186 Singing Valleys 



business which the frontier afforded. George Rogers Clark 

 ended his days as proprietor of a ferry and of a mill on the 

 Indiana shore of the Ohio. This was not a come-down in 

 the social or economic scale of the frontier. The ferry and the 

 mill represented security. They gave their owner a position in 

 that constantly changing world. Usually the miller was the 

 Justice of the Peace, the banker and the sole representative of 

 law and order. He stayed put, while other men pushed on into 

 the wilderness. His mill and his store, his house which was 

 frequently a tavern as well where travelers were fed on rye 

 coffee, pork and corn bread, and put to sleep on cornhusk 

 mattresses, were the first civilizing influences in a raw, new 

 territory. 



Bonnot/s Mill, on the Osage west of St. Louis, was mill and 

 fort in the days before the Louisiana Purchase. Once, during 

 an Indian attack, while the men were busy with the guns, the 

 wife of the French governor discovered that fire had broken 

 out in the mill which was also the storehouse for the settle- 

 ment. There was no water available to quench the flames. But 

 Madame called the other women, they ran to the sleeping 

 quarters and brought forth homely vessels seldom seen at a 

 fire brigade. They saved the mill, and the fort. And the gal- 

 lants of St. Louis presented Madame with a silver pot de 

 chambre in recognition of her feat. 



The grinding of grain was a winter occupation. The fall 

 harvest was seldom dry enough to be ground before Decem- 

 ber, and all of it was milled by April. From spring to winter 

 the mills would have stood idle had not the millers used the 

 big water wheels to run sawmills, cider presses, flax-brakes, 

 fulling mills and mills for the manufacture of gunpowder. The 

 first of this ever made in Massachusetts was turned out by 

 the grist mill in Dorchester, in 1675. 



This widely increased use of the grist mills was made pos- 

 sible by the discovery of iron ore, first in Saugus bog, later 

 near Salisbury, Connecticut. Iron bolts, bearings, screws and 



