I live in an old house.  The house is perfectly comfortable for most of the year.  However, in the coldest days of winter it is no longer a house, it’s a refrigerator.  You can look in our window on the coldest days and see a family looking like they are just about to leave for a ski trip to the north pole.  My wife and I wear our coats and gloves and on the really bad days we wear stocking caps.  My son is oblivious to cold.  He will be wearing his underwear and pretty much nothing else.  He says he’s not cold and I’m inclined to believe him.  He hasn’t gotten frost bite or hypothermia yet.  All this is fine save for one thing, the dreaded bath.
While you’re in the bath everything is fine.  It’s getting out and doing everything necessary to prepare for bedtime before actually freezing to death that’s the problem.  This sets me to thinking about what it was like for our ancestors on the plains either Indian or white when their stench became too great a burden and the bath was a necessity.  I can imagine a really cold  teepee or sod house in the dead of winter on the plains and a family who has been working hard for days on end tending to the animals, hunting, and searching for enough fuel to burn for warmth and cooking.  They’ve worked up a sweat then cooled off over and over again.  Not to mention the lack of toilet paper on the plains in those days.  You think those people were in a hurry to strip down and wash?  No way.
The image we have of pioneers and indians are of a hearty and clean peoples eeking out an existence in harsh climate.  I can keep the hearty image but the clean has got to go.  I’m starting to believe that these were some tough and funky dudes.  You recall the movies where an Indian is sneaking up on somebody.  He better have been down wind.  Unless, and this a big unless, the pioneers were just as stinky.  Then their funk would  have easily matched the indians funk and canceled each other out.  The terrible funk would also be a great natural birth control method.  I bet if we had the data we would see that no babies were born nine months after the winters on the prairie.  I’m not saying that women were any funkier than men.  I’m  just saying that the funkiness emanating from both would have forged a stronger guard than a chastity belt.  I also believe that the devices we call clothes pin weren’t for clothes originally.  They were actually for married people who couldn’t control themselves in the winter and would place these wooden devices over their noses.  Eventually it was discovered that they would also work for hanging clothes on a line.   It’s in their memory that I’ll gladly strip down and force myself into a hot shower and become mildly cool while I’m toweling off.  The pioneer spirit lives on!