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deep SW On. | Our area was all forest before it was settled and our ancestors arrived here sometime around 1850 . So how did those families not freeze to death when it was -25C ? Or what did Indians do ? Civilization was a while getting to our farm ,no electric power until 1949 , no "running water" or indoor plumbing until 1958 .I don't know if the depression chnged that generation like it scared our generation in the '80's but it looks like debt was something that never really came until later '60's as before if you didn't have cash you just went with out . Maybe life is better today than we think. |
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Martinsville, Ohio | That's a heck of a good question, Kevin. https://www.google.com/#q=how+did+people+survive+cold+winters I guess God put me right where he wanted me. Ed |
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East-Central Ontario | Fire has been around for a good long while. Teepees, long houses, small cabins, all reasonably easy to heat. Lots of furs to keep you warm, no slaves to fashion. And the ones that weren't prepared for winter didn't survive to complain about it. |
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| Fire and fur. Algore and PETA would be less that happy.
AaronSEIA |
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audrain county missouri | I also thought about how they survived. No hospitals or doctors when they got sick. No dentists when they had a tooth ache. No grocery stores for food. No refrigeration to preserve food. No axes or chain saw to cut fire wood. No rifle to shoot wildlife. No steel knifes to butcher their meat. No wal-mart for shoes and clothes. They were amazing people. |
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Indiana | It is just like I remember my Grandparents stories about the great depression. Sure people were poor. But they did not know it. They just did what they always do.....carry on. They did not know how hard they had it until looking back on things, after life had improved. |
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Crawford County, Robinson, Illinois | redoak - 2/14/2015 05:42Our area was all forest before it was settled and our ancestors arrived here sometime around 1850 . So how did those families not freeze to death when it was -25C ? Or what did Indians do ? Civilization was a while getting to our farm ,no electric power until 1949 , no "running water" or indoor plumbing until 1958 .I don't know if the depression chnged that generation like it scared our generation in the '80's but it looks like debt was something that never really came until later '60's as before if you didn't have cash you just went with out . Maybe life is better today than we think. You may recall from history that an old indian was 30 years or so in age. As our civilization improves, so does our probability of longevity. |
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deep SW On. | rebuilder - 2/14/2015 08:13
It is just like I remember my Grandparents stories about the great depression. Sure people were poor. But they did not know it. They just did what they always do.....carry on. They did not know how hard they had it until looking back on things, after life had improved.
Exactly , when we went too a 1 room school house we never knew we were poor as we had same as everybody else . Can't ever remember parents ever saying need/want this or complaining about life or being jealous of others as now me and most are chronic complainers |
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SE SD | To awnser your ?----- My father-inlaw, is from a family of 21 kids.
Now you can guess, how Ma and Pa stayed warm. :) |
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South West UK | I guess they must have survived the same way that those people in the tribes living in Siberia did. Living off the native fauna and flora, wearing animal skins and living in tents or shelters made from hides and so forth. Water wouldn't be so much of a problem if there was snow about, so long as you had fire wood to cook and keep you warm.
Apparently if you have any kind of fire inside a tent/tepee type thing, the temperature inside will never get below freezing so that would take care of the -25 degrees problem.
