some gold and a little
silver.

In the year of 1859 we had the latest spring I ever experienced. We did
not do any farming of any kind until the first week in May and this made
it very late for small grain. We had a short season, but the wheat was
very good. We had an early frost that year about the third of September
and it killed everything. I saw killdeers frozen to death the third day
of that month. Corn was not ripe yet and was ruined. It would have been
quite a crop. It was dried up afterwards and shrunk, but was not good.
Oats and wheat however were good and it made better times.

The country was gradually developing. In the spring of 1860 we had an
early spring. The bees flew and made honey the seventeenth of March. We
commenced plowing on the sixteenth of March. I brought down potatoes
that spring and put them in an open shed and they did not freeze. This
summer was a very productive one. Wheat went as high as forty bushels to
the acre, No. 1. All crops were good.

The fall of 1860 was the time they held presidential election and
Lincoln was elected that fall. We had very many speakers here at Mankato
and excitement ran high. General Baker, Governor Ramsey, Wm. Windom,
afterwards Secretary of the Treasury and other prominent men spoke.

After the war commenced and the volunteers were called out, most of the
able bodied men joined the army. These men sent their pay home and
afterward business began to get better and conditions improved. Early in
August of 1862 Lincoln called for five hundred thousand men and those
men in this immediate vicinity who had not already joined, went to war,
leaving only those not able to join to protect their homes and property.

Mr. John A. Jones.

We were among the very earliest settlers in the vicinity of Mankato and
came from Wisconsin. I had come in April and pre-empted a claim at the
top of what is known as Pigeon Hill. Two other families came with us.

Traveling across country, we and our teams and live stock made quite a
procession. We had five yoke of oxen, several span of horses, and about
forty head of cattle, among them a number of milch cows. The wagons, in
which we rode and in which we carried our household goods were the real
"prairie schooner" of early days. We found our way by compass and made
our own road west, traveling over the soft earth in which deep ruts were
made by our wheels. The following teams were compelled to proceed with
care in order not to ge