RURAL LIVING CONDITIONS 319 



It was the terrible accidents arising from the highly 

 inflammable quality of this early kerosene that con- 

 strained the legislature to provide for the inspection 

 of oil. 



The Xew Englander or Xew Yorker who brought 

 his family to the Michigan wilds in the era of pio- 

 neering, not only gave them a life of primitive sim- 

 plicity, hardness and toil, but he inflicted on them 

 the unspeakable loneliness of the wilderness home- 

 builder. "Our nearest neighbors were on the west, 

 seven miles," L. D. Watkins writes; "north, four 

 miles; east, four miles; and south, six miles. Thus 

 we were nearly in the center of a wilderness about 

 ten miles in diameter, on which no white man had 

 ever made a mark since the Government survey." 

 "No human tongue can tell the hours of loneliness 

 men and women endured," says the Scotchman, Eob- 

 ert Malcom, pioneer of Oakland County. "It was 

 no unusual sight to see the family — old and young — 

 strike out through the woods to a neighbor's cabin, 

 a distance of two or three miles, simply to find com- 

 panionship." "AYe could appreciate, in its full ex- 

 tent, the solitude, the boundlessness, the sublimity 

 of this earliest of earth's offspring — the grand, old, 

 untutored forest," writes Bela Hubbard. "He who 

 has only traversed woodlands where at every few miles 

 he meets a road leading to civilized belongings, knows 

 little of the sense of awe inspired by a forest soli- 

 tude that has never echoed to the woodman's axe and 

 where every footstep conducts only into regions more 

 mysterious and uid^nown." To E. C. Kedzie "it was 



