would go to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts--and he killed many
a wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.

The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous. What it
lacked of the "whereas" and "inasmuch" of legal ink it made up in
sound hickory. In fact, when we review the activities of this solid yet
elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic phases of Back Country
life, we are moved to wonder if the pioneers would have been the
same race of men had they been nurtured beneath a less strenuous and
adaptable vegetation! The hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all
implements and furnishings where the demand was equally for lightness,
strength, and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building,
his block mortars hollowed--by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, his
solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so forth.
It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the
junior members of his household, and his most cogent argument, as a
citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the dishonest
adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs.
Before he raised stock, the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white
liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his
store of bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this
tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red man,
whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were
fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women first made pohickory
butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee towns, so we are told,
first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth!

A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia
or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps,
after all the perfect home--a place where the personal life and the work
life are united and where nothing futile finds space. Every object in
the cabin was practical and had been made by hand on the spot to answer
a need. Besides the chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others
made of slabs set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs
served as a movable table; the permanent table was built against the
wall, its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into
the wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress of pine
needles, chaff, or dried moss. In th