A dry, orderly ranch house transformed rough freighters’ behavior.

Evidence

It is a pleasant two-story log house, not only chinked but lined with planed timber. Each room has a great open chimney with logs burning in it; there are pretty engravings on the walls, and baskets full of creepers hanging from the ceiling. This is the first settler’s house I have been in in which the ornamental has had any place. There is a door to each room, the oak chairs are bright with rubbing, and the floor, though unplaned, is so clean that one might eat off it. The table is clean and abundant, and the mother and daughter, though they do all the work, look as trim as if they did none, and actually laugh heartily. The ranchman neither allows drink to be brought into the house nor to be drunk outside, and on this condition only he “keeps travelers.” The freighters come in to supper quite well washed, and though twelve of them slept in the kitchen, by nine o’clock there was not a sound. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 429

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on domestic/material culture and how built environment shapes behavior — compare to the disciplined space in the Milgrom market institutions and to Jane Eyre’s orderliness as moral order.