saw. I was six feet, and holding them up, they were just my height. The
spread was about the same. Of course, we camped out nights and I never
enjoyed meals more than those on that trip. The game was so delicious.

In our drove of cattle was a cow with a young calf. When we came to a
wide river, we swam all the cattle across, but that little calf would
not go. We tried every way that we knew of to make it, then thought we
would let it come over when it was ready. We rested there two days. The
mother acted wild and we tied her up. The morning we were going to
start, just as it was getting light, she broke away and swam the river.
The calf ran to meet her but the mother just stood in the water and
mooed. All at once, the calf took to the water and swam with the mother
to the other side where it made a hearty breakfast after its two days
fast. I thought I had never seen any animal quite so human as that cow
mother.

When we got to St. Croix Falls, I thought it was a metropolis, for it
was quite a little town. I was back and forth across the river on the
Minnesota side too. In 1843, I helped cut the logs, saw them, and later
raft them down the river to St. Louis. This was the first raft of logs
to go down the St. Croix river. Lumber rafts had gone before. Our mill
had five saws--four frame and one muley. A muley saw was a saw without a
frame. It took a good raftsman to get a raft over the Falls. It took
four St. Croix rafts to make one Mississippi raft. I got sixteen
dollars a month and found, working on a raft. I was raised to twenty
after a while and to two dollars a day when I could take charge.

In 1844 we had been up in the woods logging all winter on the Snake
River. The logs were all in Cross Lake in the boom waiting for a rain to
carry them down to the boom at St. Croix. There was a tremendous amount
of them, for the season before, the water had been so low that it was
impossible to get many out and we had an unusual supply just cut. One
day in May, there was a regular cloudburst. We had been late in getting
out the logs as the season was late. The Snake River over-ran its banks
and the lake filled so full that the boom burst and away went all those
logs with a mighty grinding, headed straight for the Gulf of Mexico.

They swept everything clean at the Falls. Took the millrace even. The
mill was pretty well broken up too. We found some of them on the banks
along and some floated in the lake. We recovered over hal