It was grandmother Sarah Allen who told the tale. It was a long time ago, because Grandmother Allen died the year of the Chicago World's Fair. Grandmother Allen was one of the English Burlends. She came, a wee slip of a girl, in the steerage of a slow sailing ship to America in the fall of 1831, following the deep snow of the preceding winter, an event from which time was reckoned in the pioneer period.

The Burlends built a rude log cabin in a "clearing" on a slope of Big Blue Creek in east Pike County. The county had not yet lost its wilderness ways. Mother Burlend used locust thorns for pins and the girl Sarah cried through nights made hideous with the howlings of wolves and hissings of rattlesnakes beneath the puncheon floor of the cabin. Once her mother bound up a rattlesnake in a sheaf of wheat as she bound behind her husband with his cradle. Her mother's story of pioneer settlement here in the interior of North America, published in London in 1848, is reckoned by critics as one of the finest narratives of pioneer settlement in the English language. It was reprinted in America by the Lakeside Press of Chicago in 1936.

Grandmother Allen and Great Grandmother Burlend knew the economy of the backlog, a term that has leapt the bounds of pioneer idiom and become intrenched in the expression of today. There are lots of people, however, who still don't know what it means. Grandmother Allen and Great Grandmother Burlend knew. The whole economy of pioneer times depended upon the backlog. The backlog kept pioneer hearths - and hearts - warm. The backlog was rolled into the back of the great fireplace in one end of the cabin. It was green. It sizzled and oozed sap, but it wouldn't burn. It was backing for the firewood that kept the cabin warm. When it dried out enough to burn it was rolled forward and took its place as firewood.

Keeping the fire going was an important matter then. There were no matches. Keeping a live coal at hand was essential. At night the ashes were raked over the live coals and a little hole made in the ashes for a draft. This had the effect a damper has in the modern stove. Maybe it was the beginning of turning off a switch.

Once in the Burlend cabin the fire was lost. That was a time to be remembered. Grandmother Allen did remember it, to her dying day. Great Grandmother Burlend had nodded. She had not learned fully the pioneer ways. Her native Yorkshire had not taught her the backlog philosophy of the American pioneer. She let the backlog dry out and it burned to ashes and there was not a live coal, and Great Grandfather Burlend, unversed in flint and steel, was unable to strike and catch a spark. Either his tinder was wrong or he was not quick enough on the blow. And this was the time which Grandmother Allen remembered and of which she told. The great American winter was just setting in when the backlog and the precious fire it guarded was lost. A gray day darkened into night and a swirling nor'easter started sifting snow into the cabin home. Great Grandmother Burlend was getting very cold and her remarks were even colder.

Finally the boy John, eldest of the children (he was later to be killed far out on the Santa Fe Trail as he was returning from the Mexican War) was bundled up and sent out into the storm to the cabin of neighbor George Bickerdike, some two miles away, north of where Bethel Church now is. His mission was to fetch a live coal from the Bickerdike fireplace. The boy, a wild audacious youth, performed his mission well. Arousing neighbor Bickerdike in the dead of the night, the good neighbor filled one of the boy's mittened hands with cold ashes and in this insulation dropped a live pine knot coal which he lifted from the fireplace with the tongs, then topped the coal with more ashes. Clapping his other mittened hand over the precious coal and with both hands extended in front of him like Prometheus coming down from the zenith, the boy John then ran through the blinding storm back to his home. The pine knot was still alive and with a few puffs from the bellows it flamed and kindled the Burlend fireplace and Great Grandmother Burlend and her family, with a fresh backlog rolled into place, were again warmed.

So this pioneer Pike family learned the value of a backlog as a warder against evil times. Perhaps if Grandmother Allen and Great Grandmother Burlend were alive today they might discourse at some length on the value of a backlog, about which we Americans are becoming too careless. Some day, unless we go back to pioneer backlog economy, we as a people are going to be as cold as was Great Grandmother Burlend and her family when the family backlog was lost and the cabin on Big Blue became cold and cheerless.

Certainly we are not laying up a backlog against potential evil days ahead when we commit ourselves to a policy of shorter hours and less work and more pay. In spite of higher wages the per capita output of American labor and American goods is falling off and we are living little more than a hand to mouth existence, with no backlog being laid up against bitter nor'easters that are sure to blow.

Jess M. Thompson, great grandson of John and Rebecca Burlend, wrote this article. He recalls a wonderful story of pioneer life experience, as told to him by his grandmother. (I found the article in the 1998 Booklet for the Bethel Methodist Church Reunion)