In the best light from the
greased paper windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on
which the housewife made cloth for the family's garments. Over
the fireplace or beside the doorway, and suspended usually on
stags' antlers, hung the firearms and the yellow powderhorns, the
latter often carved in Indian fashion with scenes of the hunt or
war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons, plates, bowls,
and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of large
flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding
block for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring,
the men of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins
to be sent out with the trade caravan, while the women sewed,
made moccasins or mended them, in the light of pine knots or
candles of bear's grease. The larger children might be weaving
cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of hickory twigs; and
there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for scalping
knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the days
have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through
the young leafage.
The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries,
generally settled in national groups, each preserving its own
speech and its own religion, each approaching frontier life
through its own native temperament.
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