Interesting way of life, I guess man is far more adaptable than we would think. |
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West Texas | From a family of 13 kids, no one had their "own" room or bed. The older kids were already out on their own by the time the younger got here. There was no heat in the bedrooms but there was plenty of quilts and we all headed for the kitchen on a cold morning. That old cast iron cook stove sure put out a lot of heat. Well remember the water in the bucket that sit by the stove would always be froze when we first got up in the morning. That was the bucket that had the dipper in it that we all drank out of. Think it was around 54 or 55 before we got running water in the house. Got an indoor bath room at the same time. Was a good feeling when we tore down the old outhouse, and covered up the "hole" Granted the winters were not near as severe as those us north but we did have our days |
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Western Oregon | My Grandmother walked behind a wagon to New Mexico when she was 13, no wood, just dung to burn. 2 years later she walked back to Kansas pushing a hand cart after her Dad died. Tough life. They went out there for his health. She and Grandpa never had much, farmed rented ground, never owned a tractor. Sold out came to Oregon in '53. When they dropped down into the green valley at Sweet Home, they thought they were in heaven, No job but Grandpa said if you starved to death out here you had to be plumb lazy. They canned berries, cherries and apples, grew a small garden in the ditch of the road. Grandad finally got a job at a sawmill cleaning up. Bought a little house. Had a good life, retired and did a lot of fishing at Foster Dam. He lost a lung to cancer, never smoked a day in his life. It was the dust during the dirty 30's and farming. Cancer didn't get him, a test during a heart procedure shoved a blood clot to his heart. He was 74....James |
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S.C. Wisconsin | I also experienced the one room school for 2 1/2 years no running water, outdoor privy, and a kerosene heater in the middle of the school. I don't remember being cold, but we dressed accordingly. We never thought of anyone being poor as there were some kids in school where their parents made a living on 50 acres. |
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S.C. Wisconsin | One of my Grandmothers homesteaded on North Dakota in a sod house. I couldn't think of a worse place to homestead back then as they didn't even have the availability of fire wood. They heated with buffalo chips. I am guessing but wool must have been their ally. |
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Indiana | Yep, Maternal granddad as a very young child, moved with his family to Kansas and lived in a sod dugout. After a couple years they pulled stakes and beat it back to Indiana. It was miserable conditions he said. I'm not quite sure what timeframe that would have been.... |
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NW Illinois Stephenson county | Heap big squaw helped as well. |
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West of Broken Bow | A friend's relatives grew up in a dugout in the panhandle of Texas. Sod roof and some stone for walls. The family had twelve kids. If you walk the location now, there's no obvious evidence a dwelling ever existed against the hill. When one of the family members years later recalled about her childhood, she said it was very hard but that's the only life they knew. |
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Agent Orange: Friendly fire that keeps on burning. | The plains indians that lived near my farm in MT were nomads. They were, in effect, an early version of a snowbird. They migrated north, following the buffalo herds in the spring and followed the herds south in the late fall. It is amazing how much the temps can vary in a couple hundred miles and they capitalized on that. Not that it can't get cold along the Yellowstone valley, but cold lasts much longer along the Canadian border and gets much more severe. Their teepees and teepee poles were portable so they could be picked up and moved. Their ideas of permanent quarters mostly consisted of rocks left in teepee rings that could be used in old campsites that they visited along the way and at the ends of their seasonal migrations. There is a very interesting historical site concerning early indians at a buffalo jump just north of Havre, Mt. The digs and artifacts found there go back more than a thousand years. They pre-date the age of the bow and arrow. Their primary killing tool then was the atlatl and a tipped projectile. They boiled the bones and meat from slaughtered buffalo in kettles made from buffalo hides and could actually boil water faster in a hide bowl than our ancestors could in an iron pot. The human brain and opposed thumb serve to place us humans at the top of the food chain, even though we're not much for strength and natural equipment when it comes to surviving the extremes of nature and nature's predators. |
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North of London | My parents used to say nobody had anything so they were all the same. |
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North of London | And the natives in the Arctic where it was much colder than in southern Ontario.
A little fat for a candle and snow for insulation and lots of furs. |
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Central In | The book in the link below does give some clues how the Indians lived in the Missouri River watershed.
http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=chla;cc... |
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Saskatchewan, big whitetail country!!! |
There is a reason the indians in western Canada were sparsely populated, and had no technology to speak of. They had no time to delve into science, their entire aim was to stay warm and find food. The surveyors found them wandering aimlessly, starving and often bailed them out, even then. The romantic idea today that they were a proud culture is an enormous myth. They were always on the edge of starvation and freezing. The modified history books would have you think the indians bailed out the explorers, but not a chance. White men had guns, the wheel, horses. The indians had two long poles, wolf/dogs, and flint.
As far as the pioneers, it is not that difficult. Fire. Fur. Adaptability. When it is cold, you do adapt well over time as you get acclimatized. A Texan panhandle fellow, would have trouble up here in winter. But most of the pioneers came from Europe anyway, and while the winter there is less brutally long, and less intense in temperature, they found it easy enough to adapt. They also had to WORK back then, which heated one up. Today it is -30, and I fed my sheep. I found it was lovely once I got working and pitching hay. In fact I broke a sweat, with a pair of jeans and a chore jacket with a t shirt underneath, in a windchill of below -40.
