The Shenandoah

Pioneers

40 V PIONEERS * * * AS THE YEARS PASSED life took on a pattern in the Valley—a pattern of small log cabins in the clearings or the grasslands, of long laborious days, tuned to the slow change of the seasons, of lonely silent nights broken by wolves of whippoorwills. Try to imagine the silence of the Valley, where a man could work all day with his own hands for company, hearing the wind whisper, hearing the doves, hearing the corn stretch and crackle in the heat, hearing the singing silence of the earth itself. A man had his hands and arms for company, and his children helping in the fields; and for the evening, his children and his wife. His wife, and time to watch the blue deepen into purple, to see the darkness slowly cover the mountains and the trees. Day ended with the darkness. There was no road to go on, and nowhere to go. There were no lights to read by, and no books to read. A man who had a Bible had a library. The more luxurious might add a copy of Golden Apples in Silver Shells; Selected Passages from Holy Writ. With darkness it was time to make the cabin fast against the night, to shutter out the wide black spaces where no lights glowed, the panthers , bears, wolves, wildcats, and the loneliness, the loneliness most of all. Man and his labors vanished in the darkness, and the wilderness flowed back, lapping the cabin threshold like persistent water, turning each home into an island in the night. During these hours men did not pioneers 41 like to leave their families, but all slept close and warm together until day came through the chinks in the shutters, and called them to stir out again in the fresh morning. In such a society everyone turned out to bid newcomers welcome. Weddings and buryings, harvesting, log rolling, house-raisings, these were the occasions for a gathering and a feast. A newly married couple could count on all the men and boys to help them build, to set the cornerstone and lay the sleepers, to raise the log walls, and lay the puncheon floor. A long porch across the front gave saddle storage room and shade in summer. When they had cut a loophole, hung an oaken door, built a stone chimney, and chinked the cracks, the work was done. A band of energetic men could finish a home in three days. But after the wedding came the work. Then the countryside was lonely and quiet as before. From dawn to dark the husband dug and planted, hunted or harvested and the wife ground corn for journeycake and pone, cooked hog and hominy, milk and mush, spun and wove flax and wool for linsey-woolsey hunting shirts, and bore a long succession of children alone or with a helping neighbor woman. Some children died in every family, but those who lived grew strong. The pioneers attributed the diseases of children to worms, and dosed them with the scrapings of a pewter spoon. For croup, the specific was onion or garlic juice; for fever, sweating with snakeroot or purging with walnut bark; for the itch, a salve of brimstone and hog lard; for burns, a poultice of Indian meal or slippery elm; for snakebite , anything and everything that an old wife or Indian could suggest. Erysipelas could be circumscribed by the blood of a black cat, and the Germans had incantations for hemorrhage, sprains, toothache, or bullets. The men developed rheumatism, for their moccasins, although warm enough when stuffed with leaves, became waterlogged on wet days. All backwoods men learned to sleep with their feet to the fire. It was not a life for soft and easy people. There was the night loneliness and the wide dark, there was the endless laboriousness of the 42 the shenandoah self-sustaining life, there was the dread of unattended illness, there was hunger. When the Doddridges arrived they thought they had brought with them enough Indian meal to last until the first harvest, but when it gave out they had to depend on meat alone, for they did not know what roots and herbs were edible. They told the children that bear was meat, and the white breast of turkey was bread, but the children grew thin on the diet. Every day they went to watch the potatoes, corn, squash and pumpkins...