Ok, here on the board is your writing assignment for today! Finish this sentence, 2 pages, double-spaced, check your grammar...Oh sorry I got carried away, I'm not the teacher am I??? Ha, Ha! Really fill in the blank any way you want!!!!

If I lived 200 years ago...________________________...

-- Melissa (me@home.net), January 15, 2002

Answers

I would be dead due to the lack of medical advances. I would proabily be farming, living in a one room, hand built, wooden cabin with little material wealth; making wooden items to sell to others.

-- mitch hearn (moopups@citlink.net), January 15, 2002.

I would be living in my little cabin with my husband and , we'll say 6 children. We would be happy and life would be so much simpler than today!

-- Micheale from SE Kansas (mbfrye@totelcsi.net), January 15, 2002.

Before I got married, I would have been a teacher in one of those little one room school-houses.

-- Melissa (me@home.net), January 15, 2002.

First off, I would try and fiqure out a way to shed some of the under clothing, with out any one knowing it. I would stay on East coast, and live in willamsburg and lived in one of those old home,

-- Irene texas (tkorsborn@cs.com), January 15, 2002.

I'd live on the 'edge of the frontier'. Make friends with the Indians. Build us a cabin in the woods with a clearing for the garden. We'd trap and hunt and raise what we could. Dry, salt and pickle. Barter the skins for staples, yardgoods and gun powder, etc. When that area was got crowded we'd move on and keep on doin'.

-- Cindy (SE. IN) (atilrthehony@hotmail.com), January 15, 2002.

It would be nice to have the gentle spirit of many and the good language too. Where men didn't cuss in front of women, and some words just weren't said in front of anyone. I would live close to town but not too close!

-- Melissa (me@home.net), January 15, 2002.

Nathanael (13): "I wouldn't be able plug in my computer."

Josiah (12): "We would enjoy fishing without a license."

Sarah (9): "I could get the horse I want without paying $2,000."

Elijah (7): "I'd be dead."

Benjamin (5): "I'd ride a buggy."

My answer is that Tom would probably be a circuit riding preacher, I would be back home in the log cabin with a lot of children, living the homestead life I've always wanted to live. We would probably be living on the edge of the frontier, maybe Kentucky or Ohio. We would be living on cornbread and beans at first, but I would be teaching my children the benefits of a vegetable garden, a cow, and some chickens, just like now.

-- Cathy N. (keeper8@attcanada.ca), January 15, 2002.

I'd be in Texas, I know, because my progenitors were there(on both sides of the family) since about the time it became a state. I'd live in a one room house, and I'd haul water from the well and scrub the outhouse without complaining. (Side note: when I married my husband, I told him the two things I would always require are running water and a flushing toilet--I am not a pioneer;)

Oh--Texas wasn't a state in 1802, was it?

-- mary (marylgarcia@aol.com), January 15, 2002.

No Mary, I think Texas became a state in 1836. Or around that date anyway. But just because our ancesters lived in Texas before it became a state doesn't take the 'Texican' out, at least IMO. But to answer Melissa's question . . .

If I lived 200 years ago, I would be a rancher, riding the south Texas range, living in a adobe cabin, living poor and loving every minute of the freedom. But keeping my eyes peeled for the Comanches and other fierce, proud Indian tribes that would be looking to take my topknot.

At least that is what my grandfather told me his grandfather told him what life was like during that time period.

-- j.r. guerra (jrguerra@boultinghousesimpson.com), January 15, 2002.

My family was allready settled in Appalachia in 1802 thats kind of wierd to think about. We think about Ky as frontier, then, but I read recently that by 1820s the entire state was allready pretty well settled and no longer thought of as "the frontier" I got to see the "old homeplace" before it fell in-I'm not all together sure I would have wanted to live then....... I have to agree with Mitch-I'd probably be dead-I don't think I would have survived childbirth.

-- Kelly (homearts2002@yahoo.com), January 15, 2002.

Probably be in a sodie here on the plains, but it would be nice because of my carpenter husband. I would have learned what to do with buffalo by now. Lessons with my son by firelight. There would still be this awesome view of the Rockies to my west. We would be eating from our root cellar and whatever hubby could hunt...most everything then...FUN?!

-- DW (djwallace@sotc.net), January 15, 2002.

lol Good posting.

Once at an art's fair, a local soothsayer told me that 200 years ago, I used to run a brothal in San Fancisco. lol

hmmmm, 200 years ago, I was probably married with at least 10 kids and doing sewing for the rich ladies in town.

... Or maybe teaching like my female ancestors did.

Iris

-- Iris (WatchingWideEyed@peaceful.com), January 15, 2002.

I would have died at age 9 from a perforated appendix and peritonitis.

-- lesley (martchas@bellsouth.net), January 15, 2002.

Hello Melissa,

I'd probably me a mountain man. I would learn to live amongst the Indians and stay away from other white men.

Sincerely,

Ernest

-- http://communities.msn.com/livingoffthelandintheozarks (espresso42@hotmail.com), January 16, 2002.

I'd have died from a simple infection. I'll take today's life over even ten years ago.

-- Gary in Indiana (gk6854@aol.com), January 16, 2002.