I wonder more how they survived the heat of the south, quite honestly. It is easier to make a place warm in winter, than to cool off a house before A/C.
Edited by canadianeh? 2/14/2015 11:49
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Saskatchewan | Definitely the case after the bison were gone. Much changed before and after the bison. I am not sure where your from in Sask, but I recommend you to go and see Fort Walsh down in the Cypress Hills.
One remarkable photo they have blown up on the wall was before and after the bison; they show a proud prosperous Blackfoot family. 5 years later they were poor and had pawned off all furs and anything of value.
I read a good book about Canadian prairie settlers called "The Pioneer Years 1895-1914" by Barry Broadfoot. It mentions that it was not that uncommon for settler bachelors who lived alone to freeze to death in winter. |
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Saskatchewan | It is a case of building on the knowledge of our forefathers. Survival skills were serious lessons and needed to be passed on. Our modern society has thrown that all away thinking it will never be needed again. I hope we are right! |
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Saskatchewan, big whitetail country!!! | 6V53N - 2/14/2015 10:16 Definitely the case after the bison were gone. Much changed before and after the bison. I am not sure where your from in Sask, but I recommend you to go and see Fort Walsh down in the Cypress Hills. One remarkable photo they have blown up on the wall was before and after the bison; they show a proud prosperous Blackfoot family. 5 years later they were poor and had pawned off all furs and anything of value. I read a good book about Canadian prairie settlers called "The Pioneer Years 1895-1914" by Barry Broadfoot. It mentions that it was not that uncommon for settler bachelors who lived alone to freeze to death in winter.
Been to FT Walsh several times. Well the books I have read, and explorer notes from as early as Henry Kelsey, show that even with the bison, the indians were in tough. As Henry Kelsey was guided into the interior by the indians, they went MANY DAYS without seeing a single game animal, and often ate things like Seagull eggs, and the odd pigeon to keep them alive...
Palliser in the 1870;s bailed out the indians on many occasions as he came across them emaciated and starving, and this was pre-bison disappearance. He also noted that the indians would INTENTIONALLY burn the prairies, as some kind of a "cultish cleansing", and wonder where the meat animals had gone...
When he crossed the mountains, he found in the BC interior, indians growing food, and commented they were in completely different condition that the wandering, starving prairie tribes.
These are notes directly from the explorers themselves, not from an interviewer taking notes half a century or more after the fact. I am sure there was the odd band that were somewhat proud and such. But I believe they were few and far between, judging by what early settlers found.
Both of those men intervened when the guide parties wanted to raid and collect scalps from other bands they encountered along the way. Sometimes the guides would slip out in the night to make an attack and never be seen or heard from again.
Both these men found very few natives in the land, and the ones they found, were inadvertently in tough shape, hanging on for their lives. And then history books were re-written to say otherwise.
Up in the northland, early trappers found the same condition, even into the thirties, while game was still abundant. I have read trappers journals that speak about terrible camp conditions and starving indians. One particular entry made me recognize how little some things change: an indian had shot a deer, and then found a moose and shot it. He left the deer floating in the lake, instead of utilising it for his kin. The trapper was mystified because food was so scarce. Not unlike the dead moose and elk I find every year on my land, shot by indians, and left to rot.
History is not what we all think it was in some instances....
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Martinsville, Ohio | Same way in Brown Co Ohio, you brought back memories! I remember snow on the quilts because it blew threw the windows. The outhouse was the worse, they put it way downhill to avoid the stink and on a day like today you didn't care if it stunk or not, it was frozen. I also went to the one room school and survived. It was the toughest year of my life and only first grade. I came home one day with poor grades in reading and that was never a problem again. I remember helping dad split and cord wood and when we go the running water, indoor plumbing and a fuel oil furnace in 1958, dad swore he would never cut wood again. But he did for me in the 70's when fuel oil went out of the roof during the oil embargo. Basically you worked for food and shelter all the time and slept and little and has John said, they didn't live long back in those days. Ed |
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S.E. Sask. | canadianeh? - 2/14/2015 10:37 [
Palliser in the 1870;s bailed out the indians on many occasions as he came across them emaciated and starving, and this was pre-bison disappearance. He also noted that the indians would INTENTIONALLY burn the prairies, as some kind of a "cultish cleansing", and wonder where the meat animals had gone...
