s than the Indians,
yet with all the ideals of the New England they left behind them; girls
who had to have all the endurance of the young "Bird Woman" and yet keep
up the traditions and the habits of the fine old home life of Louisa
Alcott.

One of these pioneer girls, who certainly would have been patrol leader
of her troop and marched them to victory with her, was Anna Shaw. In
1859, a twelve-year old girl, with her mother and four other children
she traveled in a rough cart full of bedding and provisions, into the
Michigan woods where they took up a claim, settling down into a log
cabin whose only furniture was a fireplace of wood and stones.

She and her brothers floored this cabin with lumber from a mill, and
actually made partitions, an attic door and windows. They planted
potatoes and corn by chopping up the sod, putting seed under it and
leaving it to Nature--who rewarded them by giving them the best corn
and potatoes Dr. Shaw ever ate, she says in her autobiography.

For she became a preacher and a physician, a lecturer and organizer,
this sturdy little Scout, even though she had to educate herself,
mostly. They papered the cabin walls with the old magazines, after they
had read them once, and went all over them, in this fashion, later. So
eagerly did she devour the few books sent them from the East, that when
she entered college, years later, she passed her examinations on what
she remembered of them!

They lived on what they raised from the land; the pigs they brought in
the wagon with them, fish, caught with wires out of an old hoop skirt,
and corn meal brought from the nearest mill, twenty miles away. Ox teams
were the only means of getting about.

Anna and her brothers made what furniture they used--bunks, tables,
stools and a settle. She learned to cut trees and "heart" logs like a
man. After a trying season of carrying all the water used in the
household from a distant creek, which froze in the winter so that they
had to melt the ice, they finally dug a well. First they went as far as
they could with spades, then handed buckets of earth to each other,
standing on a ledge half-way down; then, when it was deep enough, they
lined it with slabs of wood. It was so well made that the family used it
for twelve years.

Wild beasts prowled around them, Indians terrified them by sudden
visits, the climate was rigorous, amusements and leisure scanty. But
this brave, handy girl met every job that came to her