Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/85

Rh when a man was sitting, which was, for this reason, his favorite posture; but when he arose the appearance to an inexperienced eye was that he was not yet up, for the knees of his trousers did not respond to the straightening of his legs but held the shape of the sitting posture, and the seat of the trousers did likewise. We boys, ever heedless, were caught in the grasp of buckskin trousers about every other day all through the long winter season. Coming in wet and cold, we would naturally go to the fireplace to warm our hands and feet, and the wet buckskin would immediately begin to shrink as it began to dry and the result was anything but comfortable for us. After a time a heavy unbleached muslin, commonly called "factory cloth," could be gotten at Oregon City or from the Hudson Bay trading posts; this my mother and aunts dyed a light brown, using for this purpose the bark of the alder tree which was boiled in water until the desired shade was obtained. This cloth was then used to make dresses for the girls and skirts and trousers for the boys. Hats were made of braided oat straw that were both comfortable and becoming. Shoes, as I have said before, could not be purchased, and the pioneers wore buckskin moccasins when they first settled in the new country, but after a time an attempt was made to manufacture shoes of a rough sort. Some one in almost every family could hew out a last, make pegs and rough shoes which were a tolerable protection to the feet and fairly comfortable. But there was no competent tanner and the material used was rawhide, a very poor substitute for tanned leather. If we boys waded in mud or water these rawhide boots became soft and many sizes too large so that we sometimes left them sticking in the mud. When they were finally recovered it took many hours of drying and cleaning to make them fit to wear.

Notwithstanding our privations and many hardships we children found much pleasure in life. We lived close to nature in the early days. We hunted and fished and gathered wild berries and nuts in the woods and along the streams. We dug the many toothsome roots found on the hillsides and in the valleys, and contrived in many ways to find amusement and pastime in inventions of our own. My brother Elisha was an inventive and mechanical genius, and from the instructions he got from reading some old book on mechanics made a gyro-