¶ Fire
Index Entry
Fire:
"… I find that even in peacetime when man was homesteading, going out to open up their land. And he came under tenting and very temporary form of shelter until he got to a site where they were going to commit themselves. The thing that really counted was getting the seeds in the ground, something to grow so they could eat next winter. The high priority is seed and growing things. You keep living under wraps as best you can. And on the way there you’ve been hunting and have a lot of food. But now you’re so busy clearing the fields of rocks and getting the seed in the ground, your wife says, ‘Darling the meat is beginning to spoil now,’ and so we’ve got to build a fire and at least cauterize it-- it lasts a little longer. This meant then that people in the fields began to build fires; and making fire took an awful ■ long time-- you didn’t have time for that you were so busy with the field. So you keep that fire going, and I’m clearing wood out of the fields here; so you’ve got plenty of wood. Just keep burning that wood. Well, that ■ makes smoke in the sky and that gathered often hostile strangers here. It brought animals at night. So the built kind of a chimney around it so it was easier to keep that fire going. It got a lot of rock out of the fields; there was a lot of rock around and they used that to make a temporary chimney.
¶ Citations
- Univ. of Alaska Address, p.10, 20 Apr '72
