Back in the mists of antiquity when I worked at the Ranching Heritage Center in
Lubbock, TX, we reconstructed a c.1847 14ftx14ft log building from a Spanish
land grant in central Texas.  It was called the El Capote cabin after the name
of the land grant ("the Cape"), but some of our more enterprising and creative
museum docents got it firmly in their heads that it was "built by a relative of
the famous author".  They were generally the same ones that told all the school
tours that "this building doesn't have a single nail in it" while being drowned
out by a cacphony of hammering from the crew working on the building. . .
Anyway, the aforementioned El Capote cabin had a puncheon floor that generally
conformed to the description given by Terry G. Jordan in Texas Log Buildings: A
Folk Architecture.  (University of Texas Press, 1978.  pp. 83-84).

"In the crudest log dwellings, dating from the earliest years of pioneering,
'old mother earth served as floors'.  Every few weeks the occupants wet down the
dirt floor and tamped it to increase hardness and minimize the amount of loose
soil particles.  A well-maintained dirt floor, regularly tamped and swept, is
not as primitive as it might seem.

Even so, persons with wealth or status normally aspired to something better.
'Dirt floors were common, but some of those who were considered wealthy made
their floors of puncheons'.  A puncheon is a short, thick board that reaches
from the center of one sleeper to the next.  For this reason, the exact length
of the puncheon is determined by the spacing of the sleepers, usually about two
feet apart.  The carpenter makes puncheons by riving boards about two inches
thick and six to ten inches wide from a log, using a froe and a mallet.
Smoothing is done with a foot adze, working cross-grain after the floor is
installed.  A cruder type of puncheon is made by splitting sapling logs in half,
leaving the bark intact.  In either case, whether boards or split logs, they are
lap-jointed onto the sleepers by removing wood from the underside at both ends
of the puncheon, done in such a way that they abut end-to-end at the center of
each sleeper, leaving no gaps.

Most commonly, the puncheons are not fastened to the sleepers, remaining in
place because of gravity and the lap-jointing.  In finer houses, though, the
puncheons are 'pinned down to the sleepers with an auger and wooden pins'."

Lisa