
and covering an incision around the bite with salt and gun-
powder; for internal treatment the patient drank “Mononga-
hela rye” or a beverage of plantain in boiled milk. A gunshot

Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms 1 33

wound was treated with slippery elm bark. The “itch” sent
the early pioneer to two basic materials, brimstone and hog’s
lard, which were mixed into an ointment and applied to the
affected area. Materials at hand were used for various purposes:
grease from the Christmas goose was good for sore throat; ‘a
poultice of scraped potatoes was supposed to cure headache;
cancer was believed to be cured by a poultice of a teaspoonful
of scrapings from a brass kettle mixed with mutton suet. For
rheumatism, oils from rattlesnakes, geese, wolves, bears, rac-
coons, ground hogs, and even skunks were applied to the pain-
ful areas. Common coughs and lung disorders were treated
with syrups, usually of spikenard and elecampane.

Strange things were done by the pioneers in their attempts
to ease the sufferings endured by those they loved. At many of
their practices we smile, but the people who in their ignorance
employed such cures did so with the utmost faith. To prevent
bedsores (when a patient was bedfast), a crock or an ax was
put under the bed. In case of kidney trouble, for which there
was no careful diagnosis, goat urine was given. One remedy
for the ague was to hang a spider around the neck of the suf-
ferer. To cure epilepsy the heart of a rattlesnake was eaten, or
a forked hickory tree was split open and the halves wedged
apart at the crotch, the victim was passed through three times,
and the wedge removed; if the tree healed and grew the patient
would recover. Erysipelas was cause for any black cat in the
neighborhood to run, for the pioneers believed that the blood
of a black cat could cure this disease. The result was that scarce-
ly one in the neighborhood could be found without at least a
piece of its ear missing. They also wrapped an eel skin about a

1 34 Pioneer Life

sprain, tied a toad to a snake bite to draw out the poison, and
thought bed-wetting could be cured by spanking with a bake-
oven mop or by having the child eat fried mouse pie.

Certainly the early settlers waged a valiant struggle against
adversity, intensified not only by the constant threat and reality
of illness, but even by the dangers of their so-called cures and
remedies.

Settlers who were cut off from doctors who might have ex-
plained their illnesses, or from intelligent neighbors who could
have told them why a crop had failed, often gave strange rea-
sons for such things. Poorly informed, without books or printed
guides, some individuals of all racial elements fell back on
superstitious explanations that primitive peoples had used for
centuries. It was easier to explain the sudden death of the single
cow that supplied a family with milk or the strange behavior
of a watchdog by blaming such occurrences on witches and
spells rather than to find the real reason. Many defenseless
women who were perhaps queer or merely aged were accused
of witchcraft simply because they lived near families who suf-
fered misfortune. When a mishap coincided with the passing
by of such a woman from up the branch or along the ridge,
the two events were related in the mind of the untaught set-
tler. The conclusion reached was that the woman must be a
witch. Old tales of witchcraft were revived by those who had
heard such tales in their childhood in Europe.

It was believed that animals, children, and objects could be
verhext, or bewitched, in a number of ways. Persons with such
power were said to destroy cattle by shooting them with hair
balls. They were also accused of putting spells on guns that

Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms 1 3 5

missed their mark, on knives and tools that were mislaid. They
were said to have changed men into horses that they bridled,
saddled, and rode furiously over the hills to their witches’ Sab-
baths or meetings. Many a pioneer believed his cow had gone
dry because a witch had milked her. This the witch was sup-
posed to do by fastening a new pin in a new towel for each cow
to be milked. The towels she then hung over her doorway, and,
as she repeated her incantations, she drew milk from the fringe
of the towels after the manner of milking the cows. Cattle and
dogs believed to be bewitched were burned on the forehead
with a branding iron. If an animal died under the spell of a
witch its whole body was burned to ashes. A witch could inflict
strange and incurable diseases, such as dropsy of the brain or
rickets. For rickets, or “falling away,” the German settlers had
a strange cure. At sundown the child so inflicted was measured
with a piece of red string. If the length of the body as measured
by the string was less than seven times the length of the child’s
foot, the string was made into a loop and the child was passed
through it three times while a charm was repeated. The string
was then tied round a grindstone. When the string had worn
out the child would have attained its proper length.

Charms spoken to effect such cures were treasured in secrecy.
Such charms might be told by a man to a woman or by a woman
to a man. But if told by a woman to a woman or by a man to
a man they lost their magic. Knowledge of such charms brought
down upon women who knew them the charge of being a witch;
men who could use them were looked upon as wizards.

But the power of a witch could be broken, the pioneers be-
lieved, and they had several devices for this purpose. If a

FIRE
TONGS

V

€=<C

1 36 Pioneer Life
crudely superstitious family believed an illness to be the result
of “verhexing,” they drew on a board or a log the picture of a
witch. This they shot at with a bullet containing a bit of silver.
Such a bullet was supposed to transfer the spell from the pa-
tient to the witch. If the bullet struck the arm of the drawing
the witch’s arm became affected; if it struck her thigh in the
drawing, the spell was transferred to her thigh.

A witch could in turn break the spell she was put under. To
do this she borrowed some object from the family that had
put the spell on her. Frequently an innocent old woman who
had many times borrowed a pan or an iron from a neighbor
was puzzled one day to find her request refused and was heart-
broken when she learned the reason for refusal.

The fertility of more than one frontier farm was thought to
be helped more by charms and “powwowing” than by fertiliz-
ing and rotating crops. Ignorant farmers preferred to consult
almanacs for the signs of heavenly bodies rather than actual
weather signs to decide whether or not to do their planting.
By the “waxing and waning” of the moon, as indicated in his
almanac, such a farmer sowed his grain or butchered his meat
so that it would not shrink in the pot. He planted his vegetables
when the sun was in the correct relation to the zodiacal sign of
Virgo so that they would not run to seed. All this he did not
understand, but he followed faithfully the directions in his
almanac calendar. If crops were withering from drought, it
was believed that crouching on the ground and clapping two
stones together while a charm was repeated would bring rain.
Boys whistled while tapping green bark as they made willow
whistles in spring. This, too, was a charm for rain. They did

Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms 1 37

not know that primitive people had done the same thing long
ages ago because the water spirit was supposed to live in willows
along a stream.

Rats became numerous in this grain-growing region. Spells
were put on them for riddance, particularly by the Germans,
whose customs and superstitions have been more frequently
preserved in writing than those of the other groups of early
settlers. A note was written to the rats charging them to vacate
the premises, just as it would have been written to any other
tenant, and new quarters were suggested for them at a neigh-
bor’s farm. The notice was folded and pushed into a rat hole,
where it was gnawed to pieces as acknowledgment of receipt.
On the next moonlight night, it was asserted, the careful ob-
server could see the rats marching in a long line to the new
home assigned to them.

Belief was strong, too, in the good or bad influence of certain
days of the year. A sick woman would not get up on a Sunday
lest she should never get well. Friday was also an unfortunate
day. On Ascension Day the housewife must not sweep her cabin
lest it become infested with fleas. To finish a piece of spinning,
weaving, or sewing, she would sit up late at night so that it
need not be finished on that holy day. A nameless German
settler is quoted as saying, “My mother knew a girl who sewed
on Ascension Day, and there came a gust and killed her.”
Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s each had its superstitions. A
child born on Christmas night had power to see supernatural
sights and to hear sounds no other mortal could hear and at the
stroke of twelve on Christmas eve could hear all the animals
talking together. In some sections the custom of “firing in” the

The Way of the Frontier 3

the early home-makers who, because they often could not
afford oxen or horses to draw their plows, were unable to cul-
tivate their lands properly and could only scratch over the sur-
face with a dead branch or at best a hoe. But they were the
people who had the courage to face hardship and death, who
had great physical strength, who were impatient of discipline,
and who were capable of fighting for their own beliefs.

Ahead lay endless trouble—sheep and hogs devoured by
wolves; horses and cattle wandering into the fields and tram-
pling the growing grain; corn destroyed by squirrels and rac-
coons; crops ruined by frost or drought. The men worked in
the fields with their rifles, those who could afford them, stacked
close by under the watch of a sentinel. The women were the
pioneer mothers who can1e to the frontier young, healthy, and
strong-hearted, who undertook endless household duties, who
endured loneliness, starvation, dread of Indian massacre, and
perhaps the grief of seeing their children and husbands taken
into captivity. These men and women the frontier took,
drained from them the strength and freshness of youth, and
left them creased and browned and warped, old men and
women at thirty-five.

These people, with ax and maul and wedge, had set out to
wrest from this new life the economic security denied them in
the place whence they had come. VVith no other tools, frequent-
ly, but with grim, set purpose, they were determined to win
self and community respect. And often they attained real
happiness.

The real pioneer was a home-maker, a cabin builder. He
had come West for many reasons, but first among them always

-3:0

T ’7fg((.'”

&

CHURNING BU T TER

1 38 Pioneer Life

new year was observed: young people went from cabin to cabin,
stood around the door, called greetings and good wishes in
rhymes, and fired off their guns for good luck. At Easter it was
thought a rabbit would lay eggs if a bonnet was put out as a
nest. Colored flowers were gathered and left for the Easter
rabbit to eat so that the eggs would be colored ones.
Allhallows eve, or as we know it, Halloween, was a time when
young girls, eager to see their future husband, took 21 looking-
glass in hand and walked downstairs backward, or climbed
down the ladder from the loft, to catch his reflection in the
glass. Or they melted lead and poured it into a cup of cold
water to discover in the shapes it took some indication of his
trade—a soldier’s cap, a book, or a horse. After locks and keys
came into use, the melted lead was poured through the hole
in the handle of the door key. St. Andrew’s night, the thirtieth
of November, was also a night for this practice. After the pour-
ing of lead’, the girls filled their mouths with water so that they
would not talk, for talking broke the spell. Such charms were
survivals of days when all metal was thought to have magic
power. Among the Germans, the young women also observed
the custom of eating salt cake, then going to bed backward
without speaking or drinking, and in their dreams that night
would be revealed the future husband. As marriage was more
of a necessity on the frontier than in settled regions, young
women used many such charms in their eagerness to know into
what young man’s hands their fates would fall. They walked
around the cabin or house and listened for the first man’s name
they should overhear, for it belonged to him who would ask
them in marriage. Two girls together tied a key between the

Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms 139

pages of the Bible so that the handle protruded; then each held
the handle by a finger tip and one of them repeated a charm,
each line of which began with a different letter. At the initial
of the future husband of the girl repeating the charm, the key
and the Bible turned slightly.

Often frontier matches were made between a woman and
a man of unequal age or of unequal standing in the settlement.
Then a group gathered about the cabin of the couple, and with
pans, guns, sticks, and other instruments made Katzen-musik,
or “cat music,” as a grotesque serenade.

By all these devices, and by many others, frontier people
tried to draw around them the protective powers of good luck
and to ward off evil fortune. A way of life in which help was
often far distant and in which danger came quickly made
people desperate to employ any means they could for safety
and happiness. Practices long forgotten, long lost in their child-
hood, and first learned in the childhood of the world were
revived as immediate help in time of trouble.

The Log Church

XII

HE first Christian religious services in the western Penn-
sylvania wilderness, so far as our records show, were the
Roman Catholic mass and prayers said by Fathers Vernet and
Queret, who accompanied the Baron de Longueuil on his ex-
pedition into the region in 1739, and those said by the Jesuit
Father Bonnecamps a decade later, when Céloron’s royal ex-
pedition floated down the Allegheny River. In 1754, shortly
after the French had captured and re-christened Fort Du-
quesne, the Recollet Father Denys Baron celebrated mass on
the site of Pittsburgh and dedicated a chapel to “The Assump-
tion of the Blessed Virgin of the Beautiful River.” Here, until
the fort was abandoned four years later, he and his successors
devoted themselves to the spiritual and physical welfare of
their flock, baptizing the children of the French settlers, bind-
ing the wounds of the English captives, and teaching the word
of life to the painted warriors gathered in the bark village
outside the fort.
On Christmas Day, 1750, Christopher Gist had read the
Christmas service of the Protestant Episcopal Church to the
Indians at Coshocton, Ohio. Four years later Colonel George

140

The Log Church 141

Washington read public prayers at Fort Necessity, and the next
year, in place of the regular chaplain, who had been severely
wounded, he read the burial service over General Braddock at
Great Meadows. The Reverend Charles Beatty, a Presbyterian,
traveled with the army of General John Forbes in 1758, and
late in November of that year he preached the first Protestant
sermon on the site of the future Pittsburgh. For the next few
years religious services were held occasionally by chaplains and
missionaries at Pittsburgh as well as at other forts in the region.

In these early years, however, there were continuous re-
ligious services for the settlers of western Pennsylvania. The
cabin hearth, its flames casting a ruddy glow upon the bowed
heads of the family, was the first altar, and here the pioneer
father and mother heard their children repeat their prayers
and told stories of Abraham and Isaac and of the star of Bethle-
hem. Before itinerant—that is, trave1ing—ministers threaded
the trails, and before the log churches were filled with the
singing of psalms, the first principles of religion, like the first
steps in education, were taught at the family hearth. Although
children were brought up without having been baptized, they
were taught their A B C's and the fear of God from the pioneer
Bible, frequently the only book owned, its pages crumpled and
smudged from rains soaking through the logs and from grimy
fingers following the lines by the light of the fire and the
smoking tallow dip.

So eager were the settlers to establish religious worship,
both in their desire for communion with God and in their
longing for fellowship, that they took advantage of whatever
occasions and places offered, sometimes within a fort or stock-

1 42 Pioneer Life
ade, sometimes in a neighbor's cabin, sometimes under the
open sky.

Presbyterians adopted the custom of gathering together in
their cabins in “praying societies.” These groups were at first
composed of the families that had migrated together and had
settled near one another; then of the families that, migrating
alone, had soon made friends with their neighbors. At these
meetings a man who had been an elder of his church in the East
would read from the Bible by the light of a smoking pine knot
or tallow dip and would lead in prayer and in the singing of
solemn old psalms or hymns. Later the settlers gathered to-
gether and raised cabins to serve as both church and school. In
these, the bare ground was usually the floor, there were seldom
any heating devices, and the congregation sat on log benches.
The churches eventually were built in more permanent form,
with rough stone foundations, but they were not always large
enough for the crowds that gathered for Communion services.
At such times the groves were God's temples. A stump or a
slab log fastened between two trees served as the pulpit, and
logs took the place of pews. A platform, or “tent,” as it was
called, was erected to protect the ministers, and the congrega-
tion, like the Galileans, sat on the hillside around. The broad
faces of halved logs served as Communion tables.

Early German settlers followed much the same procedure as
the Presbyterians. Their informal meetings were, however,
more cheerful. One of the settlers might possess a book of ser-
mons by an early church father, from which, or from the Bible,
passages were read. A man who was asked why churches were
built before a preacher had settled among them replied that

The Log Church 143

one of the chief reasons for going to church was that they liked
to “listen to Barbara Brandenburg sing.” As help from the East
was slow in coming to the Germans, certain of their people took
upon themselves more and more of the ministerial duties.
There were instances where those not qualified to do so con-
ducted the marriage service.

The earliest Methodist settlers in western Pennsylvania
listened to the preaching and spiritual counsel of a fervent
member of their group until an itinerant preacher happened
to pass through their community. The Methodist doctrine was
new in America at the time these settlers were moving into
western Pennsylvania, but after 1784 itinerant preachers were
regularly assigned to circuits in the region. Because such
preachers served a very large territory, Methodists even then
had to content themselves with class meetings for long periods.
Bishop Francis Asbury, founder of the Methodist Church in
America, himself visited the region sixteen times during the
pioneer period.

Missionaries of the Baptist denomination sometimes traveled
through the district. The Baptist Church did not require that
its ministers be educated men and often permitted a “gifted
brother” to preach. Thus a group of Baptists might begin to
hold services among themselves immediately upon their arri-
val in the western country.

Quakers found services easier than any of the other sects.
Wherever two or three were “gathered together in God's
name” a Quaker meeting could be held.

The Episcopalian Church, to which many settlers of English
descent might have been drawn, had been weakened by strug-

  
 

SPICE
GRINDER

  

1 44 Pioneer Life

gles in the East, where, as a Tory church, it had met strong
opposition. Its service was perhaps too elaborate for the sim-
plicity of pioneer tastes, and its vestments, altar services, and
music did not lend themselves readily to the random occasions
when church services were possible. It could consequently do
little for frontier people and could not follow up what little it
managed to accomplish. Prominent Episcopalians, however, did
their best to remedy this situation. Thus, General John Neville
built a church at Woodville, served in it as a lay reader, and
financed the education of its first minister.

Many early settlers of western Pennsylvania, to be sure, had
left their old homes to be free from the regulations and re-
straints imposed on them. Many were glad that the seat of
government was far away, and they would have been equally
happy not to have churches near to try to make them lead more
orderly lives. Most settlers, however, had given up their old
churches with heavy hearts and were eager to get new ones
started as soon as possible. Those interested in prosperous farms
and new industries, moreover, realized that the founding of
churches would encourage progress. The government realized,
too, that with the development of churches better order would
prevail in the communities and it would be called upon less
often to take a hand.

In the East, church members and church governing bodies
looked upon the frontier region with pity, and, imbued with
the missionary spirit, sent out missionaries to preach to both
Indians and whites. Almost every year for more than a decade
after 1763, the Presbyterian synod of New York and Philadel-
phia made an effort to see that sermons were preached and that

The Log Church 145

marriage and baptismal services were held in the wilderness
beyond the mountains. Although Indian troubles made ex-
tended journeys dangerous, several ministers made important
trips. On horseback from Carlisle came Charles Beatty and
George Duffield in 1766. James Finley, who later settled in
western Pennsylvania, came out in 1771.

From New England, in 1 772, two newly ordained Congrega-
tionalists, David McClure and Levi Frisbie, journeyed into
the region to convert the Indians and to preach to white set-
tlers as occasion offered. Some of these settlers, McClure said,
had not heard a sermon for fourteen years. His diary gives a
good idea of the state of religious feeling and education in the
country through which he traveled. It gives also many side-
lights on the social habits and customs. He found that the
majority of the people made the Sabbath a day of recreation
and drinking. At the time there was no settled minister or
church organization west of the Appalachians. “The people
are generally presbyterians. A few illiterate preachers of the
baptist persuasion, have preached about, zealous to make
proselytes.” Frisbie and McClure reached the Muskingum
country but, dissatisfied with their work among the Indians,
they returned to the Pittsburgh district. McClure said:

“The inhabitants of this place are very dissipated. They
seem to feel themselves beyond the arm of government, & freed
from the restraining influence of religion. It is the resort of
Indian traders, 8: many here have escaped from Justice 8: from
Creditors, in the old settlements. . . . We found, however,
a happy few who live in the fear of God, 8: maintain their
integrity.”

1 46 Pioneer Life

In the Ligonier country McClure found five new settle-
ments, in all of which he was asked to stay and preach. He felt
that his services were needed and consented to stay until the
following May or June, during which time he devoted his time
in succession to the settlements in that district. “It was pleasing
to find in each of them, some zealous and pious persons, who
came forward, 8c willingly devoted their time 8: labours to form
the people into a society, for the purpose of the public worship
of God.” He also found a settlement of Virginians, quite dif-
ferent from the Presbyterians and Germans, and “much ad-
dicted to drinking parties, gambling, horse race 8c fighting.”

Two of the most important early missionaries were the
Reverend James Power, who made a tour in 1774 and a few
years later settled in the frontier region, and the Reverend
John McMillan, who came out in 1776. These two energetic
individuals, both Presbyterians, gave many of the early settlers
in western Pennsylvania the first taste of formal religion they
had had since they had left their old homes.

As settlement expanded, order and stability came to charac-
terize the churches. The Presbyterian praying societies sent
requests eastward for preachers, and their entreaties brought
response. Four Presbyterian ministers, all of them men of ability
and character, settled in the region between 1776 and 1780.
These four—John McMillan, James Power, Thaddeus Dodd,
and Joseph Smith—each had two or more congregations in his
charge and in addition made long preaching tours into remote
sections where preachers had not yet settled. Within the next few
years four other ministers joined them. So great became the de-
mand that the East could not find men to fill the western pulpits.

The Log Church 147

Three of the early preachers, therefore, decided to keep their
eyes open for likely young men whom they could train as minis-
ters without lowering the standards under which they them-
selves had been trained in the East. About 1782 Dodd’s neigh-
bors built him a cabin in which to conduct a school. Joseph
Smith also opened a school. Most important, however, was the

log school opened by Dr. McMillan, which became, in 1791, '

the Canonsburg Academy and which in 1792 was approved by
the Redstone Presbytery as its official training school for its
ministers.

As early as 1787 a group of German Catholics had settled at
Sportsman’s Hall, now St. Vincent’s, in Westmoreland County,
and a few years later a number of these settlers went on to
found a Catholic colony near Waynesburg. In 1775 a number
of Irish Catholics settled on what was later the line between
Butler and Armstrong counties, and about 1805 men of the
neighborhood gathered and built in one day the log chapel
known as St. Patrick’s Sugar Creek Church. The log building
may still be seen standing adjacent to the more modern struc-
ture now in use as a church home. In 1790 a settlement was
begun by Captain Michael McGuire in what is now Cambria
County on the site of Loretto. Other Catholic settlers came in
the following years and in 1799 Father Demetrius Gallitzin
joined them as their spiritual guide.

Father Gallitzin was born a Russian prince in 1 770. He came
to Baltimore in 1792 and three years later became the second
priest ordained in the United States. At Loretto he invested his
fortune in aiding Catholic settlers to obtain homes in the vi-
cinity, and his latter years were burdened by the debts that he

 

4 Pioneer Life

was the desire to get land, raise his cabin, and win a living for
himself and his family in his own way. In the wilderness homes
along the streams and roads and on the hills of western Penn-
sylvania was born that free spirit which marks the laws and
institutions of our present-day civilization. The home-making
pioneer, in organizing his family life, organized the life of
his community. In erecting his cabin in the clearing, he erected
the symbol of America for years to come.

The pioneer was hard-featured. Lean and weather-beaten,
often stooped by hardship and toil, his skin an unhealthy
color from improper food, he was not always the hearty, robust
man one would expect from active life in the open. Border life
was particularly harsh with women. The dates on old grave-
stones show that many died years before their husbands, and
often several women bore the same man’s name. Widows were
few; they remarried for protection and to guard against starv-
ing. Many children died at birth or in their first year or two
of life. If they grew to manhood or womanhood they became
the typical, sinewy, roughened frontiersmen and frontier
mothers. Poor sanitation and lack of hygienic knowledge bred
skin diseases and lice. Cleanliness was difficult, and illiteracy
common. But there is a great deal more to the story than that,
as we shall see.

The pioneer was industrious. Only hard work day after day
built his log cabin, made his puncheon floors, his split-log bed
frames and tables. Only strenuous digging, sowing, raking, and
threshing would provide his family with grain and vegetables.
There was hunting to be done, for game which he hauled home
to skin, cut up, and cure.

CRADLE

1 48 Pioneer Life

incurred in this endeavor. His first chapel was completed by
Christmas, 1799, and in this log building and its successors he
ministered until his death in 1840. He always insisted upon
strict propriety in the chapel and he hung in the vestibule the
following rules:

I Scrape the dirt off your shoes on the iron scrapers
provided for that purpose.
II Do not spit on the floor of the chapel.
III Do not put your hats and caps on the chapel win-
dows.
IV Do not rub against the papered walls of the chapel.
V Do not put your heels on the washboards.
VI After coming in at the passage door shut the door
after you.

The stone chapel of 1832 has been restored in recent years.
It contains Father Gallitzin’s original altar, encased in stone
and flanked by wood carvings from Oberammergau. The win-
dows are of stained glass, one of them set with the Gallitzin
arms, and in the belfry above is the bell first used in the region
to call the devout to worship. Father Gallitzin lived in two
rooms adjoining the chapel, now one apartment containing
relics connected with his life. His tomb and statue may be
seen in the churchyard near by.

As Catholic settlements spread beyond Loretto Father Gallit-
zin gave more and more of his time to visiting other preaching
points and ministering to isolated parishioners. In his old age
he traveled on a horse-drawn sled even in the summer, for the
roads were too primitive to accommodate a wheeled vehicle.
The region is full of reminders of Father Gal1itzin’s ministry:

The Log Church 149

here is the long steep road up which he labored and the grate-
fully cool spring whose limpid current he blessed; and here
in a cabin above the fireplace is the mantelpiece on which he
placed the chalice while he stood before the worshippers kneel-
ing on the cabin floor and said the mass.

Through the combined efforts of the people on the frontier
who wanted churches and of the people back home who
thought they should have them, churches were gradually estab-
lished in western Pennsylvania. This does not mean that every
individual in a community where there was a church belonged
to it nor that every district where there were settlers had one
or more churches. In fact, it is probable that not more than
one-sixth of the entire population of western Pennsylvania
during the pioneer period were church members. It is true,
nevertheless, that churches were sufliciently numerous and
sufficiently strong to dominate completely many parts of the
region and to exercise an influence for progress and for good
in the region as a whole.

Among Presbyterians Sunday began with family worship in
the cabin. Then the father in his best jeans and the mother in
her best linsey, with their children often barefoot and the
youngest carried in their arms, walked or rode horseback to
the nearest log church. At ten o’clock in the morning, huddled
in the dim, crowded room, the congregation droned the long
hymns. A leader “lined out” the hymns, singing one line at
a time, which the congregation repeated after him. Long
prayers were offered, during which the children were apt to
grow restless. Very long sermons were preached, most fre-
quently on eternal punishment and the horrors of hell. The

1 50 Pioneer Life

air in the room grew hot and stuffy. Faces perspired; backs
ached; the log seats grew more uncomfortable. Children whim-
pered and were roughly quieted. Eyelids drooped and heads
nodded. The preacher became vehement to stifle the yawns
and to jerk up the drooping shoulders. After several hours of
such service the congregation took a recess. Baskets and ker-
chiefs in which lunches had been packed were opened. If the
weather was fine, the contents were spread outside on the grass
or a stump. After such brief recess the little crowd 2 gain ranged
themselves on the hard log seats for the afternoon service. Now
the lined-out psalms seemed endless; the long prayers rose and
fell to the accompaniment of shiftings of feet and of arms that
ached from the burden of sleeping babies. To relieve cramped
muscles and to fight off drowsiness members would stand or
even pace back and forth along the sides or backs of the pews.

Communion was a solemn occasion. Since only ordained
ministers could administer it, in the early period it was neither
frequent nor regular. Among the Presbyterians the Thursday
preceding this service was observed as a fast day or day of
prayer and rest from labor. As congregations frequently com-
bined for Communion, the houses of those who lived near
the church overflowed with visitors for the several days of the
season. On Saturday services were held “to fix the truths.”
Those members in good standing were given tokens or bits of
inscribed lead, which entitled them to Communion on the
Sunday. Since meetinghouses were too small for the crowds,
services were held in the groves, although in rainy weather,
barns, when available, were used. At least two ministers, fre-
quently three or four, administered the service. After hymns,

The Log Church 1 5 1

prayers, and the first sermon, “fencing the tables” took up an
hour or more. This was a review of all the sins forbidden in
the ten commandments. Those guilty of any sin were excluded.
Then a welcome to Communion was preached. The tables
were filled six or seven times before all were accommodated.
The Monday following was a day of great celebration.
Among Methodists, quarterly meetings, at which Commu-
nion was administered, supplied a socializing influence. From
miles around, preachers, elders, class leaders, and congrega-
tions assembled in groves. Houses and cabins were crowded
with praying, singing, and visiting families eager to feel in
common those emotions that lay so deep and that held them
in common brotherhood. The Methodist hymns, spirited and
martial, swinging along in evangelical refrains, rocked in
rhythm whole groves of assembled worshippers and gave vent
to feelings long pent up through lack of community life. Fer-
vid, almost rollicking, these tunes carried themes of salvation
sought and achieved. The leaves of the trees must have trem-
bled at hundreds of voices shouting triumphant redemption.
It is not strange that frontier people, denied close and con-
stant neighborliness, often let their feelings break out, when
the opportunity offered, in violent expressions. Their games
and dancing, their political discussions, their friendships, and
their revenge for injustice, all were expressed with much
greater vehemence than by people who are day by day in touch
with their fellows and who, therefore, are constantly express-
ing their normal feelings, their little pleasures and discontents.
In their religious hopes and fears the frontier people were no
different than in their amusements, their politics, and their

CHOPPING DISH

1 52 Pioneer Life

neighborhood relationships. They were repressed for months
at a time. Bad weather and roads, not to mention lack of shoes
and suitable clothing, made it difficult to gather and to praise
God for his care and protection, to ease conscience by con-
fession or testimony, and to seek comfort and help from
stronger characters.

When they did meet, their feelings broke out in great joy
and relief or in fearful self-accusation. These were the times
when revivals of religious life took place. Communion services
often brought on these revivals, when several preachers assisted
one another. At their joint preachings, their threats of bum-
ing punishments, and promises of heavenly happiness, many in
the congregation bowed their heads in prayer and some cried
out in anguish of soul. The pious shouted and clapped their
hands, swayed in their seats and cried out “Amen!” In 1795
McMil1an’s congregation at Chartiers experienced such a re-
vival; fifty members were added to his church, some of whom
later became ministers. Four years later another revival
brought sixty more into the fold. Frequently there was back-
sliding, indifference, and great discouragement on the part of
those who had previously been so wrought up, until they were
once more reminded.

Revivals were often held as camp meetings, lasting a number
of days. Services sometimes continued all night long, minister
following minister, while listeners came and went, weeping
and rejoicing loudly, shouting praises, and falling on the
ground in anguished repentance. “Falling work” and “bodily
exercises” held many in trances, prone on the ground, unable
to move for hours. In the Great Revival, which in 1802 swept

The Log Church 1 53

through Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, West Virginia,
and western Pennsylvania, this falling work was particularly
prevalent. At one of the meetings, in spite of snow and rain,
families came in wagons from miles away and camped. Nine
ministers preached, frequently two of them at once. There
were eight hundred communicants. This was in September. In
November another service was held, at which fifteen ministers
were present. It is said ten thousand gathered in wagons, bring-
ing food and bedding. The Reverend Elisha Macurdy preached
the most famous sermon of his career. At his words many fell
to the ground.

Released from the excitement of revivals, the frontier com-
munities settled back into everyday life. People had to rely
then on the more ordinary comfort and help of their own con-
sciences. For support in their daily difficulties they depended
on the reading of the Bible and on the regular Church services
or, in less fortunate communities, on the infrequent visits of
a traveling preacher. In communities that did not have a regu-
lar pastor, word was sent ahead of the coming of a traveling
preacher and the scattered settlements looked forward with
eagerness to another occasion for gathering. The devout were
glad of the chance to hear the sermon. The others were glad
of the opportunity to exchange news and the gossip of the sec-
tion. Ministers rarely disappointed their flocks. The faithful-
ness of the early itinerant Methodist passed into a proverb:
on stormy days people said the weather was so bad that nothing
was out but crows and Methodist preachers.

When a ministerial call was expected by a family, mother
and children swept and garnished, scoured and baked, and

1 54 Pioneer Life

prepared the wild turkey that father had shot in the woods.
The most important man in the community was paying a visit.
The elders around the hearth would be sure of a sympathetic
listener to their trials and daily sorrows; they were sure of a
strengthening word and a helpful prayer for their individual
grace. And the children would come in for their share of
attention when they were asked to stand up and recite verses
from Scripture and to show how they were learning to read
the story of the boy Jesus in the temple, or if they were Pres-
byterians they were tested for memorizing passages from the
catechism.

Growth of churches brought growth of orderliness to the
frontier. Since settlers were remote from courts and police
oflicers, the discipline that the church exercised over the lives of
its members was a great force for decency and order. The
Methodists had their book of discipline, revised by the Metho-
dist General Conference and enforced locally by the preachers.
Quaker rules of conduct were enforced by committees of
Friends, which supervised cases of discipline. The Baptists
drew up covenants to watch over one another’s lives and con-
versation and not to “suffer sin upon each other but encourage
one another to love and good works.” A German congregation
drew up the following specifications for personal conduct
among their members:

“Who ever shall work on Sundays or on the festal days, if
such is unnecessary and not a work of love, or gets drunk,
dances or gambles or allows any sinful or wicked company in
his house, or is present any time when the name of God is in-
sulted or profaned and thus cause trouble in the congregation,

BOOT
JACKS

The Log Church 1 55

and brings many innocent souls into sin and punishment, shall
for the first offense be brought before the preacher and
consistory.”

A church could not jail its members or deprive them of any
recognized civic privileges. It enforced its control by appealing
to the natural desire of human beings for the good will of their
community and by depriving them of church privileges. First
offenders got off with a scolding or a warning. If the offender
acknowledged his guilt and made a statement of repentance he
lost no standing. Frequently the facts of misbehavior were “pub-
lished” in the congregation to humiliate the offender and to
prevent the spreading of the particular misbehavior. One man
was obliged to make public apology for having struck his wife.
A man in the Dunlaps Creek congregation was not allowed to
have his children baptized because he used “unguarded ex-
pressions” at times. When he acknowledged his guilt, pro-
fessed his sorrow, and promised to be on his guard in the
future, the baptism of his children was performed. The Quak-
ers, who were most severe, “disowned” offenders; that is, re-
moved them from church rolls. Other denominations used the
same punishment for the worst transgressors.

The Sabbath was fanatically observed among Presbyterians.
Not even traveling or visiting was allowed. Two brothers who
drove home their teams from some distance away were tried
by the church for the offense. A man who allowed his son to
make sugar on the Sabbath was called up by the congregation.
The postmaster at Washington was not allowed to open the
mails on Sunday, although such business was legal.

The church also kept strict watch over week-day activities.

1 56 Pioneer Life

Attending horse races, frequenting inns for card playing and
cockfighting, dancing in public, and watching bear baiting
were forbidden. Men and women were brought before their
congregations for quarreling, for speaking rashly, and for talk-
ing scandalously about even their neighbors’ children. Persons
were suspended from churches for lying.

Churches often handled cases that a justice of the peace
might have been expected to handle. The VVestland Quakers
“disowned” two women for “opening the Door of the House
when the Family were absent and taking several things out.”
John Blane, a Presbyterian, was deprived of church privileges
until he should show signs of repentance for taking some flour
not his own from an adjacent mill. In another church the case
came up of a man who sold whiskey “which froze in the bottle,”
showing that it had been diluted with water, and who received
more pay than he should according to agreement.

In some frontier communities virtuous people formed
“watch and ward societies,” whose aims were to help civil
authorities discover and convict those found guilty of vice
and immorality and to enforce the observance of the Sabbath.
Drinking and gaming, disorderly meetings, profanity, and tak-
ing the name of God in vain were mentioned as demanding
their particular attention.

