All these things had to be done under conditions of exceptional
difficulty. The settler never knew what night his place would be
raided by marauding redskins, who would be lenient indeed if they
merely carried off part of his cattle or burned his barn. Any
morning he might peer out of the "port hole" above the cabin door
to see skulking figures awaiting their chance. Sickness, too, was
a menace and a terror. Picture the horrors of isolation in times
of emergency--wife or child suddenly taken desperately ill, and
no physician within a hundred miles; husband or son hovering
between life and death as the result of injury by a falling tree,
a wild beast, a venomous snake, an accidental gun-shot, or the
tomahawk of a prowling Indian. Who shall describe the anxiety,
the agony, which in some measure must have been the lot of every
frontier family? The prosaic illnesses of the flesh were
troublesome enough. On account of defective protection for the
feet in wet weather, almost everybody had rheumatism; most
settlers in the bottom-lands fell victims to fever and ague at
one time or another; even in the hill country few persons wholly
escaped malarial disorders.
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