On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for
granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented
thoroughfares
On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for
granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented
thoroughfares. In this hospitality, roughness and good will,
cleanliness and filth, attempts to ape the style of Eastern towns
and habits of the most primitive kind, were singularly blended.
In one instance, the traveler might be cordially assigned by the
landlord to a good position in ‘the first rush for a chance at
the head of the table’; at the next stopping place he might be
coldly turned away because the proprietor ‘had the gout’ and his
wife the ‘delicate blue-devils’; farther on, where ’soap was
unknown, nothing clean but birds, nothing industrious but pigs,
and nothing happy but squirrels,’ Daniel Boone”s daughter might
be seen in high-heeled shoes, attended by white servants whose
wages were a dollar a week, skirting muddy roads under a
ten-dollar bonnet and a six-dollar parasol. Or, he might emerge
from a lonely forest in Ohio or Indiana and come suddenly upon a
party of neighbors at a dreary tavern, enjoying a corn shucking
or a harvest home. Immediately dubbed ‘Doctor,’ ‘Squire,’ or
‘Colonel’ by the hospitable merrymakers, the passer-by would be
informed that he ’should drink and lack no good thing.’ After he
had retired, as likely as not his quarters would be invaded at
one or two o”clock in the morning by the uproarious company, and
the best refreshment of the house would be forced upon him with a
hilarity ‘created by omnipotent whiskey.’ Sometimes, however, the
traveler would encounter pitiful instances of loneliness in the
widespreading forests. One man in passing a certain isolated
cabin was implored by the woman who inhabited it to rest awhile
and talk, since she was, she confessed, completely overwhelmed by
‘the lone!’
