A Rocky Mountain home in 1873 was a chinkless log cabin served by relays
Evidence
As I intend to make Estes Park my headquarters until the winter sets in, I must make you acquainted with my surroundings and mode of living. The “Queen Anne mansion” is represented by a log cabin made of big hewn logs. The chinks should be filled with mud and lime, but these are wanting. The roof is formed of barked young spruce, then a layer of hay, and an outer coating of mud, all nearly flat. The floors are roughly boarded. … The “living room” is about sixteen feet square, and has a rough stone chimney in which pine logs are always burning. At one end there is a door into a small bedroom, and at the other a door into a small eating room, at the table of which we feed in relays. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 283
Categorization
- XREF: The cabin’s construction details (barked spruce, hay, mud roof; snow driving through chinks) connect to the earlier chapter’s contrast between genteel expectations and frontier living in ‘A Lady’s Life’.
Related
- A remote Colorado backwoods cabin mixed rough male pioneers with a writing woman (similarity 0.79)
- A log cabin perched above a skunk’s lair still felt like paradise (similarity 0.78)