The Firelands Pioneer (Volume 11) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899. Excerpt: ... waist, in which a broad hunting knife was stuck, and buck skin moccasins. In later years they wore a shirt of striped cotton, trousers of cloth or leather, leggins like the Indians, deer skin moccasins, colored belt of worsted, with knife and tobacco pouch, and blue woolen cap with red feather. European goods were exchanged for peltries, which were taken to the depots on the lake, and thence transported eastward. The French soldiers, with their blue clothes turned up with white facings and short clothes, and the priests with their long gowns and black bands, who had their stations near the forts, formed a strong contrast in their appearance to the Indians who loitered around the posts. A fort was generally a stockade enclosure, the walls on the outside were ten or twelve feet high, with a roof sloping inward. The blockhouses were built at the angles of the forts, and projected about two feet beyond the outer walls of the stockades. Their upper stories were about two feet every way larger than the under one, leaving an opening at the commencement of the second story, to prevent the enemy making a lodgment under their walls. In some forts instead of blockhouses the angles were furnished with bastions. A large folding gate, made of thick slabs, on the side nearest to water, closed the fort. The stockades, bastions and blockhouse walls were furnished with port-holes at proper heights and distances, the whole of the outside therefore being bullet-proof. The social condition of these primative inhabitants was not as civilized as in the larger colonial settlements; the humble people went out with their tents, their axes, their stores of ammunition, to win a substance by hard labor, and had little regard to the amenities which are the growth of a settled communit...