Old Rail Fence Corners | Page 5

table with bowls and wooden
spoons at the three places. We were all eyes when we saw these
preparations. Last, she brought in a large bowl of something which I
could see was snow-white and put that in the center of the table. All
were then told to draw up to the table and help themselves. The bright

anticipations vanished when the meal was seen to consist solely of
clabbered 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.