My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

Chapter VII

They grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had all the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. Yet no atoll in the far Pacific could have been more satisfactory to us. It was low and flat, and was half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall iron-weeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the spears and darts for our Indian fights.

The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons[Pg 29] with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called Western Adventure, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. I have wondered often since who wrote or compiled that book; we had printed it ourselves in D——, from the stereotype plates of some temporary publisher whose name is quite lost to me. This book, and Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made our State a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our own life in the log-cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade;” of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day[Pg 30] with undaunted spirits. With our native romance I sometimes mingled with my own reading a strain of old-world poetry, and “Hamet el Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio.