lways 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. Missouri Rose Pratt--1843.

In 1842 my father was going to the Wisconsin pineries to work, so mother
and we children went along to keep house for him. We came from Dubuque
to Lake Pepin. Mr. Furnell, from the camp, had heard there were white
people coming so he came with an ox team down the tote road to meet us
and our baggage, and take us to camp. We found a large log house