rain-dealer in Buffalo told father
that most of the wheat he handled came from Wisconsin; and this
influential information finally determined my father's choice. At
Milwaukee a farmer who had come in from the country near Fort
Winnebago with a load of wheat agreed to haul us and our formidable
load of stuff to a little town called Kingston for thirty dollars. On
that hundred-mile journey, just after the spring thaw, the roads over
the prairies were heavy and miry, causing no end of lamentation, for
we often got stuck in the mud, and the poor farmer sadly declared that
never, never again would he be tempted to try to haul such a cruel,
heart-breaking, wagon-breaking, horse-killing load, no, not for a
hundred dollars. In leaving Scotland, father, like many other
homeseekers, burdened himself with far too much luggage, as if all
America were still a wilderness in which little or nothing could be
bought. One of his big iron-bound boxes must have weighed about four
hundred pounds, for it contained an old-fashioned beam-scales with a
complete set of cast-iron counterweights, two of them fifty-six pounds
each, a twenty-eight, and so on down to a single pound. Also a lot of
iron wedges, carpenter's tools, and so forth, and at Buffalo, as if on
the very edge of the wilderness, he gladly added to his burden a big
cast-iron stove with pots and pans, provisions enough for a long
siege, and a scythe and cumbersome cradle for cutting wheat, all of
which he succeeded in landing in the primeval Wisconsin woods.

A land-agent at Kingston gave father a note to a farmer by the name of
Alexander Gray, who lived on the border of the settled part of the
country, knew the section-lines, and would probably help him to find a
good place for a farm. So father went away to spy out the land, and
in the mean time left us children in Kingston in a rented room. It
took us less than an hour to get acquainted with some of the boys in
the village; we challenged them to wrestle, run races, climb trees,
etc., and in a day or two we felt at home, carefree and happy,
notwithstanding our family was so widely divided. When father returned
he told us that he had found fine land for a farm in sunny open woods
on the side of a lake, and that a team of three yoke of oxen with a
big wagon was coming to haul us to Mr. Gray's place.

We enjoyed the strange ten-mile ride through the woods very much,
wondering how the great oxen could be so strong and wise and tame a