Presbyterianism took an early hold on the western Pennsyl-
vania frontier, stronger than any other denomination. On
other frontiers the Methodists and Baptists rooted themselves
most strongly. Thus the minds of the people were not harassed
by confusing appeals; and many were won to Presbyterian doc-
trine, to its morality and guidance in everyday living. Perhaps

The Log Church 1 57

it tightened life a little too much, restricted or forbade com-
munity and personal pleasures that would have eased the rough
road of the pioneers. But it was in the long run a beneficent
social agency. It focused and made concrete by church doctrine

and practice many general ideals by which early settlers tried
to live.

CANDLE STICK

The Way of the Frontier 5

The pioneer was resourceful. He had to be, with few tools,
without shops and stores to run to for his wants, and with few
near neighbors to give advice and help. He had harsh weather
and wild beasts to contend with. When ill or the victim of an
accident in the woods or along the trails he had no first-aid kit
of handy remedies. He faced danger from the Indians. And he
had at times to deal with wrong-thinking, wrong-doing men-
a thief, a land cheat, or a deliberate squatter. All these prob-
lems had to be dealt with quickly; otherwise, he lost out. He
might lose property, the few furnishings of his home, or even
his life. He might lose his health or his reputation as an honest
man. Against such things he had to be constantly on guard.

Bravery in Indian raids and battles had to be joined with
courage to bear pain—a wound from an accidental discharge of
a gun, a gash from a knife or an ax, a snake bite, an arm or leg
muscle torn in a hidden trap or in a fight with a bear.

The frontier demanded far more than physical courage.
Lonely months had to be endured, in which no stranger or
friend passed by the little cabin. Family ties, broken when
settlers started out for the new lands, pulled at the heartstrings.
News came from the old, far-away world of the death of a
brother or a sister. Worry about food when stores ran low in
winter, suffering from disease when no doctor or remedy was
at hand, and times of longing for the old life with its brighter,
more comfortable days often discouraged the pioneer. There
were men and women, broken in health and spirit, whose
minds were not strong enough to fight against worry and despair
brought on by loneliness or by Indian captivity and possible
torture of members of their families. Early records contain

PIPE
TOMAHAWKS

Frontier Justice

XIII

N THE process of settlement it was not long until the
frontier family had to learn to live not as a self-sufficing
farm community but with neighbors in a much more com-
plex community life. Concern of the individual for his own
safety and welfare and for those of his family broadened with
advancing settlement to concern for the safety and welfare of
larger groups—the neighborhood, the church, and the school-—
and for the administration of justice in county and township.
A frontier code of living developed, one that the pioneer
himself followed and that he forced on his fellows; it was an
unwritten code but it was effective until counties and town-
ships were legally set up, until officers such as constables and
justices of the peace were appointed, and until churches and
law courts developed. While population was sparse and while
settlers were threatened by war and other dangers, public
opinion was effective, and in public opinion were found the
first principles of justice by which frontiersmen lived. Old
sayings and saws were quoted and lived by as town ordinances
might have been. “Honesty is the best policy” and similar say-
ings were brought forth on suitable occasions as warnings or

158

Frontier justice 1 59

rebukes. Rights were defended and punishment for invading
the rights of others was administered by the settlers them-
selves. The rough-and-tumble of frontier life promoted de-
mocracy. The church and the law were for many years far on
the other side of the mountains, so that their influences were
slow in reaching the frontier. Thus the community itself was
obliged in times of peril to choose its leaders, and authority
was given to any one who proved himself capable, without
regard to how much land he owned, how large was his cabin or
drove of cattle, where he had come from, or who his ancestors
had been. Men and women who held lands and homes at the
price of bloodshed were not going to play with right and jus-
tice; they were in deadly earnest. A false decision might break
up the organization of the feeble community life. Since they
could not always afford to wait for the advice of a government
whose seat was some days’ journey across the mountains, these
early communities acted in most instances as small indepen-
dent states.

Many acts considered on the frontier as socially injurious
crimes demanding correction would pass unnoticed today in
our more highly organized community life. Lying, idleness,
and dishonesty were serious crimes because they interfered
with the work of settlement. Those who refused to do their
share in house-raising or harvesting or who indulged in thiev-
ery, lying, or slander interfered with the simple routine of
life. To accuse a man of such misconduct was to invite a fight,
for it branded a man as an antisocial person in the commu-
nity, and antisocial persons interfered with the business of
defending the fort, endangered property claims, disrupted

1 60 Pioneer Life

the community, and caused quarrels when unified action was
necessary to carry out a scouting expedition or a campaign.

The common way of handling such offenders was to “hate
them out” of the community; that is, to make living so diflicult
for them that they were forced to leave the neighborhood.
Failure to perform his share of military duty caused a man to
be hated out as a coward. Failure to accompany a scouting
party in his turn placed a man in bad standing with his neigh-
bors. Epithets of dishonor were mercilessly fastened to his
name. In cases of theft, groups of settlers might meet together
to determine the guilt of the person suspected. They punished
him by administering, in true Mosaic fashion, stripes on his
back, usually thirteen, but often the Biblical number of “forty
less one.” Flogging was used also to extort a confession of guilt,
a method that at times resulted in more injustice than justice.
Confession was often followed by exile. The device of “sweat-
ing” was also resorted to. The offender was suspended from the
limb of a tree by his arms, and lashes were then “laid on” by
several men in turn.

Until counties were erected, enforcement of the written laws
of the province, when not effected by public opinion, was in
the hands of the military commandant at Fort Pitt. When set-
tlers, for instance, were forbidden to come into the territory
after 1763, it was his task to see that they were kept out. He
also enforced regulations for the Indian trade. Kenny records
in his journal for November, 1761:

“As to ye Government of ye Place [Pittsburgh] at present ye
Chief Laws have been Out by ye General’s Orders, which are
Viz 18¢ That all Subjects may by applying to ye Chief Enginear

Frontier justice 1 6 1

Build Houses, but none to Sell or Rent any; that no person
shall buy of ye Indians, Horses nor Bells, 8cc. . . . To Sell no
Rum or Strong Liquor nor give to Indians on Pain of having
their Houses pu11’d Down 8c ye Transgressors being banished
the place. There was also some time ago, restrictions about
Selling the Indians Powdr 8c Lead to exceed five pounds for
one man at Once of Each 8c that there must be no dealing in
Trade after ye Evening Gun is fired after Sun Down.”

Not until county boundaries were established could county
courts be set up and justices of the province appointed to carry
out the law within the counties. If frontiersmen could not
settle their disputes either peaceably or by means of a good
fight or by force of community opinion, they were compelled
to travel over the mountains to Carlisle to seek legal redress for
their grievances. With formal courts far distant and roads diffi-
cult and dangerous to travel it was little wonder that they often
took affairs into their own hands.

The first county to include land west of the Alleghenies was
Cumberland County, erected January 27, 1 7 50. Its jurisdiction
over southwestern Pennsylvania was established on November
5, 1768, by the treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix,
New York. In 1771 Bedford County was formed from part of
Cumberland, and a county seat was established at Bedford, a
hundred miles from Pittsburgh. Here, on April 16, 1771, met
the first Pennsylvania courts to serve western Pennsylvania
settlers in their own territory. They had jurisdiction over the
newly established Pitt Township, which included nearly all
of the southwestern part of the province. The hardships and
dangers of travel that Pittsburghers and farther removed set-

1 62 Pioneer Life

tlers underwent to attend court at Bedford occasioned the erec-
tion, in February, 1773, of a new county, VVestmoreland, and
the establishment therein of a new court. Pittsburgh was then
in VVestmoreland County, and a dispute arose as to whether
the county seat of the new county should be at Fort Pitt or
at the new settlement of Hannastown, four miles northwest
of Greensburg, One faction was led by General Arthur St.
Clair, who favored Fort Pitt, and the other by Robert Hanna
and Joseph Erwin, who favored Hannastown. Hanna, who
had served as one of the justices at the Bedford court, and
Erwin were successful; and an act of the provincial assembly
set the place of the first elections and also of the county seat at
“the house of Robert Hanna.”

In a remote and primitive wilderness, amid danger from
hostile Indians and wild beasts, the log “house of Robert
Hanna,” which had been rented to Joseph Erwin as a tavern
furnishing “Entertainment for Man and Beast,” now furnished
formal justice to western Pennsylvania pioneers. In this log
courthouse one small room sufficed for the parties to the dis-
putes, the witnesses, the jury, and the spectators, all of whom
stood up at the trial. The only seats, rough hickory chairs
placed on a crude platform of clapboards, were occupied by
the judges. Soon a jail was added, with the usual machinery
of punishment: a whipping post, stocks, and a pillory. And here
the first murder trial in western Pennsylvania was held. Hugh
H. Brackenridge defended the prisoner, an Indian who had
killed a white man. After the burning of Hannastown in 1782
the court still met for some years in this same house, which
survived the fire. The court was then moved to Greensburg,

Frontier justice 1 6 3

where the first sitting took place in January, 1787. VVestmore-
land was the last county of Pennsylvania to be erected under
the proprietors, and the court at the house of Robert Hanna
was the only Pennsylvania court in the western section to ad-
minister justice in the name of the King of England.

The first court in Pittsburgh was held under the authority
of Virginia, which claimed this region as the District of West
Augusta. Before the Revolution Lord Dunmore, royal gover-
nor of Virginia, had given the name of Fort Dunmore to Fort
Pitt. Here in February, 1775, sat the first court for the VVest
Augusta district. And here at the Point a ducking stool was
erected for the immersion of offenders in the waters of the
two rivers. In 177 3, when Pennsylvania set up the new county
of VVestmoreland, including all of southwestern Pennsylvania
below the Ohio and as far east as the mountains, Dunmore
appointed Dr. John Connolly of Pittsburgh to challenge the
authority of Pennsylvania. Connolly attempted to break up
the new county by appearing at Hannastown and dispersing
the court. Arthur St. Clair placed Connolly under arrest, but
he was soon released. In November, 1775, Connolly was im-
prisoned for his loyalist activities and took no more part in
the boundary dispute. Virginia remained in control of the
region now included in Allegheny, Fayette, Greene, and Wash-
ington counties until the settlement of the boundary dispute
in 1780. Meanwhile Virginia had broken up the region
which it claimed into three counties-Yohogania, Ohio, and
Monongalia.

When Allegheny County was formed in 1 788, the first county
court met in Watson’s two-story log house at Pittsburgh. A jail

1 64 Pioneer Life

was erected with stocks, pillory, and whipping post. After a
brief period of meetings in VVatson’s house this court met in
William Irwin's tavern and later at the “Sign of the Waggon,”
kept by john Reed. It then removed to its home in the new
courthouse, where were also held the chief entertainments of
the time—amateur theatricals, Punch and Judy shows, tight-
rope and slack-wire performances.

Trial by jury was known early in these courts—it was estab-
lished at Hannastown in April, 1773. A jury tried five cases
before the Yohogania court in September, 1777. Ordinary
cases, however, were tried by justices themselves. Early court
sessions were picturesque. Henry Marie Brackenridge has
described in his memoirs the first court held in Butler:

“The first court held in Butler drew the whole population
to the town, some on account of business, some to make busi-
ness, but the greater part from idle curiosity. They were at
that time chiefly Irish, who had all the characteristics of the
nation. A log-cabin just raised and covered, but without win-
dow-sash, or doors, or daubing, was prepared for the hall of
justice. A carpenter’s bench with three chairs upon it was the
judgment seat. The bar of Pittsburgh attended, and the pre-
siding judge, a stiff, formal, and pedantic old bachelor, took
his seat supported by the two associate judges, who were com-
mon farmers, one of whom was blind of an eye.

“The hall was barely sufficient to contain the bench, bar,
jurors, and constables. But few of the spectators could be accom-
modated on the lower floor, the only one yet laid; many there-
fore clambered up the walls, and placing their hands and feet
in the open interstices between the logs hung there, suspended

Frontier Justice 1 65

like enormous Madagascar bats. Some had taken possession
of the joists, and big John M’_]unkin (who until now had ruled
at all public gatherings) had placed a foot on one joist and a
foot on another, directly over the heads of their honors, stand-
ing with outstretched legs like the Colossus of Rhodes. The
judge’s sense of propriety was shocked at this exhibition. The
sheriff, john M’Candless, was called, and ordered to clear the
walls and joists. He went to work with his assistants, and soon
pulled down by the legs those who were in no very great haste
to obey. M’_]unkin was the last.”

The earliest judges were not always lawyers, but merely men
chosen from the community and referred to as “judges not
learned in the law.” Although usually known for good judg-
ment and a sense of fairness, they were often as crude as the
communities they served or as the houses in which the courts
met. These lay judges, or associate judges, were frequently
uneducated frontiersmen and petty frontier politicians, who
turned out in fringed hunting shirts, leggings, and coonskin
caps, and they did not always hold court with suitable dignity.
They were known to leave the bench and pummel each other
roundly, to throw each other bodily out of the court room, to
come to court under the influence of liquor, and often not
to put in an appearance at all. Lay judges, however, had au-
thority only in the courts held every three months and known
as courts of quarter sessions. Visiting justices held the superior
courts. They must have made a brave show as, in their flowing
robes, they were greeted by the leading gentry and lawyers of
the town and marshaled by the sheriff on horseback.

Frontier justice was thus not solely in the hands of crude,

CANDLE
STICK

1 66 Pioneer Life

uneducated men. There were more than a few eminent and
capable judges and lawyers who studied law under the best
legal talent to be found. Judges Alexander Addison and Hugh
Henry Brackenridge were cultured and forceful men, as well
equipped for the law as their eastern brothers. Such a man,
also, was James Ross, a recognized leader of the Allegheny
County bar during his time. Addison was a graduate of the
University of Aberdeen and a former minister of the Redstone
Presbytery. Brackenridge was a Princeton graduate, and Ross
obtained his education first under the Reverend John McMil-
Ian at Canonsburg and later at Philadelphia.

Frontier courts concerned themselves with such matters as
the granting of permits to run ferries and to build water mills,
the licensing of taverns and the regulation of their prices, the
fining of tavern-keepers for violation of such regulations, the
registration of earmarks of cattle and stock, the regulation of
road-building, the collection of debts, and disorderliness such
as drunken carousing and theft or disputes between individ-
uals. Theft of a pig, of a plow, of plow irons, of two pounds of
coffee, of a watch, of six watches from a shop, and of fruit
trees are listed in early records. Horse-thieving was one of the
most common crimes and, since horses were valuable to the
frontiersman, one of the most harshly punished.

Punishment in most cases was severe. Locking in the pillory
and ducking were the most common punishments, and every

pmcoav person passing the pillory was allowed to throw one stone at
the prisoner. Branding with hot irons and the cutting off of

 
   

the offender's ears were frequently ordered. But in September,
j . 1. I 1776, the Pennsylvania constitution directed that penal laws

Frontier justice 1 67

be less cruel and that punishment should more nearly fit the
crime. In 1790 the penal law was revised and torture done
away with. Slaves and servants, however, still received particu-
larly severe sentences. Whipping by as much as a thousand
stripes, the application of thumbscrews, and sweating and
branding were not uncommon for such classes of offenders.
That there was no great care shown in dealing out justice is
indicated by the statement of one judge to a prisoner accused
of stealing a mare and colt: “We don’t know where you got
them, nor when, nor how, nor whose they were; but we think
you stole them.”

Although strong discontent was often voiced in regard to
early judges and although punishments were severe and some-
times savage, yet the frontier on the whole settled its disputes
with admirable fairness. Times were violent. Questions of all
kinds were hotly disputed, for they were important questions
in the growth of a new country, and much depended on their
settlement. People plunged into legal and political disputes
with the same violent energy that they put into the defense of
their homes, into their religion, into their dances and their tall
tales, and into their friendships and hatreds. When much of
the future welfare of a community depended on every decision,
each step in the advance had to be given earnest consideration.

The first attempts at organizing political parties in the fron-
tier were taken when signs of the Revolution were definitely
threatening, by the committees of correspondence in the re-
gion. It was by these committees that the frontier kept in touch
with events in the East. Through these committees the frontier
patriots acquainted themselves with the acts of their brother pa-

6 Pioneer Life

many stories of strange people living a1one—hermits, witches,
and other queer characters that life had bent out of their
natural shapes. All these things were the price the pioneers
paid to win a new world for later generations. But greater than
their sufferings were their hope and their faith in the life they
had chosen.

One of these early settlers has left a description of the first
years of his life with his family on the edge of the frontier:

“It was very lonesome for several years. People would move
in, and stay a short time, and move away again. . . . I started,
with my two yoke of oxen, to go to Jersey Shore, to mill, to
procure flour. I crossed Pine Creek eighty times going to, and
eighty times coming from mill, was gone eighteen days, broke
two axletrees to my wagon, upset twice, and one wheel came
off in crossing the creek. . . .

“The few seeds that I was able to plant the first year, yielded
but little produce. We however raised some half-grown pota-
toes, some turnips, and soft corn, with which we made out to
live, without suffering, till the next spring, at planting time,
when I planted all the seeds that I had left; and when I finished
planting, we had nothing to eat but leeks, cow-cabbage, and
milk. We lived on leeks and cow-cabbage as long as they kept
green—about six weeks. . . . during the three winter months it
snowed 70 days. I sold one yoke of my oxen in the fall, the other
yoke I wintered on browse; but in the spring one ox died, and
the other I sold to procure food for my family, and was now
destitute of a team, and had nothing but my own hands to
depend upon to clear my lands and raise provisions. We wore
out all our shoes the first year. We had no way to get more,-

1 68 Pioneer Life

triots in the East and with developments in the threatening re-
volt against the government of Great Britain, which was repre-
sented by a great number of Tories about Fort Pitt, and they
studied ways and means of preparing themselves for the strug-
gle that was ahead. The Revolutionary War first raised politi-
cal questions of major significance on the frontier. The ques-
tion of allegiance itself was serious. And if the frontier were
to break away from the control of the mother country there
were problems of setting up new governments that must be
considered. The mountains between the frontier and the re-
volting colonies on the seacoast made of the frontier almost a
separate state.

There had been some schooling in politics for the frontier
settlers in the quarrels as to the rightful control of southwest-
ern Pennsylvania between the Virginia groups of West Augusta
and the Pennsylvania groups who had crossed the mountains
from Lancaster and Cumberland to Westmoreland County.
For some time irate farmers met in caucuses in various cabins
throughout the district, arguing, scheming, and debating. Al-
though the two factions joined in the Revolution as ardent
Whigs to root out the Tories, fiery sentiments persisted be-
tween them for years.

In 1775 two stormy meetings were held, one at Hannastown
and the other at Pittsburgh, for the purpose of protesting the
actions of Great Britain and encouraging the protection of
American liberty. In the resolutions drawn up at these meet-
ings the frontier was showing its spirit and was sounding
the first angry notes of independence in western Pennsyl-
vania. Then in 1776 Pennsylvania drew up its first constitu-

Frontier justice 1 69

tion for complete self-government, and the western Penn-
sylvania representatives to the convention became intense
democrats. The rural settlers and the townspeople were con-
cerned over such questions as the Indian ravages to which the
frontier was subjected, cheap land and the development of
roads west of the mountains, free navigation of the Mississippi
—important in connection with the shipping of crops and stock
to New Orleans-and the establishment of schools. For years
the farmers of western Pennsylvania clung to the Pennsylvania
constitution of 1776, which has been called the most demo-
cratic in United States history. They seated four delegates in
the Council of Censors, a unique body that met every seven
years to determine whether or not the constitution had been
violated. Between 1776 and 1790 each county sent one repre-
sentative to the supreme executive council of the state. It was
a period of vigorous democracy. The western population was
being swollen by a great influx of newcomers from the East,
men with eastern capital interested in developing industry now
that the frontier was safe for such ventures. Business and trade
with eastern merchants and financiers developed, and these
men began to work for control of politics in the growing indus-
trial communities west of the mountains. New developments
took place in the political organization of the state. Republi-
can and Tammany societies were formed in a number of towns
for discussion and for the strengthening of political action.
Political organization, however, remained weak and exceed-
ingly loose until the end of the century. At churches, before
and after service, people could be approached and their politi-
cal beliefs sounded out and directed. A prominent Westmore-

1 70 Pioneer Life

land County democrat, William Findley, mingled with the
crowds usually to be found at ferries, mills, and distilleries and
spread his political ideas among them. Except for muster days,
when the militia met under the direction of its Federalist offi-
cers, there was no regular method for the control and develop-
ment of political feeling. The Federalist officers took advantage
of muster days to develop their men politically. At a meeting of
the Democratic-Republicans in the Meadville courthouse reso-
lutions were drawn up for the devising of “laudable means”
for electing Democratic-Republican oflicers throughout the
thirteen regiments of the state militia to counteract the influ-
ence of these Federalist officers. It was resolved that each militia
company should send representatives to a future meeting to
consider the election of officers, especially of the brigadier gen-
eral and brigade inspector. The democrats were making a
good start by centering their attention on the militia.
During the closing years of the century Democratic-Republi-
can sentiment was heightened throughout western Pennsyl-
vania by opposition to the newly established National Bank,
and this opposition was linked with the demand for cheap
paper money, which the farmers thought would enable them
to carry on the growing trade of the district. The F ederalists
and their leader, Alexander Hamilton, were decidedly un-
popular on the developing frontier, which showed strong
opposition to the national constitution. The farmers claimed
that the constitution was the work of eastern bankers and mer-
chants out of sympathy with the needs of the western agricul-
tural communities. Then Hamilton levied his excise on dis-
tilleries and their products, and frontier feeling flared into

Frontier Justice 1 7 1
the Whiskey Insurrection. The Stamp Act, or duty on notes,
deeds, and other documents, added fire to the explosion. Vio-
lent political meetings sprang up in every town. Stump
speeches from angry contestants were shouted simultaneously
to the same crowds. Oaths, yells from the listeners, blows, sticks
and stones hurtled over the heads of the audiences.

A traveler from the East in 1784 has said that even on the
frontier two men could not drink a half gill of whiskey together
without discussing a poi11t of politics, to the great improvement
and edification of the bystanders. And Johann Schoepf wrote
that although these people on the frontier hated the name of a
justice, yet they were not transgressors. It was not only the
name of a justice that they hated. Like the true Scots that
many of them were, they hated even more the name of the
excisemen, the men who collected the taxes on distilled liquors,
and they protested the appointment and activities of such ofli-
cers as soon as they were appointed. For some time liberty
poles were a favorite form of protest. Around a tall pole or
young sapling stripped of its branches crowds assembled to
hear fiery speeches, draw up resolutions, and sing the §a ira
or the Carmagnole, which had come from France with other
products of the French Revolution. When the commission
appointed to hear the complaints of the whiskey insurgents
met at the General Butler Tavern, a number of the insurgents
gathered outside and put up a pole, to which was fastened
a banner bearing the words “Liberty and no excise, Death to
cowards and traitors.” The Reverend Robert Ayres in his diary
for Friday, August 1, 1794, records the temper of such gather-
ings at a liberty-tree celebration in Brownsville:

 

TRIPODS

1 7 2 Pioneer Life

“I was riding through the town 8c ere I was aware I came
party to about 20 or 30 men erecting a Liberty-tree, I stop’d a
minute or 2 and looked: and thence ride towards my own
house, but meeting Wm. Evans in the next street, (Market
Street) he asked if there were many people at the said tree. I
told him perhaps 20 or 30, but, said I, I did not see any of
the principal leading people of the Town there; Evans goes
right to the s’d tree 8c informs what I said, which was Immedi-
ately exagerated to be entirely worse than what I said; they
were much enraged 8c wrote an imperious letter to me to come
down immediately 8c explain what I had said about the Party
assembled at liberty-tree. I first wrote them a note 8c then at
length concluded to go down 8c speake with them face to face;
they appointed a Committee 8: made much about nothing, 8c
on hearing the Report of the committee the Rabble was sat-
isfied.”

Newspapers lost all restraint in their violent partisanship.
One editor publicly cowhided another. The Tree of Liberty,
the Democratic-Republican paper in Pittsburgh, published
the following notice:

“Albert Gallatin, the friend of the people, the enemy of
tyrants, is to be supported on Tuesday the 14th of October
next, for the Congress of the U. S. Fellow citizens, ye who are
opposed to speculators, land jobbers, public plunderers, high
taxes, 8% loans, and standing armies, vote for Mr. Gallatin.”
The Pittsburgh Gazette sneered at Brackenridge, backer of the
Tree of Liberty, as “Citizen Brackenridge,” deriding what
they called the insidious French revolutionary influence in the
community. The Gazette referred to Brackenridge as the

Frontier Justice 1 7 3

“Jacobin printer of the Tree of Liberty, Blasphemy, and Slan-
der.” It also jeered at a dinner given by the leading Democrat-
ic-Republicans of the town on the fourth of March, 1802, the
anniversary of Jeiferson’s inauguration. The dinner was given
in the tavern of “Citizen” Jeremiah Sturgeon, at the “Sign of
the Cross Keys.” Toasts were drunk to “Citizen” Thomas Jef-
ferson, “Citizen” Aaron Burr, “Citizen” James Madison, “Citi-
zen” Albert Gallatin, and “Citizen” Thomas McKean.
Modern methods of political control had already been
started by a group of Pittsburgh politicians christened the
“Clapboardian Democracy” by a member of the Democratic-
Republican party who had left the party ranks. Its members
constituted the first political ring to attempt to gain control
of city and state politics. They were all close neighbors in the
city block occupied by the General Butler Tavern, and were
given their name from the row of houses in which they lived,
known as Clapboard Row from the materials of which the
houses were built. All the men were voters, some were oflice
holders, and those who were not, wanted to be. The postmaster,
George Adams; his successor, Dr. Hugh Scott; William Gaz-
zam, brigade inspector of the Allegheny County militia and
justice of the peace; Thomas Baird, a candidate for burgess in
1 803 ; Joseph McClurg, candidate for supervisor; Samuel Ewal t,
on whose lot stood the first log building of the Pittsburgh
Academy; Adamson Tannehill, president of the Pittsburgh
Fire Company; and Tarleton Bates, co-editor of the Tree of
Liberty, were all members of the “Clapboardian Democracy."
Its opponents were men whose names have been prominent in
city history—Co1onel James O’Hara, General John Neville,

1 74 Pioneer Life

Major Isaac Craig, Colonel Presley Neville, Major Ebenezer
Denny, Dr. George Stevenson, and most of the former Revo-
lutionary officers of the town.

After 1798 a strong political organization was set up in
western Pennsylvania to support the democratic movement.
Township committees of correspondence were created; and
they were headed by county committees of the same kind.
These in turn looked for guidance either to a state senatorial
district or to the United States congressional district that con-
sisted of all the counties between Pittsburgh and Erie. In 1805
the western Pennsylvania Democratic-Republican party split
into a conservative group and a radical group. The most dra-
matic incident of the political rivalry between these two wings
was a duel, in which Tarleton Bates was mortally shot. This
frontier democracy, however, was a real force in national polit-
ical affairs.

Such sharply drawn lines, such violent cleavages between
political parties, such unyielding principles may seem rather
unreasonable to later generations. They were natural expres-
sions, however, of the spirit of the frontier. The frontiersman
had taken his early economic struggles seriously, and he also
took his politics seriously.

From Indian Trail to Turnpike

XIV

N THE summer of 1 784 a family of five—father, mother, and

three children—-with a servant boy of fourteen, left Phila-

delphia and took the road to the West in typical pioneer
fashion.

“We were provided with three horses, on one of which my
mother rode carrying her infant, with all the table furniture
and cooking utensils. On another were packed the stores of
provisions, the plough irons, and other agricultural tools. The
third horse was rigged out with a pack saddle, and two large
creels, made of hickory withes in the fashion of a crate, one
over each side, in which were stored the beds and bedding, and
the wearing apparel of the family. In the centre of these creels
there was an aperture prepared for myself and sister, and the
top was well secured by lacing, to keep us in our places, so that
only our heads appeared above. Each family was supplied with
one or more cows. . . . Their milk furnished the morning and
evening meal for the children, and the surplus was carried in
canteens for use during the day.”

This was the usual manner of travel for people moving
westward. But there were hundreds of other pioneers who,

175

COW BELL.

 

1 76 Pioneer Life
poverty-stricken, had to make the journey on foot. Sometimes
the man came first, selected his land, cleared it, planted a first
crop in preparation for his family, built the cabin, and then
returned East for his wife and children. If he had a wagon he
brought his goods in that; if not, he loaded them on a pack
horse. If even a pack horse was out of the question, he trans-
ported his goods in a pushcart. Sometimes he could hire pas-
sage with a professional wagoner, a man who made a business
of hauling emigrants over the mountains. Wagoners trans-
ported several families at a time, or they carried the belongings
of several families, who followed on foot and drove small flocks
of sheep, goats, cattle, and poultry. Wagon travel, however, was
not common before 1790, as the roads were poor and there was
a scarcity of vehicles. In such plodding fashion did freight and
persons, mail and news travel between points that were not
on navigable streams.

A great system of trails lay ready for the hardy men and
women who ventured westward. The trails preferred by the
Indians had followed the watersheds, or ridges, wherever pos-
sible, because there the forest was more open and free of
obstacles, and this fact, together with the height, enabled them
to keep a sharp lookout for enemies. It also had the advantage
of avoiding swampy ground. Streams were crossed at their
mouths, where sand bars usually made the water shallow
enough to ford. White travelers at first followed the Indian
trails, but as the danger of attack decreased they followed short
cuts across low ground; it was easier, also, for wagons to follow
the valleys, especially in winter when the ground was frozen,
than to labor over the hilltop trails. In their main courses,


1:9‘?

I 
=) “o‘>??\r°» ‘“"i"”~1l
s... “fig ,

.‘nM|\  5

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 77

however, the white man’s roads followed the Indian trails, and
thus some of our great highways were first traversed by the
Indians.

Many Indian trails led through western Pennsylvania. At
Logstown, on the Ohio River a few miles below Fort Pitt, three
trails began. The Mahoning Trail followed the Ohio, the Big
Beaver, and the Mahoning rivers into the state of Ohio, where
it connected with three important western routes. The Great
Trail ran from Logstown to Detroit. The third of these was the
Mingo Trail, which crossed the Ohio River at Mingo Bottom,
below Steubenville.

From the East five main trails gave entrance to the western
country. Into the northwest corner of the state a frontier trail
led from the west branch of the Susquehanna River to Tioga
Point and the Cowanesque Creek, then across the northwest
corner of Potter County to the upper Allegheny. The Shamo-
kin Path ran west along the Susquehanna River and Bald Eagle
Creek to the upper waters of the west branch of the Susque-
hanna at Clearfield; from there it crossed a low divide to the
Mahoning Creek, which flows into the Allegheny near Kit-
tanning.

The Frankstown Path, or Kittanning Trail, was known as
“the main road to Allegheny.” It followed the Juniata River
and its Frankstown branch to Kittanning Gap; then across
country to Canoe Place and thence to Kittanning. The eastern
end of this road is now in part the William Penn Highway.

The Raystown Path followed the Raystown branch of the
Juniata and crossed the mountains to Loyalhanna Creek.
Along this path was constructed the Pennsylvania Road, con-

The Way of the Frontier 7

no money, nothing to sell, and but little to eat,—and were in
dreadful distress for the want of the necessaries of life. I was
obliged to work and travel in the woods barefooted. After a
while our clothes were worn out. Our family increased, and
the children were nearly naked. I had a broken slate that I
brought from Jersey Shore. I sold that . . . and bought two
fawn-skins, of which my wife made a petticoat for Mary; and
Mary wore the petticoat until she outgrew it; then Rhoda took
it till she outgrew it; then Susan had it, till she outgrew it; then
it fell to Abigail, and she wore it out.”

How true this picture is we know from comparing it with
other records of the early years when the wilderness of western
Pennsylvania was being prepared for the farms and well-built
towns that we pass now while driving over smooth roads that
often follow the early trails made by these pioneer men and
women.

And yet because of his solitude the pioneer was hospitable,
hailing and welcoming the stranger to his home. One of those
pleasant books that contain first-hand accounts of pioneer life,
john L. McConne1’s Western Characters or Types of Border
Life in the Western States, relates how the stranger was re-
ceived in the frontier cabin:

“But he [the pioneer] is neither unsocial, nor morose. He
welcomes the stranger as heartily as the most hospitable patri-
arch. He receives the Sojourner at his fireside without question.
He regales him with the best the house affords: is always
anxious to have him ‘stay another day.’ He cares for his horse,
renews his harness, laughs at his stories, and exchanges ro-
mances with him. He hunts with him; fishes, rides, walks, talks,

DUTCH

 

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1 78 Pioneer Life

necting Lancaster, Bedford, Ligonier, and Fort Pitt. This road
is now the Lincoln Highway. A popular alternate route to the
western end of the Pennsylvania Road was the Glade Road.
It left the Pennsylvania Road about four miles from Bedford
and ran southwest through a district known to early travelers
as the Glades. It passed near modern Somerset and Mt. Pleasant
to Simeral’s Ferry, or West Newton, on the Youghiogheny
River, where a boat was taken for Pittsburgh, Ohio, and
Kentucky.

The Nemacolin Trail crossed southwestern Pennsylvania
from Wills Creek on the upper Potomac to the Youghiogheny.
The first military forces used it in crossing the Allegheny

y 1' mountains, and it became Braddock’s road on his ill-fated

expedition. At the end of a branch of this road, a stone fort
and trading post was established at the mouth of Redstone
Creek, now Brownsville. It was the Braddock Road, connecting
Cumberland, Maryland, with the Ohio River, at Wheeling,
that gave to Cumberland the name “Key of the Mountains.”
And it is this road that is now traveled by motorists as the
National Highway.

Some idea of the nature of these trails can be had when we
realize that neither Braddock nor Forbes could cross the Alle-
ghenies until men with axes had widened the Indian and pack
horse trails to allow the passage of wagons. By the time the
great movement of pioneering set in, these roads had become
so clogged with fallen timber and new growth that in many
places they had to be reopened for pack horse traffic. Only a
few feet wide, the early roads wound from the East over hills
and level stretches until the rugged ranges of the Alleghenies

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PACK}-IORSE TRAIN

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 79

were reached. Here the trails led through oak-covered gorges,
climbed craggy ridges, along ledges of dizzy height, or crawled
under hanging rocks.

Along such trails wound the pack trains in single file; the
foremost horse was ridden by the man in charge, and each fol-
lowing animal was tied to the packsaddle of the horse in front.
A driver followed on the last horse to watch and adjust the
packs and to sting with the crack of his whip those beasts dis-
posed to lag. A pack train of from ten to fifteen horses, each
carrying two hundred pounds burden, could in this way be
managed by two men. So great was the traflic along these roads
before wagons became common that at convenient places of
rest as many as five hundred pack horses were counted at one
time. Travelers encountered at every few miles East-bound
trains of pack horses heavily burdened with whiskey, peltry,
and ginseng, the three main articles sent to the East. Those
going toward Pittsburgh were loaded with salt and bales of
dry goods, or with hardware.

