at. The other
half made the back and our chair was done. As we had no nails, we fitted
on the backs with wood pegs. Our table was made of puncheons split with
a wedge and hewed with a broadax. The cabin would have been very
homelike with its new furniture if it had not been for the smoke. My
mother had to do all the cooking on a flat stone on the floor with
another standing up behind it. She nearly lost her sight the first
winter from the smoke. Our attic was filled with cornstalks to make the
cabin warmer.

Our fare was good, as game was very plentiful and we had corn meal and a
coarse ground wheat more like cracked wheat. There was a little grist
mill at Carimona, a tiny town near. My mother made coffee from corn
meal crusts. It would skin Postum three ways for Sunday.

When I was nine years old I killed a buffalo at Buffalo Grove near us.
That grove was full of their runs. Elk were very plentiful, too, and
deer were so plenty they were a drug in our home market. I have counted
seventy-five at one time and seven elk. Pigeons were so thick that they
darkened the sky when they flew. Geese and ducks, too, were in enormous
flocks. In season, they seemed to cover everything. We used the eggs of
the prairie chickens for cooking. They answered well.

Once my brother shot a coon and my mother made him a cap with the tail
hanging behind and made me one too, but she put a gray squirrel's tail
at the back of mine. She knit our shoes and sewed them to buckskin
soles. I was twelve, when I had my first pair of leather shoes. They
were cowhide and how they did hurt, but I was proud of them. None of the
country boys wore underclothing. I was nineteen before I ever had any.
Our pants were heavily lined and if it was cold, we wore more shirts. I
never had an overcoat until I went in the army. Before we left Vermont,
my mother carded and spun all the yarn and wove all the cloth that we
wore for a long time after coming to Minnesota.

We found the most delicious wild, red plums, half the size of an egg and
many berries and wild crab-apples.

The timber wolves were plenty and fierce. My sister was treed by a pack
from nine o'clock until one. By that time we had got neighbors enough
together to scatter them. I was chased, too, when near home, but as I
had two bulldogs with me, they kept them from closing in on me until I
could get in the house.

There was a rattlesnake den near us and once we killed seventy-eight in
one day. They we