Part 12

Mr. James M. Gillespie--1853.

I remember that our first crop on our own farm at Camden Place in 1853 was corn and pumpkins. The Indians would go to the field, take a pumpkin, split it and eat it as we do an apple with grunts of satisfaction.

There was an eight acre patch of wild strawberries where Indians had cultivated the land on our new claim about where our house stands today. They were as large as the small cultivated berries with a most delicious flavor. Everyone that we knew picked and picked but wagon loads rotted on the ground.

A good strong, quick stepping ox could plow two acres a day but much oftener they plowed one and one half acres only. The pigeons flew so low in '54 that we could kill them with any farm implement we happened to be using. They seemed to be all tired out. We killed and dried the breasts for winter.

Miss Nancy Gillespie--1853.

I remember a pear shaped wild plum which grew along the river bank. It was as large as the blue California plum and of a most wonderful color and taste. I have never seen anything like it and have not seen this variety of late years.

Mr. Isaac Layman--1853.

My father came to Minnesota in '52 and bought the land where Layman's Cemetery now is for $1,000.00 of Mr. Dumar. He returned for us January first '53. Snow was two feet on a level and the cold was terrible.

We went with our horses and wagon to Chicago from Peoria. There we bought a bobsled and put the wagon box on it, adding a strong canvas top. We put in a stove and made the twenty-one day journey very comfortably. We came up through Wisconsin. The only spot I remember was Black River Falls. The woods abounded with game. There were thousands of deer and partridges. We killed what we could eat only. We saw many bear tracks. We crossed the Mississippi at St. Anthony and arrived at our cabin.

Our house was only boarded up but father got out and banked it with snow to the eaves, pounding it down hard so it would hold. It made it very comfortable.

In the early days ammunition was very expensive for the farmer boys who loved to shoot. They found that dried peas were just as good as shot for prairie chicken, quail and pigeons, so always hunted them with these. The passenger pigeons were so plentiful that the branches of trees were broken by their numbers. They flew in such enormous flocks that they would often fly in at open doors and windows. They obscured the sun in their flight. Looked at from a distance, they would seem to extend as far up as the eye could reach. I have brought down thirty at a shot. They could be knocked off the branches with a stick while roosting and thousands of them were killed in this way. In these early days, they brought only 10c or 20c a dozen. The ducks used to congregate in such large numbers on Rice Lake that their flight sounded louder than a train of cars.

Mrs. Mary Weeks--1853, Ninety years old.

We came to Minnesota in 1853. My husband went up to our claim and broke from twenty-five to forty acres and sowed rutabagas. It was on new breaking and virgin soil and they grew tremendous. We moved there and bought stock. They seemed never to tire of those turnips and grew very slick and fat on them. We, too, ate them in every form and I thought I had never tasted anything so good. They were so sweet and tasty. The children used to cut them in two and scrape them with a spoon. We said we had "Minnesota apples" when we took them out to eat. It did seem so good to have real brooms to use. In Maine, we had always made our brooms of cedar boughs securely tied to a short pole. They were good and answered the purpose but a new fangled broom made of broom straw seemed so dressy. I can well remember the first one of this kind I ever had. It was only used on great occasions. Usually we used a splint broom which we made ourselves.

I used to do all the housework for a family of seven besides making butter and taking care of the chickens. If help was short, I helped with the milking, too. I made all the clothes the men wore. A tailor would cut out their suits and then I would make them by hand. I made all their shirts too. You should have seen the fancy bosomed shirts I made. Then I knit the stocking and mittens for the whole family and warm woolen scarfs for their necks. My husband used to go to bed tired to death and leave me sitting up working. He always hated to leave me. Then he would find me up no matter how early it was. He said I never slept. I didn't have much time to waste that way. We lived on beautiful Silver Lake. In season the pink lady-slippers grew in great patches and other flowers to make the prairie gay.

For amusement we used to go visiting and always spent the day. We would put the whole family into a sleigh or wagon and away we would go for an outing. We had such kind neighbors--no one any better than the other--all equal.

Mrs. E. A. Merrill--1853, Minneapolis.

My home was where the old Union station stood. In 1853 my father, Mr. Keith, learned that the land near where the Franklin Avenue bridge now is was to be thrown open to settlement. He loaded his wagon with lumber and drove onto the piece of land he wanted and stayed there all night. In the morning he built his home. In the afternoon the family moved in and lived there for three years.

Mrs. Martha Thorne--1854.

