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CITY OF DUBOIS Page 37
rinds off the meat, cracklings from lard rendering, and grease that
might have accumulated up to the time of the soap making. This
produced a soft soap, and a barrel of it would be made. Hard soap
was produced by adding salt, which caused the soft soap to congeal.
This was cut into cakes and let dry until needed for use.
The washing first was done by a paddle, by which the
soap and water were forced through the clothing. Subsequently, some
person invented a corrugated wash board, which was used until some
genius invented a washing machine.
FOOD
The whole summer was spent preparing food and clothing
for the winter. Wild berries were gathered and dried. When
orchards had grown, the apples were cut and dried in the fall of the
year, by either hanging them on strings above the cook stove, or in
the ovens of the stove. Cider and apple butter were made. This
work lasted a week or two. Finally, the process of canning was
discovered, and a pottery at Luthersburg made fruit jars. The only
use of these jars at the present time is for relics, or probably
used as a base for an electric lamp.
We hear a great deal about girls and women smoking in
the present day, but this was not a strange custom to the pioneer.
Each pioneer raised his own tobacco. The tobacco plant raised in the
early clearings grew very rank, and the gathering of the tobacco for
use during the year was one of the occupations of the fall. Each
woman had her pipe, and smoked after meals as regularly as men now
smoke. If two or three women were gathered together, they were
usually found smoking.
Butchering day was an event of the year. While the
early pioneer killed his meat in the forest, yet after becoming
established, the wild game became more scarce, and each farmer
fattened and killed a large number of hogs and probably a beef or
two in the fall. "Butchering day" was along the last of November.
Thanksgiving Day was not celebrated or thought of by the pioneer,
but about this time he would do his butchering. Preparations for
this were made for nearly a week. Wood was gathered, kettles
borrowed, scalding table erected, scaffold to hang the hogs was
provided, and on the day fixed, one or two neighbors came in to
assist the family in this work. About four o'clock in the morning
fires were started under the kettles of water for scalding purposes,
and as soon as it was light enough to sight a gun, a couple hogs
were killed and placed on the platform for cleaning, after being
scalded. As soon as these hogs were hanged up, the entrails were
removed, and the small intestines and stomach were taken to the
house, where the women proceeded to clean them for sausage casings.
Four men could kill and hang up and dress six or eight hogs by two
o'clock in the afternoon. As soon as the hogs had cooled, the
process of cutting them up for curing purposes began, and about four
o'clock in the afternoon the
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