Old Rail Fence Corners. Various

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      The French people always kissed all the ladies on the cheek on New Year's day, when they made calls.

      In the early day, Irvine built a new house of red brick. A little boy, Alfred Furnell, took a hatchet and went out to play. He got to hewing things and finally hewed a piece about a foot long out of the corner of that red brick house making it look very queer. His father asked him who did it. Unlike George Washington, he could tell a lie and said, "A little nigger boy did it." His father 'tended to the only little boy that was near, regardless of color.

      Once there was a Sunday school convention in St. Paul. When lunch was called, Mr. Cressey, the minister, said, "Now, we will go out and have refreshments provided by the young girls who will wait on us. May God bless them, the young men catch them and the devil miss them."

      They used to call my sister-in-law, "Sweet Adeline Pratt."

      Mrs. Gideon Pond—1843, Ninety years old.

      In 1843 in Lac qui Parle, we had a cow. We paid thirty dollars to the Red River men for her. She had short legs and a shaggy black and white coat. She was very gentle. She was supposed to have come from cattle brought to Hudson Bay by the Hudson Bay traders.

      In 1843 we visited the Falls of St. Anthony. There was only a little mill there, with a hut for the soldier who guarded it. The Falls were wonderful. I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful. The spray caught the sun and the prismatic colors added to the scene. The roaring could be heard a long way off.

      We raised a short eared corn, that was very good and grew abundantly. I have never seen any like it since. Our flour was sent to us from way down the Mississippi. When we got it, it had been wet and was so mouldy that we had to chop it out with an ax. It took so much saleratus to make anything of it. We learned to like wild rice. It grew in the shallow lakes. An Indian would take a canoe and pass along through the rice when it was ripe shaking it into the boat until he had a boat full—then, take it to the shore to dry.

      I was out to dinner with Mr. Scofield and his wife who came in '49. It was dark and stormy. Mrs. Scofield was first taken home and then Mr. Scofield started for our home. We soon found we were lost and drove aimlessly around for some time. We came to a rail fence. I said "Perhaps I can find the way". I examined this fence carefully and saw that one of the posts was broken, then said to Mr. Scofield, "I know just where we are now. I noticed this broken post when I was going to meeting Sunday." I soon piloted the expedition home.

      In '43 when I was Mrs. Hopkins I was standing with Mrs. Riggs and Mrs. Huggins on the steps of the St. Louis house. The Gideon Ponds were then living in vacant rooms that anyone could occupy in this old hotel. Little three year old Edward Pond was standing with us. He and the little Riggs boy had new straw hats that we had bought of the sutler at the Fort. The wind blew his hat off suddenly. We did not see where it went but we did hear him cry. We could not find it in the tall grass. Mrs. Riggs took her little boy and stood him in the same place and we all watched. When the wind blew his hat off we went where it had blown and sure enough, there lay the other little hat too. The Indians standing around laughed long and loud at this strategy.

      Captain Stephen Hanks—1844, Ninety-four years old.

      Captain Hanks, now in his ninety-fifth year, hale, hearty, a great joker and droll storyteller, as an own cousin of Abraham Lincoln should be, says: In the spring of 1840, when a youth, I came north from Albany, Illinois, with some cattle buyers and a drove of eighty cattle, for the lumberjacks in the woods north of St. Croix Falls. We came up the east bank of the river following roads already made. In the thick woods near the Chippewa Falls, I found an elk's antlers that were the finest I ever saw. I was six feet, and holding them up, they were just my height. The spread was about the same. Of course, we camped out nights and I never enjoyed meals more than those on that trip. The game was so delicious.

      In our drove of cattle was a cow with a young calf. When we came to a wide river, we swam all the cattle across, but that little calf would not go. We tried every way that we knew of to make it, then thought we would let it come over when it was ready. We rested there two days. The mother acted wild and we tied her up. The morning we were going to start, just as it was getting light, she broke away and swam the river. The calf ran to meet her but the mother just stood in the water and mooed. All at once, the calf took to the water and swam with the mother to the other side where it made a hearty breakfast after its two days fast. I thought I had never seen any animal quite so human as that cow mother.

      When we got to St. Croix Falls, I thought it was a metropolis, for it was quite a little town. I was back and forth across the river on the Minnesota side too. In 1843, I helped cut the logs, saw them, and later raft them down the river to St. Louis. This was the first raft of logs to go down the St. Croix river. Lumber rafts had gone before. Our mill had five saws—four frame and one muley. A muley saw was a saw without a frame. It took a good raftsman to get a raft over the Falls. It took four St. Croix rafts to make one Mississippi raft. I got sixteen dollars a month and found, working on a raft. I was raised to twenty after a while and to two dollars a day when I could take charge.

      In 1844 we had been up in the woods logging all winter on the Snake River. The logs were all in Cross Lake in the boom waiting for a rain to carry them down to the boom at St. Croix. There was a tremendous amount of them, for the season before, the water had been so low that it was impossible to get many out and we had an unusual supply just cut. One day in May, there was a regular cloudburst. We had been late in getting out the logs as the season was late. The Snake River over-ran its banks and the lake filled so full that the boom burst and away went all those logs with a mighty grinding, headed straight for the Gulf of Mexico.

      They swept everything clean at the Falls. Took the millrace even. The mill was pretty well broken up too. We found some of them on the banks along and some floated in the lake. We recovered over half of them. We built a boom just where Stillwater is today, in still water. Joe Brown had a little house about a mile from there. There were the logs, and the mill at St. Croix was useless. McCusick made a canal from a lake in back and built a mill. The lumbermen came and soon there was a straggling little village. I moved there myself one of the first.

      I used to take rafts of lumber down the river and bring back a boat for someone loaded with supplies. The first one I brought up was the Amulet in 1846. She had no deck, was open just like a row boat. She had a stern wheel.

      In 1848, Wisconsin Territory was to be made a State. The people there wanted to take all the land into the new state that was east of the Rum River. We fellows in Stillwater and St. Paul wanted a territory of our own. As we were the only two towns, we wanted the capitol of the new territory for one and the penitentiary for the other. In the Spring—in May, I think, I know it was so cold that we slept in heavy blankets, the men from St. Paul sent for us and about forty of us fellows went over. We slept that night in a little hotel on one of the lower bluffs. It was a long building with a door in the middle. We slept on the floor, rolled up in blankets. The next day, we talked over the questions before mentioned and it was decided that we should vote against the boundary as proposed and have a new territory and that St. Paul should have the capital and we the penitentiary. This decision was ratified at the convention in Stillwater, the last of August 1848.

      The hottest time I ever had in a steamboat race was in May, 1857, running the Galena from Galena to St. Paul. A prize had been offered, free wharfage for the season, amounting to a thousand dollars, for the boat that would get to St. Paul first that year. I was up at Lake Pepin a week before the ice went out, waiting for that three foot ice to go. It was dreadful aggravating. There was an open channel kind of along one edge and the ice seemed to be all right back of it. There were twenty boats all waiting there in Bogus Bay. I made a kind of harbor in the ice by chopping out a place big enough for my boat and she СКАЧАТЬ