By the end of the pack train era enough settlers had taken
up lands to demand “improved” roads for wheeled vehicles.
On all these roads could be used the first crude, springless,
stage wagons—-light coaches slung on leather straps, enclosed at
the sides and ends by curtains of canvas or leather that could
be raised or lowered to let in the air or protect the travelers
from rain. These usually held three roomy seats inside and
one outside for the coachman and two passengers, thus carrying
twelve persons in all. When mail pouches were carried inside
the stage, the passengers were limited to eight.

Such travel could be quite tolerable, although frequently an

1 80 Pioneer Life

axletree broke and passengers had to wait for an oncoming
coach. Sometimes they were forced to walk several miles with
their luggage before a stagecoach could be found, and then they
had to crowd in as best they could. A stage occasionally over-
turned; this was bad enough by day when the weather was fair,
but when it happened at night in rain or snow the passengers
were forced to kindle a fire in the woods and huddle about it.
To prevent such accidents and to give balance to a swaying
stage, drivers would call to the passengers to lean out of the
stage first at one side, then at the other, to avoid upsetting in
deep ruts. “Now, gentlemen, to the right,” a driver would call,
upon which all passengers stretched themselves out of the car-
riage to balance that side. “Now, gentlemen, to the left.” This
was said to have happened on one occasion at least a dozen
times in half that number of miles. At points where the mire
was deep, drivers with trousers rolled up joined team to team
to help each other in pulling their loads forward. At times
they took down fences and made new roads through the fields.

The glory and pride of the early roads were the Conestoga
wagons, or, as they were called at times, the Pitt teams or turn-
pike schooners. Schooners they were, sweeping in great flo-
tillas over mountain roads, colorful as any Spanish galleon.
Between fields of ripening wheat and wind-shaken forests,
drawn by their six-horse teams, they lumbered (said the chroni-
clers of that day) without creak or groan, so perfectly were
they adjusted to road and freight.

The horses that drew these wagons, well-matched blacks,
bays, or dappled grays, were handsome, active animals with
great powers of endurance, legs short rather than long, short

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 8 1

arched necks, and full manes. Although their stride was short
it carried them steadily forward and was sturdy and safe in
descending long mountain roads. They could pull their load
of six tons or more from twelve to fourteen miles a day. They
were originally bred, according to tradition, from Flemish
stallions and Virginia mares.

Horse, wagon, and driver were worthy of one another. To-
gether they made up one of the finest means of transport in
the history of trade. The driver, if he was one of the better
types in his class, took a just and poetic pride in his equipment.
He knew that his wagon was built with the finest adjustment
of materials and parts—white oak for the frame, hickory for
axletrees and singletrees, gum tree for the hubs, and poplar
for the boards. The body of the wagon was long, about twenty-
four feet, and deep, with a sag in the middle from end to end
and from side to side, so that if the load shifted with the lean
of the wagon it settled in the center instead of pressing against
the sides or back. The bows over which the white homespun
covering was drawn, curving up and outward from the side-
boards, rose eleven feet from the ground and overhung the
ends like great bonnets to keep out dust and rain. As all parts
were turned and pared to a nice balance between strength
and lightness, they were everywhere reénforced with iron, not
merely practical reénforcements, but wrought painstakingly
into designs of hearts, tulips, snakes, or knob ends. At the rear
of the wagon hung the tool box, the particular pride of the
driver, with ornamental hasps and hinges beautifully chiseled
from iron. From the rear axletree hung the water bucket.

These picturesque freighters were driven, when the driver

   

1 82 Pioneer Life

was not walking or sitting astride his saddle horse (the wheel
horse on the left side), from the lazy board, which projected be-
tween the wheels on the left of the wagon. Conestoga drivers
thus originated the American practice of passing to the right
in traffic. So proud were they of their horses’ appearance that
they equipped them with bearskin or gaudily fringed woolen
housings and adorned the bridles with loops of red trimmings.
And over the hames of each harness rose an arch of open, well-
toned bells of iron, bronze, or brass, four or five to an arch.
Bells were at first a necessity on narrow wooded roads to warn
of approach; but with the widening and improvement of road
beds they were kept for decoration and for their pleasant, jin-
gling tunes. When a wagoner in distress on the road was helped
by another, the helper received the hame bells as a reward.

The materials and design of these wagons made them un-
breakable on roads that were deeply rutted and filled with rocks
and jutting boulders; roads that were obstructed by stumps
and spreading roots; roads that sloped to one side and were
washed out by storms and overflowing streams, and that led
in places through swamps.

When the road from the Cumberland Valley to Pittsburgh
was cleared and widened between 1785 and 1790, these turn-
pike schooners began to appear, bearing freight of iron, salt,
and other necessities, as well as families of settlers, to the West,
and “back-loading” to the East with furs and skins, flour and
wheat. Until their great age passed, about 1830, they came and
went in increasing numbers until as many as three thousand at
a time—a gorgeous parade in Vermilion, soft blue, and white,
bells jangling, whips cracking, men singing and cursing-were

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 8 3

rolling uphill and down, their white covers bleached whiter in
the sun.

Finding lodgings for a night was not always easy for travelers.
The Reverend David McClure described this difficulty when
he came over the Alleghenies. McClure and his companion, on
horseback, had traveled late into the night through mud and
mireand through streams up to their horses’ bellies, with the
rain pouring down. One settler, Andrew Byerly, refused to
let them in when they knocked at his door and asked for a
night’s shelter. After riding on to the next cabin they were at
first met with a like answer. The owner told them through his
closed door that his cabin was already filled with traders and
drovers. But at their pleading he relented, opened his door to
them, and allowed them to spend the night.

“Around the dirty room of the log house lay asleep and snoar-
ing, a number of men. No bed or bedding was to be had. We
persuaded the fellow who let us in, to make up a fire, we were
obliged however, to bring in the wood, 8: we partly dried our
clothes. He also brought us two dirty blankets, 8: spreading
them on the muddy floor, before the fire, we lay down supper-
less to try to sleep. But such swarms of fleas from the blankets
attacked us on all quarters, that sleep refused us its oblivious
soothing comforts.”

As the number and frequency of uninvited guests in way-
side cabins grew, the involuntary host found himself becoming
innkeeper, especially if he owned a fair-sized cabin or log
or stone house. Then, as innkeeper, he acquired in turn a num-
ber of other offices. He was the one person who was always paid
in cash for service and in consequence became a kind of fron-

1 84 Pioneer Life

tier banker. Letters were left with him for other travelers
expected to pass that way; so he became also a kind of post-
master. Travelers brought him the most recent newspapers
and wayfarers handed out gossip picked up along the road,
and by these means he became a kind of news agent.

The terms “inn” and “tavern” are not always interchange-
able in speaking of early hostelries. In New York and New
England, “tavern” was more often used; in Pennsylvania, “inn”
was more common. In the South the term “ordinary” was ha-
bitual. “Tavern” and “inn” were sometimes used to distin-
guish, respectively, between mere drinking places and es-
tablishments where meals and lodging were provided. Some
localities scorned the term “inn” as too English.

In his journal, an early traveler warned his readers not to be
deceived by the bare name of “tavern.” The people, he said,
kept tavern if they had anything over and above what they
used; if not, the traveler looked out for himself.

Another traveler arrived at the cabin of a smith “who on
occasion plays the innkeeper.” But his house was no inn that
evening. He had nothing to eat, and the traveler was compelled
to “grope for two miles more.” At a later stage he stopped at
another cabin. On inquiry, he was told that the owner kept
no tavern, but he was taken in willingly and found better
accommodations than if it had been one.

When Schoepf was driving over the Forbes Road in his
chaise, he stopped one evening at the cabin of a Dr. Peter, a
German. The doctor was absent, looking for his pigs gone
astray in the woods. But his wife, “a good little old woman,
and energetic,” gave the horses oats and set before the travelers

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 85

mountain tea and maple sugar, “which as well as her bacon,
whiskey and cakes were the products of her own land and
industry.”

When Dr. Robert Wellford traveled through western Penn-
sylvania in 1794 he breakfasted one morning at Mrs. Wood-
row’s, the most comfortable house he had seen in the region.
One large room was divided by plank partitions into three
sleeping rooms and one eating room, with a very large log fire;
the kitchen was under the same roof. The doctor’s comment
was: “If this was the best house, judge then of the others.”

It was customary for roadside dwellers to offer a floor for
sleeping and to allow lodgers to prepare their own food. One
lodger records that his party arrived at a large tavern where,
if one brought meat and drink along with him, he found room
enough to dispose of them. Two young fellows here kept house,
but had nothing except whiskey and cheese; bread and meat
were “accidental articles.”

The typical Pennsylvania inn, after the earliest days, was
usually built of stone, often almost square, with perhaps an
extension in the rear. It was seldom more than two stories in
height, usually with a two-storied porch at the rear or side and
an attic with windows in the gable ends. Two doors opened off _

 
 
 
  
 
  

the long porch stretched across the front of the building—one
to the taproom, which became the neighborhood resort for
settlers from miles around, and the other into a hall that led
to the inn parlor and family living quarters.

Three distinct classes of inns developed to serve three dis-  
tinct classes of people. Drovers stopped at inns away from f _;"“
villages or towns. There they obtained food and shelter for T

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'7' .4.

PIGGIN

1 86 Pioneer Life

themselves, and pasture, water, and feed for their animals. At
one mountain inn, during one night, there were counted more
than thirty six-horse teams in the wagon yard, one hundred
Kentucky mules in the barnyard, and one thousand hogs in
another enclosure, and as many fat cattle and sheep were pas-
tured in the fields round about. Such a Cavalcade had put up
at only one inn on one road for the night. What a procession
must have moved the next day when all the inns and taverns
along the roads had discharged their customers.

A slightly better type of inn catered to wagoners and the
poorer class of settlers. The wagoner, after putting his wagon
in the yard and his horses in the stable, washed up at the
pump. Then, leaving hiseblankets in the taproom, he went in
to supper. The meal might consist of ham and eggs, beefsteak,
fried speckled trout, fried potatoes and griddlecakes, preserves,
pickles, pie, cheese, cake, and coffee. For such a meal he paid
twelve and half cents or half a shilling. After an evening of rude
merriment at the bar, the wagoner spread his blankets on the
taproom floor and spent the night there. The landlord gave
him this right as well as that of using as much wood as he cared
to burn, in consideration of the money he had spent.

Inns catering to stagecoach passengers were of the best grade.
Appetizing, indeed, were the meals served. The landlord sat
at one end of the table to carve the roasts. At the opposite end
his wife or a guest served other dishes. The guests helped them-
selves to what was not served from the head and foot of the
table. There was no limit on “refills.” The table was loaded
with boiled mutton, boiled ham, hot roast turkey, mashed
potatoes, boiled onions, creamed turnips, coleslaw, celery, two

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 87

or three kinds of pickles, four or five kinds of jellies and pre-
serves, hot rolls, biscuits, and wheat bread. The guest had to
eat everything on his plate to make room for the mince pie,
custard pie, apple pie, pound cake, suet pudding, doughnuts,
tea, and coffee that would follow for dessert. Such a meal cost
twenty-five cents.

Inn bedrooms frequently contained six and eight beds, and
when the inn was crowded each bed did service for three per-
sons. An English traveler, Hulme, wrote of early inns:

“Very good accomodations for travellers the whole of the
way. The stage stops to breakfast and to dine, and sleeps where
it sups. They literally feasted us everywhere, at every meal,
with venison and good meat of all sorts: everything in profu-
sion. In one point, however, I must make an exception, with
regard to some houses: at night I was surprised, in taverns so
well kept in other respects, to find bugs in the beds! I am
sorry to say I observed (or, rather, felt,) this too often. Always
good eating and drinking, but not always good sleeping.”

As inn accommodations improved, the innkeeper and host
developed into a definite type and personage. Henry M. Brack-
enridge described these men:

“The landlords or tavern-keepers are, in reality, the only
lords we have in Pennsylvania; they possess a degree of intelli-
gence and respectability of character which justly gives them
an influence dans la chose publique, which very little cor-
responds with that of mine host in the country of john Bull,
which may account for the good jokes of British travelers on
our keepers of public houses, in respect to their political and
military importance. Before my time, BLACK CHARLES kept the

8 Pioneer Life

eats, and drinks with him. His wife washes and mends the
stranger's shirts, and lends him a needle and thread to sew a
button on his only pair of pantaloons. The children sit on his
knee, the dog lies at his feet, and accompanies him into the
woods. The whole family are his friends, and only grow cold
and distant when they learn that he is looking for land, and
thinks of ‘settling’ within a few leagues. If nothing of the sort
occurs—and this only ‘leaks out’ by accident, for the pioneer
never pries inquisitively into the business of his guest, he keeps
him as long as he can; and when he can stay no longer, fills his
saddle-bags with flitches of bacon and ‘pones’ of corn-bread,
shakes him heartily by the hand, exacts a promise to stop again
on his return, and bids him ‘God-speed’ on his journey.”

The same scarcity of acquaintances and associates that made
the pioneer warm and constant in friendship also made him
bitterly angry at injustice done to him, to his family, or to his
belongings. People who live much alone feel ordinary human
emotions the more strongly, perhaps, because the emotions are
stored up and when they find expression they pour out more
violently for having been pent up so long. If frontier revenge
seems sometimes extreme to us, if frontier justice and punish-
ments seem sometimes harsh and cruel, we must take condi-
tions into account.

A historian who has studied very carefully the frontier in
American history writes of the decline of knowledge on the
frontier and of the increase of “lawlessness,” in the sense of the
pioneer’s disregard of those laws that he considered unneces-
sary or unjust. We must admit that what he says has truth in
it. Books and papers were scarce, and much of what the pio-

 

1 88 Pioneer Life

first hotel in the place; when I can first remember, the sign of
GENERAL BUTLER, kept by Patrick Murphy, was the head tavern;
and afterward the GREEN TREE, on the bank of the Mononga-
hela, kept by William Morrow. The General Butler was con-
tinued by Molly Murphy for some years after the death of
Paddy; she was the friend of my boyhood and youth, and, al-
though as rough a Christian as I ever knew, I verily believe
that a better Christian heart, one more generous and benevo-
lent, as well as sturdy and fearless, never beat in Christian bos-
om. Many an orphan, many a friendless one, many a wretched
being has shed, in secret, the tear of gratitude over the memory
of Molly Murphy!”

Inns and taverns were identified and frequently became
famous by their quaint names. These names were announced
by signboards hung over the doorway or from a post near
the door. Tavern signs were frequently beautiful designs in
wrought iron or on painted boards. At Brownsville the “Sign
of the Globe” was a famous eating house. At Brownsville, too,
was the “Sign of the Cross Keys,” a curious displacement of
a religious symbol used by the church, the keys of St. Peter.
The “Sign of the Buck,” “Indian Queen,” “Black Horse,”
“Fountain Inn,” “Mermaid,” “Rising Sun,” “Sign of the White
Goose,” and “Spread Eagle” appeared as names of taverns in
various quarters. Names of popular heroes were also given to
inns; the “Sign of Gen. George Washington” was a favorite
stopping place, as was the “Sign of Gen. Wayne.”

It had been along the main watercourses that the first traders
and missionaries penetrated the region. As settlers came in
increasing numbers these waterways continued to be used.

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 89

Up the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela they came; down
the Allegheny from Connecticut and New York, via Erie; and
over the Juniata from the Susquehanna. Pittsburgh was a
meeting point for all these routes; and so, since it was also at the
head of the Ohio River, it was the gateway to the farther West.
Brownsville, too, was a transfer point from overland to water
travel, as was West Newton for the same traffic from the Po-
tomac. Conemaugh, now part of Johnstown, and Kittanning
served similar offices between the Juniata and the Conemaugh-
Kiskiminetas rivers, which carried traffic to the Allegheny and
thence to Pittsburgh. As more remote sections were opened for
settlement, the earlier portages became the keys to lines of
trade and travel. These portages the traders and hunters had
established as the shortest or most convenient land routes from
one waterway to another. From the Hudson-Mohawk system
in New York, New Englanders entered northwestern Penn-
sylvania. From the Susquehanna and _]uniata system settlers
came across the broad mountain barrier, and from the
Potomac-Monongahela system to the south they entered from
Maryland and Virginia.

Travelers could follow no water route without doing some
travel by land. For example, from New York a traveler west
bound for Pittsburgh might take a boat up the Hudson to
Albany, a voyage of three or four days; then proceed by wagon
to Schenectady, by bateau up the Mohawk River to Rome, New
York, from there‘ overland to Wood Creek, then by boat A,
through Oneida Lake, down the Oswego River to Lake On- f’?
tario, by boat to Niagara, by wagon to Buffalo on Lake Erie, by
boat to Presque Isle, or the town of Erie. From there he could

 
 
 
 
  
    
 


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1 go Pioneer Life

take a road that led through Waterford and Meadville to Pitts-
burgh, or he might embark upon a keel boat at Waterford and
descend French Greek and the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh.

The earliest water craft were dugouts and bark canoes. Used
originally by the Indians, they were later adopted by white set-
tlers as their first means of river transport. The dugout canoe,
or pirogue, was a sycamore or cypress log hollowed by burning
or with the adz. Sometimes the dugouts were split lengthwise
and planks were inserted to widen them. They could be built
large enough to accommodate thirty or forty men and as much
as forty tons of freight. They were steered by a stern oar and
propelled by poles, or sometimes by sails or oars.

The bateaux mentioned by so many early travelers on the
western waters included craft of many kinds. Usually, however,
the bateaux were flat, keelless boats made of planks, tapering
at the ends. They were sometimes equipped with cabins and
might be propelled by oars, poles, or sails. Sails were employed
on many types of craft on the three rivers. The most common
means of downstream transportation was the flatboat, some-
times called the ark or broadhorn, built somewhat like a mod-
ern houseboat, although cruder. It was usually about fifteen
feet wide and fifty feet long. It depended upon the current for
its impetus but could be managed in a clumsy fashion by great
oars that extended out at each side and at the back.

What the Conestoga wagon was to the mountain road, the
keel boat was to the Ohio River. It was king of the river, al-
though a gypsy king, to be sure. It was a slender, pointed
boat, which because of its light draft could navigate shallow
streams. But its great service lay in its navigability upstream

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 9 1

over currents and riflles. Travelers used keel boats for making
quick journeys, and merchants found them the safest and most
dependable of all the boats on the rivers. Because of their speed,
there was less chance of perishable goods spoiling, and they
were manned by experienced fellows who knew every trick of
navigation. From the keel, covered with plank, rose the ribs,
also plank-covered, with low gunwales. A cargo box was erected
over the deck with a footpath all the way around. These keel
boats were about ten by sixty feet, and carried twenty to forty
tons of freight.

As keel boats were returned up river-—un1ike flatboats, which
were broken up for firewood at the end of their journey-—
various_ methods of propelling them were used. When the
current was not too deep, setting poles, twelve to twenty feet
long and shod with iron, were struck in the river bed; then
the boatmen pressed their weight against the poles, sometimes
leaning so far forward that they crept on their hands and toes
the length of the gangway, four men on each side. Sometimes
the men on the shore side used poles while the men on the
river side rowed. When the current was too deep for setting
poles, the cordelle, or towing rope, was used to draw the boat
upstream. This rope might be several hundred feet long. One
end was made fast to the boat, and the other end was taken
ashore by men who tramped through brush, waded, and swam
inlets as they pulled the boat up river. Sometimes parties went
ahead with axes to clear the way and with rifles on their backs
as protection from Indians. Warping was another method of éd
cordelling. A skiff carried one end of the cordelle upstream,
where it was fastened to a snag or atree. The other end was «nus oA1'

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1 92 Pioneer Life

drawn by the crew around a capstan or windlass, or sometimes
hand over hand. In this way six miles were made in a day. At
high water, when the boat was navigating near trees whose
branches overhung the current, bushwacking was resorted to.
Each man in turn, from the bow, seized a branch and walked
aft. At the stern he released the branch and returned around
the cargo box to the bow, from where he began the operation
again.

The braggarts who manned the keel boats have taken their
place in legend as iron-muscled giants in scarlet shirts and blue
jackets, leather caps or wide, flop-brimmed hats. They were
usually bearded and moccasined, armed with knives and
equipped with tobacco pouches. They were bruisers and rascals
who performed great exploits on river and shore, according to
their own reports and according to reports from others. They
were heavy drinkers and frolickers, singers and fighters, card-
playing, roistering, jigging ex-soldiers of the Revolution in
search of further adventure. Or they might be former Indian
scouts grown restless since the frontier had become safe from
raids. Sometimes they were from farms that had proven un-
yielding or too tame.

The keel boat age was the age of river pageantry, when from
the upper reaches of the Monongahela above Brownsville

% down to Natchez and New Orleans the widening expanse of
water was broken by the most picturesque craft that ever
rippled a river; when the air was rent every hour of the day
by brawling shouts and oaths and newly invented epithets, by
songs of boatmen, by shouts of children who played on the
roofs of the lumbering arks and by the screams of mothers

 
  
   

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 9 3

frightened lest they fall into the water. From the flatboats the
air was shattered by the whinnying of horses and the mooing of
cattle, and rasped by the cackle of geese. From these same flat-
boats smoke rose from the fires at which women cooked family
meals. Fifty-foot canoes swayed and tilted their cargo at one
end, a settler’s family at the other. From the great ship-like
barges sixty feet long, propelled by twenty or thirty oars, so
that they looked like giant water skippers, came the feeble
whine of fiddles. And through all this pageant wove the keel
boats, passing by the bulkier, blunter, more awkward craft,
while the red-shirted, blue-jacketed keelboatmen thumbed
their noses and jeered.

Boat building for rivermen and the manufacturing of
saddles and harness for drivers gave early Pittsburgh a business-
like air. There was a fine trade in lumber, tar, and leather; and
numbers of carpenters, millwrights, and workmen made streets
and wharves bustle from Brownsville down through McKees-
port to the Point.

Pittsburgh early proved its right to the title of Gateway to
the West. It became the junction of overland travel from the
East and river traflic to the West. The residents of the thriving
city became accustomed to great numbers of boats docking at
its wharves. At low water as many as a hundred boats, each
carrying a family of emigrants, would dock along the Monon-
gahela between Pittsburgh and New Geneva, and an equal
number along the Allegheny. Larger boats than river craft were
built in the vicinity. In 1 793 a schooner built between Browns-
ville and Pittsburgh sailed to New Orleans and from there to
Philadelphia. In the same year packets operating between

1 94 Pioneer Life

Pittsburgh and Cincinnati were made bullet proof and were
armed with small cannon. Arrangements were also made where-
by passengers and crew could fire through por-tholes at ma-
rauders, white as well as red.

By 1810 shipbuilding had become an important industry.
The government built two armed galleys to be used in case of
trouble with the Spaniards in Louisiana, who ‘were hampering
American trade on the lower Mississippi. The Tarasgon
Brothers and other merchants exported goods in seagoing ves-
sels to New Orleans and thence to Philadelphia.

Tarleton Bates had written to a friend on May 25, 1798:

“On Saturday the nineteenth, precisely at 2 P. M., the first
galley was launched at this place. It was said to be a very beau-
tiful launch, she slid a most unusual distance, I believe 126
feet. When she descends the river is not known, as it depends
more on the destinies than on man, for although she is not in
a sailing state, neither is the water high enough to admit it.”

Two schooners, the “Pittsburgh” and the “Amity,” two hun-
dred and seventy tons and one hundred tons respectively, were
launched in 1803, and cleared with cargoes of flour for St.
Thomas in the Virgin Islands and for Lisbon. Between 1802
and 1805 three schooners, three brigs, and four ships were
launched.

In 1804 boats conveying flour from Pittsburgh to New Or-
leans carried two hundred and fifty to three hundred barrels
each. One company sent twenty-five thousand barrels to the
South in one year. It is estimated that during that same period
one hundred thousand tons of manufactured articles were
shipped to the same destination. The quantity of goods carried

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 95

was increasing at the rate of about two thousand tons annually.

Settlers along the rivers offered a good market for goods of all
descriptions. Traders equipped boats with staples and manu-
factured goods and floated down the rivers peddling their stock.
The store boats, as such craft were called, signaled their ap-
proach by several loud blasts from a horn. For goods, the
settlers bartered cotton, tobacco, flour, grain, pelts, and the
like. As many as four and five of these store boats passed in a
day. They also carried families into new territory. Emigrants
from the East, having arrived in Pittsburgh by Conestoga
wagon, sometimes bought and outfitted such boats and, after
cruising down the rivers, sold the boats when they had found
a desirable spot in which to found a new home.

In the years immediately following the frontier period, show
boats plied the western waters. The first of these made its
appearance in 1815 when a man named Drake launched the
first “opera boat.” A decade later an English actor named Wil-
liam Chapman came to Pittsburgh with his family of six, all
actors, and launched a show boat that became famous on all the
middle western rivers.

Many dangers threatened boats traveling the inland waters.
Channelssometimes shifted suddenly, or in spring the melt-
ing snows flooded them. Mud banks and sand bars appeared
overnight and boats were continually running upon them.
Logs caught by one end in the mud of the river bottom tore
holes in the bottoms and sides of the boats. The greatest men-
ace, however, were the white outlaws and Indians who fre-
quently plundered solitary boats. Near Shawneetown, on the
Ohio River in what is now southern Illinois, lived a notorious

1 96 Pioneer Life

gang of outlaws who attacked any boat running aground on
the adjacent shoals. After killing the occupants they took the
boats downstream to New Orleans and sold them.

Delivery of mail to the frontier was irregular and undepend-
able. All available means of transportation were used. In early
days written messages were given into the hands of any one
going in the general direction of the place of address—traders,
pack-horse men, Indian runners, army couriers, or ordinary
travelers. In this way a letter passed through many hands and
took a long time to reach its destination. Kenny says in his
journal: “Sent my letters off with Ensign Hutchins he going
to Bedford on his way to Carolina.” Innkeepers served as post-
masters, giving to their departing guests letters to be delivered.
Letters were laid on the tables of inns, and there they some-
times remained for days until they were examined and paid for.

When the government was firmly organized, regular mail
carriers, or post riders, served the frontier. In the Pittsburgh
Gazette of October 7, 1 786, appeared a Philadelphia letter con-
taining the following notice: “Mr. Brison is just returned from
New-York with orders to establish a post from this place [Phila-
delphia] to Pittsburgh.” This notice meant the breakdown of
isolation; it meant that the frontier would be drawn into con-
stant and quicker communication with the more cultured
East. But the service was not established until 1788. On July
3 of that year a fortnightly service was established between
Pittsburgh and Chambersburg. From the latter place the post
traveled weekly to Philadelphia. The duties of the frontier post
rider were many and various. His primary job was, of course, to
deliver the letters and packages he carried in the portmanteau,

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 97

slung over his horse’s back. One of his duties was to inspect and
report the conditions of the roads at ferries and fords. Another
was to help any one he might meet on the road who needed his
assistance. Still other services he performed were to transfer
money from point to point and to return horses for travelers.
Post riders were paid in accordance with the weight of mail
carried. This led to a certain amount of cheating; sham bundles
of straw, or “cheaps,” were tied to sealed packets or letters.
Wages suffered from private competition with wagon drivers,
who could underquote the post riders’ price for delivery of
mail. It is told of one early Pennsylvania post rider that he
supplemented his regular duties by knitting mittens and socks
as he jogged along the road.

With the development of roads, mail service improved. In
1 794 a post rider began service to Wheeling from Pittsburgh by
way of Canonsburg and Vvashington. In 1798 a mail route
began between Pittsburgh and Zanesville, Ohio. As early as 1 796
private service began between Pittsburgh and Erie. john Scull,
the editor of the Gazette, announced with the opening of the
road, “A careful person is employed to go from this place to
Presqu’Isle, once every two weeks. He will leave the printing
office at ten o’clock. Those who wish to write a letter to their
friends in that quarter may do so.” About 1792 boats began
to carry mail on the Ohio. Mail was also carried on river
packets, but delivery was much slower than by stage. In 1801
biweekly service was begun through Beaver to northwestern
Ohio.

From 1799 to 1814 a one-page letter cost eight cents postage
if sent under forty miles. For more than five hundred miles,

The Way of the Frontier 9

neer had learned in his earlier settled community, with its
schools, churches, libraries, and papers, became useless and was
forgotten. These facts explain the rawness of early American
civilization; but they also explain its strength and promise. In
many a family’s scant belongings, however, carried over the
mountains in cart or on pack horse, or on foot in a cloth-
wrapped bundle, was a Bible or a copy of Shakespeare. From
the Bible more than one frontier child learned to read by fire-
light or rushlight. And these little flames of culture and knowl-
edge were cared for as carefully as the rows of beans and pump-
kins outside the cabin door.

The “law1essness” of the frontiersman might be explained
by his refusal to be wronged, his independence, his courage, his
active sense of justice. Lawlessness, in its true sense, means the
breaking of just and reasonable laws. This is not characteristic
of Americans. Americans have inherited from these pioneer
men and women, who had been trained in the hard school of
experience to win the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,” an unusual sense of what is just in lawmaking. It
was to establish these rights more firmly that pioneers strug-
gled in the wilderness; they wanted personal liberty and eco-
nomic freedom, the right to a full life. In the pursuit of happi-
ness these men and women sought the unsettled lands of the
western country. And they defended their enterprise sturdily,
whether they were threatened by poor living, Indians, illness
and hunger, or by unjust oflicials and intruders.

Frontier people were often grave and heavy-spirited. Howl-
ing winter winds, the cry of wolves, the screech of owls through
the clearing—such sounds on the strained ears of a family

1 98 Pioneer Life

postage cost thirty-five cents. The usual rate from Philadelphia
to Pittsburgh was seventeen cents per sheet. One of the John
Thaw letters gives interesting light on postal service at the
turn of the century:

“Permit me now to advise when ever you write to any one
per post never to make two pieces of paper of a letter when one
is sufficient, as with the one to me altho’ totally blank on one
side you enclosed in another blank, for which I had to pay
double postage 3 s which you can refund when you receive this,
as its allways customary for a person to pay the postage of Let-
ters when on Bussiness entirely their own.”

Letters were not enclosed in envelopes, nor stamped. The
single sheet was folded, sealed with wax, and the address was
written on the back along with the amount of postage to be
collected from the receiver.

Although by this time mail could be rapidly sent between
towns such as Chambersburg, Pittsburgh, and Wheeling, often
several months were required for it to reach the distant West
and Southwest. It was seventy-eight days from the time Presi-
dent Monroe's message to Congress was published, in 1819,
until it was read in Little Rock, Arkansas.

When Cramer’s Pittsburgh Magazine Almanack announced
in 1804 the arrival on Monday and Thursday of each week of
the “Pittsburgh Good Intent” mail coach from Philadelphia,
travel and transport across the Pennsylvania mountains had
lost much of its earlier inconvenience and danger, time had
been cut down, and passage could be had for twenty dollars.
News, goods, and passengers could pass easily now from west-
ern Pennsylvania to the eastern seaboard. Life beyond the

From Indian Trail to Turnpike 1 99

mountains was therefore more attractive. The roughest pioneer-
ing was finished; the first cabins had multiplied into settle-
ments, and settlements had grown into towns. Business men
in the East, began to look toward western Pennsylvania as a
good place to make fortunes, so they came to places like Pitts-
burgh, Washington, or Uniontown, established their banks
and industries, developed the natural resources, and created
a new industrial empire.

 

Life in the Towns

XV

ITTSBURGH is a fine Country Town . . . possesses toler-
P able good 8: cheap markets, dear stores 8c bad society the In-
habitants being so much Engrossed with political discussions
that those of oppisite sentiments can hardly think or speak well
of each other—its a place by no means so enticeing as Philada
8c a person comeing from thence should do it under the convic-
tion of making money 8: bettering his circumstances, but not of
Enjoying the pleasure either of a country or city life.”

Thus was Pittsburgh described in a letter written by john
Thaw in 1804, and that description would also apply in gen-
eral, to those other towns that had grown up in western Penn-
sylvania, which only a quarter century before had been largely
wilderness. The point of view of the business man from the
East expresses the opinion that we ourselves would have held
of these c:ommunities—towns “by no means so enticeing” as
Philadelphia, towns “Engrossed with political discussions,”
country towns most of them, with the advantages and disad-
vantages that such a description implies.

Mr. Thaw in that same year wrote another letter, in which
he said that the houses in Pittsburgh numbered four or five

200

Life in the Towns 201

hundred, were generally two stories high, and that the old
ones were principally of log and the new ones of brick construc-
tion. The streets, he said, were straight and narrow but not
paved and, of course, were extremely muddy. He spoke of the
family pride and of the distinction between classes. He was
writing of the frontier metropolis.

These observations show that the frontier was moving be-
yond the forks of the Ohio River, which, when Captain Trent
built his first rude fort there a half century before, had been
its extreme edge. A man living when Mr. Thaw wrote might
have erected his cabin in actual wilderness, and before he
reached old age he would have seen the frontier transformed
into a network of roads that led past prosperous farms into any
one of a score of thriving towns. He might have ground his
corn in a hominy block when he was a young married man;
in his later years he could have it ground at a steam mill. He
might have made his first journey over the mountains on foot,
but before he had grandchildren he could have returned for
a visit by regular stage. Settlers had arrived in suflicient num-
bers to establish such towns as Pittsburgh, Erie, Meadville,
Butler, Washington, Uniontown, Brownsville, Connellsville,
and Greensburg, besides a hundred villages at points between
these towns. What had been wilderness had, through the labors
of the pioneers, become civilization when Mr. Thaw arrived
in Pittsburgh. In western Pennsylvania men no longer plowed
their fields under armed guards as protection from Indians.
The stations and forts to which settlers had once fled from
attack were falling into decay. No longer was the pack horse
the most serviceable means of carrying freight, nor were moc-

   
 
  

WATER MILL

 
 

202 Pioneer Life

casins and linsey the best wearing apparel. People no longer
had to meet in groves or in cabin “praying societies” to wor-
ship. Nor did they have to try court cases at Hannastown if
they lived in the triangle between the Allegheny and Monon-
gahela rivers. Jerk and johnnycake were staples of diet now
only in backward communities.

Gristmills and sawmills, iron works, and distilleries and tan-
neries had developed like lusty youngsters from the small in-
dustries of the settlers, and communities had grown up around
them. Conveniences of trade and the heightened standard of
living brought organization of town life with markets, court-
houses, libraries, and theaters. Connellsville became a thriving
town of store keepers and tradesmen, mechanics and inn-
keepers. Brownsville supported many mills, for corn grinding,
for sawing lumber, for fulling and carding wool, and for oil
making. Stores developed and taverns were opened. John Gil-
pin visited Brownsville in 1809 and mentioned the fact that
the town boasted eighteen stores. These outfitted a large num-
ber of migrants, or “flitters,” as they were called, who were on
the road to the farther West.

“Generally poor they get here as well as they can, 8c encamp
on the bank of the river 8c furnish themselves with a boat-
the scarcity of this article 8c the tardiness of the winter often
causes them to remain a considerable time 8c sometimes numer-
ous families have passed the whole winter in their tents or huts
to be ready for the earliest breaking of the frost 8c rising of the
waters.”

