eat. It would not make bread. The biscuits
were so elastic and soft that they could be stretched way out. These
were the first playthings that I can remember.

A trader came with cows, into the country where we were living, just
before the hail storm and as there was nothing to feed them on, my
father traded for some of them. He traded one of his pair of oxen for
forty acres of land in Wayzata and the other for corn to winter the
stock.

The first meal we had in our new home was of venison from a buck which
my father shot. It was very fat and juicy and as we had not had any meat
but ducks and prairie chickens in two years, it tasted very delicious. I
have counted thirty-four deer in the swamps at one time near our house;
they were so abundant. We lived the first winter in Wayzata on fish,
venison and corn meal and I have never lived so well.

I was sixteen years old before I ever had a coat. We wore thick shirts
in the winter and the colder it was, the more of them we wore. In the
east, my mother had always spun her own yarn and woven great piles of
blankets and woolen sheets. These were loaded in the wagon and brought
to our new home. When there was nothing else, these sheets made our
shirts. We never wore underclothing, but our pants were thickly lined.

My mother was a tailoress and that first year in Minnesota we could not
have lived if it had not been for this. She cut out and made by hand all
kinds of clothing for the settlers. My father used to buy leather and
the shoemaker came to the house and made our shoes.

One spring we had a cellar full of vegetables that we could not use, so
father invited all the squaws who lived near us to come and get some.
They came and took them away. In the cellar also was a keg and a two
gallon jug of maple vinegar. Cut Nose, one of the finest specimens of
manhood I have ever seen, tall, straight and with agreeable features in
spite of the small piece gone from the edge of one nostril, was their
chief, and came the next day with a large bottle, asking to have it
filled with whiskey. Father said he had none, but Cut Nose said he knew
there was a jug and keg of it in the cellar. Father told him to go and
take it if he found any. He sampled first the jug and then the keg with
a most disgusted expression and upon coming upstairs threw the bottle on
the bed and stalked out. This maple vinegar was made from maple sugar
and none could be better.

Cut Nose was often a visitor at our