SCOUTING FOR GIRLS 
25 
nearer neighbors than the Indians, yet with all the ideals 
of the New England they left behind them: girls who 
had to have all the endurance of the young “Bird Wo- 
man” and yet keep up the traditions and the habits of 
the fine old home life of Louisa Alcott. 
One of these pioneer girls, who certainly would have 
been patrol leader of her troop and marched them to vic- 
tory with her, was Anna Shaw. In 1859, a twelve-year- 
old girl, with her mother and four other children she trav- 
eled in a rough cart full of bedding and provisions, into 
the Michigan woods and took up a claim there, settling 
down into a log cabin whose only furniture was a fire 
place of wood and stones. 
She and her brothers floored this cabin with lumber 
from a mill, and actually made partitions, an attic door 
and windows. They planted potatoes and corn by chop- 
ping up the sod, putting a seed under it and leaving it to 
Nature— who rewarded them by giving them the best 
corn and potatoes Dr. Shaw ever ate, she says in her 
autobiography. 
For she became a preacher and a physician, a lecturer 
and organizer, this sturdy little Scout, even though she 
had to educate herself, mostly. They papered the cabin 
walls with the old magazines, after they had read them 
once, and went all over them, in this fashion, later. So 
eagerly did she devour the few books sent them from the 
East, that when she entered college, years later, she 
passed her examinations on what she remembered of 
them ! 
They lived on what they raised from the land ; the pigs 
they brought in the wagon with them, fish, caught 
with wires out of an old hoop skirt, and corn meal brought 
from the nearest mill, twenty miles way. Ox teams were 
the only means of getting about. 
Anna and her brothers made what furniture they used 
—bunks, tables, stools and a settle. She learned to cut 