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Burning the dead grass in spring does clean up the ground and encourage new growth. I had a wildfire go through some of my land about 25 years ago (started by a white man). The resulting regrowth of poplars and prairie was amazing but I would not want to try it again. We still see it practiced on some of the reserves these days and it gets a little concerning for farms and communities around the edges of those areas.
My grandparents came here from England 116 years ago and found the winter quite a shock. Living in an 10x12 log shack. They could not afford the trip back to England so stuck it out on the homestead. Winter is not so bad if you have some trees around. Its the guys out on the treeless plains that I feel sorry for. No protection from the relentless wind chill. |
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Kingston,Mi | The house my mother lived in had walls 2 ft. thick of locally mined Limestone. You could close the exterior door, lean against the wall and take off your overshoes before opening the interior door. The limestone was mined out of the eventual basement. That house was primarily heated with the big old cast iron wood range in the kitchen. Five generations ago the first of my Codd/Code/Coad relatives left southern Ireland for Ontario in 1822, soil was thin but the hardwoods were big, so they cut timber and burned a lot of it. That house had a wood shed attached that was about 20 by 20 feet square and 10 feet to the rafters.
As my 96 year old uncle is said to have told my grandfather when he came home from 6 years in Europe during WW2 "the trouble with farming in Ontario was you cut hay all summer, wood all winter and hauled crap and ashes the rest of the time" , he didn't use the word crap either.
A house on the next concession line where my paternal grandmother spent a few years in her youth had doors opposite each other in the kitchen and a large fireplace. When a new back log was needed for the fireplace, they hitched a single horse to a short log and skidded into the kitchen before rolling it into the fireplace. Those early Irish farmers most have thought they had achieved heaven with the abundant firewood and being able to build houses that would have been mansions in England and Ireland. |
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North Central Kansas | OntarioCanuck - 2/14/2015 11:03
My parents used to say nobody had anything so they were all the same.
I've heard that many a time about people in the depression, and long after that too. I sure see a the difference between the have's and the have not's getting much bigger. Creating division with people in rural America. |
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North Central Kansas | As winter drags on I marvel at how those early settlers survived. I have a theory. They must have all showed up in the Spring of the year and thought, wow this is nice, built a cabin, planted a garden. Then when winter came they must have figured, well, we are already here might as well stick it out.
I also think the small simple little cabin was more efficient to heat and everybody bundled up. |
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Hagen Brothers farms,Goodrich ND | Some did die from the cold. We were at the original site of an early fort near Valley City ND last summer.
The place was only occupied for a few years before moving it nearer the river. Two of those who died at that short lived fort, were a couple of local indians the army hired to bring the mail to the fort. The sign said they froze to death when caught in storms. |
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| While prairie winters would have been a shock to settlers from more moderate climate areas of Europe, a lot of the settlers from northern Scandinavia and other such areas were accustomed to frigid conditions. I remember reading an article once about Finns who migrated to the north of their country who endured hardships the equal of anything here.
On the open prairie the first homes were often built of sod. The thick walls provided good insulation in winter, and summer for that matter. When the pioneers prospered and built their Eaton and other catalogue houses they found it much harder to keep them warm than the old soddies.
Edited by Jim in Sask 2/14/2015 16:45
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North of London | It can be interesting to look at the gravestones in an old cemetery with the descriptions on the headstones.
Quite a change from the present to see the ages and the reasons for their deaths.
Lots of accidents and lots of disease that we would not have happen today.
Those who were lucky could live to a ripe old age but many died quite young from things we would consider only a bother today like a bad tooth and the resulting infection. |
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| I remember reading a reprinted article in the local paper about 4 fellows who got caught traveling from one town to another in a blizzard and how they barely made it to a small house before dark during the storm. Unfortunately, the house was so small there wasn't enough room for all 4 guys, they had to draw straws to see who had to spend the night outside with the livestock. In the morning they found the short straw guy had survived the night. |
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How did the settlers/Indians not freeze too death?
