“The labor and employment of a pioneer family were distributed in accordance with surrounding circumstances.  To the men was assigned the duty of procuring subsistence and materials for clothing, erecting the cabin and the station, opening and cultivating the farm, hunting the wild beasts, and repelling and pursuing the Indians.  The women spun the flax, the cotton and wool, wove the cloth, made them up, milked, churned, and prepared the food, and did their full share of the duties of house-keeping.  Another thus describes them:  ’There we behold woman in her true glory; not a doll to carry silks and jewels; not a puppet to be dandled by fops, an idol of profane adoration, reverenced to-day, discarded to-morrow; admired, but not respected; desired, but not esteemed; ruling by passion, not affection; imparting her weakness, not her constancy, to the sex she should exalt; the source and mirror of vanity.  We see her as a wife, partaking of the cares, and guiding the labors of her husband, and by her domestic diligence spreading cheerfulness all around; for his sake, sharing the decent refinements of the world, without being fond of them; placing all her joy, all her happiness, in the merited approbation of the man she loves.  As a mother, we find her the affectionate, the ardent instructress of the children she has reared from infancy, and trained them up to thought and virtue, to meditation and benevolence; addressing them as rational beings, and preparing them to become men and women in their turn.

“’Could there be happiness or comfort in such dwellings and such a state of society?  To those who are accustomed to modern refinements, the truth appears like fable.  The early occupants of log-cabins were among the most happy of mankind.  Exercise and excitement gave them health; they were practically equal; common danger made them mutually dependant; brilliant hopes of future wealth and distinction led them on; and as there was ample room for all, and as each new-comer increased individual and general security, there was little room for that envy, jealousy, and hatred which constitute a large portion of human misery in older societies.  Never were the story, the joke, the song, and the laugh better enjoyed than upon the hewed blocks, or puncheon stools, around the roaring log fire of the early Western settler.  The lyre of Apollo was not hailed with more delight in primitive Greece than the advent of the first fiddler among the dwellers of the wilderness; and the polished daughters of the East never enjoyed themselves half so well, moving to the music of a full band, upon the elastic floor of their ornamented ball-room, as did the daughters of the emigrants, keeping time to a self-taught fiddler, on the bare earth or puncheon floor of the primitive log-cabin.  The smile of the polished beauty is the wave of the lake, where the breeze plays gently over it, and her movement is the gentle stream which drains it; but the laugh of the log-cabin is the gush of nature’s fountain, and its movement, its leaping water.’"[51]