with now and then a deer ; but fresh pork was an unknown quantity, there being no corn or other fattening food produced upon which hogs could be raised. There was also a scarcity of material with which to make enclosures for the hogs. One settler tried the expedient of building a pig pen out of sod, but on leaving home one Sunday for a call upon a neighbor some miles distant and returning after dark, found that the family pig had rooted a hole through the sod, invaded the house and crawled into the family bed.

The settlers managed to find some social enjoyment by being mutually helpful to each other, organizing Sunday schools, holding prayer meetings, and sometimes religious services with a sermon delivered by an itinerant minister, and in the more thickly populated settlements by having dances and parties during the long winter evenings.

Notwithstanding the hardships, the health of the early settlers was very good -- very few deaths occurred from diseases and not many from accidents. Among the accidents of the early days, which were singularly free from fatalities, was that which occurred at the home of Charles Schilling, northeast of Hemingford. He with his large family lived in quite a large sod house with a leanto kitchen in the rear, back of which was a cave cellar. An eighteen hundred pound horse belonging to his neighbor, Frank Porter, got out of his stall one Sunday night, wandering over to Neighbor Schilling's, first walked on the cave cellar and from that to the leanto and from there to the main part of the house. His weight was too much for the ridge pole, which broke, and precipitated him bottom side up down among the soundly sleeping Schilling family. The kickings and squealings of the horse led the rudely awakened family to believe that the world had come to an end.