Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/83



In the course of three or four years after we began life in the wilderness of Salt Creek, we had pastures fenced, grain fields and gardens, small apple and peach orchards grown from the seed, comfortable log cabins, barns and other outhouses, and quite a number of cattle, horses, hogs and chickens. We had grain growing and in store and vegetables in abundance. But many things we had always considered necessities were not to be had in the wilderness where we lived. Coffee, tea and sugar were among these. Having an abundance of good milk, a family could do without tea or coffee, and even an old coffee drinker could be consoled by a beverage made of roasted peas crushed in a buckskin bag. Habitual tea drinkers soon became reconciled to what was generall known as "mountain tea," a drink of a spicy odor made from the leaves of a vine found growing in the woods. Many people came to prefer this tea to any tea of commerce. But there was no substitute for sugar. Father and mother had been in the sugar camps in Kentucky and Tennessee and knew how sugar was made from the sap of maple trees. Our spring was surrounded by a grove of maple trees and though the sap was not as sweet as the sap of the sugar maple, they believed sugar could be made from it. The experiment was tried and proved a success and we had plenty of sugar, syrup and candy.

The problem of clothing had become a very serious one. Tents and wagon covers that had seen service from the Mississippi to the Columbia would shed rain when made into coats. Lined with the remnants of some old woolen garment, and with a broad collar and cuffs faced with the fur of beaver or otter, these garments would pass without criticism even though their ancestry might be known to every one by indelible marks that had been on the tent or wagon cover. It would be a mistake to suppose that this was regarded as humiliating or a