f of them. We
built a boom just where Stillwater is today, in still water. Joe Brown
had a little house about a mile from there. There were the logs, and the
mill at St. Croix was useless. McCusick made a canal from a lake in back
and built a mill. The lumbermen came and soon there was a straggling
little village. I moved there myself one of the first.

I used to take rafts of lumber down the river and bring back a boat for
someone loaded with supplies. The first one I brought up was the Amulet
in 1846. She had no deck, was open just like a row boat. She had a stern
wheel.

In 1848, Wisconsin Territory was to be made a State. The people there
wanted to take all the land into the new state that was east of the Rum
River. We fellows in Stillwater and St. Paul wanted a territory of our
own. As we were the only two towns, we wanted the capitol of the new
territory for one and the penitentiary for the other. In the Spring--in
May, I think, I know it was so cold that we slept in heavy blankets,
the men from St. Paul sent for us and about forty of us fellows went
over. We slept that night in a little hotel on one of the lower bluffs.
It was a long building with a door in the middle. We slept on the floor,
rolled up in blankets. The next day, we talked over the questions before
mentioned and it was decided that we should vote against the boundary as
proposed and have a new territory and that St. Paul should have the
capital and we the penitentiary. This decision was ratified at the
convention in Stillwater, the last of August 1848.

The hottest time I ever had in a steamboat race was in May, 1857,
running the Galena from Galena to St. Paul. A prize had been offered,
free wharfage for the season, amounting to a thousand dollars, for the
boat that would get to St. Paul first that year. I was up at Lake Pepin
a week before the ice went out, waiting for that three foot ice to go.
It was dreadful aggravating. There was an open channel kind of along one
edge and the ice seemed to be all right back of it. There were twenty
boats all waiting there in Bogus Bay. I made a kind of harbor in the ice
by chopping out a place big enough for my boat and she set in there cozy
as could be. I anchored her to the ice too. The Nelson, a big boat from
Pittsburg was there with a big cargo, mostly of hardware--nails pretty
much. There were several steamers that had come from down the Ohio. When
the ice shut in, it cut the "Arcola" in two just as if