Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

86 ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
as "Hoosiers." They were a stalwart race of the backwoods
type, dressed in homespun, a wamus or hunting jacket of heavy
home-made woolen, dyed with butternut bark; coarse woolen
shirts, boots of cowhide made on ancient lasts, having peculiar
pointed toes; hair long and unkempt and a general appearance
of the wilderness country from which they had come.
The droves were always accompanied by the gigantic
schooner of a Pennsylvania wagon, where they carried a large
cribful of corn, a day's rations for each drove. I recall that
once in this season there came a raw, cold day when the mud
was Hke mortar and the big hogs were falling down in the halffrozen
slush. Some of them had to be lifted by the combined
force of the drovers into the Pennsylvania schooner to be
carried until they could march again. It was some task to
get these heavy porkers dragged up by ropes into the wagon.
On this particular day, as they were passing our house the
drovers discovered our big clean orchard, and as night was
coming on they felt they could not take the risk of going
further over such treacherous roads, so they asked if they
might drive their hogs into our orchard and stay all night at
our house. Father came in to talk it over with mother, for
their pitiable pHght touched his sympathies, and mother con-
sented to keep the entire crowd. I should think, as well as
I can remember, there must have been fifteen men in all, who
were wet, muddy and tired to complete exhaustion. We built
a great fire in the open fireplace, and as soon as supper was over
we all went upstairs to bed and left the drovers down in the
front room by the big fireplace. They dried their wet cloth-
ing; mother furnished them covers and they lay down on the
floor before the fire and slept until about four o'clock the next
morning, when all hands were out to feed the drove so as to
get an early start. Father's corncrib furnished food for the
hungry pigs.
That morning the men brought in a backlog and built a
great fire, which so heated the chimney that it too caught
fire. I was sleeping upstairs and was suddenly aroused by the
loud roar in the chimney, and I thought the whole house was
on fire; I looked out the window and found the orchard illumi-