kedness. The man tanned the buckskin,
the woman was tailor and shoemaker, and made the deerskin sifters to be
used instead of bolting-cloths. There were a few pewter spoons in use;
but the table furniture consisted mainly of hand-made trenchers,
platters, noggins, and bowls. The cradle was of peeled hickory bark.[41]
Ploughshares had to be imported, but harrows and sleds were made without
difficulty; and the cooper work was well done. Chaff beds were thrown on
the floor of the loft, if the house-owner was well off. Each cabin had a
hand-mill and a hominy block; the last was borrowed from the Indians,
and was only a large block of wood, with a hole burned in the top, as a
mortar, where the pestle was worked. If there were any sugar maples
accessible, they were tapped every year.

But some articles, especially salt and iron, could not be produced in
the backwoods. In order to get them each family collected during the
year all the furs possible, these being valuable and yet easily carried
on pack-horses, the sole means of transport. Then, after seeding time,
in the fall, the people of a neighborhood ordinarily joined in sending
down a train of peltry-laden pack-horses to some large sea-coast or
tidal-river trading town, where their burdens were bartered for the
needed iron and salt. The unshod horses all had bells hung round their
neck; the clappers were stopped during the day, but when the train was
halted for the night, and the horses were hobbled and turned loose, the
bells were once more unstopped.[42] Several men accompanied each little
caravan, and sometimes they drove with them steers and hogs to sell on
the sea-coast. A bushel of alum salt was worth a good cow and calf, and
as each of the poorly fed, undersized pack animals could carry but two
bushels, the mountaineers prized it greatly, and instead of salting or
pickling their venison, they jerked it, by drying it in the sun or
smoking it over a fire.

The life of the backwoodsmen was one long struggle. The forest had to be
felled, droughts, deep snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest fires, and
all the other dangers of a wilderness life faced. Swarms of deer-flies,
mosquitoes, and midges rendered life a torment in the weeks of hot
weather. Rattlesnakes and copperheads were very plentiful, and, the
former especially, constant sources of danger and death. Wolves and
bears were incessant and inveterate foes of the live stock, and the
cougar or panther occasionally at