Washington, by 1794, was a considerable town of frame
buildings, clapboarded, and “chiefly painted red,” except the

ll”  IJI l

    

%

Life in the Towns 203

courthouse and two or three other buildings, which were of
stone. The appearance of the place was very pleasing to James
Elliot, who passed through in that year, because it reminded
him of a New England town. He added that the houses in
general throughout Pennsylvania were built of brick or stone,
but we must remember that he kept pretty well to the main
roads.

Harmony (near Zelienople) had been well built soon after
1800 by the Harmonites under the leadership of the Rapps.
The red brick buildings housed tanning, dyeing, weaving, car-
pentering, blacksmithing, and other industries. The town had a
botanical garden as well as its vegetable gardens and orchards.
And it had what few if any other towns had—a church orchestra
of three violins, a violincello, a clarinet, a flute, and two French
horns.

Greensburg by 1804 was a pleasant town of one hundred
dwelling houses, a German Reformed Church, a courthouse
of brick, “and a prison.” It also had a post oflice. To Greens-
burg many dandies from the surrounding country flocked to
see the public races, coming even from Pittsburgh to enjoy the
sports and the hospitality of the town's leading citizens and
its five inns.

Bedford in the 1790's was a town chiefly of log houses two
stories high. To one traveler the inhabitants appeared to be a
“heathenish, groveling sort of people, mostly Irish.” Although
a county seat, there was not a church in it. But to Johann
Schoepf, who astonished all settlers along the road by traveling
over the mountains in a chaise, it was an agreeable stopping
place, regularly planned, with a courthouse and two houses of

204 Pioneer Life

worship, “which cannot be called churches, being only wooden
huts.” It was a small town, but as Schoepf said, “a little town
in a great wilderness may easily please without beauty.”

And so might any of the earliest towns have been described
—these clusters of brick or log houses set down far apart “in a
great wilderness,” with their muddy streets, over which a few
thoughtful house owners had perhaps laid occasional planks
or a few scattered flagstones and loose bricks. If in summer the
streets were pleasant with shade from trees planted along them,
they were also grass-grown and weedy and afforded not only
pasture for cows and sheep, but also a running ground for
pigs and dogs, and were frequently cluttered with drays drawn
in from the country by oxen. They were dark streets by night,
brightened only occasionally by a lantern swung from a tavern
door or a signpost.

Along the mud streets houses ranged themselves according
to the fancy of the builders-—some of frame with their ends to
the street; others of brick, built lengthwise, and with open
yards between. Over them stood poplars and willows, inter-
spersed with street wells and pumps. Merchants usually lived
with their families in the houses where they carried on busi-
ness, and over their doorways swung signs announcing their
names, signs often as curious as the names of the inns and

   
 
 
 
  

taverns.

Getting land in the towns was not a question of tornahawk
rights or patents, but of buying real estate. Of this business,
too, Mr. Thaw wrote to his father to explain why he wanted
a loan a year or so after he arrived in Pittsburgh:

“As I deem it proper for you to be acquainted with the reason

Life in the Towns 205

of this urgency and what I am doing at this distance from my
parents I have to Inform you, that this day I have purchased
at Sheriffs sale, a new two story Brick House standing on one
of the most improveing streets in Pittsburgh 20 ft front by 32
ft deep, the lot 63 ft in depth with a 4 ft alley leading into 3d st
passing the adjoining corner house fronting Wood st. This
house, cost the person (now dead) who built it, about 2500 35
and the Lots adjoining of same size and value are let at Two
Dlls per foot. . . . Wood street is the handsomest in the place,
it is now paved from the river up to 3rd st and the next square
on which my house stands will be done next year.”

As to rents and removals, Mr. Thaw had written earlier:

“Removals generally takes place here the first of April 8c
the population being equal to the dwelling houses, makes it
very difficult to get one at this time, and also causes rents to be
as high as with you. After looking in vain for a suitable house
-I have taken one near the Bank but in an unfinished state at
Eight Dlls per month in this I am now living 8c collecting the
necessary apparatus for housekeeping—the house not being
comfortable I intend moveing as soon as I can procure an-
other, have one now in view, that will be finished in a few
weeks, it is a very convenient two story Building, rents at 150 $
8c dont expect to get one for much less.’’

Mr. Thaw, who had come to Pittsburgh as a banker, had a
good business eye and for a time thought of buying and selling
real estate. But he wrote in one of his letters, “As for specula-
tion there is no chance, landed property being already monopo-
lized by monied men 8c held at very high prices.”

Pittsburgh in 1783 numbered “perhaps 60 wooden houses

206 Pioneer Life

and cabins” said Schoepf, “in which live something more than
100 families. . . . The first stone house was built this summer,
but soon many good buildings may be seen, because the place
reasonably expects to grow large and considerable with the
passage of time.” There were no houses of worship or justice,
but only a resident German preacher; and the Pennsylvania
government sent a judge once or twice a year to administer
justice.

By 1796-97 a traveler named Baily mentioned that Pitts-
burgh houses were still mostly of wood, although lately people
had begun to build them with brick. The streets did not al-
ways cross at right angles, but near the rivers they ran parallel
with the stream. In 1802 the burgess and his assistants adver-
tised in the Pittsburgh Gazette for bids for digging and walling
with stone or brick four wells in Market Street, not less than
forty-seven feet deep. A few months later pumps had been
installed at two of these wells.

Pittsburgh had become, when Mr. Thaw arrived, the “west-
ern exchange,” a reflex of New York, in its earnest bustle and in
the same variety of thronging strangers. By 1807 Christian
Schultz, another traveler who passed through on one of those
western tours that were then becoming fashionable, said that
the town contained many houses that would be called elegant
even in New York.

The town grew so rapidly that five years later the first traflic
regulations were necessary. Since streets easily became encum-
bered with wagons and drays, a fine of two dollars was to be
collected by street commissioners from the owners of vehicles
that were a nuisance. If these oflicers failed in their duty they

Life in the Towns 207

themselves were fined from fifty cents to two dollars. And
in winter sleighs could not be driven faster than a trot.

Town houses throughout western Pennsylvania had greatly
improved over the first unhewn log structures. As early as the
1780's, weatherboarding had come into use, and houses built
of such material, as well as houses of stone and brick, were two
and even three stories high. Staircases had been built, and
glass panes were usual for windows, which were few and small
at first. When Mr. Thaw bought his home in Pittsburgh,
Albert Gallatin had been making glass at New Geneva on the
Monongahela River for eleven years. And for four years
O’Hara and Craig had been making window glass on the south
side of the Monongahela-glass which measured as much as
eighteen by twenty-four inches.

Inside, the houses belonging to the more affluent classes had
become more cheerful, lighter with the entrance of sun
through glass panes and colorful with wall papers recently
imported from the East. Against such walls gleamed sideboards
and well turned, polished tables of cherry or walnut. Mr. Thaw
wrote to his father back East:

“We have no mahogany here, but a cherry wood that looks
nearly as well Sc plenty of Walnut. We have no difficulty in
procureing Furniture of this at about the Philada prices 8:
about double for crockery and glass ware with which 8: for the
second time in so short a course of house keeping, am I now
providing myself.”

Glass and pewter lamps welcomed the incoming guest at
night, and flowers from the well-kept garden brightened hall-
ways and bedrooms. Fire irons of wrought iron or brass made

1 0 Pioneer Life

huddled close to the crude chimney place in a smoke-filled
cabin night after night might start their minds working upon
fantastic ideas. Such sounds came to be omens of misfortune-
of accident, illness, and death. Often enough they were heard
when worry had already turned the thoughts of the listeners
toward trouble that could be seen ahead. The pioneers thought
and felt in ways strange to us, ways not at all practical but
highly imaginative, although not properly so. For instance, it
takes imagination to associate the baying of a dog with the
death of some one you love, but it is not healthy imagination.
It takes imagination to feel that the cry of an owl means danger
ahead, but that, too, is not healthy imagination. There was,
of course, some reason for thinking an owl’s cry was a warning,
for prowling Indians might have disturbed the bird. But the
pioneer made many unreasonable associations between sounds
and misfortunes and became a superstitious person.

Yet these people were not always somber and pathetic, not
always straining body and mind to earn a bare living. Simple
and plain in person, dress, and speech, the pioneer yet broke
out occasionally into salty speech and dashing, boisterous ac-
tion. At house raisings and weddings, at quilting bees and
schnitzens (apple parings), there was a great deal of rough
festivity. In the cramped cabins, on the puncheon floors, lit by
the faint radiance of tallow dips or smoky pine knots or by
the smelly wicks of Betty lamps, happy groups would dance
and swirl, noisily, unrestrainedly, because such occasions were
rare. And the faint light brought out the soft color of homespun
dresses, red and blue and saffron yellow. The brown breeches
and leggings of the men in their checkered hunting shirts wove

208 Pioneer Life

the hearth cheerful. Bookcases with paneled or diamond-
shaped glass panes held bound volumes stamped with gilt titles,
and recent numbers of magazines, almanacs, and newspapers
might be found on the table by the fireside. This was the age
of objects eagerly sought today by collectors--of ladder back
chairs and Seth Thomas clocks.

In town homes the housewife found life much more pleasant
than the frontier farm woman had found it. Her household
duties were less arduous. Her kitchen was equipped with
utensils that any woman would be pleased with, articles with
which she could make dainties for an ill member of her family
or for those visitors who were now so much more frequent and
with whom she could daily exchange kitchen and dining room
secrets. The woman who had left a cultured life in the East,
with its home conveniences, was no longer compelled to do
back-breaking work in the truck patch and clearing and then
to be satisfied with a bowl of mush and milk for supper, or with
hog and hominy, and without dainties because she had neither
ingredients nor utensils to make them. She could now, if she
were fairly well off in the town, have a chafing dish, a muffineer,
and a punch bowl. She could furnish her kitchen and table with
glassware. Caddies and canisters of japanned tinware stood on
the kitchen shelves and held beans, coffee, tea, and sugar.

Most kitchens had ovens and stoves with which women could
cook in comfort, without singeing their hair, filling their eyes
with smoke, and breaking their backs by leaning low over the
hearth coals. It was not necessary now to bake corn cake in
the ashes or on a clean ash board in front of the fire. There
were ovens, often opening from outside the house, into which

Life in the Towns 209

loaves, laid on grape leaves, were slid on a long paddle. Can-
non stoves shaped like upright cylinders had come into use.
Then the Franklin stoves and grates, as coal became plentiful,
warmed the early parlors.

Where dining tables of cherry or walnut could not be
afforded, the older type of table served, long boards three feet
wide laid on trestles and covered with linen cloths or Holland
huskaback. The old custom still prevailed of placing the salt-
cellar, usually of pewter, in the middle of the table and cover-
ing it with a napkin. Sugar boxes or sugar pots and milk ewers
were in use, although many families still used leather pitchers.
Wooden jugs, waxed and bound and tipped with metal, made
pouring convenient. Children were served their soft foods in
porringers and posset cups.

After the Revolutionary War china generally replaced the
earlier wooden trenchers. There were charming blue-edged
plates that brightened the table, and yellow-flowered cups used
without saucers at first and then with a deep saucer in which
tea and coffee were poured to cool. Now forks were three-
pronged, and——a great innovation had taken place--people
actually used forks to carry food to the mouth instead of merely
to hold meat while cutting it. But napkins were still badly
needed, and every proud housewife had an abundant supply,
as fingers were much used in eating.

Improvements in table service kept pace with the increase of
delicacies. Old papers announce for sale at the stores of the day
chocolate, spices of all kinds, red and sugar almonds, muscatel
raisins, dried peas, and such luxuries as imported wines and
1iquors——Madeira, sherry, claret, Lisbon, and port wines, and

TEA KETTLE

2 1 o Pioneer Life

French and Spanish brandies. Not only the town aristocracy
now brought to their tables such dainties as spiced fruits, pre-
serves, candied fruits and flowers, and marmalades; many
housewives pickled purple cabbage with samphire and fennel,
put up nasturtium buds, and candied elder flowers. They had
sugar shears to cut the huge cones of loaf sugar that were
bought wrapped in blue-purple paper. Curds and creams, tarts,
trifles, floating islands, and whipped sillabubs, once great deli-
cacies although they were not altogether unknown, were now
common to many.

Meats and vegetables, sweets and pastries were all put on the
table together, often with a “grand conceit” of fruits for center
ornament. The average doctor’s or lawyer's family, or the
family of average means, frequently dined from a single abun-
dant dish, a great round pewter dish heaped with a tasty
stew, perhaps. Puddings were served before meat, so that visi-
tors dropping in before the family had eaten were wont to
say, “I came early, in pudding time.” Town tables had become
something more than a source of strength for frontier tasks.
They were attractive gathering places and instruments of socia-
bility.

Prices of foodstuffs, dry goods, and other common articles
have survived in old papers and account books. From 1796 to
1 8oo a pound of sugar sold for thirty-five cents. A yard of calico
cost a dollar and a quarter; a quarter pound of ginger, eighteen
cents; the same weight of pepper, thirty cents; a bushel of salt,
a dollar and thirty-five cents; and a pound of coffee, fifty—eight
cents. An almanac cost twelve cents. A wool hat could be
bought for two dollars and thirty-five cents. A half paper of

Life in the Towns 21 1

pins was worth eighteen cents; an ounce of indigo sold for
twenty-two cents. A ton of hay was worth six dollars; a scythe,
a dollar and a half; and five pounds of nails, about one dollar.

Charming, old-fashioned gardens inclosed by box hedges,
grew up about many of the homes—plots of pleasant confusion
where flowers, herbs, and vegetables grew together and which,
after rain, when the sun came out, filled the air with pungent
fragrance. At the bottom of the gardens were planted goose-
berry and currant bushes and quince and crab apple trees; the
whole expanse was frequently below street level and was pro-
tected from hogs, dogs, and intruders by a paling fence. From
such gardens ladies plucked sprigs of rosemary or southern-
wood to carry to church to sniff at, and they picked striped
grasses to lay between leaves of their books. Here grew the
sweet smelling lavender that they placed between sheets in
the linen chest. Against the fence climbed hollyhocks, and over
the paths sweetbriar trailed. Against the house walls were
trellised apricots and peaches. Roses were gathered to make
rose water for the toilet table and to lay among spices in rose
jars. Peonies, yellow day lilies, clumps of iris, lilac bushes,
squills, and syringa all helped to make the town gardens.

Herbs so necessary to the savory dishes that appeared on the
supper table, to the preserving of fruits and candying of
flowers, and for family ailments, were supplied from a little
plot. Sage, anise, mint, balm, and herbs transplanted from
fields beyond the edge of the town, such as pennyroyal and
boneset, were grown here. Some housewives made “pin money”
from seeds gathered in their gardens.

The garden was lived in, too. Early diaries and letters tell

2 1 2 Pioneer Life

of day-to-day tasks carried out in a summer house, or on a
garden bench. Ladies sat there to cast up their household ac-
counts, or in apron, garden hat, and gloves to protect their
hands from thorns and soil they worked among vines and
shrubs. If a letter was to be answered, quill pen and sander were
carried into the garden. Young mothers who taught their
children their A B C’s took children and books there, and if
the lessons were well learned a tale might be read or told before
some task or errand was set. In the shade of the summer house,
where the sun could not reach their complexions but where
the fragrance of thyme and lavender reached, young ladies
perused the latest novel or tatted a lace collar. Here the banker
and his client might walk before supper, or the town lawyer
talk with his wife of the wisdom of ordering a new barrel
of salt, or even confide what town talk he had learned from
the gentlemen he had “been closeted with.”

The distinction of classes among town dwellers that Mr.
Thaw noticed meant that the frontier had prospered, that
men had accumulated money and, with it, had imported luxu-
ries from the East, or they had founded businesses and indus-
tries to supply such goods. Safety and leisure allowed this class
of people, even in country towns, to enjoy objects and pas-
times that had once been luxuries but had now become part
of daily life.

Not all frontier people, however, had invested money in
lands or in the founding of businesses. Business and industry
developed one class of men who owned and promoted and an-
other class composed of the men who performed the actual
work in the shops and offices. Increasing settlement and com-

Life in the Towns 2 1 3

fort had allowed more men to turn their full time to profes-
sions, such as law, medicine, and the ministry. They opened
offices in town or in their homes, and from there made their
usual circuits into the outlying country. Even the population
of smaller towns divided itself into two classes: the business
and professional men and the mechanics. An economic and
social life of complex rights and privileges had developed; and
its outward signs were different habits of home building, dress,
behavior, and general amusement.

The mechanics and workmen became familiar sights about
the streets and rivers in their long, loose trousers of tow and
their short, tight-fitting sailors’ jackets, or roundabouts, made
in winter of linsey and in summer of nankeen, dimity, or linen.

Towns also bred other classes of people. Business and in-
dustry brought in their wake men and women who were not
the most desirable citizens, hangers-on of prosperity. In towns
such as Brownsville, Uniontown, and Pittsburgh, where road-
ways and waterways brought in large numbers of transients,
it was natural that many poor and shiftless persons should stop
over. Swindlers and sharpers gathered in such towns to cheat
or wheedle a living out of the citizens. Beggars, tramps, even
lunatics, were also unwelcome sojourners.

But such was the free, give-and-take spirit of the growing
communities that men of many different types mingled at cer-
tain places and times for amusements. River boatmen, Irish
traders, loafers, sharpers, honest mechanics, and young dandies
met for jovial pastimes and rough diversions in taprooms and
inn yards, especially on Sundays and holidays, for bull baiting,
cockfighting, gaming, and boxing “to the death.” Horse racing,

2 14 Pioneer Life

too, was popular. At Pittsburgh, each autumn for several days
the town was noisy with racing crowds gathered from all the
country around, for the Jockey Club had a race track at the
extreme northeastern corner of the town about where the Fort
Pitt Hotel now stands.

Town dwellers and country dwellers alike found their days
less taken up with household industries. A single family need
no longer plant its own truck patch and make the tools to work
with, to grow its own flax and spin and weave it into cloth for
dresses and jackets, or to tan its own leather and make its own
shoepacks and shoes. Men and women had time now to think
about ideas and to gather for simple amusements and friendly
visits. Many evenings were spent in telling tales and in singing
to the accompaniment of the violin, spinet, or dulcimer, in
dancing and card games of whist and bezique. Taverns set
rooms apart as ballrooms. In Pittsburgh, for instance, at the
“Sign of the Green Tree” the assembly room was often gay
with young ladies and army officers and young men who by
day read law or medicine. In the ballrooms of the “General
Butler” and “Sign of the Waggon” practicing balls were held
by dancing masters, with a cotillion at seven, concluded with
country dances. Dancing classes were held also over William
Irwin's tavern and store, for ladies at three o'clock, for gentle-
men at six.

Rich and gay fashions modeled on the eastern and European
vogues made streets and ballrooms colorful. Closer contacts
had been established by travel, and papers announced new
fabrics and designs for sale in the shops. Fashionable ladies who
danced the cotillion or attended the dancing classes did so in

Life in the Towns 2 1 5

tamboured frocks and petticoats, in silk and cotton shawls,
with wreaths and plumes in their hair, their feet gliding and
stepping in kid and morocco slippers. In the summer the
ladies carried elaborate parasols, and if the weather was bad
or if they rode in from outside the town they wore a “weather
skirt.” Men wore sherry-vallies, or spatterdashes, to protect
their gay breeches. Cocked hats gave way to soft or stiff hats

BED
WARNER

with low square crowns and straight brims. “Ruffles without

   

shirts!” wrote Tarleton Bates, a fashionable young man about
town, “I had no idea there was any such thing until receipt of
your letter.” In concluding his letter, he joked with his friend,
“Confine yourself to rations and ‘live like a Frenchman’ and
even wear ruflles without shirts.” But men wore stranger things
than ruffles without shirts. They carried muffs in winter and
wore great thumb rings, and at the beginning of the century
high, tasseled boots were worn much both in military and civil
circles.

Young people could now take up the finer accomplishments
of the fashionable world. They could receive instruction in
French, as Tarleton Bates did for ten dollars a quarter, or
could learn to play the violin or to sing an air to an accompani-
ment. The Pittsburgh Gazette on December 2, 1786, published
a notice: “Wanted, a man who understands Vocal Music, and
who can teach it with propriety; such a person will meet with
good encouragement from the Inhabitants of Pittsburgh.’ ’ A Mr.
Tyler, a chorister from England, had early settled in the town
and taught sacred and secular music. Mr. Tyler did not confine
his teaching to Pittsburgh. Indeed, by the end of the century
almost every community had a singing master who gathered

 

2 1 6 Pioneer Life

the people together in houses or crossroad schools and churches
and taught them not only what songs he knew but often to play
the flute or the fiddle, and if some one owned a spinet he could,
if he had had Mr. Tyler’s training, gather a few pupils and
teach them to play fashionable airs and waltzes and the sonatas
of Mozart and Martini. A town like Pittsburgh soon passed the
benighted, backwoods stage as people like Mr. Tyler, Miss
Sophia Weidner, and Mr. Declary came here to settle. The
Gazette announced on August 31, 1799, a vocal and instru-
mental concert by Miss Weidner and Mr. Declary in the assem-
bly room at the “Sign of the Green Tree.” But Pittsburgh could
not yet support such people by their chosen profession alone;
so Mr. Declary later opened a grocery and dry goods shop. At
any rate he found the community congenial, and no doubt he
relieved his days of handling packages of soap and flour over
his counter by teaching music to the promising young ladies
and young men.

The whole tone of living had changed by the time Mr. Thaw
first placed his quill pen and sander on his counting table at
the bank. Settlements took off the rough edges of frontier
character, and living together had made life more pleasant. In
spite of the scarcity of churches and schools, people learned
from one another, and the discipline acquired through frontier
life had given mental and moral training, had improved
people's manners, and had refined their tastes. If we add up all
the items in the general life of the people who lived in the
many towns scattered over western Pennsylvania at the close of
the pioneer period, we should find the beginnings of a very
genuine culture.

  

Life in the Towns 2 1 7

Meadville, set off more or less by itself in Crawford County,
without easy contact with such an active town as Pittsburgh,
had a number of citizens of intelligence and refinement. Its
distance from other towns and its limited opportunities for
reading and study led the inhabitants of the town to establish
a public library of several hundred books on history, travel,
biography, and the arts. In 1805 the Meadville Academy was
chartered, later to become Allegheny College. At Washington,
too, young men could attend the Washington Academy as
early as 1789.

Much of the culture of the times found its expression in clubs
of men gathered together to discuss and experiment in those
fields in which they were interested. The Western Medical
Society at Washington had members in Pittsburgh who found
attending meetings at Washington so dillicult that they or-
ganized their own Pittsburgh Medical Society. The young
gentlemen of the town also had organized into an amateur
theatrical club the year before Mr. Thaw came to the city.
Their first performance, a popular comic opera, The Poor Sol-
dier, was presented in the courthouse. A group of young men
in Washington, Pennsylvania, had offered there a performance
of Thomson’s tragedy, Tancred and S i gismunda, and a curtain
raiser in the form of a farce called The Register.

Town life made printing and distribution of newspaper and
almanacs comparatively general. By 1805 a dozen papers and
half a dozen almanacs were in circulation throughout western
Pennsylvania from Eric to Uniontown. The early newspapers
were printed on double sheets about half the size of present-day
papers and sold for about six pence. Payment for subscriptions

The Way of the Frontier 1 1

in and out among twirling skirts to the scratching tune of a
fiddle in the corner, in the firelight. Or, on a summer night,
the same scene took place outside the cabin, where moonlight
slanted across the dancing forms and softened the figures and
the crude homespun garments.

So we see the frontiersman as a many-sided personality. This
new and difficult life that he faced made him in turn open-
natured or reserved; stern or gay; heroic, yet as often pitiable.
And he never lost a sense of beauty and wonder. The fury of
winds and storms, though threatening and disastrous, held him
in awe. He saw day after day the beech trunks gilded by sun-
light and the dimness of great forests, quiet as a sleeping child.
He saw the violets by the palisades and the wild mint by

'the creek edge. He saw the sun flame over the mountains and

the purple of twilight deepen to thick black of night. Blue
shadows on Christmas snows, the orange sunsets of January,
the gurgle of water under thawing ice in February, and the
winds that tossed the branches of the pines in March; the first
shrill songs of the tree toads in April, the meadows of bluebells
in May, the fresh fields of rye and wheat well—sprung in June,
and the hot, starry nights in July when the birds had grown
silent—-all the pageant of the year spread sights and sounds
around him. Living always at the heart of nature, he could not
fail to feel the beat of that great heart.

 

2 1 8 Pioneer Life

was taken in farm produce or merchandise when cash was not
convenient. The papers were regularly delivered in towns, but
in the country they were distributed more or less irregula'rly.
Papers came into the district from as far away as Philadelphia
and New York. The Pittsburgh Gazette made its appearance
on July 29, 1786, and until 1795 was the only paper printed in
western Pennsylvania. In that year the Western Telegraphe
and Washington Advertiser was started in Washington, and in
1798 the Fayette Gazette, and Union Advertiser appeared at
Uniontown. In 1799 the Farmers Register was begun in
Greensburg. The northwestern section, too, had its papers-
at Erie the Mirror, begun in 1808, and at Meadville the Craw-
ford Weekly Messenger, begun in 1805. These early papers
gave much space to the doings of the federal government and
also to foreign correspondence, so that the settlers were in
touch with general world affairs. Very little space, however,
was devoted to local events, with the exception of politics.
Almanacs had been issued as early as 1788 by the Gazette.
Zadok Cramer began publishing his famous series of almanacs
about 1801; they contained receipts and prescriptions, astro-
nomical calculations for Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky, and se-
lections from English writers. About the same time he issued the
Navigator, a manual of information for voyagers on the west-
ern rivers. Cramer was an important figure in the development
of literary life in the Pittsburgh district. He established in 1 801
the first successful circulating library in Pittsburgh, which in
time grew to contain about one thousand volumes. It was open
three days a week to readers, on Monday, Wednesday, and Fri-
day. Subscribers paid a dollar a month, two dollars for three

Life in the Towns 2 1 9

months, two dollars and fifty cents for six months, and five dol-
lars for the year. It was, however, at the print shop of the Pitts-
burgh Gazette that the first book written and printed west of
the Allegheny Mountains, the third volume of Hugh Henry
Bracl<enridge’s Modem Chivalry, was issued in 1793.

Little by little life was taking on brighter colors, and slowly
a grace of living was taking form. There were still hardships
and privation and struggle with men and nature, plenty of
ugliness, and in places much darkness of spirit and distortion
of human lives out of their normal patterns. But there was a
growth of lightness of spirit, if only at times and in scattered
places.

 

The First Factories

XVI

S INDUSTRIES expanded beyond the household, the as-
A pect of the country and of towns changed rapidly. The
frontier, in passing, had prepared the way for the growth of in-
dustry in shops and factories throughout the region. Early set-
tlers had located coal and iron veins, had learned where salt
could be found and where the best stone could be quarried.
They had found good soil for bricks and pottery, and sand for
making glass. Brickmaking developed rapidly in the 17go’s;
it was probably the first industry established in Pittsburgh,
for there had been brickmakers with General Stanwix in 1 759.
And in 1789 John Ormsby advertised for rent a brick kiln on
the south side of the Monongahela River. Weaving was pass-
ing out of the cabin and the home. In 18oo four looms were
operating in Pittsburgh. By 1 804 the first factory in Pittsburgh
for carding, spinning, and weaving cotton yarns and materials
was established by Peter Eltonhead, a cotton manufacturer
from England. By 1809 forty-four weavers had opened estab-
lishments in the city. Cabinetmaking and upholstering were in
progress in 1785. In the following year Hugh Ross opened a
rope-making establishment. Hat and cap-making were carried

220

The First Factories 2 2 1

on in 1786 to the extent of forty-two thousand hats yearly in
four counties west of the Alleghenies. By 1799 the boot and
shoemaking industry was well established. Saddlers and fur-
riers prospered in towns on the main roads of travel.

More important than all these to the future of the region
that was fast losing its pioneer character was the iron industry,
which, in the early years of the nineteenth century, was already
blackening the air over Pittsburgh. Step by step with the iron
industry grew its brother industry, coal mining. As early as
1761 James Kenny had recorded in his journal that he had
gone with four men from Fort Pitt to the mountain on the
south side of the Monongahela, about one and a quarter miles
from the river, and had brought home at night in a flatboat
about forty bushels of fine coal.

The Penns in 1784 had granted permission to dig coal on
certain lots, at a fixed price, as far in as the perpendicular line
falling from the summit of the hill thereon. And when John
Canon laid out Canonsburg, each purchaser was granted the
right to mine coal on his own premises. After John Hayden
had made the first iron west of the mountains in a blacksmith
shop in 1790 the two industries grew together. Furnaces and
forges were put into operation in a dozen sections of the region
in as many years—F airfield Furnace near Uniontown; Laurel
Furnace on Laurel Run; Redstone Furnace, also near Union-
town; Springhill, Mary Ann, and Pine Grove Furnaces—by

 
 
 
 
  

1 805 four furnaces and six forges were going in Fayette County.
From such furnaces and forges the settlers, both those who
lived in the district and those who were venturing through on
their way down the Ohio, were supplied with pots, skillets,

BLAST FURNACE

222 Pioneer Life

grates, stoves, and castings of various kinds. Among the names
of the founders of the steel empire that grew out of these early
pioneer industries are those of William Turnbull and Peter
Marmie, who built the Alliance Iron Works on Jacobs Creek
in Fayette County; Isaac Meason, who constructed a furnace
on Dunbar Creek four miles south of Connellsville; and
George Anshutz, who set up in Pittsburgh the first furnace for
smelting iron ore.

In some sections there grew up about these industries fair-
sized iron plantations of several hundred acres, on which stood
the mansion house of the owner, the furnace and forges, the
charcoal house, the office, the store, the gristmill and the saw-
mill, the blacksmith shop, and the common bake oven. There
were also the barns, grain fields, and orchards, and the log
cabins and houses of theworkers. Plantations of note in western
Pennsylvania were those of two early ironmasters: Nathaniel
Gibson, who built, at Little Falls, Fayette County, one of the
first large mansion houses in the Monongahela country before
1800; and Henry William Stiegel, who at about the same time
set up a similar establishment at Elizabeth.

Until 1807 no steam engines were used in the industries of
the region. In 1 8o3, however, Oliver Evans had begun the mak-
ing of steam engines in Philadelphia. It was he who built the
first engine used in Pittsburgh, which was designed to run the
gristmill of his son George at Water Street and Redoubt Alley.
The mill was ready to grind meal in 1809 and was the first
steam-driven factory in Pennsylvania west of the mountains.
The engine that ran George Evans’ gristmill announced the
end of that era in western Pennsylvania that we call the pioneer

The First Factories 2 2 3

period—the period during which trade and travel, education
and religion, and art and science were in their crudest form-
and it also announced the beginning of an era during which
there developed a new way of living, new problems, new types
of people, and new ideas. As the frontier passed into the Middle
West, the towns it left behind along the Allegheny and Monon-
gahela rivers changed their aspect and character as at the touch
of Aladdin’s lamp.

The Pittsburgh Gazette, which untiringly preached the ad-
vantages of the district to business men and farmers alike, car-
ried in its pages in April, 1 789, the following paragraph extoll-
ing the benefits of the region to mechanics and laborers:

“This country offers at present the most unbounded encour-
agement to the artificer and labourer. . . . The reward which
the mechanic meets with is greater than at any former period.
One pair of shoes which costs 11s. 3d. will buy 180 lb. of wheat,
which will furnish 1 20 lb. of flour; the shoes will also procure
more than 60 lb. of good beef or pork. The necessaries of life
are uncommonly low, and the workmanship of the industrious
artisan, whether shoemaker, carpenter, taylor, or smith, is most
amply and deservedly rewarded. We want people, we want
sober and diligent tradesmen; hatters, button makers, rope
makers, weavers, 8cc, will be more welcome, and will essentially
promote our prosperity. VV e should employ our own workmen
rather than foreigners, those of our own town or county in
preference to those at a distance from us. I wish this state would
give a bounty of forty shillings to every mechanic or labourer
who arrives in it from Europe. Population and industry are the
true causes of national greatness.”

 

HAT'I‘ER'S BLOCK
AND MALLET

224 Pioneer Life

In towns throughout western Pennsylvania a class of laborers
and mechanics rapidly developed. Streets resounded with
sounds of hammers on anvils, and of saws in carpenters’ shops
and cabinetmakers’ establishments. Shoemakers were busy at
their lasts. Saddlers astride their benches stitched industriously.
Tailors sat cross-legged to make breeches, an important trade
in itself for many years. Soap and candle works, dye works, and
machine works grew from month to month, and with them
grew the class of artisans who ran them. Towns were likewise
centers from which journeymen could travel through the coun-
try; itinerant coopers, gunsmiths, ironworkers, and weavers
found a great deal of work in the back country.

Skilled labor soon became plentiful, but unskilled labor was
scarce. In 1804 a tin factory in Pittsburgh employed twenty-
eight persons, a nail factory thirty persons, and a cotton manu-
factory twelve persons; thirty workmen were employed in ship-
building, about fifty in boat building, and thirty in the rope-
walks. Large numbers of boys were apprenticed at very early
ages to practically every trade. Such apprentices were in gen-
eral humanely treated, for they were under the protection of
the state. In 1789 a certain Patrick Flynn, aged eighteen, was
apprenticed to dwell with and serve Hugh Ross for three years,
during which time he was to be taught the art and mystery of
rope-making and to be given each winter three months’ eve-
ning schooling. William Maloney, aged ten years, was appren-
ticed in 1796 to a farmer in Fayette County under the usual
terms. He was to serve his master ten years “in all lawful and
reasonable service.” His master, in turn, was to provide “sufli-
cient meat, drink, apparel, washing, and lodging”; was to teach

The First Factories 2 2 5

or cause him to be taught “the art, trade or mystery of a
farmer”; and was to give him two years’ schooling in reading,
writing, and arithmetic. At the expiration of the boy's term the
master was to give him “two complete suits of Apparel, one of
which to be new.”

Slavery took root in the western counties and lasted longer
there than anywhere else in Pennsylvania. Although the typi-
cal frontiersman had a natural dislike for slavery and, more-
over, could not afford to keep slaves, and although slaves were
not ordinarily profitable in western Pennsylvania except as
domestic servants in well-to-do families, yet there were re-
corded in 1 792 in Allegheny, Washington, Westmoreland, and
Fayette counties 878 slaves, or one to every eighty-seven per-
sons. A slave woman sold for about one thousand dollars in
Fayette County in 1 794, and it was said that this price was repre-
sentative. The statement has been made that six of the early
ministers in and around Pittsburgh and nearly all the elders
and church oflicers were slave owners. H. H. Brackenridge
said in his M odem Chivalry that many men in the district who
“would not for a fine cow have shaved their beards on a Sun-
day” held and abused slaves. They were bartered for cattle or
farm produce. They were exposed to public sale: “Horses, cows,
sheep, stills, negroes, and household furniture.” A farm of 360
acres was advertised for sale in the Gazette on February 2, 1 790,
the terms of payment to be half in cash and the balance in
negroes. Slaves were often sold at public outcry in the streets
of Greensburg.

