The winter here on the Monongahela in recent weeks has been uncommonly hard, with temperatures remaining in the teens and even the single digits day after day, and the snow accumulating without melting. Compared with more northern regions, we have had it fairly easy, but around here it has been colder than what we have been accustomed to in recent years.
Looking at the fort covered in snow, I am led to wonder how severe the winters may have been here in the 1770s and 80s when the original fort was active. Just how difficult was life in winter west of the Alleghenies during the Revolutionary era?
For the next few posts I would like to explore this question, and in preparation I have been reading original sources — diaries and memoirs and early histories — and having some conversations with Greg Bray, whose knowledge of those times is extensive.
According to Greg, and my research, the winters on the Virginia frontier during the forting period were considerably more severe than they are at present. Joseph Doddridge, for one, believed the winters on the trans-Allegheny frontier during the eighteenth century were consistently more severe than they were even forty or fifty years later.
Doddridge was brought to the Virginia frontier as an infant, just a year or two before the original Pricketts Fort was built, and he grew up about sixty miles north of here, just over the border in Pennsylvania, during the years that Pricketts Fort was active.
Writing some decades afterwards, around 1820, Doddridge had observed a permanent shift in the climate. Winters on the frontier in his boyhood, he remembered, were more severe than they were at the time he was writing (about 1820). One might attribute this difference to an older man’s natural tendency to exaggerate the hardships of a frontier childhood, but Doddridge is speaking as an historian, and his memory is supported by specific details. Even during the summer months, Doddridge remembers, the nights were almost always cool, and the coolness would persist to midday. As for the winters, they began early, and it was not uncommon for frost to occur in September. One year Doddridge witnessed saw an entire field of corn ruined by a hard freeze on September 22. “Hunting” snows generally arrived by mid-October, and severe winter conditions tended to settle in during November, sometimes early in the month.
Doddridge writes that the snows were consistently deeper and longer-lasting in his boyhood than they would be later, being anywhere from a foot to three feet deep and persisting from November into March or April. The deep snows made every chore an ordeal, with trails needing to be opened and frequently re-shoveled from the cabin to outbuildings and to the spring. Doddridge remembers watching a large dead tree felled for firewood in the forest. When it hit the ground the snow was so deep that it was immediately buried. When the settler reached down to yoke a chain around the base of its trunk so that it could be hauled by horse back to the cabin, his arms were buried in snow up to his shoulders.
Doddridge mentions one characteristic of the snow which would have greatly hindered anyone attempting to travel through it: namely that it frequently had a hard crust. This crust would not usually have been strong enough to support the weight of a man or large animal, but it would have been thick and hard enough that trying to plow through it, especially over distance, would have been extremely difficult and exhausting. Doddridge noted that when the snow was heavily crusted, deer could scarcely move through it at all. If there was any benefit to deep crusted snow persisting throughout the winter in the wilderness, it was that the Shawnee and other native tribes gave up attacking settlements until Spring or early Summer. It must have been a comfort to know that while you were slowly starving or freezing to death, you were at least spared the indignity of losing your hair into the bargain. The perils of frontier life may have been too terrible and numerous to be counted, but in many cases they were seasonal.
If it can be established that winters on the Virginia frontier were long and relatively severe (and I will be attempting to collaborate this with further sources), the next obvious question is, how well were the first European settlers equipped to survive their first winter in the wilderness? How well were they able to shelter, clothe and feed themselves? In my next post I will be looking especially at the question of shelter. We are accustomed to Hollywood images of hardy pioneers passing winter nights in snug, sturdy log cabins, warming themselves before a blazing log in a stone fireplace. How true was this image in fact? I’ll dig into some of those old memoirs and journals and see what they have to say.