It would not be easy to say where or when the first log cabin was built, but it is safe to say that it was somewhere in the English colonies of North America, and it is certain that it became the type of the settler's house throughout the whole middle west. It may be called the American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman's home; and not fifty years ago, I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely shaped with the broadax; the joints between the logs were plastered with mortar; the chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled, the windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well hung. But throughout that region there were many log cabins, mostly sunk to the uses of stables and corn cribs, of the kind that the borderers built in the times of the Indian War, from 1750 to 1800. They were framed of the round logs untouched by the ax except for the notches at the ends where they were fitted into one another; the chimney was of small sticks stuck together with mud, and was as frail as a barn swallow's nest; the walls were stuffed with moss, plastered with clay; the floor was of rough boards called puncheons, riven from the block with a heavy knife; the roof was of clapboards laid loosely on the rafters, and held in place with logs fastened athwart them.

There is a delightful account of such a log cabin by John S. Williams, whose father settled in the woods of Belmont County in 1800. "Our cabin," he says, "had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked, and part of the floor laid, when we moved in on Christmas day. There had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin, which was so high from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any animal less in size than a cow could enter without even a squeeze.... The green ash puncheons had shrunk so as to leave cracks in the floor and doors from one to two inches wide. At both the doors we had high, unsteady, and sometimes icy steps, made by piling the logs cut out of the walls, for the doors and the window, if it could be called a window, when perhaps it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin where the wind could not enter. It was made by sawing out a log, and placing sticks across and then by pasting an old newspaper over the hole, and applying hog's lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it. All other light entered at the doors, cracks, and chimneys. Our cabin was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by two beds, the center of each side by a door.... On the opposite side of the window, made of clapboards, supported on pins driven into the walls, were our shelves. On these shelves my sister displayed in simple order, a host of pewter plates, and dishes and spoons, scoured and bright.... Our chimney occupied most of the east end; with pots and kettles opposite the window, under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four split-bottomed chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight by ten looking-glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb case.... We got a roof laid over head as soon as possible, but it was laid of loose clapboards split from a red-oak, and a cat might have shaken every board in our ceiling.... We made two kinds of furniture. One kind was of hickory bark, with the outside shaved off. This we would take off all around the tree, the size of which would determine the caliber of our box. Into one end we would place a flat piece of bark or puncheon, cut round to fit in the bark, which stood on end the same as when on the tree.... A much finer article was made of slippery-elm bark, shaved smooth, with the inside out, bent round and sewed together, where the end of the hoop or main bark lapped over.... This was the finest furniture in a lady's dressing room," and such a cabin and its appointments were splendor and luxury beside those of the very earliest pioneers, and many of the latest. The Williamses were Quakers, and the mother was recently from England; they were of far gentler breeding and finer tastes than most of their neighbors, who had been backwoodsmen for generations.

When the first settlers broke the silence of the woods with the stroke of their axes, and hewed out a space for their cabins and their fields, they inclosed their homes with a high stockade of logs, for defense against the Indians; or if they built their cabins outside the wooden walls of their stronghold, they always expected to flee to it at the first alarm, and to stand siege within it.

The Indians had no cannon, and the logs of the stockade were proof against their rifles; if a breach was made, there was still the blockhouse left, the citadel of every little fort. This was heavily built, and pierced with loopholes for the riflemen within, whose wives ran bullets for them at its mighty hearth, and who kept the savage foe from its sides by firing down upon them through the projecting timbers of its upper story. But in many a fearful siege the Indians set the roof ablaze with arrows wrapped in burning tow, and then the fight became desperate indeed. After the Indian war ended, the stockade was no longer needed, and the settlers had only the wild beasts to contend with, and those constant enemies of the poor in all ages and conditions,—hunger and cold.

Winter after winter, the Williamses heard the wolves howling round them in the woods, and this music was familiar to the ears of all the Ohio pioneers, who trusted their rifles for both the safety and support of their families. They deadened the trees around them by girdling them with the ax, and planted the spaces between the leafless trunks with corn and beans and pumpkins. These were their necessaries, but they had an occasional luxury in the wild honey from the hollow of a bee tree when the bears had not got at it.

In its season, there was an abundance of wild fruit, plums and cherries, haws and grapes, berries, and nuts of every kind, and the maples yielded all the sugar they chose to make from them. But it was long before they had, at any time, the profusion which our modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields.

When once the settler was housed against the weather, he had the conditions of a certain rude comfort indoors. If his cabin was not proof against the wind and rain or snow, its vast fireplace formed the means of heating, while the forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At first he dressed in the skins and pelts of the deer and fox and wolf, and his costume could have varied little from that of the red savage about him, for we often read how he mistook Indians for white men at first sight, and how the Indians in their turn mistook white men for their own people.

The whole family went barefoot in the summer, but in winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin, and buckskin leggins or trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, and out of this the dresses of his wife and daughters were made; the wool was shorn from the sheep which were so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the wolves, which were very fond of mutton, but had no use for wool.

For a wedding dress a cotton check was thought superb, and it really cost a dollar a yard; silks, satins, laces, were unknown. A man never left his house without his rifle; the gun was a part of his dress, and in his belt he carried a hunting knife and a hatchet; on his head he wore a cap of squirrel skin, often with the plume-like tail dangling from it.

The furniture of the cabins was, like the clothing of the pioneers, homemade. A bedstead was contrived by stretching poles from forked sticks driven into the ground, and laying clapboards across them; the bedclothes were bearskins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare, and if the earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the grass which was its first carpet. The cabin had but one room where the whole of life went on by day; the father and mother slept there at night, and the children mounted to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder.

The food was what has been already named. The meat was venison, bear, raccoon, wild turkey, wild duck, and pheasant; the drink was water, or rye coffee, or whisky which the little stills everywhere supplied only too abundantly. Wheat bread was long unknown, and corn cakes of various makings and bakings supplied its place. The most delicious morsel of all was corn grated while still in the milk and fashioned into round cakes eaten hot from the clapboard before the fire, or from the mysterious depths of the Dutch oven, buried in coals and ashes on the hearth. There was soon a great flow of milk from the kine that multiplied in the woods and pastures, and there was sweetening enough from the maple tree and the bee tree, but salt was very scarce and very dear, and long journeys were made through the perilous woods to and from the licks, or salt springs, which the deer had discovered before the white man or red man knew them.

The bees which hived their honey in the hollow trees were tame bees gone wild, and with the coming of the settlers, some of the wild things increased so much that they became a pest. Such were the crows which literally blackened the fields after the settlers plowed, and which the whole family had to fight from the corn when it was planted. Such were the rabbits, and such, above all, were the squirrels which overran the farms, and devoured every green thing till the people combined in great squirrel hunts and destroyed them by tens of thousands. The larger game had meanwhile disappeared. The buffalo and the elk went first; the deer followed, and the bear, and even the useless wolf. But long after these the poisonous reptiles lingered, the rattlesnake, the moccasin, and the yet deadlier copperhead; and it was only when the whole country was cleared that they ceased to be a very common danger.