Thus, when he took up his claim of three hundred and sixty acres of
land in the wilderness of northern Michigan, and sent my mother and
five young children to live there alone until he could join us eighteen
months later, he gave no thought to the manner in which we were to make
the struggle and survive the hardships before us. He had furnished us
with land and the four walls of a log cabin. Some day, he reasoned, the
place would be a fine estate, which his sons would inherit and in
the course of time pass on to their sons--always an Englishman's most
iridescent dream. That for the present we were one hundred miles from
a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen
miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats; that we
were wholly unlearned in the ways of the woods as well as in the most
primitive methods of farming; that we lacked not only every comfort, but
even the bare necessities of life; and that we must begin, single-handed
and untaught, a struggle for existence in which some of the severest
forces of nature would be arrayed against us--these facts had no weight
in my father's mind. Even if he had witnessed my mother's despair on the
night of our arrival in our new home, he would not have understood it.
From his viewpoint, he was doing a man's duty. He was working steadily
in Lawrence, and, incidentally, giving much time to the Abolition cause
and to other big public movements of his day which had his interest and
sympathy. He wrote to us regularly and sent us occasional remittances,
as well as a generous supply of improving literature for our minds.
It remained for us to strengthen our bodies, to meet the conditions in
which he had placed us, and to survive if we could.

We faced our situation with clear and unalarmed eyes the morning after
our arrival. The problem of food, we knew, was at least temporarily
solved. We had brought with us enough coffee, pork, and flour to last
for several weeks; and the one necessity father had put inside the cabin
walls was a great fireplace, made of mud and stones, in which our food
could be cooked. The problem of our water-supply was less simple, but
my brother James solved it for the time by showing us a creek a long
distance from the house; and for months we carried from this creek, in
pails, every drop of water we used, save that which we caught in troughs
when the rain fell.

We held a family council after breakfast, and in this, t