We started from Davenport, Iowa, for Minnesota Territory in 1854. We had expected to be only two weeks on the trip to the junction of the Blue Earth and Minnesota rivers, but were six weeks on that terrible trip with our ox teams. There had been so much rain that all dry land was a swamp, all swamps lakes, and the lakes and rivers all over everywhere. Sometimes we worked a whole day to get one hundred feet through one of the sloughs. We would cut the tallest and coarsest rushes and grass and pile in to make a road bed. We would seem to be in a sea, but finally this trip ended as all trips, no matter how bad, must, and we came to Lake Crystal where we were to stay.

Such a beautiful spot as it was, this home spot! We camped for three weeks, living in our prairie schooner, while the men put up the wild hay.

We built a log cabin with "chinkins" to let in the air. We filled in the cracks except where these chinkins were, with mud. The roof was made by laying popple poles so they met in the middle and fastening them together. Over this we laid a heavy thickness of wild hay, and over that the popple poles again well tied with hand twisted ropes of wild hay, to those below. It was a good roof, only it leaked like a sieve. The floor was just the ground. Over it we put a layer of the wild hay and then staked a rag carpet over it. A puncheon shelf to put my trunk under, and the furniture placed, made a home that I was more than satisfied with. It took my husband over two weeks with a pair of trotting oxen to go for the furniture to St. Paul.

My baby was born three weeks after we moved in. There was no doctor within a hundred miles. I got through, helped only by my sister-in-law. What do you women nowadays, with your hospitals and doctors know of a time like this? When it rained, and rain it did, plenty, that October, the only dry place was on that trunk under the shelf and many an hour baby and I spent there. Whenever there was sunshine that carpet was drying.

We were much troubled with what the settlers called "prairie dig." It was a kind of itch that seemed to come from the new land. It made the hands very sore and troublesome. We did everything but could find no cure. The Dakota Sioux were our neighbors and were very friendly. They had not yet learned to drink the white man's firewater. A squaw came in one day and when she saw how I was suffering, went out and dug a root. She scraped off the outer bark, then cooked the inner bark and rubbed it on my hands. I was cured as if by magic. She buried all parts of the root, so I think it was poison.

The next year we raised the first wheat on the Des Moines River. We put the sacks in the bottom of the wagon, then our feather beds on top of them. The children were put on these and we started for the mill at Garden City, one hundred and thirty miles away. We had two yoke of oxen; the leaders were white with black heads and hoofs and great, wide spreading horns. They were Texas cattle and were noble beasts, very intelligent and affectionate. I could drive them by just calling "Gee and Haw". They went steadily along. My husband and I spelled each other and went right along by night as well as day. We were about forty hours going. The moonlight, with the shadows of the clouds on the prairie was magnificent. We never saw a human being. We had our wheat ground and started back. As I was walking beside the oxen while my husband slept, I started up a flock of very young geese. I caught them all and they became very tame. They once flew away and were gone three weeks, but all returned. When we got home, we had a regular jubilation over that flour. Twenty of the neighbors came in to help eat it. They were crazy for the bread. I made three loaves of salt rising bread and they were enormous, but we never got a taste of them.

The Indians were always kind neighbors. They learned evil from the whites. The father of Inkpadutah used to hold my little girl and measure her foot for moccasins. Then he would bring her the finest they could make and would be so pleased when they fitted. The Indians always had wonderful teeth. They did not scrub the enamel off. They used to ask for coffee and one who had been to school said, "Could I have a green pumpkin?" and ate it raw with a relish.

We had a carpet sack for stockings. An Indian orator used to look at it with covetous eyes. One day he came in, laid two mink skins on the table, took the stockings out of the bag and stepping right along with victory in his eye, bore that sack away.

We lived on salt and potatoes for five weeks that first winter. We paid $1.00 for three pounds of sugar and $18.00 for a barrel of musty flour that we had to chop out with an ax and grate. That was in the winter of '55. During the Inkpadutah outbreak, the soldiers ate everything we had.

During the outbreak of '62 we moved to Mankato. I belonged to the ladies aid and we took care of the wounded and refugees sent from New Ulm. We made field beds on the floor for them. One poor German woman went to sleep while carrying a glass of water across the room to her husband, who was wounded. She just sank down in such a deep sleep that nothing could arouse her. I never could imagine such exhaustion. Old man Ireland had sixteen bullet holes, but had never stopped walking until he got to us. Mrs. Eastlake, that wonderful woman, was in this hospital. She was the woman who crawled all those miles on her hands and knees.