home conveniences by bringing things needful from their for-
mer homesteads, but the majority of those first settlers had
come from long distances, poorly equipped for traveling or for
even camp life for a while. Good housewives who had brought
pewter plates from "away back east" could not give them up
without protest to the daughter's innovation of a lot of porce-
lain ware. It was claimed that the knives would all be dull if
used on such plates.
Mr. Daniel Rathburn, who was a carpenter, built a frame
barn without nails. He put everything together with wooden
pins. This was the first frame barn erected on Leading creek.
Wheat was cut with sickles and threshed with flails, and the
grain winnowed by a sheet held by two men, who employed
the wind and their united force to clear the chaff from the
grain.
SALT.
In giving an account of this indispensable article I will in-
troduce an extract from the life of Griffin Green, by S. P.
Hildreth. "In 1794, when salt was worth from $6 to $8 a bushel,
he projected an expedition into the Indian country near the
Scioto river for the discovery of the salt springs said to be
worked by the savages near the present town of Jackson. At
the hazard of big life and all those with him, ten or twelve in
number, he succeeded in finding the saline water and boiled
some of it down on the spot in their camp kettle, making about
a tablespoonful of salt. While here he narrowly escaped death
from the rifle of an Indian who discovered them, unobserved by
the party. After peace was concluded, this warrior related the
circumstance of his raising his rifle twice to fire at a tall man
who had a tin cup strung to his girdle on his loins and who
was known to be Mr. Green. As he might miss his object,
being a long shot, and be killed himself, he desisted and hur-
ried back to the Indian village below the present town of Chil-
licothe for aid. A party of twenty warriors turned out in pur-
