Page 17 - 2015_Cabin Days curriculum booklet

What may be the fundamental ambiguity and challenge for us in understanding pioneers is
our difficulty in seeing them as flesh and blood human beings. One example may be
extreme for some, but it is entirely valid and particularly revealing. It is sex.

I know of no scholarly study of pioneer Hoosier sexuality, and so I can't cite chapter and
verse. But I know that the most energetic and active pioneers were in their teens, 20s, and
30s because it was younger settlers who moved to Indiana. I know that pioneers produced
nothing in more abundance than they did pioneer babies. In fact, Indiana in the 1820s had
a fertility rate as high as any place in the world.

Can we think about pioneers without thinking about love, marriage, and sex? And shouldn't
we think also about gender roles, about the range of relationships between male and
female, about the social and cultural roles assigned to and sometimes resisted by men and
by women?

This leads to my primary point--a very simple point too often lost in our celebrations of
pioneers. Pioneer Hoosiers were ordinary people. They had an abundance of ordinary
common sense. Few, I suspect, were brilliant or self-sacrificing, or heroic, at least no more
so in number or quality than in our own generation. This is NOT to argue that pioneers did
not work hard, did not sweat, and did not suffer. Many were courageous and hardy. Many
were virtuous and noble. But I doubt they worked harder then we do. I doubt they were
more courageous or hardy, more virtuous or noble.

Too often we look at pioneers as superheroes and compare them to our own generation in a
way that does disservice to our own achievement. It is true that few of us could move to
Brown County with an axe, chop down a few poplar trees, and build a log cabin. No chain
saw, no nails, no hardware store nearby. Few of us could survive a winter in such a cabin,
with no furnace, no grocery store, and no video rental.

Few of us could navigate a crude flatboat down the Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers to
New Orleans, as Abe Lincoln did at the age of 19, as hundreds of Hoosier pioneers did, and
then return home from New Orleans by walking. Few of us could rear children or make a
quilt with materials and conditions that prevailed in 1825.