Old Rail Fence Corners | Page 5

milk with black looking maple sugar.
Mr. Williamson left me at Traverse to go East. Before going he helped me load all our supplies into the two Red River carts which he had brought. There were six hundred pounds on each. The trail was very easy to follow and I walked along by the side of the slow going oxen. By keeping up until late, and getting up at daybreak, I made the trip in seven days. For the first four days I was followed by a great gaunt shape that made me uneasy. I knew if it was a dog it would have come nearer. I slept under the cart the first night, but was conscious of its presence as the cattle were restless. On the fourth day of its enforced company, I met a little caravan of carts owned by a Frenchman who was with the half breeds. I told him of my stealthy companion, and he sent some of the half breeds after it with their bows and arrows. They followed it four miles into a swamp and then lost it. They seemed suspicious about this particular animal, and went after it half heartedly. The trader gave me a piece of dough and told me if it came again to put this in meat and drop it. He said "Kill him quick as one gun."
My sister, Mrs. Huggins, wife of the farmer at Lac qui Parle, was overjoyed to see me. Think what it must have meant to a woman way off in the wilderness in that early day to see anyone from civilization, let alone her brother. I had not seen her in several years. They had a nice little garden and quite a patch of wheat, which I was told was fine for the climate. The seed came from the craw of a wild swan that they had shot. It was supposed to have come from the Pembina country for those people had wheat long before the missionaries came. It was always called "Red River Wheat."
Pemmican, which I first tasted on this journey was made by boiling the flesh of any edible animal, usually that of buffalo or deer, pounding it fine and packing it tight into a sack made of the skin of a buffalo calf, then melting the fat and filling all interstices. When sewed up, it was absolutely air tight and would keep indefinitely. It was the most nourishing food that has ever been prepared. For many years it was the chief diet of all hunters, trappers, explorers and frontiersmen.
Pemmican was also made by drying the meat and pulverizing it. The bones were then cracked and the marrow melted and poured into this. No white man could ever make pemmican right. It took a half breed to do it.
The Red River people had cattle very early. The stock at the mission at Lac qui Parle came from there.
I returned to Illinois in the summer of '43 and threshed. In the Fall I returned and built a house for Gideon Pond. It was a wooden house where their brick house now stands.
In 1844, I was building a mission building at Traverse. An Indian came in one day and told me there was a very sick man about twenty miles away at his camp. I went back with him and we brought the white man to the mission. After he was better, he told me that he was one of six drovers who had been bringing a herd of three hundred cattle from Missouri to Fort Snelling. They had lost their compass and then the trail and wandered along until they found a road near what is now Sauk Center. There they met a band of Sioux. The Indians killed a cow and when the drovers remonstrated, they killed one of them and stampeded the cattle. The drovers all ran for their lives. Two of them managed to elude the Indians, and took the road leading east. Our man was one, the other was drowned while crossing the river on a log raft, the rest were never found. Many of the cattle ran wild on the prairies. The Indians used often to kill them and sell the meat to the whites. One of the claims at Traverse de Sioux was for these cattle from the owners of the herd.
Mrs. Missouri Rose Pratt--1843.
In 1842 my father was going to the Wisconsin pineries to work, so mother and we children went along to keep house for him. We came from Dubuque to Lake Pepin. Mr. Furnell, from the camp, had heard there were white people coming so he came with an ox team down the tote road to meet us and our baggage, and take us to camp. We found a large log house which we thought