The Bark Covered House Or, Back In the Woods Again; Being a Graphic and Thrilling Description of Real Pioneer Life in the Wilderness of Michigan

I go with her, accompanied by my wife and brother John S. As the train we wished to take did not stop at Dearborn I had a hired man, with my team, take us to Detroit. Father wen...

My father was born in 1793, and my mother in 1802, in Putnam County, State of New York. Their names were John and Melinda Nowlin. Mother's maiden name was Light.

The mortgage which had hung so long over us, like a dark cloud obscuring our temporal horizon and chilling our hopes, was at last removed, May first, 1841. After the mortgage wa...

Mother's maiden name was Melinda Light. Her mother died when she was quite young. She and father were married when she was about nineteen years old. She took one of her youngest...

Some three or four years after we came to the country there came a tribe, or part of a tribe, of Indians and camped a little over a mile southwest of our house, in the timber, n...

One day in winter my brother-in-law, Reuben Crandell, and myself started to go hunting deer, as we supposed. We went south across the windfall, started a flock of deer and were...

Time sped on. The earth had traveled its circuit many times since father sold his little place in Putnam County, State of New York, and bade adieu to all the dear scenes of his...

The dark portentous cloud seemed to hang above our horizon. It looked dark and threatening, (and more terrible because the disputants were members of the same family). We though...

We made troughs, tapped hard maples on each side of the creek; took our oxen, sled and two barrels (as the trees were scattered) to draw the sap to the place we had prepared for...

I have said that I tried to persuade father to take life more easily and not to labor so hard himself on the new place he had bought. It was a new place to him; but in an early...

As I have been led away, for some years, following poor Indian in his belief, life and death, and in doing so have wandered from my story, I will now return to the second or thi...

As will be remembered by the early settlers of Michigan, bee hunting and wild honey constituted one of the comforts and luxuries of life. Father being somewhat expert in finding...

It was night, in the Spring of 1834, when we arrived at Detroit, and we made our way to the "United States Hotel" which stood near where the old post office was and where the "M...

We thought it was about time we started for home. We began to want to get back to Michigan, so we agreed to start. Brother J. S. was to take the "Harlem Railroad," go to uncle's...

I follow father, in my mind, to his last farm which he bought in 1849, where he lived out his days. It was not cleared up, as he wished to have it, and he continued to labor as...

Father commenced chopping cord-wood and he said I could draw it as fast as he could chop it. I was so much engaged that, when the moon was in its full, I often started with my l...

Father's farm improved with astonishing rapidity and became quite a pleasant place. Some of the stumps rotted out, some we tore out and some were burned up. In these ways many h...

There were two stately trees which stood near the center of the place. In view of their antiquity it seemed almost wrong to cut them. One was an elm which stood on the flat of t...

Father got our road laid out and districted for a mile and a half on the north and south section line. One mile north of our place it struck the Dearborn road. Father cut it out...

Our prospects began to brighten a little, and it is needless for me to attempt to describe what our feelings were, when we got a strip of the primeval forest cleared away. Our c...

Father and I went hunting one day. I took my shot-gun, loaded with half a charge of shot and three rifle bullets, which just chambered in the barrel, so I thought I was ready to...

I have already said that, as money was getting short; father sold Asa Blare half of his oxen. They thought they could winter the oxen on marsh hay. They found some they thought...

In the spring of the year when the ice broke up, in the creek, the (pike) or (pickerel) came up in great abundance from Detroit River, and they were easily caught. At such times...

Father said he would get us some apple trees. He had heard there was a small nursery below Dearbornville. One morning he and I started for the village; from there, we went to Mr...

The old cow always wore the bell. Early in the spring, when there were no flies or mosquitoes to drive them up the cattle sometimes wandered off. At such times, when we went to...

One warm day in winter father and I went hunting. I had the rifle that day. We went south, crossed the windfall and Reed creek, and went into what we called the "big woods." We...

When I was twenty-one we had a good young team, of our own, and father made it a rule to go to Detroit once in two weeks, with butter and eggs. When he had other farm products h...

When I commenced for myself, father gave me a strip across the two lots on the south end of his farm, south of the Ecorse, containing forty-two acres and lying on the town line...

I often rode in my canoe when I did not go fishing. I took one ride in it that I shall always remember, at least the remembrance of it has forced itself upon my mind a number of...

The oxen having worked hard and been used to good hay, which we bought for them, grew poor when they were fed on marsh hay. Then Mr. Blare wanted to sell his part to father; the...

Among the annoyances common to man and beast in Michigan, of which we knew nothing where we came from, were some enormous flies. There were two kinds that were terrible pests to...