PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EARLY EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT.
THE FINNS. {con't}
my duds, was now disclosed. An armful of hay with Jacob's
overcoat fora covering and my raiment for a pillow-that was it. In the
morning the hay disappeared leaving no trace. The woman could swing an axe like
a man. I saw her do it at the woodpile. When she wanted to go into deep
snow she used a home-made pair of skis, made of two staves of a salt
barrel with a strap in the centre to go over the instep. She certainly
failed to shed any light on the path of an excellent man who was a nat-
ural gentleman.
Jacob was one of the most versatile of men. He tanned leather and
made harness. He showed me some leather he had made, and in color
and other respects it seemed to me equal to that one sees in saddlers' shops.
He had used willow bark, and asked me if I thought that was best. What
the writer doesn't know about tanning is considerable, but I told him oak
bark was supposed to be the best and that I had seen some scrub oak in
the valley. He also made poplar shingles and had his log house shingled.
His mechanism was very simple. It was near the house affixed between
two poplar saplings. He would take a poplar log, square it with an axe
and cut it in foot or eighteen inch lengths. One of these lengths he would
stick in the frame and then shave off the shingle with a pole which be
pulled towards him and in~ which was a long home-made knife. He made
good shingles, that is as good as poplar would let him. He also was a
blacksmith, and I may say here that every Finn seemed to have a forge
of his own, simple but effective, mostly set up in the shelter of the bluffs.
He also like many others made footwear of the leather of his own tanning.
The Finn I have spoken of as living outside the colony had a home-made
fanning mill made entirely of wood. He set it going for my behoof, and
it worked well.
Jacob used to play the mouth organ for me in the evening and he
played it remarkably well. The next year he brought me a load of wood
into Whitewood, and reluctantly consented to have dinner with us. I had
an Uxbridge piano organ. I had a notion he could play it. He demurred
but I got him to it. His hands were terribly rough and he had lost a finger
or two. He played and after the first few bars I was somehow reminded
of the organ playing in Hereford Cathedral. When he was through he
turned to me and said "Church music in Finland". He was also a great
axe man. He had the frame of a new log house up; just the walls were
in place. The logs were beautifully squared. Where they were not straight
they had been nicked with the crosscut and bent. The logs had not yet
been chinked, yet so perfect was the work and so close together the logs
that I could only find two or three places through which you could slip a
silver quarter between the timbers. It was the finest piece of axe work
I have seen before or since.
The next man I went to was on the next quarter section to Jacob
Lakki, so it was a short move. Here was a numerous family in a large
commodious house. Mrs. Haulm was a splendid housewife. She grew flax
and made linen. The house and the children were scrupulously clean
and the latter wore spotless night clothes when they went to bed. Con-
Bibliography follows:
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