In 1780 a state law declared that all negroes and mulattoes
born of slave mothers should become free after they reached

226 Pioneer Life

the age of twenty-eight. But the law was not effective. In 1788
a law decreed that all slaves brought into the state should be
immediately freed. As late as 1840, however, some slaves were
still held in western Pennsylvania, and in 1845 one is recorded
in Washington County.

More profitable to trade and industry in western Pennsyl-
vania than slaves, however, were the indentured servants and
apprentices and the workmen who were paid daily or weekly
wages. In the 17 5o’s the ‘highest wage paid to ironworkers was
eighty-four cents a day, but after the Revolutionary War
workers were scarce, and wages advanced. One ironworks ad-
vertised for furnace men and offered wages of twelve dollars a
week with board and lodging and whiskey every day. In the
1790's twenty to forty cents a day was fair pay for a day’s work.
By 1809 ordinary workmen were paid from sixty-seven cents
to one dollar a day, and this was said by one observer to be
more in proportion than in any other region because of the
low cost of living in Pittsburgh. Most accounts, nevertheless,
mention that living was high in Pittsburgh. John Thaw was of
such opinion. If a business man of Mr. Thaw’s standing and
means found prices high, the mechanics and tradesmen must
also have found them so. In 1786 the advertisement in the
Gazette of Daniel Britt and Company showed that although
furs and peltry were no longer used as money, goods were still
exchanged by barter. Daniel Britt and Company announced
that they had for sale a general allotment of merchandise,
“which will be sold on reasonable terms for cash, flour, whiskey,
beef, pork, bacon, wheat, rye, oats, corn, ashes, candle wick,
tallow, etc. etc. etc.” A young man who had been given a piece

The First Factories 227

of 1and—two hundred acres-—sold it to a man in the neighbor-
hood for “a cow and calf and a wool hat.”

Money was still in a confused state in the 1 7go’s. The earliest
settlers had brought little money with them to the frontier,
and only those who were close to shipping points and who
worked farms large enough to produce a surplus for shipping
could sell their crops or stock. Currency was never stable. Dur-
ing the Revolution this confusion in currency was made worse
for a time by the introduction of Continental money, which
had depreciated in value, and also by the introduction of Vir-
ginia money and money from New York. English, French, and
Spanish coins were brought north from the New Orleans
market and sometimes found their way to the East in return
for goods purchased there. Business accounts preserved from
those days show that English currency predominated even
after the federal government began to coin money in 1792.
United States currency, or for that matter, any currency, was
scarce in the western country until after the establishment of
the first bank in 1804. Until that time banking had been done
for the settler by a lawyer, a friend, a post rider, or a pack-horse
driver who happened to be going to Philadelphia.

Until after the Whiskey Insurrection of 1794 whiskey was
the chief circulating medium, the money of the western coun-
try. A gallon of good rye whiskey at any store in the district and
at every farmhouse in southwestern Pennsylvania was the equal
of a shilling coin. An early historian says that two barrels of
whiskey would buy a good corner lot. But the pages of the
Pittsburgh Gazette show that bonds, bank certificates, drafts,
and promissory notes were in fairly wide circulation.

First Footprints

II

N N O map showing the country before 1700 is the section
0 that we know today as western Pennsylvania definitely
outlined. This country around the headwaters of the Ohio
River, then called the Ohio or the western country, was to
the white man an unlimited and unexplored region. When
the forerunners of settlement first came through the gaps in
the Allegheny Mountains made by the Juniata River and
descended the last slope of Laurel Hill, they knew they had
passed beyond the western limits of settled country and had
entered the upper Ohio Valley, but just where the western
boundaries of this new region lay they did not know. The
“vast level sea of waving tree tops” stretching from the foot
of the slope reached to Lake Erie in the north and somewhere
about the Potomac River in the south and it was drained by
a system of three main rivers--the Allegheny, the Mononga-
hela, and the Youghiogheny—and their tributaries of lesser
rivers and creeks. Most of the waterways, even in their upper
reaches, were navigable by canoe, and some of them by larger
craft. From the settlements that first sprang up in the Monon-
gahela Valley, or from the north by way of the Allegheny River,

12

228 Pioneer Life

Industry and trade, however, increased the need for coins
and for the establishment of banks to handle the commercial
notes and the credit of merchants and manufacturers. Finan-
cial organization of this kind meant that the workingmen could
put the large copper cents, the quarters, and the occasional
half dollars into the pockets of their tow trousers or jeans. But
most people who carried money about did not for a long time
carry many American coins. More likely they carried the ‘‘levy’’
or eleven-penny bit, the commonest coin in circulation, equal
to one-eighth of a dollar. The fivepenny bit, fippeny bit, or
“fip,” which was the Spanish half-real, was sometimes called by
the name given it in Louisiana, the picayune. If a man were
well off he might have some pieces of eight in his purse. These
coins of pirate fame were the original Spanish dollar, after
which the first silver dollars coined by the United States mint
were modeled. They were, after the Revolution, the standard
unit of money. A piece, or dollar, was worth eight reals; hence
the name pieces of eight. Sometimes a Spanish dollar was cut
into quarters or eighths with a chisel, and the smaller division
was known as “a bit.” Besides these, French money, chiefly the
napoleon, was in wide circulation. Every man had almost to
be a banker to transact business in the currency of those days.
The almanacs of the day printed tables to help compute values
of one coin in terms of another. And this condition lasted for
some years after the beginning of the nineteenth century.

V/Vith high prices and the complicated system of money, the
common laborer found life none too easy. Labor or trade
unions developed slowly, and were in a primitive state until the
middle of the nineteenth century. A few trade societies had

3 ELLOWS

 

The First Factories 2 2 9

been organized, however-—one in Pittsburgh in 1788 and an-
other in Washington, Pennsylvania. These were intended to
educate the working people, to induce them to settle in towns,
and thus to attract manufacturers. Membership was not re-
stricted to members of one trade, but was open to all workers
in the town who wished to join. These societies paid no atten-
tion to wages or working conditions. They were, until the end
of the 1790's, rather in the nature of guilds or social groups.
But in 1804 the journeymen shoemakers in Pittsburgh found
their wages insuflicient in proportion to the cost of living.
When the price of board was raised and wages remained sta-
tionary, these journeymen shoemakers issued the following
statement:

“Pittsburgh, December 19, 1804. This notice is intended to
inform the traveling journeymen shoemakers of Pennsylvania,
or of any other State, that the journeymen of this town made
a turnout for higher wages. Two or three of their employers
had a meeting, and having a number of apprentices thought
proper to advise the other master shoemakers to raise the board-
ing from $1.50 to $2.25 per week. We think it our duty to
give this notice to all journeymen shoemakers that they may
be guarded against imposition. The following are the prices
which we turned out for, viz.: Fine shoes, 80 cents; coarse shoes,
75 cents; women’s slippers, 75 cents; boottees, $2 .00; long boots,
$2.50; cossacks, $2.50; N. B. We would not advise any journey-
men to come here unless they want a seat of cobbling.”

This was probably the first strike in Pittsburgh. It meant
that the day had passed when the ordinary migrant to the West
struggled alone to gain a living on his frontier farm. It meant

@ BLACKSHITH

C3

5.5.-.'3

SHOP

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2 30 Pioneer Life
that agriculture and stock-raising were no longer the chief
means of living. It meant that the early wilderness of the west-
ern region had been transformed into progressive communi-
ties. It meant that the foundations of the future industrial
empire had been laid.

The declaration of the joumeymen shoemakers was a dra-
matic moment, for it marked a stage in the march of a gigantic
army that was moving ever westward in the conquest of forests
and savagery. In each stage of this march a higher level of living
had been established. There had come first the hardy scouts,
the traders, trappers, hunters, and military adventurers. These
had passed through a state of semi-civilization in which they
had learned from the savages themselves the means of coping
with savagery. By these means and through their own resources
they blazed the wilderness for the oncoming settlers.

Then up the main streams and water courses and over the
almost roadless mountains came hardy bands of pioneers, the
main body of the army, battling at every step against natural
dangers and against the perils of warfare, illness, and solitude.
Once having gained a foothold in an isolated clearing or a small
community, the first farmers were reénforced by stock-raisers
and herdsmen who brought droves of cattle, hogs, sheep, and
horses over well-worn trails and half-formed roads. Each set-
tler defended his home for himself—against the dangers of the
wilderness and against other claimants who threatened his
rights. As settlement increased, however, safety was found in
numbers and disputes over land ownership grew less frequent.
Then this growing army of pioneers, who had won their lands
through bitter contest, both with the rival French claimants

¢

The First Factories 2 3 1

and with the native savages, finally won the right to establish
their own institutions independent of the mother country from
which most of them had come.

With peaceful possession insured, the last frontier stage be-
gan. The settlers now took up new tasks; and to aid the farmer
and the stock-raiser came the tradesman and the mechanic.
Ever increasing numbers invaded the western Pennsylvania
country and swept beyond it to reproduce in new places the
process of pioneering. Those who held fast to the lands that
had already been won were eager now to improve their ways
of life. From the soil they had once cleared of forests and from
which their farms had been won, on which their stock had
been nourished, and on which their towns had been built, they
now drew treasures of materials as the basis for a new empire.
Deeper under the surface than the seeds they planted lay valu-
able ores and veins of coal. And in the streams that flowed
through this soil was power to convert these materials to their
own uses.

The initial work was over. The first great advance was ac-
complished. With the increase of craftsmen and laborers, the
servants of growing industry; with the ring of hammers, the
hum of saws, the rattle of wheels over cobbles, and the drifting
of factory smoke through the air; with the clamor of forges and
the hiss of the steam engines that drove them, pioneering was at
an end. The onetime frontier had become history.

The Road to the Past

XVII

THE past is always with us. We may never think or care

at all about it, but there it is for good or bad, guiding
and controlling us in every thought and act. Since time began
men and women had wondered about the past, told tales about
it, tales of courage and heroism that stir and move us, and they
have tried for many reasons and by many means to recapture it.

To discover the truth about the past takes long and careful
searching. Much useless, tasteless, and harmful material ob-
scures the road that the reader or student must follow if he
seeks a past that is real. If he wishes to find that historical land
from which he came, born of its traditions and its shadowy
thoughts and customs, he must choose his way with judgment.
Otherwise he will become lost in hazy impressions that will
serve only to cloud his mind.

Among the accounts and records of the times and places in
which we had our beginning, much is true and valuable; much
is false and misleading. Those who have given time and
thought to the study of history have learned what materials
they can best trust and what is unreliable. In reconstructing
the past they have divided these materials into two classes:

232

The Road to the Past 233

primary materials, the true sources of information, which are
“usually the by-products of the actual business of living, back
of which the scholar cannot go in his search for new facts and
truths”; and secondary materials. Primary materials include
such things as objects, letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts
nearest to the times and conditions we want to recapture. Sec-
ondary works deal with times and conditions at second-hand;
they are writings based on data that actually survive from the
period.

Relics, or remnants, are perhaps the most primary of all
sources. The cabin that has been left standing, if it has not
been remodeled; the candle molds that have lain in the old loft
or attic; the pewter dishes that have been hidden in some dark
cupboard or in the rafters where the hands that last used them
put them one day years ago—these are relics that have survived
and are actual, visible tokens of life long past. Many such ar-
ticles have been collected and placed in museums or have been
cleaned and put out to decorate a shelf or modern fireplace.
Here and there they may yet be found in less traveled districts,
in barns or attics, or in the more backward mountain places
where they are still in use by persons who frequently do not
know where the relics came from. Some of these relics have
always been in the house and have been used since anyone in
the family can remember.

Old things have a way of establishing themselves in the lives
of those who use them for a long time, especially if they are
soundly made to begin with, as most of the old tools and uten-
sils were. Careful workmanship was customary in the past, and
cheap substitutes for good materials were rare. The old-

 

TIN LANTERN

2 34 Pioneer Life
fashioned furniture displayed in antique shops along the high-
ways, although often reworked and repaired, are relics of past
tastes and ways of living. Since such things do not always sur-
vive in their first, most authentic state, they are of varying
degrees of accuracy. Sketches and paintings of places and per-
sons and objects are also primary material. But these especially
vary in point of accuracy. Pictures, as we know, may not reveal
the true design, even when they are photographs. How much
less reliable is a drawing likely to be, in which the judgment and
ability of the artist may or may not have been equal to the
task. Nevertheless, sketches of early Pittsburgh and of the first
courthouse at Greensburg help to give us some ideas of the
towns and buildings of the past. Old newspapers show us the
state of printing and of advertising and tell us when certain
luxuries and conveniences were first introduced. Old books
show us much about papermaking and applied arts such as
bookbinding and decorating, and show us, too, what words
people used and how they handled words and ideas.

Diaries and journals of early ministers, traders, travelers, and
army officers are invaluable sources of history, although these
also differ in their degrees of value. A diary kept during a trip
into the westward lands, for instance, is better source material
than a journal written after the trip. The diaries of certain
early preachers in western Pennsylvania re-create for us the
ways of travel, the life and customs of the people in the settle-
ments, the way in which early church services were held, and
many other details, which put together in their proper rela-
tionship build up chapters in books. The diary of James
Kenny, Indian trader at Fort Pitt, tells us about early trade,

The Road to the Past 2 3 5

planting, and the first coal dug from the hills along the Monon-
gahela; about the floods at the Point, and the fires that broke
out in the cabins and storehouses.

Minutes of church meetings and of political caucuses, of con-
ventions and trade meetings, account books of early merchants,
and the account books of farmers who recorded their transac-
tions and the wages they paid their helpers are all historical
sources of great importance.

Much of the written material is difficult to find when it is
needed. Transcripts have therefore been made by students who
have already used the old documents, letters, and manuscripts;
these transcripts are accurately typed copies that can be kept in
convenient places for study. They are valuable because they
make such records available to larger numbers of persons than
could reach the originals, and the copies save the originals
from overuse or careless use and thus help to preserve them.
One collection of transcripts covers the records of fourteen
Presbyterian churches in southwestern Pennsylvania, records
of sessions and congregational meetings, of preachers’ baptis-
mal registers and such things.

Many a pleasant summer afternoon can be spent over such
records in an old church in the country, while bees buzz about
the open windows and a cardinal sings in the elms outside. Or
winter afternoons can be spent in a musty courthouse in one
of the smaller towns, when the shadows are growing in the cor-
ners and the lights outside grow bright on the snow. There is
no better lesson in history than to search out these records and
to pore over them ourselves, or to visit the museums and his
torical societies and see what a flail is, to handle the old guns

236 Pioneer Life
and hackles actually used by hands that have long been dust.

Besides these sources, there are interesting old-fashioned
books, weather-stained and broken-backed, written by persons
who lived through most of the events they describe. They have
told us how they built their cabins, defended their forts,
worked in their fields, made merry at the fulling bees, what
they sang and read, what they ate and wore, and what they
thought of and dreamed of in the days that are no longer dead
to us as we read and relive the vividly recorded experiences.

Regional histories are histories written about a particular
district that has been important as a geographic, political, or
economic entity. The early accounts of western Pennsylvania
are reliable within limitations. Their authors often lacked pri-
mary data on which to base judgments and statements of fact.
And they were usually not trained in the procedure of his-
torical method. Too often a faulty memory or inaccurate ac-
counts and tales of their times by old survivors, or inaccurate
earlier written accounts formed their guides. Nevertheless
such books inevitably show some of the personality of the
authors, and from their pages we gather the sense and atmos-
phere of times past, which is the most elusive thing the his-
torian has to capture, the final grace of all historical writing,
and without which such writing is as dead as the bones of the
horses that plowed the fields of the pioneers. Such books have
a definite value because frequently they offer the first organ-
ized, synthesized information about incidents and regions,
which we should not have had if these pleasant antiquarians
had not written it down for us.

Finally, there are stories, poems, essays, and plays that re-

The Road to the Past 2 37

build and illumine the past for us, many of them with truth
and beauty.

The authors would like to mention here a few of the books
to which the interested student may refer for additional read-
ing in connection with western Pennsylvania history. For an
entertaining and concise account of practically every phase of
early pioneer life, there is Joseph Doddridge’s Notes on the
Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia
and Pennsylvania from 1763 to 1783. Another chronicle of the
pioneer period is James Veech’s The Monongahela of Old.

The Diary of the Reverend David McClure records some-
thing of the manners and religion of the western Pennsylvania
frontier people. Joseph Smith's Old Redstone; or, Historical
Sketches of Western Presbyterianism is also valuable for its
insight into early churches, missionaries, and ministers.

Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier, compiled by Mary
C. Darlington, contains the journals of Céloron de Blainville
and Captain William Trent (the journal of the latter is errone-
ously ascribed to Simeon Ecuyer) and numerous letters con-
cerning Indian campaigns before 18oo. The report of the In-
dian Forts Commission of Pennsylvania on the Frontier F orts
of Pennsylvania gives locations and descriptions and contains
many excellent maps, plans, and illustrations.

Two other books that should not be overlooked are Charles
W. Dah1inger’s Pittsburgh: A Sketch of Its Early Social Life,
which depicts the political and social life of Pittsburgh early in
its transition from wilderness town to metropolis; and Frank
Cowan’s Southwestern Pennsylvania in Song and Story.

The works of Henry W. Shoemaker are especially valuable

First Footprints 1 3
the pioneers later transported themselves and their goods to
the forks of the Ohio, from where, although the two streams
merged, the greener water of the Allegheny still kept its iden-
tity some distance down country.

This uncharted headwater country was covered with many
kinds of trees. The commonest large trees were the oak, pine,
hemlock, chestnut, and tulip trees. Ash, wild plum, and syca-
more trees were also plentiful, and in the southern section
there were more chestnut, walnut, and hickory than in the
northern part. Seen from the last ridge of the mountains, how-
ever, the region appeared only as a “forest of leaves.” As trader

or hunter descended into the wilderness, he came upon a realm '

of dense shadows and silence. The thick green gloom was
caused largely by an overhead curtain of wild grapevines,
which climbed from branch to branch and tangled together
the tops of the trees. As he pushed on, deer and elk started at
his footstep or gun crack, and bears lumbered out of his path.
Wild cats flashed through the brush, and rattlesnakes coiled
and sounded their alarm at his progress.

This Ohio or western country offered the oncoming white
men what they sought. It offered them opportunity, freedom,
and the “elbowroom” that so many pioneers felt they must
have. There land was to be had almost for the taking. And with
the land they would get what they needed to keep alive, if they
were willing to face hard work and to do without many com-
forts. There were furs for the trader, game for the hunter, lum-
ber for cabins and fires, and fruits and nuts for the settler until
his vegetable patch yielded a crop, however small, and the
forests were thought to mean fertile soil, which, when cleared,

2
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PIGNUT HICKORY

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2 38 Pioneer Life

for the way in which his retelling of old time stories and legends
has re-created the past. He is also the author of several inter-
esting and useful books on the wild animals of Pennsylvania.

Among the most authoritative and interesting of the second-
ary works dealing with the history of Pennsylvania during the
pioneer period are the several books written by C. Hale Sipe,
and they will prove useful to any one looking for sketches of
individual pioneers and Indian chiefs. Clarence E. McCart-
ney’s N at Far from Pittsburgh, and Right Here in Pittsburgh,
should also be mentioned.

The other books in the series of which this volume is one
are John Harpster’s Pen Pictures of Early Western Pennsyl-
vania, a collection of travelers’ accounts; Russell J. Ferguson’s
Early Western Pennsylvania Politics; Leland D. Baldwin’s
Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, and Whiskey Rebels: The Story
of a Frontier Uprising; Solon J. Buck’s and Elizabeth H. Buck’s
The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania; With
Rifle and Plow: Stories of the Western Pennsylvania Frontier
by J. E. Wright, Elisabeth M. Sellers, and Jeanette C. Shirk;
and Guidebook to Historic Places in Western Pennsylvania.
Books yet to be issued in the series are: Randolph C. Downes,
Indian A fiairs in the Upper Ohio Valley; E. Douglas Branch,
Travelways of Western Pennsylvania; Arthur Pound, Two
Centuries of Industry; and Leland D. Baldwin, The Keelboat
Age on Western Waters.

In the field of fiction, the following are highly entertaining
stories aside from their value in presenting clear pictures of
particular phases: Henry C. McCook, The Latimers: A Tale of
the Western Insurrection of 1794; Andrew L. Russell, The

The Road to the Past 2 39

Freighter: A Tale of the Pittsburgh Frontier; and Richard T.
Wiley, Sim Greene and Tom the Tinker’s Men: A Narrative of
the Whisky Insurrection.

A satirical novel in Don Quixote trend is Hugh H. Brack-
enridge’s Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of a
Captain, and Teague 0’Regan, His Servant. It casts much light
upon life in western Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth
century and contains, as well, the political sentiments of the
famous Brackenridge. Old Fort Duquesne: or, Captain Jack,
the Scout, by Charles McKnight, is heartily recommended for
its color and treatment of the early days in the upper Ohio
Valley. More recently written novels are The Judas Tree, by
Neil H. Swanson, which deals with the frontier in the days of
Pontiac’s conspiracy and offers an extensive portrayal of the
siege of Fort Pitt; The First Rebel, by the same author, based
upon the actual adventures of James Smith as an Indian cap-
tive, and of the Black Boys’ resistance to British tyranny several
years before the Revolution; and Mary Schumann’s Strife Be-
fore Dawn, a tale of Pittsburgh during the Indian Wars and the
Revolution. Two fine children’s stories recently published are
Moccasins in the Wilderness, and Rifles Beyond Fort Pitt, both
by Elizabeth H. Buck.

These are only a part of the books to which we can go for
a very full and readable account of old days in the hills of west-
ern Pennsylvania, days that have left only their memory and
their shadows. But the memory and the shadows are around us
still, whether we move in and out of them with eyes unseeing
or whether we pause to be charmed with their shapes and
colors, trying to hold them for a moment before they dissolve.


Glossary


GLOSSARY

9!!

APPLE BUTTER “BILIN —See p. 1 1 1

BARLOW KNIFE—-A one—bladed jackknife.

BARRACK—-A large structure or row of buildings for lodging soldiers
or workmen.

BARTER—TO trade by exchanging goods for other goods without
using money.

BAsT1oN—See p. 1 18

BELTZNICKEL MAN—See p. go

BETTY LAMP—See p. 49

B1-:z1QUE--Played with a deck of 64 cards and similar to pinochle.

BLACK MAN'S BASE—-A180 called BLACK MAN'S TIG. A long rope is
tied to a gate or pole and one of the players holds the end of the
rope and tries to catch another player. When he succeeds in
doing so, the one captured joins him by holding hands and helps
to catch the other players. The game is finished when all the
players are caught.

BoHEA—-A black tea of an inferior quality, so named from the hills
on which it grows in China.

BRAZIER—A pan for holding hot coals.
BUTTING PoLE—See p. 46
CADDY—A small box or can for holding tea, etc.

CALK—TO drive filling into the seams between logs or planks, or to
stop up the crevices.

CANDLE DIP-—See p. 49
CANDLE MoLn—See pp. 49 and 81
CANDLEWOOD-See p. 48

CANISTER—-A box or small container, usually of metal for holding
tea, coffee, etc.

243

244 Pioneer Life

CASEMATE--A shelter of stone in which cannons are kept. There are
small openings through which they can be fired.

CEnARwARE—See p. 53

CHAIN--In weaving, each stitch is dependent upon the preceding
one.

CHEESE HOOP—A broad hoop or cylinder, usually of wood in which
curd is pressed in making cheese.

CHIcoRY—A plant with bright blue flowers. Its leaves are used for
salad; its roots are roasted and used as a substitute for coffee.

CI-IIPPED Loc—A log which has had the bark removed.

CLAPBOARD—A narrow board often thicker at one edge than the
other, used for covering the outer walls of frame buildings.

COCKI..0F'l'—An upper loft or attic; a smaller garret next to the roof.

CoNcH-SHELL—A large spiral sea shell often converted into a horn.

CO0NSKIN—The skin of a raccoon used as material for caps.

CooPER-To make or repair casks, barrels, tubs, and other con.
tainers made of staves held together by hoops.

CoPPERAs—A green chemical used in dyeing and in making inks.

CORDELLE—A towline or towrope.

CORNSTALK FIDDLE—A fiddle whittled from a cornstalk.

COW-CABBAGE-An inferior kind of cabbage.

CowLE—A large tub for holding water.

DAUE—To coat or cover with plaster, clay, mud, etc.

DELF’l'WARE—A kind of brown pottery covered with a solid white
glaze over which a decoration is often painted. It was first made
in the town of Delft, Holland.

DISTAFF—A split stick about a yard long, used for holding a bunch
of flax, tow or wool from which thread is drawn in spinning yarn.

DRAWBRIDGE—A bridge which may be entirely or partly lifted,
lowered, or moved aside.

DUI..CIMER—A musical instrument with wire strings, played with
two light hammers.

Glossary 245

ELECAMPANE-A large plant with yellow flowers. The root was used
in the treatment of lung disorders.

ERYSIPELAS—An acute infectious disease that causes fever and a
deep-red inflammation of the skin.

EwER—A wide-mouthed pitcher or jug for holding water or milk.

F1LL1Nc—Usually anything of an inferior quality introduced to in-
crease bulk, especially in weaving.

FuuuN—A small wooden cask for holding butter or lard. A firkin
of butter weighs about 56 pounds.

F LAIL—See p. 66

FLATBOAT-A boxlike boat much used for downstream transporta-
tion on the western rivers. See p. 189

FLINT--A very hard black stone that strikes fire with steel.

FL1'rcH—A side of bacon, or the cured side of any animal.

Fom)-The place where a river, stream, or other body of water is
not too deep to cross by walking through the water.

Fox AND GE1«:sr~:—Seventeen engraved pieces called geese are placed
in an order similar to chess; the objective of the game is to corner
the odd piece called the fox.

FREEBOOTER-A pirate, or buccaneer.

FROW—A cleaving tool used in splitting logs.

FULLED—See p. 77

FULLING BEE—See p. 1 1 1

GARRISON—A fortified place in which soldiers are stationed.

GIRDLE—TO make a circular cut around a tree, through the bark
and cortex, and thus to kill the tree.

Goosr: You-—A frame worn on the neck of an animal to prevent its
passing through a fence or hedge. See p. 69

Gounn-A vegetable related to the pumpkin. Its dried skin was used
for bowls, pitchers, etc.

GRIDIRON-An iron utensil with parallel bars used for broiling over
a fire.

246 Pioneer Life

GU1LD—The union of men in one trade to keep standards high and
to look out for the interests of their trade.

HACKLE-—See pp. 76 and 77

HAFT--A handle, as of a cutting tool; especially of an ax.

HALF-FACED CAMP--See p. 19

HAME—One of two curved pieces of wood to which traces are fasten-
ed; used in heavy draft.

HAND MILL-See p. 75

HASP--A hinged metal clasp for a door or a box which folds over a
staple and is fastened with a pin or padlock.

HAYCOCK—A heap of hay shaped like a cone.

HEADRIGHT SYSTEM-See p. 3 1

HELVE-See p. 87
HEWED Loc CABIN--A cabin of logs roughly squared with an ax.

Hoc YoKE—See goose yoke.

HORNBEAM-l-A tree which has a smooth gray bark and hard white
wood; the leaves resemble those of a beech tree.

HoRNBooK-—See p. 95

Housz RAISING-—-See p. 45

HURLY-BURLY—See p. 104

HYSON SKIN--A Chinese green tea having a special twist.

JACK.—A small pitcher or drinking cup made of waxed leather coat»
ed on the outside with tar or pitch.

_]AcoB1r1~:--A term applied to the period in which James II of
England lived. It was about 1690 A.D.

JAMB-—One of the side pieces of a window, door, or fireplace.

_]'1:AN-Twilled cotton cloth used for overalls.

JERK--Meat that has been dried by cutting it in slices and exposing
it to the sun.

JIGGING-—Dancing a jig, a lively dance.

JOHNNYCAKE-—A flat cake of corn meal mixed with milk or water,
eggs, etc., and baked.

Glossary 247

]o1s'r-One of the parallel pieces of timber to which the boards of
a floor or ceiling are fastened.

KEELBOAT--A long, thin keel-bottomed boat propelled by poles or
oars used on the western rivers for both downstream and up-
stream transportation. See p. 191

KEELER--A broad, shallow tub, used for holding milk or for washing
dishes.

LATCHSTRING—-See p. 43

LEAGUE—-A measure of distance, usually about 3 miles.

LEEK--An onionlike plant used as food or flavoring.

LEEWARD-—The side away from the wind.

LINSEY-—A shortened name for linsey-woolsey.

LINSEY-WOOLSEY—A cloth made of linen and wool.

Loo CABIN-—See pp. 42-46

Loo HOUSE—S6e p. 44

LONG HUNTER—One who spent a season or more in the wilderness
on each hunting trip.

MADDER-An herb with a yellow flower, the roots of which were
used in making a variety of dyes.

MAGAZINE—A place for keeping gunpowder and other military
supplies.

MAUL—A very heavy hammer or mallet. See p. 70

NOGGIN—A small mug or cup.

PACK HORSE—A horse used for carrying supplies or goods. See p. 14

PADDLE BALL—A game played with paddles and a ball according to
handball rules.

PATTEN--A wooden overshoe. See p. 102

PEWTER—An alloy principally of tin, with a little antimony, copper
and bismuth; inferior kinds have much lead.

PICAYUNI-:—See p. 228

PIETIST--A group of German religious sects which emphasized re-
pentance and faith as an attitude of the heart.

1 4 Pioneer Life

would grow his grain. Later, with the advancement of settle-
ment, the streams would turn the wheels of his mill and the
ground would furnish coal, sandstone, and limestone, and clay
for brick-making. This new western country, which was first
visited by Indian traders and hunters, held everything to help
civilization grow from its first stages of agricultural settle-
ment, through the crude beginnings of industrial activity, to
a great network of cities and towns.

But except for a visit in 1691 by the Albany trader, Arnold
Viele, the Ohio country was unknown to white men until
1720. The only smoke that rose in its forests, against its
skies, came from the campfires of the Iroquois, whose hunting
ground it was. The only craft on its streams were their bark
and log canoes. The only paths were their narrow, winding
trails.

Then about 1720 the Shawnee, whose hunting grounds had
been in eastern and central Pennsylvania, were pushed west-
ward by the growth of agricultural settlement there into this
wilderness country. Close on their heels followed the traders
and trappers, eager for pelts and furs. Hunters’ rifles, bringing
down the elk and the deer, began to crack in the forests. Smoke
from the traders’ campfires began to drift over the western
waters. But for thirty years after these first adventurers came
into the section no settler’s cabin hung out its latch-string of
deer thong and burned its smoking pine knots in the night.

Before the western wilderness could be cleared and land
broken for farms, before the frontiersman and his wife could
settle into their business of home-making, much preparation
was needed. It was the mission of the Indian trader to do much

‘ ‘“\I..

I . ..
A‘; \‘

$,l-\‘.-i\i 
,I|,,,|£,,~ L‘. I

   
  

PACKHORSE TRAIN

248 Pioneer Life

PIccIN—A small wooden pail with an upright stave for a handle. It
was often used as a dipper. See p. 186

PINE KNo'r—The hard mass formed in a pine tree where a branch
grows out. It burns with a bright sputtering flame.

PONE— Bread made of corn meal, with or without milk or eggs.

PORRINGER—A small dish or bowl from which soup, porridge, bread
and milk, etc., may be eaten.

PossI-:'r CUP—A two-handled vessel used for making a beverage of
hot milk curdled by ale, wine, etc., and often containing spices.

POTATO HoLI-:—A hole dug several feet deep in the ground in
which potatoes or turnips were kept during the winter. The vege-
tables were covered with loose earth several inches deep to keep
the frost away from them.

PorHooK—An S-shaped hook for hanging pots and kettles over an
open fire. See p. 46

POWDER HORN-See pp. 91 and 122

PUNCHEON—A split log with the flat side smoothed, or a heavy slab.

RAISING BEI-:—See p. 45 g

RENNET—A lining membrane of the stomach of a calf used for
curdling milk in the making of cheese.

RIcK—A rounded stack of hay or straw made so that the rain will
run off it.

ROSEMARY—A fragrant evergreen shrub whose leaves are used for
flavoring and in making perfumes. It is an emblem of remem-

‘brance. i

RUNLI-:'r—Or RUNDLET. A small barrel, usually holding about 18
gallons. T

RusHLIcH'r—The dried pith of reeds soaked in grease and burned

I in tongs or iron clips. . _

SADDLE-BAG—One of a pair of bags or pouches attached to a saddle,
for carrying small articles.

SALTPETER—A salty, white mineral, used in making gunpowder, in
preserving meat and also used in medicine.

Glossary 249

SAND}-2R—-A shaker for sprinkling sand on wet ink in order to dry it.
SAW-A wise saying or a proverb.

SCHNlTZEN—See p. 110

Scrum BnooM—See p. 48

SCUTCHING KNIFE—See p. 76

SCUTCHING Tow—The short fibers produced in separating the

woody fibers from the flax.
SET WoRx—See p. 53
SI-IOEPACK—See p. 55

SILLABUB—SWeet€nCd cream, flavored with wine and beaten to a
stiff froth.

SLEEPER—Any of the stones or timbers on or near the ground level
supporting the structure above.

SLo1>—Any thin, tasteless drink or liquid food

SMALLCLOTHI-3S—LOOSe fitting knee breeches worn in the 1700's.

SOUTHERNWOOD-A shrub used in beer.

SPELT-See p. 124

SPIDER—A cast iron frying pan with a long handle and legs, that can
be used over coals on a hearth.

SPIKE BUCK—A male deer in its second year with single-forked
antlers.

SPIKENARD—A tall, fragrant plant with greenish flower clusters.

SPIT-A slender pointed rod, usually iron, for holding meat that is
being roasted over a fire.

SPLIT BRooM—See p. 48

SQUA'I'l‘ER—A person who settles on another’s land without right;
or a person who settles on public land to acquire ownership of it.

STALK—TO approach game cautiously and under cover.

STANC1-IION—A device which fits loosely about an animal’s neck
limiting forward and backward motion while permitting lateral
motion.

SUTLER—A person who follows an army to sell food, liquor, etc.

2 50 Pioneer Life

SWINGLE STAFF-A wooden instrument like a large knife about two
feet long with one thin edge used for beating flax to separate the
woody parts from the flax fiber that would be used in weaving.

TALLOW DIP—A candle made from the hard fat from sheep, cows,
etc., by dipping the wick repeatedly into the liquid tallow. See
p. 80

TARE AND TRET—Teaching how to compute weight and waste,
especially in the handling of wool.

THILL-Either of two long pieces of wood between which a horse
is hitched to a vehicle; a shaft.

