ry to get our wagon over, and there
came the rub. We swam the cattle in twenty minutes' time, but it took
us a full half day to get the wagon over. The river was at least a
hundred yards wide, three quarters of which was swimming to a horse.
But we hunted up and down the river until we found an eddy, where the
banks had a gradual approach to deep water, and started to raft the
wagon over--a thing none of the outfit had ever seen done, though we
had often heard of it around camp-fires in Texas. The first thing was
to get the necessary timber to make the raft. We scouted along the
Salt Fork for a mile either way before we found sufficient dry, dead
cottonwood to form our raft. Then we set about cutting it, but we had
only one axe, and were the poorest set of axemen that were ever called
upon to perform a similar task; when we cut a tree it looked as though
a beaver had gnawed it down. On horseback the Texan shines at the head
of his class, but in any occupation which must be performed on foot he
is never a competitor. There was scarcely a man in our outfit who
could not swing a rope and tie down a steer in a given space of time,
but when it came to swinging an axe to cut logs for the raft, our
lustre faded. "Cutting these logs," said Joe Stallings, as he mopped
the sweat from his brow, "reminds me of what the Tennessee girl who
married a Texan wrote home to her sister. 'Texas,' so she wrote, 'is a
good place for men and dogs, but it's hell on women and oxen.'"

Dragging the logs up to the place selected for the ford was an easy
matter. They were light, and we did it with ropes from the pommels of
our saddles, two to four horses being sufficient to handle any of the
trees. When everything was ready, we ran the wagon out into two-foot
water and built the raft under it. We had cut the dry logs from
eighteen to twenty feet long, and now ran a tier of these under the
wagon between the wheels. These we lashed securely to the axle, and
even lashed one large log on the underside of the hub on the outside
of the wheel. Then we cross-timbered under these, lashing everything
securely to this outside guard log. Before we had finished the
cross-timbering, it was necessary to take an anchor rope ashore for
fear our wagon would float away. By the time we had succeeded in
getting twenty-five dry cottonwood logs under our wagon, it was
afloat. Half a dozen of us then swam the river on our horses, taking
across the heaviest rope we had for