lk handkerchief knotted round his head, and his feet
shod with moccasins or strong rawhide sandals. If young, he walked or
rode a shaggy pony; if older, he drove his creaking, springless wooden
cart, untired and unironed, in which his family sat on stools.[29]

The grades of society were much more clearly marked than in similar
communities of our own people. The gentry, although not numerous,
possessed unquestioned social and political headship and were the
military leaders; although of course they did not have any thing like
such marked preeminence of position as in Quebec or New Orleans, where
the conditions were more like those obtaining in the old world. There
was very little education. The common people were rarely versed in the
mysteries of reading and writing, and even the wives of the gentry were
often only able to make their marks instead of signing their names.[30]

The little villages in which they dwelt were pretty places,[31] with
wide, shaded streets. The houses lay far apart, often a couple of
hundred feet from one another. They were built of heavy hewn timbers;
those of the better sort were furnished with broad verandas, and
contained large, low-ceilinged rooms, the high mantle-pieces and the
mouldings of the doors and windows being made of curiously carved wood.
Each village was defended by a palisaded fort and block-houses, and was
occasionally itself surrounded by a high wooden stockade. The
inhabitants were extravagantly fond of music and dancing;[32] marriages
and christenings were seasons of merriment, when the fiddles were
scraped all night long, while the moccasined feet danced deftly in time
to the music.

Three generations of isolated life in the wilderness had greatly changed
the characters of these groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and
adventurous warriors. It was inevitable that they should borrow many
traits from their savage friends and neighbors. Hospitable, but bigoted
to their old customs, ignorant, indolent, and given to drunkenness, they
spoke a corrupt jargon of the French tongue; the common people were even
beginning to give up reckoning time by months and years, and dated
events, as the Indians did, with reference to the phenomena of nature,
such as the time of the floods, the maturing of the green corn, or the
ripening of the strawberries.[33] All their attributes seemed alien to
the polished army-officers of old France;[34] they had but little more
in common with the lat