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The City of DuBois
Chapter 4
Page 026
Page 26 CLEARING THE LAND
every member of the Legislature carried a free pass to ride on the
railroad
during his term of office, and if he had some influence he could get
a pass for
his friends. The farmer not having the advantage of a pass to go to
the
capital, and having to pay his own fare, to defend his own rights,
soon
discovered that he was relieved of fencing his land. Of course if he
had wanted
to appear he had no notice of the introduction of the Act. However,
the farmer
soon found that he had to fence his own cattle in to keep them from
trespassing
on his neighbor. But the members of the Legislature retained their
passes.
The making of rails was a hard job. The tools used were two or three
iron
wedges, some wooden wedges, an ax and a maul. The farmer had to work
days
getting his rails split, distributed around the sides of the fields
and laid up
in a worm fence.
All of the stumps except the pine soon rotted and could be removed
with a
team of horses or oxen. The pine stumps, however, were a different
matter. This
kind of stump required a very strong machine.
In 1867 Thomas J. Booth, a resident of what was afterwards DuBois,
invented a stump pulling machine for which he procured a patent. A
picture of
this machine is inserted herein. This picture has been shown to a
number of the
younger generation, and none of them have had the slighest idea of
what it
might be used for, but to the farmer of that time it was a very
valuable
acquisition.
In clayey ground the stump was rooted very deep. The writer has
knowledge
of one stump he helped to pull, which required all the power of the
machine to
extract it. The machine spread twenty-two feet between the runners.
The longer
roots of this stump had been cut off to permit the machine to
straddle it. When
this stump was lifted it pulled up clay with the roots, leaving a
hole 8 feet
deep. The clay had to be dug off the roots and of course fell back
into the
hole. However, many of the stumps were on shale ground and did not
make a hole
over three or four feet deep.
Of course the stumps had to be disposed of, and the farmer used them
for
fences. These fences have become relics, and it was advisable to
insert a
picture of one fence in fair condition.
Although the farmer had a hard time wrestling the land from the
forests,
yet in a way this was only an incident in his life. In addition to
having to
fight the forests and get rid of the trees and stumps in order to
get a living
from the soil, he had to fight the animal life of the period. If any
one had
suggested conservation of wild life to the pioneer, he would have
had a fight
on his hands, for he had to destroy these creatures as a matter of
self
preservation. The deer pastured on his wheat, and rye in the spring
and on his
clover fields. When the grain ripened the squirrels were so
plentiful that they
destroyed acres of grain. Col. Robert Smiley, an early pioneer, in
one day
killed one hundred squirrels with his rifle. Foxes, hawks, skunks
and weasels
preyed on chickens. Foxes and hawks, by
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