Old Rail Fence Corners | Page 9

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