pposed to be showing the white feather if I surrendered to the
climate and covered my poor little bare neck or whether I would be too
out of style. I must have looked like a little picked chicken with goose
flesh all over me. Once before this costume was added to, by the little
sack, my mother sent me for a jug of vinegar down to Helen Street and
Washington Avenue South. I had on the same little hoops and only one
thickness of cotton underclothing under them. It must have been twenty
degrees below zero. I thought I would perish before I got there, but
childlike, never peeped. When I finally reached home, they had an awful
time thawing me out. The vinegar was frozen solid in the jug.

A boardwalk six blocks long was built from Bridge Square to Bassett's
Hall on First Street North. It was a regular sidewalk, not just two
boards laid lengthwise and held by crosspieces as the other sidewalks
were. Our dress parade always took place there. We would walk back and
forth untiringly, passing everybody we knew and we knew everybody in
town. Instead of taking a girl out driving or to the theatre, a young
man would ask, "Won't you go walking on the boardwalk?"

Lucy Morgan used to go to school with us when we first came. She had
long ringlets and always wore lownecked dresses, just as the rest of us
did, but her white neck never had any gooseflesh on it and she was the
only one who had curls.

We went to high school where the court house now stands. It was on a
little hill, so we always said we were climbing the "Hill of
Knowledge."

I can well remember the dazed look that came on my father's face when
for the first time, he realized that there were horses in town that he
did not know. The town had grown so that he could not keep pace with it.

Mr. Frank Slocum--1856.

When we drove from St. Paul to Cannon Falls in '56 we only saw one small
piece of fence on the way. A man by the name of Baker at Rich Valley in
Dakota County had this around his door yard. He had dug a trench and
thrown up a ridge of dirt. On top of this he had two cross pieces and a
rail on top. You call it a rail fence. We called it oftener "stake and
rider." We followed the regular road from St. Paul to Dubuque.

The original Indian trail which was afterward the stage road, started at
Red Wing and went through Cannon Falls, Staunton, Northfield, Dundas,
Cannon City to Faribault.

My father had a store in Cannon Falls. I was only thirteen and small for