On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons, plates, bowls, and noggins.

Also near the fireplace, which was made of large flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding block for making hominy.

If it were an evening in early spring, the men of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins to be sent out with the trade caravan, while the women sewed, made moccasins or mended them, in the light of pine knots or candles of bear's grease.

The larger children might be weaving cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of hickory twigs; and there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for scalping knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the days have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through the young leafage.
The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally settled in national groups, each preserving its own speech and its own religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native temperament.

And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need and the same menace, and molded them after one general pattern.