THoNo--A narrow strip of leather, used as a fastening-the lash of
a whip, a rein, etc.

THREE-CORNERED HAT—A1S0 called THREE AROUND. All players are
arranged in a double circle, facing in. The rear players directly
behind the front players and 4 ft. back. “It” runs around the outer
circle to the right and tags a player. The tagged player immedi-
ately tags the one in front of him and running in opposite direc-
tions between the two lines the last of the three runners to reach
the vacant space is “It”.

TINDER-Dry wood shavings or bits of paper that catch fire easily.

TINDER Box—See p. 49

TOMAHAWK—A light ax used by North American Indians as a
weapon and a tool. See p. 5

Tow--The coarse or broken parts of flax used for tinder and some-
times woven into a coarse cloth for sacking.

TOWNBALL-—A game much like baseball. A team remains at bat
until all the members have been put out. When all but one have
retired and this one scores three runs, he may call in to bat any
member of his team he chooses.

TRAMMEL—An adjustable pothook for the fireplace crane, from
which kettles and pots are suspended over the fire. See p. 47

TRENCHER—A wooden plate or platter.

TRIVET-—See p. 47

Glossary 251

TUB M1LL—See p. 75
TURNIP HoL1«:—See Potato Hole.
TuRNoUT—The early name given to a labor strike. See p. 229

WEDGE-A piece of wood or metal thick at one end and thin at the
other, used in splitting wood or rocks, raising heavy objects, etc.

WEFT--The lengthwise threads of woven material.
WH11>sTocK-—The handle of a whip, usually made from wood.
WHIST-—A card game for two pairs of players.
“WoNDERs”-—A kind of sweet friedcake.

WORM FENCE-A zigzag fence of rails crossing at their ends; also
called a snake fence or a rail fence.

PIONEER LIFE

J. E. Wright and Doris S. Corbett

”A gem of a book! . . . written glowingly and imaginatively.”
—Pittsburgh Press

”The true virtue of this book lies in its methodical presentation of the
day-to-day occupations of the frontier. The incredible drudgery and
danger of pioneer self-sufficiency presents itself more forcefully
through this laconic recitation of cabin raising, crop harvests, leather-
tanning, candle making, weaving, sewing, and cattle raising, than
any panegyric could recite it.

”For the student of Pennsylvania, the book abounds with informa-
tion on land-grants, German and Scotch-lrish immigration, the influx
of particular religions (including the Moravians and Huguenots) and
local customs and superstitions. These readers, as well as aficionados
of pioneer lore, will find this book fascinating.”

—K/iatt Paperback Book Guide

"People live without underwear, get the ’ager,’ are treated with yarbs
(herbs), are bled, use charms for cures, and die. On church days lead-
ers ’line out’ hymns, on court days culprits are flogged.

"Guests gorge themselves at inns and spend sleepless nights under
flea-infested blankets.

”Finally, the frontier passes away as the streets take on cobble-
stone, the housewife adds glassware and china to the cupboard, and
raisins and whipped sillabubs to the menu. The gardens flower, sum-
mer houses are built, the first blast furnaces redden the sky and
blacken the air, and Pittsburgh mechanics strike. The refinements of
civilization have come.” ——Mississippi Valley Historical Review

ISBN 0-8229-6044-3
University of Pittsburgh Press  
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260 9 780822 960447

         

First Footprints 1 5

of this preparation, to be the forerunner of the true pioneer,
who was the home-maker and farmer. It was the trader who
widened the first trails with his pack horse. He first followed
the streams, charting their courses and the lay of the hills,
marking on his crude maps the locations of the Indian towns
and trading posts. He noted the trees and shrubs, the kinds of
game in the forests, and the fish in the streams. He saw where
coal lay near the surface, where clay could be used for bricks,
and where salt springs could be found. He learned the advan-
tages of Indian dress and the ways of Indian warfare and ad-
vised the settlers who followed. He learned what berries, bark,
and plants could be eaten and which could be used for cures.
The trader was often a diplomat, dealing with Indian tribes,
winning their friendship, organizing their trade, or treating
with them for lands. .
He was sometimes a boatman, going up and down the rivers
which, taken together, were called the western waters, explor-
ing new creeks in bark or dugout canoe, and reaching the most
distant spots to establish his trading posts. But generally he was
a pack-horse man. His goods were brought over the mountains
on the backs of wiry ponies, and since he more often forded
the rivers than followed them it was more practical to continue
toward the west with pack horses than by boat. The French
traders who brought their goods from Montreal, since they
followed the water route most of the way, naturally used boats.
At times the trader served as a scout, not attached to any
particular fort or company and not a professional soldier, but
appointed and sent out at need as a guide, a messenger, or a
spy. George Croghan, the famous trader, wrote to General

1 6 Pioneer Life

Braddock that these men should be enlisted to dress, march,
and fight as they pleased, without being subject to the strict
regulations of a soldiers’ camp.

Too often the Indian trader was just a plain rascal, roaming
the country as a freebooter, cheating, lying, and bartering rum
with the Indians, murdering if it suited his purposes, burning
out Indians or white men—unclean, unjust, immoral. Sir Wil-
liam Johnson in 1767 characterized them as “the very dregs
of the people,” and from them, he said, “regularity, honesty,
or discretion could not be expected.”

Yet there were many fine men among them. One of these,
named James Kenny, was for some time between the years 1 759
and 1763 employed in the trading store established by the
province of Pennsylvania at Pittsburgh. He was a Quaker and
represented the best type among the traders. Kenny kept a
journal that tells from day to day of his affairs on the frontier.
With ‘its quaint spelling, abbreviations, and punctuation it
makes delightful reading.

“One of ye Mingo Warriors,” he writes, “brot a Beaver late
in ye Evening, it came to 2% lb Powder, so I took his Bag 8: went
for ye Powdr by myself, he scruppled my measure, I told him
there was 2‘/2 Pints but he wanted to see it measur’d, so I
measured it 8c it held out Large measure; I laugh’d at him 8:
he Clapt me on ye Shoulder 8c sd it was right.” Kenny gives us
some idea of the amount of trade carried on: “Jack Stroud, 8c
3 Waggons more came here, he brot sundry Goods.” Or he
writes, “Load’d two Waggons with Peltry yesterday and they
set off; I sent my Wolf, Racoon 8c Wild Cat, a present to ye
Governor.” Kenny also tells how attempts were made to regu-

First Footprints 1 7

late the Indian trade. “There is a Proclamation from Collol
Johnson Posted up here for all ye Indian Traders to Adhere to,
ye Prices of ye Goods that is now fix’d at a more benefishal
profit than here before; all ye Traders to have a Pass from S? Wm
Johnson or George Croughan Esqr else ye Commanding offi-
ciers at each Post are forbid to let them Trade.”

Many of the traders became famous for qualities that made
life on the frontier easier than it might have been without their
services. The career of one of them, James O'Hara, demon-
strates the changes through which early settlement passed.
O'Hara was first of all, in 177 3, an Indian trader. He became
a government agent among the Indians, a diplomat to encour-
age friendship. In the Revolutionary War he was captain of
a volunteer company. He was appointed quartermaster-general
of the United States Army in 1792, and he served during Gen-
eral Wayne's expedition against the Indians. He represented
the first stages in the growth of industry when he formed a
partnership with Major Isaac Craig for the manufacture of
glass in Pittsburgh. He built ocean vessels for the Liverpool
trade and aided as well in the development of river traffic. He
had a part in the growth of business through the period when
banking became necessary, for he was president, then director,
of the Pittsburgh branch of the Bank of Pennsylvania. He took
part in the first stages of the most important industry of western
Pennsylvania, for he was a partner in certain ironworks at Ligo-
nier. He was also interested in the real estate business in the
rapidly growing town of Pittsburgh. By that time the pioneer
age in western Pennsylvania had passed; a settled civilization
had come to stay.

POWDER KEG

Pioneer Life

In Western Pennsylvania

1 8 Pioneer Life

Other men who engaged in Indian trading were George
Croghan, said to have been “worth more than a garrison in
troublous times,” Richard Butler, and George Morgan—all of
whom built up great fortunes for their day. john Gibson was
a trader, an Indian captive, a commander in the Revolution,
and secretary of the Indiana Territory. Alexander Lowrey and
Alexander Maginty did valuable work for Lewis Evans in mak-
ing his maps of the new lands.

The professional trader obtained his skins and furs from the
Indians and from those white men who searched the woods
with rifles to bring down the wild animals whose skins served
as money in the purchase of the goods they needed from the
East. The hunter, in his half Indian dress, the color of the
brown leaves of autumn, made his way mile upon mile through
virgin forest; he wore a hunting shirt of doeskin or linsey,
breeches of the same materials, moccasins or shoepacks, a coon-
skin cap on his head, over one shoulder on a leather thong his
powder horn, at his belt a tomahawk and a leather bullet bag
with squirrel tail hanging for ornament. He carried his pro-
visions on his back, or in the full front of his shirt he stufied
tow and flint for fire, a piece of dried venison or jerk, and a
small bag of meal to be made into hard cake on a stone by his
campfire. At night he had only a tree for shelter, or a half-faced
Indian camp if he took time to erect it. He tracked the woods
with eyes alert for every sight of antlers and every scurrying
squirrel, for every change of sky that promised change of
weather, for every variation in the way smoke rose and drifted;
with ears tuned for every snapping twig and scuffle of leaves,
for every animal call or cry as clues to locating game.

First Footprints 1 9

He guided himself by the signs of nature-the moss on tree
trunks, the direction and length of shadows, the courses of
streams, the positions of particular trees or stones. He was
geographer, botanist, astronomer, geologist; he was his own
butcher, his own cook, his own doctor in case of accident. He
knew the properties of plant and herb and the habits of bird
and beast. All this lore he used to stalk deer, to trap bear, to
shoot fox and raccoon.

When the leaves had fallen and the first thin snow lay over
them, then the long hunt took place. Fall and early winter
were the seasons for hunting deer, the whole of winter and
part of spring for fur-bearing animals. The long hunter, some-
times with a hunting dog and a horse to carry provisions, set
out for the spot where he knew he would erect his half-faced
camp, on some site protected by hills from the north and west
winds. A single large log served as the back of his shelter. Eight
or ten feet in front stakes were driven into the ground to receive
the upper ends of the roof poles. The roof sloped from front
to back and was made of slabs, skins, or blankets, or of hickory
or ash bark in the spring. The front stood open, and a fire was
built directly before it. Moss was stuffed in the cracks; dry
leaves served for a bed. Such a three-sided structure was thrown
up in a few hours and it protected the hunter from storms. But
it was not a protection from Indians; hunters were often sur-
prised and murdered in their camps.

VVith wonderful skill the long hunter laid his campaign and
calculated his chances. If the day was stormy he hunted deer on
the leeward side of the hills, where they sought shelter. If the
day brought rain but little wind he went to the open woods on

FRONT IERSMAN

20 Pioneer Life

high ground. In the morning he moistened his finger in his
mouth, then raised it high above his head to see which side
dried first. From that side came the wind, which he must learn
in order to keep to the leeward of the game. He maneuvered all
day to approach his game without discovery, skinned the ani-
mals as he found them, and hung the pelts out of reach of the
wolves, to be picked up on his return to camp.

Arrived at evening with his catch, he built his fire, cooked his
venison and johnnycake, and, if he had a companion, told of
the day’s long doings, tales of the spike buck, the two and
three-pronged buck, and the doe. Then he stretched himself
on his bed of leaves and dreamed of the buck with silver horns
and the doe that sped on wings.

On the frontier the gun came before the ax or the plow. Men
were often hunters before they became settled home-makers.
And, more important, armed conflict had to determine the
ownership of the region before homes and industries could
safely be established. After the traders had told the world about
the Ohio country as a place for settlement, the French, the
English, and the Indians all claimed it. Baron de Longueuil
and his lieutenant, De Léry, led a French expedition from
Canada through western Pennsylvania in 1 7 39. In 1 747 the Ohio
Company was formed by some Virginia gentlemen to extend
the settlement of their province into lands around the upper
Ohio River claimed under its charter. In 1749 Céloron de
Blainville, accompanied by De Léry, led another expedition
down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers and claimed them for the
French with the lands the two rivers drained. But the following
year the Ohio Company sent Christopher Gist to explore the

First Footprints 2 1

same country so that they might encourage settlers to go there.

The question as to whether the French or the Virginians had
the better right to the country was bitterly disputed and soon
led to what historians call the French and Indian War. Gover-
nor Dinwiddie of Virginia sent George Washington to Fort
Le Boeuf (Waterford, Erie County) with a message ordering
the French to leave—of course they refused. Captain Trent,
upon the orders of Governor Dinwiddie, began to erect a fort
at the junction of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. But before it
could be completed it was captured by the French and a new
fort, named Fort Duquesne, was erected on the spot. Washing-
ton set out in 1754 to take back the fort but was defeated at
Great Meadows. General Braddock was sent from England the
following year to aid the colonists, but he, too, was defeated not
far from the fort. The war between the French and English
then became general; the war zone extended from the mouth
of the St. Lawrence River to the backwoods of Virginia. Finally
in 1758 William Pitt, England’s new prime minister, sent Gen-
eral Forbes to command the British troops in Pennsylvania.
From Raystown, now Bedford, the edge of western settlement
at the time, General Forbes sent Major James Grant with a
scouting party to Fort Duquesne. Grant got into a battle with
the garrison of the fort and was defeated on the hill overlook-
ing the Point in Pittsburgh that has ever since been known as
Grant’s Hill. But Forbes in the meantime had advanced from
Raystown, the French set fire to the fort and fled. Near its half-
burned remains the English erected Fort Pitt.

These events had brought into the frontier new people who
shared in paving the way for the settlers to come. For a time

2 2 Pioneer Life

soldiers were far more numerous than traders. They com-
manded scouting parties of redskins, surveyed the mountains
and the courses of the rivers, built forts at strategic points, and
served as diplomats, making treaties between their govern-
ments and the Indians. More than these services in preparing
the country for settlement, the soldiers brought new articles to
the frontier, among them new plants and seeds to be experi-
mented with in such places as the King’s Garden around Fort
Pitt. Some of these soldiers were British regulars, and some
were Virginia and Pennsylvania militia. After their military
service had ended, many of them returned to the western coun-
try to take up farms and to found homes.

About the time the first military expeditions came into the
region, the missionaries began to enter and to preach Chris-
tianity to the Indians. The earliest missionary priests came
with the French from Canada and were chiefly Jesuits and
Recollect friars. The Jesuits, able, cultured, and enthusiastic,
not only took the usual three vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience but also vowed to undertake missionary work in
whatever lands to which they might be sent. They traveled the
densest forests, followed unknown streams, through bitter win-
ter and withering summer heat, faced hardship, torture, and
death to carry Christianity to the Indians and.to claim the land.
For years after their first appearance it was not uncommon to
meet wandering Indians whom they had baptized, Indians
with rosaries and crucifixes, who talked of Christianity with-
out understanding.

When, in 17 54, Pierre de Contrecoeur built Fort Duquesne,
his chaplain was Father Denys Baron, whose figure became

First Footprints 2 3
familiar in the coarse brown habit of the Recollect friars, with
its cowl and its rope girdle, from which dangled a crucifix.
Father Baron was at Fort Duquesne two years, during which
time he kept a register of births and deaths which has been
preserved. During the four years that the fort was known as
Fort Duquesne other French priests were on duty in the dis-
trict. The year after Father Baron left, a Jesuit, Father Virot,
planted a mission cross at the mouth of the Big Beaver River.
The same year he was joined by another Jesuit, Father Rou-
boud. When the Ohio country fell to the British, the Wolf
tribe of the local Delaware Indians drove away the French
priests from the Big Beaver, and their share in the history of
the western Pennsylvania frontier was ended.

For fifty years after General Forbes took Fort Duquesne in
the name of the English king, most of the Protestant sects sent
out ministers to both the Indians and the white settlers. With
the Indians they seem to have had little success except for the
work done by the Moravians, Christian Frederick Post, John
Heckewelder, and David Zeisberger.

Post, with two Indian guides, entered the hostile country
just ahead of General Forbes; across the river from Fort Du-
quesne he held a conference with the Indians that won their
friendship for the English. In 1761, before formal peace was
signed between England and France, he made another journey,
this time as far west as the Tuscarawas River in Ohio. Later
the Moravian brethren at Bethlehem sent him a helper. He was
a young man nineteen years old, John Heckewelder, who, after
many years of service as a missionary, was to write the story of
his work among the Indians.

INDIAN
WAR
CLUBS

l’\‘j

24 Pioneer Life

David Zeisberger in 1767 preached to the Indians in their
council house at Goshgoshunk on the left bank of the Alle-
gheny River near the mouth of Tionesta Creek in Venango
County. This service must have been a strange sight. The in-
terior of the council house had been arranged as much as pos-
sible like a church. In the middle of the floor burned the fire,
for warmth. Around it sat the men on one side and the women
on the other, wrapped in blankets of red and black, their faces
painted, and their bodies decorated with strings of beads. In
the midst stood the good Moravian brother, Zeisberger, in
simple clerical dress, a close fitting coat without lapels, knee-
buckled small clothes, and broad, round-toed shoes. He had
laid aside his wide brimmed, shallow hat.

With the help of a new comer of the same sect, Gottlieb
Senseman, and three families of Christian Indians, Zeisberger
formed another church on the banks of the Allegheny. But in
the troublesome times that followed, the church was moved
three miles farther north for safety. Zeisberger and Senseman
kept in close touch with the young settlement at Pittsburgh.
In 1 770 the congregation of Indians moved from Goshgoshunk
to a site on the Big Beaver River, in Lawrence County, some-
where between the Shenango River and Slippery Rock Creek.
The place was called Friedensstadt, or Town of Peace, to dis-
tinguish it from the troublesome places that had been aban-
doned. Zeisberger was joined the next year by john Hecke-
welder as helper. Zeisberger had so won the admiration of the
Indians that they adopted him into their tribe. But the end
of Friedensstadt was not a happy one. Drunken Indians from
neighboring towns often overran the mission and caused

First Footprints 2 5

trouble; so Zeisberger concluded that it was best to move the
mission farther west to lands already settled by the Moravian
Indians along the Tuscarawas River in Ohio.

By their friendly civilizing of these Indians the pioneer
Moravian missionaries helped ease the way for settlers in west-
ern Pennsylvania. They accompanied the Indians on hunting
trips, paddled in their canoes, and fished with them. In this way
they learned the Indian language and taught their language to
the Indians. In the missions these men taught the Indians to
build substantial log houses, and they conducted schools where
the beginnings of reading and writing were taught. Each mis-
sion had a log chapel. Fields and gardens were laid out and
fenced. Hogs, horses, cattle, and poultry were brought from
the East. The Indians learned to do simple carpentry and such
blacksmithing as they needed.

One of the final steps in opening the Ohio country for settle-
ment was the battle of Bushy Run. Forbes had won from the
French the right to English settlement, but the Indians who
had joined with the French to fight the English were not satis-
fied with the outcome. Under Pontiac the Indians organized a
Confederacy to drive out the English and regain their lost lands.
They destroyed the forts ceded by the French to the English-
Presque Isle (Erie), Le Boeuf, and Venango (Franklin)-and
laid seige to Fort Pitt. Colonel Henry Bouquet was sent to
relieve Fort Pitt. On August 5, 1763, he met the Indians at
Bushy Run (near what is now Export, Westmoreland County)
and won one of the most important battles in American history.
This victory cleared the way for settlement.

How the Settler Got His Land

III

HE territory now included in Pennsylvania had been
T granted by King Charles II of England to William Penn
in 1681 and had been owned ever since by Penn or his heirs,
although the people of the colony governed themselves. From
the first the Penns had made every effort to induce settlers
to come to Pennsylvania. They came by thousands directly
from Europe—from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and
France—after voyages of from four to twelve weeks, during
which a diet of hard biscuits, salt beef, pork with beans, and
potatoes was common ship’s fare. From the eastern ports they
made the long journey to the westward, caravans of patient
plodders along the rough highways.

Most of those who came were poor, some of them so penni-
less that they had to pay for their passage by signing an agree-
ment to serve for a certain number of years with whoever
would pay their fare to the ship’s captain. These immigrants
were known as indentured servants because the agreement
they signed was known as an indenture. For many years the
emigration from Europe of this class of people was encouraged
by shipowners who sent out agents, particularly among the

26

How the Settler Got His Land 27

German peasants of the Rhine country. The time of service
was generally four or five years, after which these immigrants
were free to go where they chose. Up to 1730 many of these
redemptioners were British; after 1 7 30 most of them were from
Germany. The immigration of redemptioners into Pennsyl-
vania reached its peak about 1750. When they had completed
their periods of indenture they came in large numbers to the
western country because there they could more easily establish
themselves, since land was cheap and they could begin life
again as free, self-respecting men and women.

The southern half of western Pennsylvania was first settled
from Virginia and Maryland. Virginians and Marylanders
were mostly Englishmen, although many Scotch and Scotch-
Irish were included, who, on arriving in Philadelphia or Bal-
timore, had gone south through the Cumberland and Shenan-
doah valleys. Later these Scotch and Scotch-Irish came north-
west into western Pennsylvania and took up lands in what are
now Fayette, Greene, Washington, and Somerset counties.
Many of the Virginians who hoped to better themselves by
acquiring lands and making homes in a new region had been
used to the open hospitality of the South. They were friendly
and gay and liked good living, horse racing, dancing, and gam-
ing. It was chiefly the Virginians who, among the early settlers
in southwestern Pennsylvania, observed feast days and holi-
days, especially Christmas. The people of English descent who
came to the other parts of southwestern Pennsylvania, particu-
larly Westmoreland County, were mostly from eastern Penn-
sylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

From 1720 on, many Germans settled in the region on each

    
 

SKILLET


28 Pioneer Life

side of the lower Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. These
German settlers were industrious, frugal, and self-reliant. They
were pious people with great love for order and for laws that
they thought would maintain order, but they were also a
superstitious people. After the first generation of settlement
in the new lands, where schools and churches, books and
papers were rare, many of them lost their habits of reading
and writing or failed to teach them to their children, so that
the second generation was often illiterate.

The Germans did not in general push so far westward as did
the Scotch, the Irish, and the Scotch-Irish. The Scotch-Irish
were so-called because they were of that group of Scotch people
who had removed to northern Ireland two or three generations
before their emigration to America. The Scotch and Scotch-
Irish settlers had inherited the political ideas and religious
teachings of John Knox and Andrew Melville. They were
chiefly Calvinists, whose preachers in the old country had
taught them the ideal of the freedom of the individual. There,
too, they had been forbidden to trade with England's colonies
because England wanted that trade for her own manufacturers,
and as a result most of their seaports were ruined; land values
dropped, and the tenants became impoverished. Many of these
people scraped together enough money to buy passage to
America, or they agreed to become indentured servants. It was
said that land was cheap in the western country and that there
was room there for men's consciences to work.

The Scotch, the Irish, and the Scotch-Irish did not get along
well with the Quakers of eastern Pennsylvania and so were
pushed out to the frontiers, farther west than the region where

How the Settler Got His Land 29

the Germans settled. They were more aggressive than the
Germans. They were more restless, too, harsher and less toler-
ant, easily angered and as easily won to friendship. They were
hardy, and were able drinkers and fighters. They sometimes
settled on lands still belonging to the Indians, much to the
alarm of the red men.

Some Welsh also settled in Pennsylvania and some of them
moved to Cambria County. And there were more French
Huguenots in Pennsylvania than in any other state north of the
Carolinas, although most of them kept to the eastern part of
the state. A-number of individual families of French Hugue-
nots, however, who had migrated from France to Germany
during the French persecutions of the Protestants, drifted
through to the West with the Germans.

The early population of western Pennsylvania has usually
been spoken of as chiefly Scotch-Irish, but recent studies show
that there were really more of the English than of any other
nationality. Perhaps the fiery energy and the quick tempera-
ment of the Scotch-Irish made them seem greater in number
than other groups of settlers. Then, too, they were always in
the fore of all fights that took place, whether in the intimacy
of the taverns or in group uprisings such as the Whiskey In-
surrection. They were also most prominent in the religious
development of the new communities.

During and immediately following the Revolutionary War
many who did not want to fight came from the eastern counties
into the western end of the state. These citizens of the East,
who had refused to join in what seemed to them a civil war
or who had actively sided with the King and felt that the colo-

CALABASHES

 

  

HANGING
GRIDDLE

  

30 Pioneer Life

nies should not secede from the mother country, aroused the
hostility of the eastern patriots. Many of them were arrested,
sometimes paroled and sometimes exiled. After the British
gave up Philadelphia in 1778, feeling against these “traitors”
ran so high that they were fined or imprisoned; their proper-
ties were taken over by the state; their lands and their homes
sold at auction. To escape such hardships they moved westward.
They and the newly freed indentured servants were, on the
whole, extremely poor, but they were hopeful of the advan-
tages of the frontier.

Land speculators came for other reasons. Their business was
to buy up tracts of land and to sell them to settlers. They ad-
vertised the country, organized settlement companies, and had
laws passed to make settlement easy. Washington was one of
the greatest of these speculators and was the closest rival of
the man who was perhaps the greatest of them all before the
Revolution, George Croghan.

Thus during the last forty years of the eighteenth century
the western country was settled by the former inhabitants of
the Rhine country and of the British Isles who found them-
selves reduced to servitude and who wished to regain their
self-respect; by the citizens who could not side with the colo-
nists breaking from their mother country and who were called
traitors by their neighbors; by the land speculators who hoped
to create great fortunes in the new country; and by adven-
turers, restless wanderers, and homeseekers.

When the first military expeditions were made into the
region during the French and Indian War, need was felt for
supply stations at which the army could replenish its stores.

How the Settler Got His Land 3 1

Settlements along the line of march would serve as hostelries or
inns for men and horses and as storehouses where supplies
might be held in readiness. In order to hasten settlement,
therefore, army commanders granted permits to families that
wished to settle. These permits were necessary because the
rights to this land had not yet been purchased from the In-
dians. The permits gave the settlers the right to buy the land
when it should be placed on the market. Later land laws gave
settlers the right to buy the land on which they had built cabins
and planted crops.

The ownership of the southwestern part of the state-Greene,
Washington, and Fayette counties and parts of Allegheny and
Westmoreland counties—was for years in dispute. Virginia
claimed that her royal charter gave her control of this section.
She had a more liberal land policy than did Pennsylvania, who
also claimed the section. Virginia’s policy, known as the head-
right system, granted fifty acres of land free to each family of
immigrants. It encouraged settlers to move north and north-
west of Virginia; thus, settlement was, until after the Revolu-
tion, advancing more from the South than it was from the
East. Virginia was interested chiefly in the settlement of her
province. But Pennsylvania was more interested in profit from
land and therefore bitterly resented the occupation, by Vir-
ginians, of lands she claimed as her own. A brief struggle fol-
lowed between the interested parties before the dispute was
settled in 1780 and Pennsylvania recognized the rights of set-
tlers who had taken up Virginia grants.

Meanwhile the colonies had declared themselves indepen-
dent of Great Britain, and Pennsylvania felt that the owner-

32 Pioneer Life

ship of the land should be vested in the state rather than in the
Penn family. By the Divesting Act of 1779 the ownership of
unsettled land passed from the Penns to the commonwealth,
except for certain sections or private estates called “manors”
that were reserved to the Penn family.

The spread of immigration had not been steady through the
period of Indian wars and revolution. Hardy pioneers who
before Pontiac’s War had already established themselves on
their lands retreated in large numbers before the warring In-
dians. Then with the coming of peace and comparative safety
at the close of the conflict settlement began again. In the period
between Pontiac’s War and Dunmore’s War (1 764-74) the tide
of settlers flowed in through the mountain passes, chiefly into
Fayette County. Those who had fled from southern VVestmore-
land County now returned, or others took their places, and
when the Indians gave up more of their land at the treaty of
Fort Stanwix in 1768 the movement was in full swing. During
the troubled years of the Revolutionary War there was some
slowing up of settlement. The frontier had a double duty of
supplying its share of men for the Continental army in the
East and of holding off the Indians in the West. The Eighth
Pennsylvania Regiment was recruited largely from Westmore—
land County, and the Thirteenth Virginia Regiment from
Fayette, Greene, and Washington counties. The burning of
Hannastown in 1782 by a company of Indians and Canadian
rangers is typical of what threatened all frontier towns until
peace was signed with Great Britain and peaceful settlement
could once more proceed. I

During the Revolutionary War the Pennsylvania land ofiice

How the Settler Got His Land 33

had been closed, and no sales were made to speculators or to
settlers. But in 1 784 it was reopened. Quitrents were abolished.
A man could purchase as much as four hundred acres in a plot
on a single application. Land sold at ten pounds for a hundred
acres. By a treaty with the Indians in 1784 and another in 1785
all hitherto Indian land became the property of the common-
wealth. The price was set at thirty pounds a hundred acres.
There was much land to be had. Many early settlers paid no
attention to the legal processes of taking it up. Those who
simply went out into the wilderness and cleared land for their
cabins without permission from the proprietors or the state
were called squatters. Both Pennsylvania and Virginia made
attempts to remove these unlicensed settlers from the Monon-
gahela Valley because of Indian protests, but with little effect.
In the early period a great deal of southwestern Pennsylvania
was marked oil as tomahawk claims by hunters or land seekers
on their way through the forest. Each established his tomahawk
right by girdling a few trees near the head of a stream or spring
or at the corners of the claimed area and by blazing one or more
of the trees with his initials or his full name. Such rights were
not really legal but in many cases were recognized, and on this
basis sales of land were made. Many people who wished to
settle on such tracts bought up the tomahawk rights rather than
quarrel with those who had established them. Joseph Dodd-
ridge, who was a boy during the Indian wars and from whose
Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars has been drawn
much of the information in this book, says of these rights:
“Other improvers of the land, with a view to actual settle-
ment, and who happened to be stout veteran fellows, took a

WOODEN
MEASURE

34 Pioneer Life

very different course from that of purchasing the tomahawk
rights. When annoyed by the claimants under those rights,
they deliberately cut a few good hickories, and gave them what
was called in those days a laced jacket, that is a sound whip-
ping.”

The story of George Teagarden’s fight for the claim to his
farm in Greene County is typical of the settlement of many
disputes over early land rights. Teagarden had married and
had prepared to erect a comfortable cabin home on his land.
His friends had gathered for the “raisin’,” and there was much
gaiety. In the midst of the preparations there appeared a man
who claimed the land and forbade the raising to proceed.
Aware of the only law recognized on such occasions, Teagarden
challenged him to fight it out. The fight was fierce and bloody,
but in the end the claimant surrendered, and the wounds of
victor and vanquished were dressed by the young wife. The
two families later became neighbors and fast friends.

The settlement of the western end of the state falls rather
clearly into two periods. First the southwestern corner was
settled—-—Fayette, Greene, Allegheny, Washington, Somerset,
and Westmoreland counties—during the period from 1760 to
1 790. After 1 790 the northwestern half of the state was opened,
and towns sprang up at Erie, Waterford, Meadville, and But-
ler. By that time the frontier had already passed into states
farther west-—Ohio and Indiana. By about 1760 settlement in
southwestern Pennsylvania was increasing steadily. The first
settlements grew up around the forts, because they gave pro-
tection, or along the Braddock and Forbes roads, because
travelers would pause to purchase supplies or because the pass-

How the Settler Got His Land 3 5

ing military expeditions would buy the settlers’ produce for
the garrisons. The main centers of settlement west of the moun-
tains and south of the Ohio River were at Pittsburgh, at Red-
stone (now Brownsville), at Stewart’s Crossing (now Connells-
ville), and at the mouth of the Cheat River, where Point
Marion had developed.

Because Pittsburgh was the most important military and
trading post, there was a town there from the first. In July,
1760, it had a population of 149, not including the soldiers
at the fort. Nine months later the population had grown to
332. In 1 763 the houses of the town were torn down to prevent
the Indian besiegers of Fort Pitt from using them for shelter,
and the next year when the town was rebuilt the new town plan
of Colonel John Campbell laid out the blocks bounded by
what are now the Boulevard of the Allies and Water, Ferry,
and Market Streets. In 1766 the first shingle roof was laid on
a warehouse by George Morgan for the firm of Baynton, Whar-
ton and Morgan, of Philadelphia, whose trading at the Point
helped the growth of the new town. Settlements were fairly
well established between Pittsburgh and Bedford during the
years from 1760 to 1763.

In 1760 George Croghan had begun to develop grants
about fourmiles from Pittsburgh. William Clapham had set-
tled on a farm on the Youghiogheny near the site of West New-
ton. Andrew Byerly had begun what was perhaps the first white
agricultural settlement in Westmoreland County, near Bushy
Run. By 1763 fourteen families were living along the Forbes
Road west of Ligonier, and there were also about a hundred
families around Bedford, east of the Indian frontier.

36 Pioneer Life

The Monongahela Valley had become one of the main areas
of settlement. Farms had been worked near Fort Burd at Red-
stone, at the mouth of Redstone Creek—some, at least, under
military permits. A thousand bushels of corn were sent from
Redstone to Fort Pitt in 1761 . Fort Burd had been a center of
settlement as early as 1759. It was situated at the crossing of a
navigable stream and an extension of the Braddock Road and
was an ideal point for transferring from land to water transpor-
tation the goods which traders brought to the settlers. It was this
district, now Fayette County, that was the goal of most of the
early settlers of western Pennsylvania. Here they settled first
the bottom lands near the mouths of the streams; then they
moved up the creeks to the lands farther from the river but
kept close to the banks for convenience; and finally they
reached the higher ground away from the streams.

Brownsville, Fayette County, had been laid out by Mary-
landers and Virginians in 1785, although Wendell Brown and
his sons had settled near there in 1750. In 1767 Thomas
Douthet and Henry Beeson, a Quaker who was a blacksmith
and a miller, had founded Uniontown; by 1787 a courthouse
and school were established in one building; there were a mill,
four taverns, three blacksmith shops, five stores, and a distill-
ery. Into this district many Quakers came after the war for
independence.

In Washington County there was the town of Washington,
founded in 1781. It was a way station on the road between
Brownsville and Wheeling for traffic that was seeking the Ohio
River. On Chartiers Creek the town of Canonsburg was found-
ed in 1787, and by 1790 it had a mill, a distillery, a store a

How the Settler Got His Land

tavern, and a number of resident mechanics.
Modern Greene County had Muddy Creek, where in 1768
the Swan, Hughes, and Van Meter families had built their

37

cabins. By 1782 Hannastown in Westmoreland County con-
sisted of thirty log houses. Greensburg had been laid out in
1785 and became the county seat in 1787. There were a hun-
dred families in the Ligonier Valley as early as 1772.

What is now Somerset County was settled very early. A
number of Jersey men had settled Turkey Foot, now Conflu-
ence. German Pietists had laid out Berlin in the years between
1784 and 1787. The site of the town of Somerset was occupied
in 1771 by several hunters’ families. The town itself was laid
out as Brunerstown in 1785 and was expanded by people from
Maryland, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania during the
Revolutionary War.

