Another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.......
I wonder at people who think nothing of driving 30 minutes to get a pizza at 8 pm at night in how extravagant it all is. It is why there is so much trouble in the world as bread is instant at purchase instead of an eight our creation.
What was to become America was begun in Holland's Purchase on the east coast, in what was once New Amsterdam. Americans always in ignorance speak of English roots, but the reality America at Plymouth was Dutch Holland, as was New York and as was created, Pennsylvania was German Israelite, as all America was.
In those days there were seasons. Seasons for all things and all one did was prepare and wait. You could get ready to leave the settlements at May, but the land would be a mire of melt and rains, so you would wait.
It was a covered wagon, with oxen and not prancing pretty horses. It was Gee and Haw, and not "giddy up". You did not take the kitchen sink, because the oxen would wear out and in most cases you walked, because those animals were more important than you.
When you arrived finally at your clearing, perhaps you buried a child or some parent on the way. Sickness, Indians or just getting yourself drown crossing a river was how things went. There were no bridges and really no roads, as you sank in mud, and in turn you had to chop your way through downed trees from storms just to make 10 miles a day, so you could find grazing for your animals, water, wood for fire and hopefully a location where some Indian would not sneak up and bash you brains in as they raped your wife, and enslaved your children.
Once you made it, to what you thought was home, if you were not a fool who would get washed down a stream, flooded out in your meadow or burned out by the forest, you built your cabin. The reason people built dugouts and little cabins is big houses took too much time and energy to create. You were dead tired and it was just enough to try and keep something in meat on the table.
Trees were cut down for the next planting, where you would plant corn around the stumps in waiting five years for them to hopefully rot out so you would have your 40 acre field.
Your stock needed shelter and rails, as wolves, bears, Indians and white trash would just as soon run off your cow as not.
Yes that cow, they only give milk a year, and then you need a bull to start the process again, but you can not wait a year, so Bessie just was busy with the oxen eating like a horse, but of course the grazing was not good in that jungle, and the best you could do was cut down sweet trees like Linden, Maple and Hemlock to have the cows browse on the branch tips.
An American to an Indian did not cut hay for their animals in winter for fodder, but they cut wood and let the animals eat the sappy wood and buds.
What you made it through the first winter on was a sack of meal, a bear for lard, hams and rug to keep warm, maybe an elk, and the hope that the mice did not eat your garden seeds for the plot you were looking at longfully under a foot of snow.
The first farming done was not of corn. Wheat would not arrive until decades later. No the crops harvested for survival were the beaver pelt, the bear skin and the deer hide.
For wife or husband, you placed as much value on your knife and axe as you depended on them for life as much as a person. In most cases, you kept a knife, axe or rifle longer than a spouse, as spouses had a way of dying and graves dug with a board split out.
I know if I was a Pilgrim or a Pioneer in seeing all the work I did in Christian virtue with all who died, I would not be the least pleased with what is sodom America.
"America was planted with choice fruits, but is now nothing but a curse of noxious weeds."
Lame Cherry
agtG
