Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1891 — EARLY DAYS. [ARTICLE]

EARLY DAYS.

Building a Log Cabin on the Desolate Frontier. Log-cabin building was great fun to the boys, although they did not find it easy work. There was a certain novelty about the raising of the structure that was to be a home, and an interest in learning the use of rude tools, that lasted until the cabin was finished. The maul and the wedges, the frow and the little maul intended for it, and all the other means and appliances of the building were all new and strange to these bright lads. First, the size of the cabin, twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, was marked out on the site on which it was to rise, and four logs were laid to define the foundation. These were the sills of the new house. At each end of every log two notches were cut. one on the under side and one on the up-

per, to fit into similar notches cut in the log below, and in that which was to be placed on top, Sp each corner was formed by these interlacing and overlapping ends. The logs were piled up, one above another, just as children build “cob-houses” from odds and ends of playthings. Cabin-build-ers do not say that a cabin is a certain number of feet high; they usually say that it is ten logs high, or twelve logs high, as the case may be. When the structure is as high a 3 the eaves are intended to be, the top logs are bound together, from side to Bide, with smaller logs fitted up&i the upper logs of each side and laid across as if thev were to be the supports of a floor for another story. Then the gable ends are built up of logs, shorter and shorter as the peak of the gable is approached. and kept in place by other smaller logs laid across, endwise of the cabin, and locked into the end es each log in the gable until all are in place. On these transverse logs, or rafters, the roof is laid. Holes are cut or eawed through the logs for the door and windows, and the house begins to look habitable.

The settlers on the Bepublican Fork cut the holes for doors and windows before they put on the roof, and w T heu thelayer of split shakes that made the roof was in place, and the boys bounded inside to see how things looked, they were greatly amused to notice how light it was. The space between the logs was almost wide enough to crawl through, Oscar said. But they had studied log-cabin building enough to know that these wide cracks were to be “chinked” with thin strips of wood, the refuse of shakes, driven in tightly, and then daubed over with clay, a ime bed of which was fortunately near at hand. The provident lonnkins had laid away in his own cabin the sashes and glass for two small windows; and these he had agreed to sell to the newcomers. Partly hewn logs for floorjoists were placed upon the ground inside the cabin, previously leveled off for the purpose. On these were laid thick slabs of oak and hickory, riven out of logs drawn from the grove near by. These slabs of hardwood ere “puncheons,” and fortunate as was the man who could have a floor of sawed lumber to his cabin, he who was obliged to use puncheons was better off than those with whom timber was so scarce that the natural surface of ground was their only floor. SL Nicholas. A New Yoke girl, suffering from the grip, meditated suicide. Then, changing her mind, she sought relief in another way—she got married.