The bands of women and children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and love-making.

It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces.

The Indian peril trained the pioneers to alertness, shaped them as warriors and hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common enemy.
Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested by the Indian with fire.

The hardest privations suffered by farmers and stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly, depended.
Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came in time for the frontiersman to collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live stock and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure.

At others, the tap of the "express"-- as the herald of Indian danger was called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily, ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.
The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered settlements.