Living with less

I am amazed how truly spoiled we are today. All one has to do is check out the vehicles we drive. About the only thing the cars and pickups don't do is drive themselves, and that is being worked on. Electric windows and auto lights and computers to do everything. Seats that heat and vibrate and as plush as any lounger. Foods are ready to eat in a jiffy. Most come in disposable pans or pots. Remotes that will do everything or helps such as Siri. We are spoiled.

Back when the homesteaders settled across the plains which are now Kansas and Nebraska and the Dakotas down into Oklahoma, most of them were dirt poor. They didn't have a lot of resources to spend on even necessities. Many lived in tents until they could get some kind of home built. Homesteaders had to build at least a 10-by-12-foot structure on their property. That's not very big. We are used to walking up to a faucet and turning on good clean water. Many settlers had to pack their water from a nearby spring. Some had to dig their wells. It was difficult.

Today we have a small box on the wall, and we can set it at 72 or 74 or even 76 or 78, and our whole house is warm. Many settlers had some type of wood stove where they burned wood or cow chips or even coal. It was really warm by the stove and the temps went down the further you were from the stove. When you look at pictures of homes built in the last part of the 1800s and up into the 1900s, many will have numerous chimneys. I saw a picture of one the other day, and it had three chimneys. I'll bet at times all three were burning.

Cooking was done on a wood cook stove. The wood burned in the cook stove had to be short and split down pretty small. We would probably describe it as kindling today. Marge and I split wood down into say 1-by-1-by-12-inch pieces to use as kindling to start our wood stove. That's about what was needed in the old wood cook stove.

One didn't shop on a daily or weekly basis, but maybe once a month or even twice a year, so one either bought a good amount of necessities or one learned how to do without. Flour was one of the necessities. Many kitchens back when I was a boy had flour bins right in the kitchen that would hold at least 25 pounds and many even 50 pounds of flour. Most of the hoosier cabinets had a flour bin. They didn't hold much, maybe 20 pounds. If the family was average size, it could go through 10 to 20 pounds of flour weekly. I'll bet Marge goes through 5 to 10 pounds weekly. I could see settlers buying 200 pounds or more of flour when they went to a mercantile store. I remember little worms or bugs in the flour. Most old timers probably ate a ton of these little worms, and it didn't hurt a one of us.

Sugar and coffee was another staple. I could see the settlers buying 100 pounds of sugar when they went shopping. Coffee was green whole beans or some were roasted whole beans. Just from my own experience, I would say a couple could drink up a couple pounds per week. If one went shopping every six weeks to two months, they would need say 20 to 30 pounds of beans at least every trip to the store.

Another staple many times we overlook is cornmeal. There is a writing about Mollie Dorsey Sanford, who was a teacher in an 1857 Nebraska Territory school. She tells of eating for breakfast cornbread and salt pork; lunch was cold cornbread, wild greens and boiled pork; and supper was hoecakes (cornbread), cold greens and pork. Almost every picture one sees of homesteaders or settlers in the plains shows them raising corn of one kind or another. Corn can be eaten similar to how we eat sweet corn today, but corn can be allowed to dry and used later. Corn can be ground into a meal or even boiled and turned into a kind of mush.

One also needed salt and pepper. Most settlers raised their own hogs. with most having chickens. Many raised turkeys. Chickens would set on a dozen or so eggs and one would end up with a mess of baby chickens. Most settlers probably let their chickens run loose so they'd find their own feed. I've read where some had hundreds of turkeys. Most settlers had a milk cow or two.

Last week Marge and I were in Jackson, so we stopped and bought doughnuts. Mom or Grandma would have made them from scratch. Marge can. Today we have all kinds of fancy sugar-laden coffee drinks. Settlers were happy with a cup of coffee with maybe a touch of milk and sugar. Many a settler roasted his green coffee beans in an old cast iron skillet. Fried chicken meant one had to catch the chicken and behead it, scald it in boiling water and pick it and run it through a fire to burn off the pinfeathers. After gutting the chicken we were in business. Fried chicken. Never frozen fried chicken.

Could we live on what the settlers did? Some of us could, but many wouldn't make it. It took "grit" to live back then.