Page:Mennonite Handbook of Information 1925.djvu/60

 with game until the disappearance of the snow and the coming of spring.

"Possibly no settlement of pioneers in America was begun under greater distress of circumstances. There were no plows or other farming implements. Houses were built of rough unhewn tree trunks, and clothing was made from skins of animals killed for them by the Indians. In this way the poor creatures dragged along till the following autumn, when the meager corn crop afforded some relief. Even this had to be beaten on stones in order to be prepared in any way for food.

"By the close of the year 1714, it developed that they could not hold their land on the Schoharie which had been offered them as a gift by the Indians. The majority of the survivors decided to migrate once more. Others continued to struggle for existence on the Schoharie and in . later years became founders of a number of the now larger towns and villages of that valley and on the Mohawk. The residue, after a series of wanderings down the valley of the Susquehanna, found new and more permanent homes with people of like religious faith and nationality in the Mennonite settlements of Pennsylvania."