By 1790 the population of southwestern Pennsylvania had
reached eighty thousand. This was almost wholly an agricul-
tural population, however, with an average density of fifteen
people to the square mile. There were a number of towns, but
none contained more than four hundred people. Of the present
counties as we know them, Washington, which then included
the present Greene County, was the most populous, with a
population of 2 3,901 . Bedford, which included modern Somer-
set County, contained some 16,100 persons. Westmoreland fol-
lowed in order with 16,000; at that time it embraced the re-
gions north of the Kiskiminetas River. Then came Fayette
with 13,325, and Allegheny with 10,322.

Within a half century the southern section of western Penn-
sylvania, from a wilderness occupied by Indians, traders,

JL.

A
LQCODIIOOOOOOOO

fl

BY J. E. WRIGHT

AND DORIS S. CORBETT

Pioneer Life

 

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARENCE MCWILLIAMS

In Western
Pennsylvania

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Pittsburgh and London

38 Pioneer Life

hunters, and trappers, had become a safe home for the overflow
of population from the South and the East.

The northern part of western Pennsylvania was still, how-
ever, largely unoccupied, partly because of Indian raids that
frightened off settlers from the donation and depreciation
lands opened up after 1785. The donation lands were the
bonuses paid to Revolutionary veterans of the Pennsylvania
regulars. For this purpose the legislature set off a section of
land consisting of the greater part of Lawrence and Mercer
counties, the northern part of Butler County, and the western
half of Crawford County. About three thousand soldiers thus
obtained land for settlement. But as most of the men were
desperate for ready money they sold their lands to speculators.

Another section was set off to be bought by soldiers with the
Continental certificates which they had received as pay and
which had lost most of their value because Congress had been
unable to redeem them with gold and silver. Land that could be
bought with these certificates lay in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler,
Lawrence, and Armstrong counties. Even at the price of twenty
cents an acre, less than half these lands were sold by 1787.
Several large land companies bought up rights to the northern
half of western Pennsylvania from the state. The North Ameri-
can Company, controlled by Robert Morris; the Pennsylvania
Population Company, directed by John Nicholson; and the
Holland Land Company owned most of the region among
themselves.

After the Land Law of 1792, which confirmed the rights of
the squatters to the land they had cleared, settlers began to
move into this section. In a few years the northern half of that

How the Settler Got His Land 39

region of Pennsylvania west of the Appalachians was added to
the southern section as a new conquest for civilization.

Settlement had now reached that stage at which purely
agricultural living was giving way to the beginnings of indus-
try. One early industry, of importance to western Pennsylvania
farmers, was the distilling of whiskey from grain. Rye, which
was largely cultivated in the region, had neither home nor
foreign market. It could not easily be packed across the moun-
tains. A horse carried only four bushels of it as grain, but dis-
tilled into liquor, which found a ready market east of the moun-
tains, the equivalent of twenty-four bushels could be carried.
This meant that whiskey could be transported at one-sixth the
cost of transporting grain. Monongahela whiskey was the best
in the country and was preferred in every market. Thus, when
the long arm of the United States government at Philadelphia
reached over the mountains and directly touched the western
farmers with an excise tax on their most important product,
great resentment showed itself. The frontier people felt that
the government had until now more or less ignored them and
had neither protected their frontier nor paid the militiamen
for their services. There was little money in circulation on the
frontier and since the tax was to be paid in gold or silver they
felt they could not pay it. The tax seemed to them the hateful
work of eastern industrialists and financiers, encouraged by
Alexander Hamilton. Their distance from the seat of govern-
ment, together with the feeling that they knew best what was
needed in the West, encouraged resistance.

In the summer of 1794 the rebellious farmers tarred and
feathered several of the excisemen, marched on General John

40 Pioneer Life

N eville’s home to demand the surrender of his commission as
inspector of the excise, and set fire to his buildings. Two weeks
later several thousand angry opponents of the excise gathered
at Braddock’s Field and marched on Pittsburgh. Fortunately,
at the last minute, they decided not to attack the town but
merely marched through it. In October the federal government
sent thirteen thousand militia, who had been gathering in the
East, into western Pennsylvania to preserve order, but the
expedition was unnecessary. The insurrection, if there really
had been one, had subsided, and western Pennsylvania farmers
had submitted to the excise.

While the whiskey rebels had been meeting, protesting, and
marching, General Anthony Wayne had won a victory over
the Indians of the Northwest Territory and by removing the
danger of their raids had opened up a large part of Ohio to
settlement. Thousands left the southwestern district for the
new lands, and while Pittsburgh began a career of great in-
dustrial development, communication and commerce grew,
towns multiplied, and the frontier began to move westward.

The Cabin in the Clearing

IV

HERE his ax had laid low century-old oaks and ash trees

clustered with red berries, so that ten or a dozen of
the fallen trees left a clearing of half an acre, there the fron-
tiersman might begin the raising of his wilderness home. Or
he might choose a section of bottom land near a river, where
the ground was already clear and he could begin work on his
cabin immediately. Many an immigrant, worn with climbing
over the mountain trails, stopped perhaps at some hill point
along a creek where there were no trees, not knowing the
land was poor. At the sight of such treeless land, he thought,
in his lack of experience, that much labor could be saved if
he built his cabin here. He was not aware that a tract of this
kind offered only the most scanty return of crops for his plow-
ing and hoeing. On such clearings, also, many a pioneer family
that arrived too late to claim a fertile area struggled through
bitter hardships.

If the newcomer had chosen wisely, however, he spent the
first few days in a temporary shelter of tree branches or a cave
while he set to work to clear a space for his cabin. If the felling
of trees was to be done by his ax alone, he would clear just

41

42 Pioneer Life

enough space to squeeze his cabin among the trees. When the
crude little home was finished the first clearing could be made
larger as he saw fit. If he used the Indian method of felling
trees, greater space could be cleared at once, enough for a truck
patch and perhaps for the first planting of a cornfield. The
Indians cleared land by girdling, or cutting away the bark in
a ring around the trunk of a tree so that it would die and let
the sunlight through to the corn planted below. Sometimes
they felled the trees by building fires around their bases. The
fallen trees were burned into suitable lengths, then heaped
on a pile, and reduced to ashes. This work of burning fallen
trees was often done by the women. In one day a hard-working
woman could burn off as many fallen trees as a strong man
could cut with a good ax in two or three days.

More than one family at this stage of its frontier history went
back to a method of living as primitive as that of the Israelites
in the wilderness. The Harmons, who came from Germany to
Westmoreland County with nothing but ax, mattock, and
rifle, lodged for the summer in a hut of boughs built against a
rock until their cabin was ready. During the summer they
struggled to get into the ground some simple crops for winter
food and lived meanwhile on wild fruits and berries and on
what game they could trap and shoot.

A log cabin was seldom larger than twenty by thirty feet and
one and a half stories high. In its clearing in the forest, on the
hill brow, by the roadside, or by the creek bank, it stood close
against the earth. It did not pretend to be a house, but was an
honest cabin made of the crude materials that were at hand.
For that reason it was the symbol and has remained the symbol

The Cabin in the Clearing 43

of American traditions. There was not a false note in its struc-
ture. Its walls were unpainted logs, round or hewed square;
the spaces between were filled with plain rails or were calked
with moss or straw and daubed with mud. Its roof was covered
with split staves, about four feet long and five inches wide, of
oak or ash that had grown where the cabin now stood. The
chimney often took up one entire end of the structure and was
made of mud and sticks, in the humbler cabins, or of stones
from the fields. Sometimes one window let in light, a square
opening covered with greased paper. The door, usually with
upper and lower halves, was made of roughhewn slabs and was
barred at night by a log rolled against it or by heavy Crossbars.
During the day a light wooden latch could be lifted from the
outside by a buckskin string passed through a hole and hanging
free to the rare visitor.

The interior of the cabin was dim, and was relieved only by
grey light through the one greased paper pane and, in summer,
by the path of sunlight that fell through the open door. The
walls were darkened by smoke from the big fireplace, and to
them clung the smell of cooking, of hanging hams and fiitches
of bacon, of drying fruits and herbs dangling from the ceiling.
Against one wall the bed was built—forked branches driven
into the ground with poles laid across them to support a mat-
tress of oak leaves or of cattails stripped and dried in the sun.
Beneath the one small window a table of clapboards resting on
pins driven into the wall might catch some light. From the
cavern at the end, which was the fireplace, the flame of a pine
log might flicker and shake its light over the earthen floor,
across the smoked-grimed walls, touching the rim of a prized

 
   
 

44 Pioneer Life

pewter jug, swinging black shadows from stool legs and from
the clothes hung on the wall.

Rude indeed was the frontier cabin; its comforts were scanty,
its discomforts many. It was drafty, smoky, and badly venti-
lated; its interior was sometimes visited by rats and snakes; its
blankets and bear rugs were often infested with fleas. The door-
yard was barren and unkempt. Usually the yard was kept bare
of weeds, however, for the taller and denser the growth, the
more danger there was from concealed Indians. Home life on
the border, nevertheless, was not all rudeness. Friends settled
near one another. Relatives came out in groups to the western
border. New families made friends with older ones. Commu-
nity life developed. Friendship and affection kept groups and
families together as closely as did danger and suffering.

As settlers multiplied, as they became experienced in build-
ing with the materials at hand, as they added to their tools and
found more time for building, they constructed houses of
different types. A census of houses in one valley mentions
round log cabins, chipped log cabins, hewed log cabins;
scutched log houses, chipped log houses, hewed log houses, and
round log houses. The log house was a step farther toward the
development of the clapboard house. The log house was built
of hewn, or shaped, logs and was often two stories high. It had
at least two rooms, sometimes more; and the chimney, although
still outside and at the end of the building, as in the cabin,
was of stone and mortar instead of mud and sticks. The floors
were of sawed boards, the roof of oak shingles was nailed on,
and the windows contained glass panes.

With the growth of settlement there came about the friendly

{B

 
 
   

.41.

 

LOG HOUSE

   

The Cabin in the Clearing 45

custom of house raising. Neighbors within the area of a few
miles, when they heard of the arrival of a newcomer, would set
a day when all could gather together to help erect the new
home. This was the important factor in the gradual improve-
ment of the pioneer home. Many hands could build a better
cabin than two hands could. Doddridge gives an account of
such a raising:

“The fatigue party consisted of choppers, whose business it
was to fell the trees and cut them off at proper lengths. A man
with a team for hauling them to the place, and arranging them,
properly assorted, at the sides and ends of the building, a car-
penter, if such he might be called, whose business it was to search
the woods for a proper tree for making clapboards for the roof.
The tree for this purpose must be straight grained and from
three to four feet in diameter. The boards were split four feet
long, with a long frow, and as wide as the timber would allow.
They were used without planing or shaving. Another division
was employed in getting puncheons for the floor of the cabin;
this was done by splitting trees, about eighteen inches in diame-
ter, and hewing the faces of them with a broad axe. They were
half the length of the floor they were intended to make. The
materials for the cabin were mostly prepared on the first day
and sometimes the foundation laid in the evening. The second
day was allotted for the raising.

“In the morning of the next day the neighbors collected for
the raising. The first thing to be done was the election of four
comer men, whose business it was to notch and place the logs.
The rest of the company furnished them with the timbers. In
the meantime the boards and puncheons were collecting for

FIREPLACE

 
 
  

46 Pioneer Life
the floor and roof, so that by the time the cabin was a few
rounds high the sleepers and floor began to be laid. The door
was made by sawing or cutting the logs in one side so as to make
an opening about three feet wide. This opening was secured
by upright pieces of timber about three inches thick through
which holes were bored into the ends of the logs for the pur-
pose of pinning them fast. A similar opening, but wider, was
made at the end for the chimney. This was built of logs and
made large to admit of a back and jambs of stone. At the square,
two end logs projected a foot or eighteen inches beyond the
wall to receive the butting poles, as they were called, against
which the ends of the first row of clapboards was supported.
The roof was formed by making the end logs shorter until a
single log formed the comb of the roof, on these logs the clap-
boards were placed, the ranges of them lapping some distance
over those next below them and kept in their places by logs,
placed at proper distances upon them.

“The roof and sometimes the floor were finished on the same
day of the raising. A third day was commonly spent by a few
carpenters in leveling off the floor, making a clapboard door
and a table. . . .

“In the meantime masons were at work. With the heart
pieces of the timber of which the clapboards were made, they
made billets for chunking up the cracks between the logs of
the cabin and chimney, a large bed of mortar was made for
daubing up those cracks; a few stones formed the back and
jambs of the chimney.”

Signs of home and daily living gradually appeared—spoons
of clamshells set in split sticks, gourds for bowls or dippers or

The Cabin in the Clearing 47

skimmers, and turkey-wing brushes for sweeping the hearth.
The plain Saxon names of many old household articles are
strange to us now, forgotten like so many of the objects they
belong to because these objects have long ago passed out of
use: piggins, noggins, trenchers, runlets, keelers, firkins, cowles,
and jacks. The frontier age was an age of wood, and many of
these objects were “turned” from ash knots or coopered from
staves and metal bands.

Iron was the frontier metal, and around the cabin hearth
clustered ironware of curious shapes and uses. Those who could
afford them used andirons in the fireplace to hold the logs.
From the chimney was suspended an iron hook, or trammel, for
iron pots that cooked a whole dinner at once. Other pothooks
of various sizes were screwed into the chimney place or hung
from a pole set inside the opening. Jacks and spits for suspend-
ing and turning a roast also hung from the chimney piece.
Sometimes a swinging crane was hinged inside the chimney,
or outside below the mantelpiece. On the hearth stood an
array of iron utensils whose shapes and uses would puzzle the
housewife of today. Since many of these articles were to be
used over the fire, they were made with feet to raise them
above the flames. Those without feet could be used on a trivet,
a small three-footed iron stand. In the better equipped cabins
there were gridirons, skillets or spiders, broilers for rabbits
and small game, braziers, and waffle irons. Pots and pans, waflle
irons, and all other utensils that did not hang from hooks were
very long-handled to protect the hands from the heat. Round
the outside of the fireplace might be hung other iron articles:
smoking tongs to lift a live coal from the hearth to a smoker’s

TRAMMEL

THE AUTHORS gratefully acknowledge their indebt-
edness to the Masters thesis of Mary Sterrett Moses,
“Pioneer Women in Western Pennsylvania, ” for
some of the ideas contained in Chapter IX.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 41-10730

ISBN 0-8229-6044-3

Copyright 1940, University of Pittsburgh Press
Fifth printing,,1996
Eurospan, London

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

48 Pioneer Life

pipe, long-handled toasting forks, and perhaps a brass bed-
warming pan. Occasionally knives and forks were brought from
the East, along with a few pewter spoons. Sometimes, if the
settler prospered, he bought these from a peddler. Few settlers,
however, could afford pewter dishes and spoons in their first
months on the border.

Sweeping and scrubbing were done with split brooms; the
making of them occupied many a frontier boy during a rainy
day or a long winter evening. The end of a small hickory sap-
ling was split for eight or ten inches by a jackknife pressed with
the right thumb; the strips were bent back and held down with
the left hand. As the splits were cut deeper into the heart of the
sapling they became more and more brittle, until they had to
be cut off. They were then turned forward and tied firmly with
a tow string, and the pole above was cut to the size of a handle.
“Scrubs” for scouring the table and the wooden trenchers and
bowls were short hand-brooms, made like the split brooms but
from smaller saplings.

The usual working day about the cabin began when the
first morning light found its way through the forests and
through the single window. If the appointed day’s tasks were
unfinished by nightfall, working hours were not easily ex-
tended, for artificial light was exceedingly dim and smoky.
Rushlights were good enough at first, made of dried rushes
dipped in grease. Or candlewood was used—pieces of resinous
pine cut and dried during the winter. Strips of hickory bark
were sometimes lighted and stuck in the cracks of the walls.
It was the chore of many a frontier child to search the woods
every evening for seasoned sticks and strips of shellbark hickory

TOASTER

The Cabin in the Clearing 49

for lights. The pith of cane and similar reeds was soaked in fat
and held by tongs or clips, or stuck on an iron pin or a candle
hook hung from the wall.

Although in the earliest cabins candles were a luxury, some-
where near the hearth might stand a candle mold, which con-
sisted of a cluster of metal tubes on a metal base. In the poorer
cabin might be found a set of candle dips, a set of long and short
rods that was kept on a shelf year after year and to which wicks
were tied to be dipped into melted tallow.

The earliest form of lamp used on the frontier was the Betty
lamp, which was in shape as attractive as its name implies. It
was a small, shallow receptacle, two or three inches in diameter
and an inch or so in depth, shaped much like an antique
Roman lamp, oval, round, or triangular, with a projecting
nose or spout. It was filled with tallow, grease, or oil in which
was placed a piece of cotton rag or coarse wick, which hung out
on the nose to be lighted. The shape of the lamp was more
attractive than its light, for the wick dripped grease and burned
with a dull, smoky, ill-smelling flame. The Betty lamp hung
by a hook and chain from a peg in the wall, or, for close light,
from the back of a chair.

Until 1834 the only means of making fire was by flint and
steel struck together. If the fire on the hearth was allowed to
go out, and if a neighbor lived near, a child was often sent to
carry home a live coal or ember on a shovel, or on a broad strip
of green bark, or by tongs. If there was no close neighbor, the
tinder box was used. Flint, steel, and tinder were kept together
in a circular tin box. The box had two sections: in one section
the flint and a bit of steel was kept; and in the other, the tinder,

BETTY LAMP

50 Pioneer Life

a bit of dry linen rag. On the upper lid there was a place to hold
a candle to carry the newly-made light. A later improvement
made it possible to get sparks by spinning a steel wheel by
means of a piece of cord so that the wheel struck a flint fixed
in the side of a little trough full of tinder. The striking of a
light from such implements required a very fine skill, you may
be sure, and often took considerable time. That is why some
one was often sent to “bring home some fire” on a shovel.

In time comforts multiplied. New equipment, fabrics, and
tools were brought from the East or were developed close at
home. Once fairly well established and progressing, many bor-
der people left their cabins on visits and journeys back beyond
the mountains they had first crossed as emigrants. On such
trips acquaintance was made with old comforts and new luxu-
ries, and these were brought back to soften the rigors of fron-
tier life. Many a pioneer boy and girl on such a visit caught a
first glimpse of a world strange indeed to a child who knew
only the rough simplicity of the frontier. Doddridge describes
his own experience:

“I well recollect the first time I ever saw a tea cup and saucer,
and tasted coffee. My mother died when I was about six or
seven years of age. My father then sent me to Maryland with
a brother of my grandfather, Mr. Alexander Wells, to school.
At Colonel Brown’s in the mountains, at Stony creek glades, I
for the first time saw tame geese, and by bantering a pet gander
I got a severe biting by his bill, and beating by his wings. I
wondered very much that birds so large and strong should be
so much tamer than the wild turkeys. At this place, however,
all was right, excepting the large birds which they called geese.

The Cabin in the Clearing 5 1

The cabin and its furniture were such as I had been accustomed
to see in the backwoods, as my country was there called. At
Bedford everything was changed. The tavern at which my
uncle put up, was a stone house, and to make the change still
more complete it was plastered in the inside, both as to the
walls and ceilings. On going into the dining room I was struck
with astonishment at the appearance of the house. I had no
idea that there was any house in the world which was not built
of logs; but here I looked around the house and could see no
logs, and above I could see no joists; whether such a thing had
been made by the hands of man, or had grown so of itself, I
could not conjecture. I had not the courage to inquire anything
about it. When supper came on, ‘my confusion was worse con-
founded.’ A little cup stood in a bigger one with some brown-
ish looking stuff in it, which was neither milk, hominy, nor
broth; what to do with these little cups and the little spoon
belonging to them, I could not tell; and I was afraid to ask
anything concerning the use of them.

“It was in the time of the war, and the company were giving
accounts of catching, whipping and hanging the tories. The
word jail frequently occurred: this word I had never heard
before; but I soon discovered, and was much terrified at its
meaning, and supposed that we were in much danger of the
fate of the tories; for I thought, as we had come from the back-
woods, it was altogether likely that we must be tories too. For
fear of being discovered I durst not utter a single word. I there-
fore watched attentively to see what the big folks would do
with their little cups and spoons. I imitated them, and found
the taste of the coffee nauseous beyond anything I ever had

COFFEE
ROASTER

 

5 2 Pioneer Life

tasted in my life. I continued to drink, as the rest of the com-
pany did, with the tears streaming from my eyes, but when it
was to end I was at a loss to know, as the little cups were filled
immediately after being emptied. This circumstance distressed
me very much, as I durst not say I had enough. Looking atten-
tively at the grown persons, I saw one man turn his little cup
bottom upwards and put his little spoon across it. I observed
that after this his cup was not filled again; I followed his ex-
ample, and to my great satisfaction, the result as to my cup
was the same.

“The introduction of delft ware was considered by many of
the backwoods people as a culpable innovation. It was too
easily broken, and the plates of that ware dulled their scalping
and clasp knives; tea ware was too small for men; they might
do for women and children. Tea and coffee were only slops,
which in the adage of the day ‘did not stick by the ribs.’ The
idea was they were designed only for people of quality, who do
not labor, or the sick. A genuine backwoodsman would have
thought himself disgraced by showing a fondness for those
slops. Indeed, many of them have, to this day, very little respect
for them.”

When the “genuine backwoodsman” had to start cabin
housekeeping and to continue it as long as most of them did
with a nearly or quite empty purse, it is easy to understand how
he felt about the lack of comforts and luxuries. Families that
started housekeeping with twenty dollars’ worth of goods, or
less, could not very soon have even the most ordinary comforts.
John Reynolds, one of the early settlers of Meadville, wrote:

“More than half the people slept on the floor with their feet

The Cabin in the Clearing 53

to the fire. I have myself so slept in a neighbor's cabin. The
conventional customs of those years would be intolerable
now . . . Nor was there lack of modesty where one room was
bed chamber for all. One sex retired while the other disrobed,
then the light——if any—was put out and the former returned
anddisposed themselves for sleep.”

When they did retire, it was usually under bearskins. If the
cabin contained a cockloft of loose planks, this was covered
with straw for the younger members of the family, and their
sleep was disturbed very often by scurrying rats.

But improved furnishings kept pace with the building of
more substantial cabins. Cooper ware, well executed, was in
time used for holding milk, water, and other liquids. Cedar
ware, of alternate red and white staves, made its appearance
and was thought very beautiful. Men learned to make set work,
which was really coopering in miniature; for this the staves
were all attached to the bottom of the vessel by means of grooves
cut in with a clasp knife and a small chisel. Later, too, quilts
were made from patches of outworn clothing. When calico and
gingham became common, quilts were made from these ma-
terials cut into beautiful patterns.

As in all things, time was the softening influence on the
roughness of cabin life. It brought knowledge of how to make
new furnishings, and it brought money to buy them with. But
in the beginning the frontier cabin was rude, and life within
its walls was harsh. Nevertheless, it was the sett1er’s home.

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone

V

RONTIER dress was as much the product of environment

as were the log cabin and the food of the settlers. These
people whose bodies became gaunt and sinewy from privation,
exposure, constant toil, and rough diet would ill have worn
the fine fabrics and styles that prevailed in the fashionable
world of the East. Plain, coarse enough to resist hard wear,
and practical enough for protection, the clothing of the fron-
tier men and women was perfectly adapted to its time and
place. As with their cabins, their dress was the result of the
materials and methods immediately available.

The men of the frontier, chiefly, adopted in part the dress
of the Indians; they learned what was most suited to their life
as scout, as farmer-soldier, as hunter. The hunting shirt, which
hung almost to the knees and had a cape over the shoulders,
could not have been more practical. Its color, if it was of jean
or linsey, was usually tan or a red compounded of copperas and
madder. If of dressed deerskin, its color was light brown. Its
loose bosom, which could be lapped over half a foot and was
held shut by a belt tied behind, was perfectly adjusted to the
needs of a hunting trip or of a scouting expedition. In its full-

54

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone 55

ness could be stowed a small bag of meal and a piece of jerk for
the day, pieces of tow for wiping the rifle barrel, and other
necessities. From the belt in the front hung mittens, in cold
weather, and a bullet bag decorated with a squirrel’s tail. The
tomahawk hung at the right, and at the left the hunting knife
in its leather sheath. Over one shoulder was slung the powder
horn, protected by a square of deerskin. Breeches and leggings
were of the same material as the shirt. In winter deerskin was
cold and clammy; rain stiffened and cracked it. For this reason,
linsey was worn in preference to deerskin in cold or wet
weather. Moccasins were made of a single piece of deerskin
gathered along the top of the foot and from the bottom of the
heel to the ankle. They had flaps at each side that reached
some distance up the legs, and these were strapped round by
thongs so that dust, gravel, and snow could not work inside.
Although such footwear was better adapted to frontier travel
than heeled shoes, it was bad in wet weather and in winter
moccasins had to be stuffed with deer’s hair or dried leaves to
keep the feet warm.

Each family supplied its own shoemakers and tailors. Those
who could not make boots and shoes could make shoepacks.
These were somewhat like moccasins, with a tongue to which
the single piece of leather was gathered. The seam at the heel
was like that of the moccasin, but usually a sole was added to
the shoepack. All through fine weather pioneer families went
barefoot. Children did so not only about the cabin but even
to church meetings and school. The pioneer woman habitually
carried shoes or shoepacks and stockings in her hand as she
traveled the miles of rough road to occasional meetings. As she

\ L2

CANDLESTICK WITH
EXTINGUISHER

SPINNING WHEEL

56 Pioneer Life
neared the log church, or the cabin where the meeting was
held, she sat on a brookside log and put on her stockings and
shoes. On her return, when she got out of sight of the settle-
ment, she sat down once more and took them off and barefoot
continued the journey home. Her stockings and those of her
family she knit from homespun yarn.

If the frontier woman could afford to pack among her few
household goods any bit of finery of dress, she soon found it
unsuitable. Stripped of color and fashion, border life must
have pressed heavily at times on the hearts of those sturdy,
courageous wives and mothers, and especially upon the heart
of the young woman who wished to appear attractive in the
eyes of the young man looking for a wife. Rarely was there a
soft frill for girlish shoulders or throat, or a bright ribbon for
the hair. There was not even a mirror to reflect the eyes that

I grew moist wishing for such things. But the gowns of the wo-

men did not lack grace. In blouse and sleeve they took the
simplest lines of the figure. The skirts were plain, long, and
full-gathered about the hips. There was no ornament except,
perhaps, the large kerchief folded over the shoulders. The
dresses were made of homespun 1insey—woolsey in solid colors,
blue, brown, grey, or butternut yellow—colors that softened
with time, as did the texture of the cloth.

So durable and so scarce was clothing that old dresses were
re-dyed again and again. They were often thought so valuable
as to be willed to another generation. The scarcity of fine
clothes for men is shown by the fact that in 1 781 a certain mag-
istrate at Catfish Camp (now Washington), in Washington
County, who had been summoned to court and who wished to

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone 57

uphold the dignity of the occasion, had difliculty in borrowing
a pair of leather breeches from a neighbor who had also been
summoned as a juror. There was only one pair of good leather
breeches in the community. Another instance is recorded in
the history of an Old Redstone church, where we are told
that nineteen bridegrooms were married in the same blue coat
with brass buttons. For years, even in the towns, clothing in
general was extremely simple and plain, partly because rich
fabrics, jewelry, wigs, ribbons, and laces had to be brought
from the East; and the need was much greater for such things
as salt, nails, powder, and bullets.

Boys wore trousers of tow for everyday wear, and for the rare
occasions of church services, weddings, or community festivi-
ties a roundabout, or sai1or’s jacket, of fustian. Seldom indeed
could a “boughten suit” with its under jacket of cheap mar-
seilles be afforded. A boy’s winter dress included a suit of linsey,
a wool cap, mittens, and a pair of old stockings with the feet
cut out drawn on over his shoes to keep out the snow. Girls’
clothing was much like that of their mothers. The coats and
bedgowns and dresses of the women and the hunting shirts of
the men were hung in full display on wooden pegs along the
walls of a cabin. In this way they helped to relieve the bareness
of the room, and they told strangers and neighbors the wealth
or poverty of the family.

The settlers of western Pennsylvania lived a rugged, dis-
ciplined life, much out-of-doors. Their diet was simple and
coarse. The forest itself offered many foods. There was game
in the woods, fish in the streams, and bushes and plants offered
berries in abundance. Until chimneys could be constructed,

THIS BOOK is one of a series relating West-
ern Pennsylvania history, written under the
direction of the Western Pennsylvania His-
torical Survey sponsored jointly by The Buhl
Foundation, the Historical Society of Western

Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh.

58 . Pioneer Life

and often in warm weather afterwards, cooking was done at
a fire outside the cabin. Fats for frying were obtained from
meat drippings, and the fat from bear and opossum was ren-
dered into oil and stored in deerskin bags for many purposes.
Bread, the most staple modern article of diet, was a rare
commodity on the frontier. It was no uncommon thing for
families to live several months without a mouthful of bread,
although a rough substitute was made from dried pumpkin
ground into meal. And from corn meal johnnycake was made.
This was originally called “journeycake” because it was easily
made on a hot stone or in the ashes at wayside fires. As it was
diflicult to obtain alum and soda, frontier baked goods were
heavy and hard. Later, when these articles were more common,
cakes and cookies, breads and muflins could be enjoyed.
Indian corn was perhaps the most valuable single article of
food known to the settlers. In season, a boy's first task in the
morning was to pull, husk, and silk enough to roast or boil for
breakfast. As meal, it was made into johnnycake and pone. For
supper the usual dish was milk and mush. Mush was also used,
if milk was scarce, with sweetened water, molasses, maple
syrup, bear’s oil, or gravy from fried meat. Corn meal was some-
times mixed with boiled beans and baked in cakes under ashes.
“Hog and hominy” was another standard dish. For hominy
the hulls of the corn kernels were peeled off by soaking them
until they became soft in a strong leach made by running water
through wood ashes. The kernels were then soaked again and
washed, and when used were fried in venison grease or with
pork or eaten with bear’s oil and sugar.
Frontier diet contained overmuch meat because game was

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone 59

so plentiful. It was common to bag wild turkeys weighing thirty
and forty pounds and so fat that when they fell from a branch
to the ground they burst open. Woodcock, grouse, quail, and
wild pigeon were to be had for the lifting of a rifle. Within
twenty rods of the cabin a man could sometimes shoot deer,
bear, elk, or squirrels. A famous hunter, Philip Tome, wrote
that it was not unusual to see a drove of fifteen or twenty elk
crossing a river and that in two days he killed four deer and
two large, fat bears. Doddridge says that the children of his day
were taught to look upon lean venison and the breast of turkey
as “bread.” But this artifice, he says, did not succeed very well,
for after living for some time on such a diet they became sickly;
the stomach seemed to be always empty and tormented with
a sense of hunger.

Trout were plentiful in most branches of the Allegheny;
perch and pike in the Monongahela. There were also catfish,
sturgeon, and bass, as well as turtle and eel. Fish caught in the
colder Allegheny waters were said to be firmer and better
flavored than those from the Monongahela.

As salt was scarce, salt springs were highly prized by early
settlers. At first, however, salt was imported across the Penn-
sylvania mountains. Later it was brought from the Onondaga
Lake region, New York, and from the Kanawha River Valley,
West Virginia. Large underground deposits were also dis-
covered in the Kiskiminetas and Conemaugh region, but it
was not until after 1812 that this salt could be mined and sold
with profit. From the salt springs it was sometimes necessary to
boil eight hundred gallons of water to obtain a bushel of salt.
When purchased it cost three dollars a bushel; so it was used

60 Pioneer Life

sparingly, and spilling it was really a misfortune.

Forest berries were the chief fruits of the settlers. On Sun-
days it was usual for large companies of neighbors to gather
berries under the protection of armed men. In time of harvest
groups of children and young people, under a guard, resorted
to the fallen timber for the purpose of gathering blackberries,
of which tarts, or small pies, were often made for the harvest
table. The forest supplied other things good to eat in the way
of persimmons, crab apples, hickory nuts, and black walnuts.
Whatever grew wild and was edible was sought—papaws, wild
plums, wild strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and butter-
nuts. Acorns, chestnuts, and beechnuts were also used, although
chiefly as food for cattle and hogs.

Beverages were little used at meals for many years. Water
was looked on with distaste for a long time. But since most of
the settlers made whiskey, or since it could be traded for, it
became a regular item on the household list. Everycne drank
it: men, women, and children; farmers, ministers, and mechan-
ics. It was often mixed with sugar, milk, and spices. Morning
bitters were taken regularly. These were made by pouring the
whiskey over wild cherries or other bitter fruits, or over the
bark of certain shrubs and trees. It was usual to take a dram
before meals, and a whiskey bottle and two glasses were kept
on every sideboard in the region. A guest who was not offered
a glass on arrival felt that the house was inhospitable. It was
kept on the counter of every store, in the corner cupboard of
every well-to-do family. . . .

Tea soon came into use, although it was used in strange ways
until the settlers became used to it. People at first boiled the

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone 6 1

leaves, poured off the liquid, and ate the leaves. One writer
records having gone into a neighbor’s house early one morning
to see in a large pot over the fire a ham being boiled with a
mess of tea leaves instead of usual greens. Bohea tea was
brought over the mountains, like many other foods. And it
was a great day when fathers could go to the nearest settlement
“and returning, bring back, to the great joy of their families,
meal, butter, cheese, tea, sugar, and other articles of sustenance
regarded as luxuries of the most delicate kind.” Many settlers
had been accustomed to tea in their old homes and found sub-
stitutes on the frontier. Kenny says in his journal, “Gathered
mountain Tea which we used commonly 8c likes it as well as
bohea.” Black birch bark, spice bark, and sassafras were also
used for making tea.

Colfee was introduced after the Revolution. The fruit of
what was known as the coffee bean tree was used a great deal
where it was found. And by way of a substitute honey locust
pods were used in the fall.

Maple sugar and molasses were in great favor. The Pitts-
burgh Gazette, which boomed all local resources, carried a
notice in its issue for December 27, 1788, urging settlers to
make more maple sugar:

“A German farmer, in Northumberland county, Pennsyl-
vania, where the maple trees grow as plentifully as oaks or pines
in many other places, made three hundred pounds of sugar in
one year, which he sold to his neighbours and to travellers for
9d. a pound. From the value of these trees, and the many uses
to which their sap has been applied, the new settlers have
learned to preserve them with as much care, as if they were

62 Pioneer Life

apple or other fruit trees. From the facility with which they
may be cultivated, and the profit which can be had from them,
it is plain, that a farmer in an old county could raise nothing
on his farm with less labor, and nothing from which he could
derive more emolument, than the sugar maple tree.”

The same issue of the paper published recipes for the making
of maple sugar into molasses, beer, wine, and vinegar.

