Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen by Rae Katherine Eighmey Page B

my father would take his gun and basket and go to thewoods and return in the evening loaded with pawpaws, young squirrel, and sometimes mushrooms of which he was very fond. There will never be a recurrence of those which were the happiest days of my life.”
    AbrahamLincoln expressed yet another view of pioneer life. He wrote succinctly, “I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two.” He also wrote that his father put an ax into his hands when they arrived inIndiana. Fellow Hoosiers remembered his skill. “His ax would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, down it would come. If you heard him felling trees in aclearing, you would say there were three men at work.”
    Dennis Hanks recalled those early days, too. “In the winter and spring we cleared ground, made a field of about 6 acres on which we raised our crops. We all hunted pretty much all the time. Especially when we got tired of work—which we did very often, I will assure you. We did not have to go more than 4 or 5 hundred yards to kill deer, turkeys & other wild game. We found bee trees all over the forests.”
    Honey from those bee trees stands in my mind as symbolic of the second stage of settlement. Gathering pawpaws and other fruits and nuts simply made use of nature’s gifts. Harvesting honey from bee trees marked the intrusion and impact of settlers on the land. Honey bees were not native to the United States. Early colonists brought beehives over from Europe. As settlements advanced away from the Atlantic coast, bees flew ahead, staking their own claims, protected from natural predators, in the hollows of dead trees. To reach the honey, bee tree hunters simply chopped the tree down. They shattered and destroyed months, even years, of work by the bee colony in just a few strokes of an ax. Some bee hunters captured the bees as well to establishfarmyard hives to pollinate gardens and provide a handy honey harvest.
    I wondered what the honey from those wild and later farm-tended hives tasted like. For years the only honey I ate came from the grocery store. Highly filtered and heated during processing, it’s sweet and almost cloying. I have to confess it has not been my favorite sweetener. Certainly the honey the Lincolns and their neighbors enjoyed would have been different. Then two summers ago my neighbor, Tim, set up a hive in his backyard. Now bees harvest pollen and nectar from my flowers, pear tree, and even the basil plants. I see them all summer long. Sometimes the rubber mat outside my back door is covered with bees harvesting the morning dew. Tim says they need a lot of moisture in the spring and fall. You could say that unheated, lightly filtered honey from Tim’s bees has vintages. Summer honey is light and beguiling, almost with a hint of mint from the linden tree pollen and clover. End-of-season honey is dark and rich with heady floral overtones. The Lincolns must have enjoyed these kinds of honey. And they could have had a lot of it, too. Tim gets about eighty pounds a year from his hive. Those eighty pounds yield twenty-six quarts. Bee trees would have yielded much more.
    Washington Irving wrote about wild bees in an essay published in 1848. He asserted that the “Indians consider them the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say that, in proportion as the bee advances, the Indian and buffalo retire. We are always accustomed to associate the hum of the bee-hive with the farm house and flower garden and to consider these industrious little animals as connected with the busy haunts of man, and I am told that the wild bee is seldom to be met with at any great distance from the frontier.”
    The Lincolns’Little Pigeon Creek community in Spencer County did grow quickly, pushing back the frontier forest. In 1818, newly married to Thomas Lincoln, SarahJohnston and her three children moved to Indiana. She brought furniture and household goods