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the way to the southern tip ot this country was a dense forest tike none any of us have seen. The virgin timber was so high and thick that .it -was. hard to left .night frosts day and even harder to travel without getting lost. Level graund was cleared for planting and building by cutting one giant tree at a time and hauling out the immense stumps. An acre of cleared land was a huge expanse to the starving Pilgrims.
Most of the Pilgrims were not seasoned farmers and woodsmen: the great forests of Europe had been stripped a century before and England had begun a course of industrialization that was to swallow up huge pieces of the countryside. And the wild forests were a big change from the ancient, civilized farms of Europe.
The Indians had some advantages. They knew the ways of the American woods and its animal inhabitants and they had crops under cultivation. But their life was not easy. In a bad year they lost one for every two children born and many mothers during childbirth. If they survived infancy, their life expectancy was thirty years, about ten years less than a European man of the same generation. When drought or flood wiped out their crops and their game, they had only the forest plants to eat. In desperate times they ate plants that they knew were poisonous, hoping to gain some nourish
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