Brick to be made, a sturgion house . . . a Block
house to be raised on the North side of our back river to prevent the
Indians from killing our cattle, a house to be set up to lodge our cattle
in the winter, and hay to be appointed in his due time to be made, a
smith's forge to be perfected, caske for our Sturgions to be made, and
besides private gardens for each man common gardens for hemp and flax and
such other seeds, and lastly a bridge to land our goods dry and safe upon,
for most of which I take present order."
Dale would have agreed with Dr. Watts that
Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do!
If we of the United States today will call to mind certain Western small
towns of some decades ago--if we will review them as they are pictured in
poem and novel and play--we may receive, as it were out of the tail of the
eye, an impression of some aspects of these western plantings of the
seventeenth century. The dare-devil, the bully, the tenderfoot, the
gambler, the gentleman-desperado had their counterparts in Virginia. So had
the cool, indomitable sheriff and his dependable posse, the friends
generally of law and order. Dale may be viewed as the picturesque sheriff
of this earlier age.
But it must be remembered that this Virginia was of the seventeenth, not of
the nineteenth century. And law had cruel and idiot faces as well as faces
just and wise. Hitherto the colony possessed no written statutes. The
Company now resolved to impose upon the wayward an iron restraint.
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