As life settled on the frontier and cooking utensils became
more varied, more and more delicacies appeared on frontier
tables. An old recipe book of 1790 contains recipes neatly
written out for potato pudding, Sally Lunn tea cakes, bread
and butter pudding, plum pudding, gingerbread, hard wafers,
yellow cocoanut pulfs, blancmange, sauerkraut, quince liqueur,
wine bitters, “pumcan” chips, clam soup, and “wonders,”
which we call doughnuts. Puddings must have been plentiful,
for there are recipes for puddings made with carrots, with rice,
with almonds, and with apricots. Other delightful sounding
names found there are whipped syllabub, cream cups, apple
fancy, quince cream, gooseberry fool, floating island, and snow-
balls. According to this book, those who could afford it lived
well, for there are given ways to prepare beefsteaks, veal cut-
let, lobsters, oysters, and eels, to fricassee calves’ feet, and to
make calves’-foot jelly.

The German families of western Pennsylvania had a dis-
tinct and complete school of cookery that has survived in all
its delicious variety. They had also a number of hospitable
customs, one of which had to do with butchering and sausage-
making time, or metzeln time. When the sausage was made, a
dish heaped with eight or ten pounds of the meat was sent to

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone 6 3

each of the most intimate friends of the family. Such a gift was
called metzelsupp. The friends, in turn, if they lived near, sent
hot soup and other delicacies to the family busy with butcher-
ing. If the metzelsupp was not sent to a certain neighbor, the
minister promptly learned of it and he felt that something must
be done to reconcile the offended families.

<<c:::3:»>

ROLLING PINS

 

Truck Patch and Cornfield

VI

S IN all young communities, agriculture was the chief
A industry on the western Pennsylvania frontier. Upon
it depended all classes of people: millers, innkeepers, the sol-
diers in the forts, carpenters, ministers, lawyers, and doctors.
Many a settler had only a bag of seed corn with which to start
his crops; a little later he could trade pelts at the fort or at
the government store, or could barter a day’s rail splitting
with a neighbor, for additional seeds. For the first summer an
acre of corn and a half acre truck patch was as much as he could
manage with the methods and tools at his disposal; and from
these he tried to harvest enough grain and vegetables to see him
through his first winter. With each spring sowing he cleared
more land until he gradually brought his full claim under plow
and sickle. Barring illness, Indian raids, and ravages from grass-
hoppers and other pests to which farmers were victims, he
could perhaps in several years produce enough more than his
food to barter crops for other articles. In rare instances the
military men might be supplied, and emigrants passing farther
westward, or his products might be shipped by pack horse
across country to the towns or to the rivers for transport by

 

Truck Patch and Cornfield 65

boat down the Ohio. River transport, however, was risky be-
cause of the dangerous rapids, the leaky boats, Indian attacks,
and river pirates.

The average frontier farmer who worried out a livelihood
on the forty or fifty-acre farm he had cleared by himself, or
with a few friendly helpers, seldom attempted to raise more
than would supply his own needs. He lacked all but the sim-
plest tools until he found time to make them out of the crude
materials at hand; he was usually too poor to obtain them
otherwise—at least in the first years. Improved methods that
might have produced abundance were not available, and news-
papers that carried articles on farming were scarce. Such sur-
plus as might be obtained was usually due to good luck.

The farms of the settlers took the natural formation of the
land as their boundaries-—genera11y creeks or the tops of ridges,
particularly the latter. Doddridge says that this is why so many
farms in the western part of Pennsylvania had the shape of
a bowl. This still holds true, for most farms are so laid out that
the buildings are in a valley and the tops of surrounding hills
are frequently the boundaries. Doddridge comments that our
forefathers were fond of farms so located because, as they said,
“everything comes to the farm downhill.”

The farms in western Pennsylvania were, at first, generally
fertile. Good crops were produced of almost anything sown,
even with crude methods of agriculture. Maize, wheat, rye,
flax, and Irish potatoes, in the order named, were the chief
crops raised; and besides these there were buckwheat, millet,
oats, barley, hay, peas, tobacco, and melons.

Farming methods were at best simple, at times very crude.

FLAIL

66 Pioneer Life

Farming was sometimes carried on with nothing more than an
ax, a hoe, and a scythe. Most plows were of wood, until iron
became common on the frontier. Men, women, and children
hitched themselves to the plows like horses. Oxen, however,
were used by those who could afford them, and later, horses
were used. An early traveler, Michaux, wrote an account of
his journeys through western Pennsylvania. “Planters,” he
said, “only plough the land once and do not fertilize it and
never allow it to lie fallow.” He observed that seeds were
planted by hand and covered by a hoe or a crooked stick, that
weeding and cultivation were done by hand and a hoe, and that
in ordinary planting areas good soil and small size (three or
four acres) made planting easy. Grain was reaped with the
sickle or the scythe.

Threshing was done with a flail, an instrument consisting
of a long handle, like the handle of a hoe, and another shorter
strip of wood dangling from its end by a strong leather thong.
'With this, the kernels of wheat or buckwheat were beaten from
the heads of the grain as it lay spread on a floor or on a patch of
hard-tramped ground. A man who threshed out five or six
bushels of grain in a day had done a good day’s work. Some-
times this work was done by treading the grain with oxen or
horses. Wheat was winnowed from the chaff by tossing the grain
after it had been beaten or trampled with a paddle or shovel
over a sheet spread on the ground. The wind blew away the
chaff and the sheet caught the wheat grains. W. J. McKnight
gives a vivid picture of the trampling of the grain from sheaves:

“The tramping was done by horses and by farmers who had
good or extra barn floors. The sheaves were laid in a circle, a

Truck Patch and Cornfield 67

man stood in the middle of the circle to turn up and over the
straw as needed, and then, with a boy to ride one horse and
lead another, the ‘tramping’ in this circuit commenced. This
was hard work for the boy; it made him tired and sore where
he sat down. To prevent dizziness, the travel on the circuit was
frequently reversed. One man, a boy, and two horses could
tramp out in this way in a day about fifteen bushels of wheat or
thirty-five bushels of oats.”

The use of the cradle scythe made harvesting easier arid
quicker. Several slender curved bars were arranged above and
parallel to the curved blade of the scythe itself, so that with
each sweep of the implement the grain was laid in regular rows.
In frontier grain fields men and women performed the beauti-
ful, swaying, rhythmical movement of cradling wheat; at one
broad sweep a space was cut as wide as strong arms aided by the
long blade of the scythe could reach, and at the same time the
reaped grain was laid in long golden paths.

The end of harvesting time was an excuse for what were
called frolics. These frolics were family or neighborhood cele-
brations, when fun abounded. Any musician was called a fid-
dler, whether he played a fiddle, a fife, or a flute, or any other
musical instrument that could be carried from cabin to cabin.
There were reels and jigs and boisterous songs. The harvest
had been gathered; the summer’s work had borne fruit; the
winter’s store of food was pretty safely assured; anxiety was
over, and people could forget themselves and their work in an
all-night festival; they could be care-free and hilarious. There
was no thought of having to get out early in the morning to
the fields and gardens, for the harvesting was finished and the

    
   

J".-7
CRADLE

SCYTHE


68 Pioneer Life

morrow could be a day of rest.

When harvests had been gathered and the fall sowing com-
pleted the settlers took stock of their farms. Salt and other
supplies had run low; tools were worn or broken. On the other
hand, skins and ginseng roots had collected into a store that
could be bartered for necessities. Or rye had been distilled into
whiskey, and flax had been woven into cloth. Hence, families
banded together to start a caravan over the mountains to bar-
ter such things in return for dry goods, groceries, and hard-
ware. From among themselves they chose a master driver and
one or two boys as helpers. Horses were fitted with wooden
packsaddles and hobbles of hickory withes to keep them from
roaming too far when the pack train camped in the woods at
night. The bags that were to bring back salt were filled with
fodder for the horses. Several bags of fodder were to be left at
depots on the way for the return trip. When the men and boys
had filled large wallets with jerk, boiled ham, cheese, meal,
and any other food that would keep, and when the horses had
had their bells attached and the clappers tied for the day-—to
be loosened at night when the horses were let roam-the little
caravan got under way. Many a boy had the most exciting time
of his life on such trips. And the men often visited the old set-
tlements from which they had come to the frontier, gathering
news to take back to their families and friends and carrying
small gifts and letters. Such caravans traveled frequently dur-
ing the autumn days between points in the Monongahela Val-
ley and Frederick, Hagerstown, Old Town, and Cumberland,
Maryland; or to Harrisburg and Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Few frontier farms had barns or haymows. Wheat and hay

Truck Patch and Cornfield 69

were stacked out for the winter. This was an art, for stacking
had to be done so as to turn off the rain and stacks had to be
balanced so that they would not be blown over by winds.

Every cabin had its truck patch—corn for roasting ears,
pumpkins, squash, beans, potatoes, and cabbage. And turnips
took the place of apples. One settler has said there was nothing
more pleasant than scraping and eating a juicy turnip. Water-
melons and muskmelons were commonly grown.

In the diary of James Kenny we read: “Having Planted out
abot four Hundr of Cabbage Plants, there is not I think fourty
left but what ye Grasshoppers has Eatten; they have serv’d them
so in ye King's Garden likewise.” Grasshoppers, drought, stam-
peding stock, and thunderstorms that washed out whole gar-
den beds were not the only disasters to be faced. Frequently a
whole patch of corn would be destroyed by raccoons or squir-
rels. Rats followed settlers to the frontier and became one of
the greatest pests, destroying crops and killing poultry.

Kenny's journal shows another danger: “Through Mercy
we were deliver’d last night, ye House having catch’d fire in ye
Logs 8c was blasing up ye Clabbords 8c thro ye Upper floor touch-
ing ye Roof when I Awak’d 8c heard it, so was happyly Ex-
tinguish’d without allarming ye Neighbours.” But not all fires
were so happily extinguished. Frequently a family at work at
the other end of the field would hear the crackle of fire and
turn to see their cabin enveloped in flame and smoke. Often
they returned from a short trip to a neighbor’s cabin to find,
not their hard-built home, but a smouldering mound of ashes.

Settlers learned early the value of Indian corn as a frontier
crop. In the frontier soil corn yielded, with the moderate cul-

SINGLE YOKES

70 Pioneer Life

tivation they could give it, from sixty to eighty bushels an acre.
It was food not only for themselves but also for horses, cows,
pigs, and sheep. Ground into meal, it furnished the chief article
of diet in the form of mush, johnnycake, and pone. The cobs
furnished fuel, toys for the children, and pipes for the men.
The husks were dried for bedding and for stuffing cushions.
Several weeks after the corn had been “laid by”—that is, re-
ceived its last hoeing—wheat could be sown in the cornfields.

Flax and hemp were important crops. Easily grown on any
soil, the flax gave a pure linseed oil that could be put to many
uses. The finer fiber was spun into cloth; the coarser fiber into
tow. Hemp was raised for sacking and rope. The harvesting
and preparation of flax was a series of laborious processes. It
had to be pulled, threshed, spread out to dry, taken up again,
and stacked. This finished the actual harvesting. Other opera-
tions that prepared it for spinning were delayed until winter.

Frontier winters seemed very long, for the days that closed
in so early could not be lengthened by good artificial light as
they are now. But there was plenty of work to be done, work
for which there was little time during growing and harvest sea-
sons. Winter was the time for mauling, or splitting, rails and
for fencing. The mauling was boys’ work, although strenuous
boys’ work. Blue ash was easily split with a maul and wedge,
but honey locust was different. A boy could cut and split
seventy-five rails of blue ash in a day; whereas forty to fifty a
day of locust was a good day’s work. There was a knack to maul-
ing. The power of the stroke had to be well gauged, for the
wedges flew out from a hard blow. Gentle taps were necessary

7 (—— J

V

 O get them well entered. Boys did much of the fencing, espe-
O

L

MAULS

Truck Patch and Cornfield 7 1

cially the hauling of rails by dragging them with a log chain. If
a horse could be afforded, the log chain was fastened around
the ends of six or eight rails at a time.

Pioneer farmers were of necessity handy men, with some
knowledge of several occupations, and they made many of their
own tools. Winter days and evenings were spent by the cabin
fireside getting ready a new flail, plow, or sickle for work that
was still some months off in the future.

Every pioneer farmer who could afford it owned one cow, or
more. The plentiful herbage in the unbroken wilderness made
their care easy. The pea vine and buffalo grass offered good
grazing. During May, June, and July, cattle were turned out to
range, as well as the mares, colts, and horses not yet broken. At
certain points salt was spread on the ground for them to lick
up, and these spots became rallying places. In the latter part of
winter, toward the end of February, when stored fodder had
run short, cattle were again turned out to browse. For this
purpose thickets of red or slippery elm were best, then white
elm, then pignut or white hickory. When trees were felled,
the cattle stripped the twigs and tender bark. Cattle had their
ears punched with special “earmarks” for identification, and
bells were tied to their necks so that their sound would guide
whoever rounded them up. The bringing home of cattle and
horses was usually boys’ work, as was the herding of sheep. An-
other task for boys was sheltering lambs in winter and feeding
them by the fire.

The more prosperous farmers hired men and women for
much of the farm work. By the end of the eighteenth century
farm servants were not uncommon; they were “washed, lodged,

72 Pioneer Life

and boarded” and paid a yearly wage of from ten to sixteen
pounds sterling. Men, women, and children became bound
servants, or bond servants; that is, persons who signed a bond,
or contract, for their services for a given number of years.
Children were bound out by parents, by guardians, or by
courts. When the bond was signed, to insure no mistreatment
it was torn in two, and one half was given to the master and
the other half to the servant. In case of complaint or argument
between the parties these torn, indented parts were fitted to-
gether to display the contract. From the indentures on the
edges of the torn halves came the name “indentured servants.”
This was the same method by which many of the early Euro-
pean immigrants earned their passage to America.

As settlement of the border became safe, many easterners
who were at that time considered well-to-do crossed the moun-
tains and took up farms. These farmers introduced into the
western country good—sized droves of cattle, sheep, and hogs,
because such stock could walk off the farm over the mountains
to eastern markets. They cleared larger farms than the earlier
settlers had cleared. They built gristmills and sawmills and dis-
tilleries, and they employed numbers of poor settlers. They
could ship flour, bacon, lumber, and whiskey down the Ohio
and Mississippi rivers to a good market at New Orleans. Hugh
Henry Brackenridge, referring to transportation by water as
compared to hauling in wagons, had said that people in the
East, when they considered moving to the frontier, “calculated
oftentimes that a farm in the neighborhood of these rivers,
was nearer the market of any part of the world than a farm
within twenty miles of Philadelphia.” At New Orleans goods

Truck Patch and Cornfield 73

were unloaded from river boats and the cargoes transferred to
seagoing vessels without payment of duty. This right was called
the right of deposit and had been won in 1795 from Spain,
which controlled the mouth of the Mississippi. But when Na-
poleon in 1800 acquired from Spain the province of Louisiana,
which included the land at the mouth of the Mississippi, the
western farmers were alarmed at the prospect of French con-
trol because France was strong enough to close New Orleans to
western commerce and keep it closed. Eastern merchants, also,
were concerned over the question, but they had a viewpoint
different from that of the West. An open port at New Orleans
would take much of the trade that might otherwise come to
them. But in April, 1803, President Jefferson ended the dis-
pute by purchasing Louisiana from France for the United
States, and the Mississippi and Ohio rivers were opened finally
to the trade of the western farmers. From this time on they
could transport their wheat, flour, beef, bacon, and lumber
down river to a good seaport.

 

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-maker

VII

‘ N [HEN the cabin was built and furnished, the grain
reaped and stacked, the pioneer turned his attention to
other needs. Grinding grain; spinning and weaving cloth, which
then had to be dyed and made into clothing; tanning leather for
shoes and breeches; coopering buckets, tubs, and tankards;
mending pots and pans; making plowshares, candle holders,
and griddles—a1l these things were generally done by one
family for itself. A pioneer family was a complete little world,
supplying its every demand by its own efforts. In such practices
lay the beginnings of the industrial empire of western Penn-
sylvania, which today satisfies our needs in a very different way
from that by which the first settlers supplied theirs.
Near the doorway of every cabin stood the hominy block,
a stump hollowed by fire or ax to serve as a mortar in which
corn was ground by a stone, an ax head, or a sapling made into
a s-weep. One end of the sweep was wedged under the bottom
log of the cabin or under a heavy stone. The other end was
supported by a forked pole placed upright about one-third of
the way from the free end of the sweep and serving as a ful-
crum. To the free end of the wedged sapling was attached a

74

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker 75

piece of sapling about five or six inches thick, the lower end
of which was rounded to serve as a pestle or pounder. Thus a
person’s weight would drive the pestle down upon the corn
in the hollow stump and the wedged sapling would spring
back after each stroke lifting the pestle with it. Sometimes a
wooden crosspiece was attached to the pestle so that two persons
could work, one at each side. When the corn kernels were soft,
a simpler device was used—a grater made from a piece of punc-
tured sheet metal fastened to a board.

In time the hand mill was devised, a distinct advance over
the grater and the mortar. At each stage of development, pio-
neer life reproduced the long process of history. Each commu-
nity was compelled to start from the point almost of savagery,
but advanced quickly through each successive stage until it
entered into the vast and complex enterprises made possible by
the steam engine. The hand mill and then the tub mill were
steps along the way. The hand mill consisted of two circular
stones, one laid on top of the other; the lower one was called
the bed stone, the upper was called the runner. These were
encased in a hoop-like wooden ring with a spout for discharging
the meal. A rod was let into a hole in the upper surface of the
runner stone near its outer edge. The upper end of the rod, or
turning handle, was so arranged that two persons could work
the mill together. The tub mill was a water mill; consequently
it could be used only so long as the spring freshets were strong
enough to supply power. Not much grinding could be done by
this method after May, for there was seldom enough water
except immediately after a summer storm. Once the grain was
ground it was sifted through deer-skins that had been dried,

  
  
  

SWEEP MILL

FOFLGRINDING CORN J
n ‘°[~ _\ 

SCUTCHING BOARD
AND KNIFE.

76 Pioneer Life
stretched over a hoop, and punctured with a hot wire.

At least a half acre of flax made up part of every frontier
farm. It could be grown in almost any soil with little cultiva-
tion. After cutting, it was allowed to bleach for three weeks in
the meadow, in dew, rain, and sun. Under this process the
inner wood of the stem rotted. The flax was then raked and
tied in large bundles and laid away in a dry place until after
the fall wheat sowing, when it was completely dried out over a
slow fire. The next process was the breaking of the flax. It was
spread over a wooden frame, which had three blades of wood
across the top and two more on a handle that was lifted from
a hinge. As the hinged part was brought down the two blades
fitted between the three. This broke the brittle fibers of the
flax stems. The next step took it to the scutching board, where,
with a kind of broad wooden sword called a scutching knife,
it was cleaned of the broken bits of woody stalk. It was then
hackled; that is, the fibers were pulled through the long, steel
teeth of a comb called a hackle, and by this means the tow, or
coarser fibers, were separated from the flax fibers. The spin-
ning wheel then spun the tow into coarse yarn and the flax
into a yarn of finer quality. The “scutchin’ tow” was woven
into cloth to be used for grain bags and coarser kinds of cloth-
ing. The finer fibers were spun on small spinning wheels into
varying grades of linen thread for shirts and frocks.

As important as the tasks that made up the pioneer flax
industry were those of the wool industry. Early summer was
sheep-washing time; the sheep were taken to a stream or pond,
plunged into the water, and given a rough rubbing. This was
supposed to cleanse and purify the fleece before it was shorn.

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker 77

When warm weather had settled into summer the shearing
took place. Neighbor helped neighbor, proudly competing for
speed but careful to shear the thick-wooled, wrinkle-covered
sheep with the fewest “nicks” on the hide. Shearing was back-
breaking work, for the struggling animal had to be held with
one hand while the other hand used the shears. A skillful
shearer removed the fleece so that it lay on the ground with
its inner and whiter side up, almost wholly one blanket-like
piece, which was rolled or folded and tied with tow twine. This
might be done by hand or with the aid of a wool-tying table,
which pressed the fleece into the smallest possible bundle. The
carding of the wool into rolls for the winter's weaving and
knitting was done by hand before the carding mill came into
use. Each roll was a slender batch of stretched fibers from
eighteen to twenty-four inches in length and as thick as a
finger. These rolls were spun on the big wheel into yarn, which
was scoured, dyed, and woven into cloth, which then had to be
fulled; that is, shrunk and thickened. Some of the yarn, of
course, was used for knitting.

When at last the cloth was made, it was ready to be dyed.
Sometimes indigo was bought for dyeing blue, and madder for
red, but usually the inner bark of the white walnut was used,
and this produced the peculiar and permanent shade of dull
yellow that was so characteristic of pioneer dress. The hulls of
black walnuts gave a rusty black; copperas was used as a fixative
when there was money to buy it, since it afforded a better tint
for the black. Because flax was colored with difficulty and wool
more easily took the dye, the typical material for a frontier
dress was a linen and wool mixture called linsey-woolsey,

 

II

III
IV

VI
VII
VIII

IX

XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI

XVII

CONTENTS

The Way of the Frontier
First Footprints

How the Settler Got His Land
The Cabin in the Clearing

Linsey and Buckskin: Venison and Pone

Truck Patch and Cornfield

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker

Growing Up on the Frontier
jigging It Off

“Indians in the Valley!”
Yarbs, Doctors, and Charms
The Log Church

Frontier Justice

From Indian Trail to Turnpike
Life in the Towns

The First Factories

The Road to the Past
Glossary

78 Pioneer Life

shortened in everyday speech to “linsey.” For this, flax con-
stituted the chain and wool the filling. In poor families linsey
was often made of nettle bark. Every pioneer woman could
spin, weave, knit, and sew for every member of her family. In
sewing, the jackets and leggings of the men were more often
than not cut out with a butcher knife; an awl served as needle,
and deer sinew for thread.

Let a pioneer speak for himself concerning another of the
early occupations. Daniel Drake, whose parents early settled in
Kentucky under conditions not very different from those in
western Pennsylvania, wrote that the most important manu-
facturing done by his mother and himself as a boy was soap-
making.

“Father constructed the ‘ash-hopper,’ which was composed
of clapboards, arranged in an inverted pyramid. In the bot-
tom was thrown some husks, or straw, or dry buffalo grass, to
act as a strainer. It was filled with ashes, on the broad surface of
which the water was, from time to time, poured by the bucket-
ful. A trough beneath received the lye, which, over a fire in
the yard, was boiled down till it was strong enough to float an
egg. The fat was then added, and the boiling continued till the
soap came. By the aid of salt we sometimes made an imperfect
hard soap, to be used for special purposes.”

Tanning of leather for jackets, shoepacks, boots, and other
uses was another occupation. A trough was sunk in the ground
to its upper edge. Oak and hemlock bark obtained in spring from
clearing and fencing the land was dried, and on wet days when
work outdoors was inadvisable the time was used to shave and
pound the collected bark on a wooden block. When the hair

  

CARDS

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker 79

had been removed from the hide by a lye made from ashes, the
hide was soaked with the bark in the trough. It was then cur,-
ried, or smoothed, by the turned edge of a drawing knife and
finally dressed with bear’s oil, hog’s lard, or tallow. If the
leather was to be blackened, the blacking was made from soot
and hog’s lard.

Sugar-making is also described by Drake:

“There were but few sugar trees on father's land, and he
rented a ‘camp,’ as the grove was called, about two miles off.
Our tapping was with the axe. The troughs were rudely dug
out with the same tool, and generally of buckeye, as being a
soft wood, which, moreover, was not apt to crack during the
summer. One or two iron kettles, with the old iron pot, were
swung over a log fire, before which was a kind of half-faced
camp, covered with clapboards, as a shelter from the rain.
While father did the wood chopping and kept up the fires, it
was my province to drive ‘old gray’ with an open barrel on
a sled, turning and winding through the woods, to collect the
sugar water. Sometimes we staid all night, but generally got
home before morning. In the best sugar weather the water ran
only in the day, and when the flow had not been very great, we
would bring the sugar with us. When it had, the ‘graining’
had to be postponed till the next day. . . . VV e took milk along,
and made spicewood tea with the syrup; the time was that in
which many trees and shrubs had begun to unfold their buds;
the birds had begun to chirp and carol; the leaves of the cane
were green; the wild turkeys occasionally paid us a visit; and,
to top out the whole, we were laying in a good supply of sugar
for the coming year, and I should add, of molasses, too.”

I/./

MEN‘.-3 BOOTS

80 Pioneer Life

In summer, when the scanty flowers that could grow in the
shade of the forests had sweetened the warm air sufficiently to
attract bees, men and boys organized bee hunts. Sometimes a
stone was heated, and on its surface a little honey was spread.
As the sweet fumes rose the bees gathered, sipped their fill,
and then made off in their proverbial straight line to the bee
tree, where the men and boys who could follow the bees’ swift
flight found a rich store of honey. Honeybees were not native to
this country, but always kept a little in advance of the white
settlers and were called by the Indians the white man's flies.

Autumn brought the annual “killing,” or butchering.
Calves, hogs, and sheep were tied and thrown to the ground
or hung from a branch head down, and their throats were cut.
At the cutting up and skinning, at the grinding of sausage
meat, and at the salting and smoking not only men and women
worked, but also boys and girls—carrying hot water to the scald-
ing trough, scraping the hair from the skins, climbing on stools
to hold the sweet smelling hams while mother or father fas-
tened them to the rafters. And when saltpeter for curing was
available, children ground it in the hominy block.

Another autumnal duty was the making of a winter's stock
of candles. A day was set, when, over a good fire in the chimney
place, a kettle filled with melted tallow was hung from the lug
pole or crane. Two long poles were laid from one chair to an-
other, or from one stool to another. Across these poles were
laid sticks of from fifteen to eighteen inches in length, called
candle rods. To each candle rod were tied eight or ten strongly
twisted wicks. The wicks, held by the rod, were dipped in the
melted tallow and returned to their place on the poles. Each

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker 81

row was dipped in turn; the tallow on each wick hardened
slowly between dips and the candles gradually grew in size.
Too quick cooling made the candles brittle, and they cracked;
so a good dipper worked carefully. On a good cooling day,
when the room was not too warm, a good worker could make a
stock of two hundred candles.

Candles were also run into a candle mold—a group of tin or
pewter cylinders set on a base. Many an early household owned
such a mold, usually of six cylinders, as part of its necessary
kitchen outfit. The wicks were attached to a wire or a nail
placed across the open top of each cylinder and hung down in
the center. Melted tallow was carefully poured in around each
wick. This work was often done by traveling candlemakers,
carrying large molds that made sixteen to eighteen candles at
a time.

Wax candles were made by pressing or pouring beeswax
around the wicks. Deer fat, moose suet, and bear grease were all
carefully saved in frontier settlements and rendered into tal-
low for candles, with the careful skimmings of meat drippings.
If household labors were not too urgent, the frontier woman,
on mild autumn days when the last yellow sunlight of the year
fell over her doorsill, might enjoy a quiet hour while molding
the candles that, burning, would fill the cabin with pungent
fumes. ’

As candles were precious, they were carefully used and were
kept in candle boxes to keep them from the light so that they
would not discolor. They were burned to the very last bit by a
small frame of pins and rings called a save-all. Many and vari-
ous were the shapes and sizes of candle holders, from the hooks

    

if ‘T   ' CANDLE HOLDS

// E?

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SLAW CUTTER

82 Pioneer Life

and sconces suspended on the wall to the candlesticks of many
beautiful shapes kept by the fireplace on a special small table,
called the candle table. Candle beams were crude chandeliers
of metal or wooden hoops with upright pins or prongs upon
which the candles were stuck. On a convenient tray were kept
a pair of snuffers with which to trim the wicks, and a little
metal cone, an extinguisher, to be put over the flames like a
hood.

As kettles and pails and cups of tin or pewter became more
widely used on the frontier, a new trade grew. Worn with use,
bent, punctured, and cracked, these had to be mended from
time to time, and the man who did this was the tinker. At first,
the same head of the family who in summer had been farmer
and in autumn had been butcher and miller and hunter now
became tinker as well. With a simple soldering iron and some
lead brought over the mountains (until a lead mine or two had
been discovered) he patched up the house ware. Then when

- tin and pewter had become common enough so that the repair-

ing supplied one man with steady work, the itinerant tinker
made his appearance. He made his regular rounds on a pony,
under him a pair of saddlebags that held his molds, his solder-
ing irons, and other tools. At each cabin door he stopped to
patch holes in tin cups, to make old pewter basins new, to cast
new pewter plates, or to hammer out new basins on a block.

Coopering, too, became a pioneer occupation. Men learned
to make staves and hoops and to cooper them into barrels,
tubs, milk pails, and kegs, or into smaller articles such as tank-
ards and noggins.

Rifle repairing took up many an hour. To straighten a gun

Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker 8 3

barrel all the frontier gunsmith needed was a small depression
in the surface of a stump or a log and a wooden mallet or maul.
He kept his gun in excellent condition at all times. There were
also bullets to be cast, flints to be shaped, and powder horns
to be carved.

Long, full days were those spent by the men and women of
the frontier. And long, too, were the evenings. The sunny
fields, the shaded woods, the stones by the roadside, and the
creek that flowed back of the cabin all gave materials to be
worked with, and the hands that grew hard and stained were
often the only source of power. Although backs ached from a
long day’s labors with ax and knife, at the scutching board, or
at the hand mill, yet night brought its own household indus-
tries: the carding and spinning of wool, the making of split
brooms, the coopering of a new tub, or the tinkering of a pew-
ter basin. Such household industries brought the family to-
gether, and while the logs crackled and fell and the fat-lamp
sputtered, the big wheel hummed as it spun its thread; tales
were told then of another kind of life. Each member of the
family occupied himself with his allotted task, keeping feet
and fingers employed, but the mind wandered off on its own
paths, into the lands of long legends and adventures.

BUTTER TUB

 

Growing Up on the Frontier

VIII

I KN OW of no scene in civilized life more primitive than such
a cabin hearth as that of my mother,” wrote Dr. Daniel
Drake in recalling what must have been a typical day in the
life of a frontier child. He continues:

“In the morning, a buckeye backlog and hickory forestick
resting on stone andirons, with a Johnny-cake on a clean ash
board, set before it to bake, a frying pan with its long handle
resting on a split-bottomed 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 Lizzy dress them!

“Then came blowing the conch-shell for father in the field,
the howling of old Lion, and the momentary application of the
shell to my ear, to hear the roaring of the sea, which, like all
things in that fathomless profound, was a great mystery. Then
came the gathering round the table, the blessing, the dull clat-
ter of pewter spoons in pewter basins, the talk about the stock
and crops, the inquiry whether ‘Dannel’ could be spared from

84

Growing Up on the Frontier 85
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 fields and collect the
greens; in summer and autumn, to explore the ‘truck patch,’
or our little garden; and from among the weeds dig or pull
whatever might be in season. If I afterward went to the field,
my culinary labors ceased till night. If not, they continued
through the day, and consisted of participation in all that was
going on; now tending the child; now hunting eggs to boil;
now making up the fire; now sweeping up the hearth, and
putting things to rights; now cleaning the old iron candle-stick;
now looking at the sill of the front door, to see by the shadow
of one of its cheeks whether it was time I should put the pota-
toes in; now twisting a fork in the meat to know if it were
nearly done; and now fetching a pail of fresh water, that father
might wash his hands and take a drink.

“At night, all without being attended to, and the family
collected, the iron mush-pot must be swung and supplied with
water. Mother, or Lizzy (when old enough), generally stirred
in the meal, but ‘Dannel’ often stirred the mush. This was, of
course, a standing dish for the younger children, but father
and mother drank their bohea tea (and abominable stuff it
was; after a while, however, they reached the greater luxury
of hyson skin). As often as possible, mother would engage in
making pumpkin pies, in which, con amore, I generally bore
a part; and one of these more commonly graced the supper
than the dinner—table. At the proper season, ‘wonders’ made
our supper, and although I never made the dough, I was quite

CANDLE STAND

86 Pioneer Life

au fait in lifting them, at the proper time, out of the boiling
fat, and equally adroit in managing them at the table.”

In the little community of the cabin clearing children were
important citizens. They lightened the labors of both men
and women. And at fourteen a boy was given a rifle and as-
signed his loophole in the fort, where he stood shoulder to
shoulder with the men. A boy’s life or a girl's was filled with
chores that were half work, half play. Getting in wood, making
fires, feeding stock, and going to the mill were parts of the daily
round and could themselves have filled any average day. But
these were not all. Other tasks were the grating and pounding
of corn, bringing water from the spring, and carrying clothes
to and from the pond on wash days. There was the churning,
and the Saturday scrubbing and scouring with split brooms.

Children helped at all stages of woolen clothmaking from
the shearing of the sheep to the sewing of the garments. Drake
says that at twelve years of age he could handle the shears well
in sheep shearing. And he comments on the picking of the wool
when it was thick with cockleburs: “In this wearisome labor
I have toiled through many a long rainy day, with my sisters
and sometimes father and mother around the same fleece.’.’
The carding of the wool and the doubling and twisting of the
thread was work in which the children could take real pleasure;
the buzz of the big spinning wheel, as it increased in velocity,
rose from the lowest to the highest musical note in the octave.
Then came reeling into skeins and winding the yarn into balls.

In flax culture and in the preparation of linsey and linen
young people took part. With father in the flax patch and at
the swingling board, or with mother hackling out the tow and

Growing Up on the Frontier 87

preparing the knots of beautiful linen fiber for the distalf, both
boys and girls worked. Pulling, spreading out to rot, and break-
ing the flax were dirty and disagreeable tasks; but bleaching
the cloth was pleasant and picturesque—spreading the linen
on the grass, weighting itdown with stones and sticks, carrying
water from the spring to sprinkle the ever whitening material
as the high summer sun fell upon it, until it was ready for
making into new shirts.

Like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, who themselves
were survivals of the pioneer boy, every young fellow who
could possibly afford the eighteen pence it cost had a barlow
knife, a kind of one-bladed jackknife. Like the ax, the rifle,
and the spinning wheel, the barlow knife stands as a symbol
of those days before machinery turned out the necessary arti-
cles for daily life. Daniel Webster called the barlow knife the
direct forerunner of the cotton gin and of countless other
American inventions. It was indeed one of the most useful and
most beloved articles on the frontier and was valued more than
any other boyhood possession by generations of young whit-
tlers, who, with it, learned their first lessons in making tools
and toys. Not only were whistles, popguns, corn-stalk fiddles,
bows, arrows, windmills, and water wheels carved by its blade,
but also Indian brooms, scrubs, sled runners, hames for har-
nesses, thills for carts, hay hooks, pothooks, whip stocks, feed
boxes, goose and hog yokes, spade and rake handles, stanchions,
flails, cheese hoops and ladders, butter paddles, and birch bark
baskets were all made by the boys’ hands and the barlow knife.

How much depended for comfort on the right use of this
knife! The carving of an ax helve, for instance, was a real art.