the floor, or out in the barn or anywhere else we could find a
place.

During our first winter, a party of about fifty Sioux Indians came and
camped in our woods just west of where the Washburn Park water tower now
stands. They put up about twenty tepees, made partly of skins and partly
of canvas. We boys would often go in the evening to visit them and watch
them make moccasins, which we would buy of them. They would often come
to our house to beg for food, but in all the time they remained there
(nearly the whole winter) they committed no depredations, except that
they cut down a great deal of our fine timber, and killed a great
quantity of game, so that when they wanted to come back the next winter,
father would not allow it.

Once after they had gone away, they came back through the farm and went
off somewhere north of us, where they had a battle with the Chippewas.
When they returned, they brought two scalps and held a "pow-wow" on the
side of our hill.

We had a great deal of small game in our woods, and great quantities of
fish in the creek. We used to spear the fish and sometimes would get two
upon our spears at once.

My mother was very fond of dandelion greens, and missed them very much,
as she could find none growing about our place. So she sent back to
Maine for seed and planted them. But I hardly think that the great
quantities we have now are the result of that one importation.

After a few years we had a school at Wood Lake, which is down Lyndale
avenue two or three miles.

Mrs. Mary Pribble--1854.

My father, Hiram Smith arrived in Minnesota Apr. 21, 1854 settling first
in Brooklyn, Hennepin County. My mother followed in July of the same
year, with the family of three children, myself, aged seven, and two
brothers aged two and five years. We arrived in St. Paul July ninth and
my mother, with her usual forethought and thrift, (realizing that before
long navigation would close for the winter and shut off all source of
supplies) laid in a supply of provisions while we were in St. Paul.
Among other things she bought a bag of rice flour which was all the
flour in our colony until April of the next year.

We came by stage to Anoka and were to cross the Mississippi river in a
canoe, to the trading post of Mr. Miles, which was on a high point of
land in what is now Champlin. It was where Elm creek empties into the
Mississippi. But the canoe was too small to carry us all at once and so
I was left on t