Let any one try the experiment of felling and eradicating a single tree, and he will begin to approach an estimate of what the first English settler had before him, as he entered upon his work.  It was not only a work of the utmost difficulty, calling for the greatest possible exercise of physical toil, strength, patience, and perseverance, but it was a work of years and generations.  The axe, swung by muscular arms, could, one by one, fell the trees.  There was no machinery to aid in extracting the tough roots, equal, often, in size and spread, to the branches.  The practice was to level by the axe a portion of the forest, managing so as to have the trees fall inward, early in the season.  After the summer had passed, and the fallen timber become dried, fire would be set to the whole tract covered by it.  After it had smouldered out, there would be left charred trunks and stumps.  The trunks would then be drawn together, piled in heaps, and burned again.  Between the blackened stumps, barley or some other grain, and probably corn, would be planted, and the lapse of years waited for, before the roots would be sufficiently decayed to enable oxen with chains to extract them.  Then the rocks and stones would have to be removed, before the plough could, to any considerable extent, be applied.  As late as 1637, the people of Salem voted twenty acres, to be added within two years to his previous grant, to Richard Hutchinson, upon the condition that he would, in the mean time, “set up ploughing.”  The meadow to the eastward of the meeting-house, seen in the head-piece of this Part, probably was the ground where ploughing was thus first “set up.”  The plough had undoubtedly been used before in town-lots, and by some of the old planters who had secured favorable open locations along the coves and shores; but it required all this length of time to bring the interior country into a condition for its use.

The opening of a wilderness combined circumstances of interest which are not, perhaps, equalled in any other occupation.  It is impossible to imagine a more exhilarating or invigorating employment.  It developed the muscular powers more equally and effectively than any other.  The handling of the axe brought into exercise every part of the manly frame.  It afforded room for experience and skill, as well as strength; it was an athletic art of the highest kind, and awakened energy, enterprise, and ambition; it was accompanied with sufficient danger to invest it with interest, and demand the most careful judgment and observation.  He who best knew how to fell a tree was justly looked upon as the most valuable and the leading man.  To bring a tall giant of the woods to the ground was a noble and perilous achievement.  As it slowly trembled and tottered to its fall, it was all-important to give it the right direction, so that, as it came down with a thundering crash, it might not be diverted from its expected course by the surrounding trees and their multifarious