VOTi. XXXVTII. No. 13.1 
WHOLE No. 1522. I 
NEW YORE CITY, MARCH 29, 1879. 
[PRICE FIVE CENTS. 
[ #2.00 PER YEAR. 
[Entered according- to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by the Rural Publishing Company, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.! 
lovingly take our treasures from our hands 
and say, “ Pale-faced pappoose very rich. Big 
Injun much poor. Big Injun keep much 
money ; bring white pappoose much sugar by- 
aruJ-by." We had not di earned we should ‘ ac¬ 
cept the situation,” and depart “ sadder and 
wiser meu!” 
The third or “Iron Age” of the industry—if 
we may still keep up the'metuphor—was not 
much in advance of that last noticed. The 
early settlers worked in a rude way; long 
elder ” spiles ” conveyed the sap to *' dug-outs " 
or sap troughs. These were made from soft 
wood, usually bass-wood. A tree a foot or 
more in diameter was cut in o lengths of three 
feet each, split in two and the halves dug out 
with ax and adze, so as to hold a pailful or so; 
or rude wooden buckets were made, like those 
shown In Fig. 2. The mode of boiling was 
some improvement, too, on the Indian mode. 
Three huge iron kettles were swung by long 
sweeps (see engraving) over a fire-place made 
by hauling and rolling uear together two huge 
logs. Wood was thrust in from every direc¬ 
tion and the fire lighted, and the draft from 
either or both ends made the blaze roll around 
the kettles and the sap in them toss and foam. 
Sticks and leaves and ashes and fire-brands and 
smoke had free access to the sap and helped to 
little loss of time, and the squaws stood by and 
stirred the mess with a loug stick, a growing 
appetite and a contented spirit! Even our 
childish tastes used dimly to discern in the 
sugar a flavor of turnips and coon-oil. and 
when a visit to the camp reavealed the modus 
operandi, our tastes revolted. But soon the 
all-devouriug appetite of childhood conquered 
these foolish aesthetic prejudices, and we pick¬ 
ed the squirrel hair from our teeth and swal¬ 
lowed the sweetuess with our former bound¬ 
less relish. 
Dim visions of the memory or fancy picture 
a raid upon the sugar camp, as already inti¬ 
mated. It was reasonable to suppose that with 
the hoarded speuding-money of a month, and 
with a few “big brothers” for protection, we 
could, by visiting the camp, buy at wholesale 
rates and save cost of transportation besides 
If we displayed our coiubim-d treasures before 
their gaze and said in dialect used In every In¬ 
dian tale from Cooper down, “Much mouey. 
much sugar, much cheap," how could the high- 
minded, generous savages fail to respond ?—It 
did not prove a financial success ! We had not 
dreamed the noble savages would get up a 
“corner in sugar” with the shrewdness of a 
Chicago wheat-broker or a Wall street " bull” 
or bear.” We had not dreamed they would 
flavor the sugar and give it the real “ maple- 
sugar color”—as black a9 the faces of the In¬ 
dians who were its original manufacturers. As 
the sirup got thick enough to be in danger of 
boiling over, a ebuuk ol pork suspended from 
above, kept it down pretty well, but sometimes 
the man would have to rush to the end of the 
sweep and lift the kettle irotn the flames and 
swing it aside for a raomeut to save its con¬ 
tents. A shanty over these huge sweeps was 
out of the question, and when the rain poured 
the man must staud and take it, or run occa¬ 
sionally for a moment into his cubby-hole of 
a shed (see Fig. 2) and wish he could stay 
there all the time. For twenty years of my in¬ 
fancy. childhood aud youth, our nearest neigh¬ 
bor boiled with such an apparatus, and the 
whole scene was so often and so vividly im¬ 
pressed upon my mind that I am sure it is cor¬ 
rectly pictured in Fig 2. 
In the next stage of onr industry a rude arch of 
brick or nnhewu stone wa9 built (see Fig 3, last 
issue), half dozen large iron kettles wtre " set ” 
in it down nearly even with their rims, and 
the sap was boiled with large wood, running 
nearly to the hack end of the arch. A simple 
r >of supported by four posts, was sometimes 
built over the kettles and the part w-here the 
man stood to pnt in wood. The a c'a aud ket¬ 
tles and shed 
MAPLE-SUGAR MAKING. 
W. I. CHAMBERLIN. 
It is interesting to trace an industry to its in¬ 
ception and through its early stages, and the 
industry which gives us our present subject is 
no exception to this rule. The history of the 
most delicious sweet produced by nature and 
human skill combined, will lead us thiongh as 
many periods or stages as geology and archae¬ 
ology declare the human race has passed 
through in the slow lapse of ages, though the 
length of the former differed considerably from 
that of iho latter. 
Our Pilgrim Fathers found the Indians ac¬ 
quainted with the value of this sweet. Their 
tomahawks scarred the trees, rude devices for 
spouts conducted the sap into rude stone ves¬ 
sels. aud it was boiled in vessels of stone, or of 
copper hammered cold from metal brought at 
some time from the Lake Superior region, or 
dug, already formed, from the tombs of the 
Mound Builders. This may be called the “ Stone 
Age." 
My own dim, childish recollections are 
of the second, or 
“ Bronze Age," of -——;- 
the industry, and i r 
were gained dur- tV L VM- 
ing a year's so- j/"~ .V 
jouru in a village / \ 
were in no 
More than 
80 years ago my 
father had one 
made, having got 
the idea. I think, 
from a Vermont 
hired m a n. It 
was the first of 
the kind, I believe, 
in the State, and 
many people came 
to see “ the thing 
work." Most of 
them went away 
laughing at the 
idea of “boiling 
in a wooden 
trough." They 
“ believed the ket¬ 
tles would beat 
the thing any¬ 
way." The sap 
didn't “roll and 
tumble as it did In 
ihe kettles,” &c., 
ite. And it was 
many years before 
the pans came in¬ 
to general use. 
Nor was it until 
recently that it 
became common 
to take advantage 
of a slope or side- 
hill so as to sa\ e 
roll ing up the bar¬ 
rels of sap on 
skids aud dipping 
from the store- 
trough into the 
kettles or boiling 
pans. These and 
many similar im- 
wise 
disturbed. Coons, 
squirrels and veg¬ 
etables were boil¬ 
ed in the sap with 
INDIANS MAKING MAPLE SUGAR.—Fig. 1 
