Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/56

26 comfort while camping-out were meagre. The father and mother were compelled to walk. The two little children, aged respectively nine and seven, were uncomfortably disposed among the packs with which the horses were loaded. Arrived at the Ohio River, the horses were sent back and the goods, augmented by those which had been transported by means of the river, were loaded on a hired wagon and hauled out to the claim, where they were deposited. Without a single domestic animal, three miles from any neighbor, with no protection from the approaching winter storms but the now leafless trees, no defence from the cold but an open brush fire, and no shelter from the rude weather but the few ragged clothes they chanced to have, they present to the imagination a picture more pitiable than that of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, or, indeed, of any of the more spectacular scenes of pioneer life.

The first essential enterprise was to construct a shelter for his family, and the father went resolutely at work to fabricate not anything arising to the dignity of a cabin but a camp. Of this the mode and style of construction were as follows: A slightly sloping patch of ground was selected where two straight trees stood about fourteen feet apart, east and west of each other. The pioneer then cut down a number of small straight trees, and cut the tops off, so that the finished product would be fourteen feet long. Then the helpful wife would trim off the superfluous branches, and the entire family, two at each end of a log, would somehow tug the logs to the place needed. Two-thirds of these logs would be notched at one end and flattened at the other;