Translations:Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Recreation/Pioneering/28/en

g. Sanitation

Once they arrived in an area, the pioneers would establish a permanent latrine, or an outhouse. This consisted of a hole dug into the ground (three-to-six feet deep). They would then erect a structure over the hole and furnish it with one or two seats positioned over the hole. When the hole was nearly filled with human waste, they would dig another latrine elsewhere and relocated the outhouse over it, burying the old hole with dirt removed from the new one. They did not have toilet paper, but rather used corn cobs, tree bark, leaves, or if they were lucky, the pages from catalogs. Toilet paper became available in 1857 and was sold by the sheet, rather than on a roll but still remained less common than other forms of sanitary wipes.