d it
if it fell off and your sacks broke, but now you have flour."

When my boy was three weeks old, I drove fourteen miles to a dance and
took in every dance all night and wasn't sick afterward either. Of
course, I took him along.

When I came to sell my oxen after my husband died in the army, no one
wanted to give me a fair price for them, because I was a woman, but Mr.
S. T. McKnight, who had a small general store in Blue Earth gave me what
was right and paid me $2.50 for the yoke besides.

We had company one Sunday when we first came and all we had to eat was a
batch of biscuits. They all said they was mighty good too and they never
had a better meal.

We all raised our own tobacco. I remember once our Probate Judge came
along and asked, "Have you any stalks I can chew?" It was hard to keep
chickens for the country was so full of foxes. Seed potatoes brought
$4.00 a bushel. We used to grate corn when it was in the dough grade and
make bread from that. It was fine.

In 1856 and 1857 money was scarcer than teeth in a fly. We never saw a
penny sometimes for a year at a time. Everything was trade.

Mrs. Duncan Kennedy--1856.

My father moved from Canada to Minnesota. He was urged to come by
friends who had gone before and wrote back that there was a wonderful
piece of land on a lake, but when we got there with an ox team after a
two days trip from St. Paul, our goods on a lumber wagon--we thought it
was a mudhole. We were used to the clear lakes of Canada and this one
was full of wild rice. It was near Nicollet Village. The road we took
from St. Paul went through Shakopee, Henderson and Le Seuer. They said
it was made on an old Indian trail.

The turnips grew so enormous on our virgin soil that we could hardly
believe they were turnips. They looked more like small pumpkins inverted
in the ground.

The wild flowers were wonderful too. In the fall, the prairies were gay
with the yellow and sad with the lavender bloom.

The first party we went to was a housewarming. We went about seven miles
with the ox team. I thought I would die laughing when I saw the girls go
to their dressing room. They went up a ladder on the outside. There were
two fiddlers and we danced all the old dances. Supper was served on a
work bench from victuals out of a wash tub. We didn't have hundred
dollar dresses, but we did have red cheeks from the fine clear air.

One day when I was alone at my father's, an Indian with feathers in his