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 brokeu 
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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