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Put yourself in the shoes or moccasins (whatever the case may be) of the pioneers. Today your wife calls you on the cell phone while you’re cutting grass or coming home from work and wants you to bring home milk, bread, eggs and meat for dinner.
Now days you just whip into a corner market or gas mart, go in get what you need, pay, walk out, get back in your car in less than 10 minutes. At home you help fix your family’s third meal of the day. You eat, load the dishwasher, go into the living room and click the remote control which gives you 150 channels. You call out to your lovely wife to bring you a beer, and after a pleasant exchange of words she relents and brings you a beer even though she has worked all day, then fed the kids, the dog and the cats, got the kids off to school and went to work to relax.
Well that is now. Back then when your mate wanted you to bring something home to eat, she would go out to the front porch and ring a bell. If there was no bell she might have to try smoke signals. Back then you would have had to work out some kind of code. One ring of the bell or puff of smoke for milk, two rings of the bell for meat and so on. The bell system would probably have worked but the smoke signals would have left a little to be desired on wet or windy days.
Then the pioneer would have had to go out and find a cow, goat or buffalo, milk it and squirt milk into his canteen or rum jar. A good pioneer would have to make sure the rum jar was empty before he put milk into it and this might cause a bit of a delay in getting home, depending on how full the jar was.
After retrieving the milk a decision had to be made whether or not to kill that goat, cow or buffalo that had just so graciously given milk. But he couldn’t harm the goat, cow or buffalo that he just was so personal with so on he goes..
Now the pioneer faces his next dilemma - where to shop next. Now the pioneer wife back at the cabin is not wondering were her man is. She knows that his shopping might take a little while. (Just like going to the giant supermarket today and trying to find the processed cheese - it ain’t in the cheese aisle.)
The three meal a day concept had not caught on yet on the frontier and lunch or supper might take hours.
So now the pioneer husband is starting to worry. He’s been squirreling around the forrest and hasn’t found any meat for his family’s meal. Now he’s still wondering whether he should have killed that goat. cow or buffalo.
And finally he sees a rabbit. Rabbit stew - delicious he thinks - takes a shot, bags the rabbit, guts it, cleans it on the spot puts it in his pouch and heads back with the milk to the family cabin.
He is eagerly greeted by his family, His wife takes the catch of the day to prepare supper. This might take a couple of hours. In the mean time our pioneer kicks off his mocs in his one room cabin and the only “show” is the fireplace. Ain’t life grand!
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