STUDIES OF PLANT LIFE 



upon their own ingenuity and personal exertions for the 

 actual necessaries of life. The men supplied the household 

 with game from the forest (it was over-plentiful in those 

 days) and fish from the lakes and streams; while in clear- 

 ing the land, and cultivating it in the rude fashion of the 

 time, the women and children, without respect of age and 

 sex, did their part. On the females depended the manu- 

 facture of every article of clothing; the loom occupied a 

 prominent place in the log house, and the big spinning- 

 wheel occupied the " stoop " in summer. 



Occasionally a few families, bound together by ties of 

 love or interest, wisely formed a colony and lived within a 

 reasonable distance from one another; but more commonly, 

 their grants comprising many hundreds of acres, according 

 to the number of persons in one household; the settlers were 

 thrown far apart. A blazed path through the forest was 

 their only means of communication by land, and this often 

 interrupted by rapid unbridged streams or impenetrable 

 cedar-swamps. 



In case of accidents, such as wounds from axes, broken 

 limbs, and such ailments as agues and fevers, necessity 

 compelled active measures to be adopted on the spot; of 

 medical practitioners, so called, there were none ; the broken 

 limbs were set by those in the settlement possessed of the 

 most nerve, while the elder women bound up the wounds or 

 gathered the healing herbs which they had learned to dis- 

 tinguish by experience, or from oral tradition, as being 

 curative in certain disorders. Something of this healing art 

 was derived from their ancestors, who had the knowledge 

 from the Indian medicine-men; and some remedies were, no 

 doubt, discovered by chance a happy thought seized upon 

 and put into practice in some desperate case, where the 

 chances of life hung upon something being done to relieve 

 the sufferer. 



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