Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 145 



each little caravan, and sometimes they drove with 

 them steers and hogs to sell on the seacoast. A 

 bushel of alum salt was worth a good cow arid calf, 

 and as each of the poorly fed, undersized pack ani- 

 mals could carry but two bushels, the mountaineers 

 prized it greatly, and instead of salting or pickling 

 their venison, they jerked it, by drying it in the sun 

 or smoking it over a fire. 



The life of the backwoodsmen was one long strug- 

 gle. The forest had to be felled, droughts, deep 

 snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest fires, and all the 

 other dangers of a wilderness life faced. Swarms 

 of deer-flies, mosquitoes, and midges rendered life 

 a torment in the weeks of hot weather. Rattle- 

 snakes and copperheads were very plentiful, and, 

 the former especially, constant sources of danger 

 and death. Wolves and bears were incessant and in- 

 veterate foes of the live stock, and the cougar or 

 panther occasionally attacked man as well. 43 More 

 terrible still, the wolves sometimes went mad, and 

 the men who then encountered them were almost 

 certain to be bitten and to die of hydrophobia. 44 



43 An instance of this, which happened in my mother's 

 family, has been mentioned elsewhere (Hunting Trips of a 

 Ranchman}. Even the wolves occasionally attacked man; 

 Audubon gives an example. 



44 Doddridge, 194. Dodge, in his "Hunting Grounds of the 

 Great West," gives some recent instances. Bears were some- 

 times dangerous to human life. Doddridge, 64. A slave on 

 the plantation of my great-grandfather in Georgia was once 

 regularly scalped by a she-bear whom he had tried to rob of 

 her cubs, and ever after he was called, both by the other 

 negroes and by the children on the plantation, "Bear Bob." 



G VOL. V. 



