ndous appetite. Our food consisted mostly of potatoes,
bread, wheat or corn, beans and plenty of game. Ducks, chickens or fish
could be had by going a few hundred feet in almost any direction. We had
no well and all the water we used was hauled from the lake, nearly a
half mile distant. Father rigged up a crotch of a tree upon which was
placed a water barrel and this was dragged back and forth by a yoke of
cattle. Starting from the lake with a full barrel we had good luck if we
reached the house with half of it.

In the summer when the corn began to get into the milk stage, we had a
great fight with the blackbirds. They would swarm down upon the fields
and picking open the heads of the ears, would practically spoil every
ear they touched. Scare-crows were of no service in keeping the birds
off, and finally the boys were put into the fields, upon little
elevations made of fence rails, with guns loaded with powder and shot.
We killed hundreds of birds in order to save the corn and had good crops
of wheat and oats and we also had a most remarkable yield of potatoes;
so large in fact, that we had to build a root-cellar in the hillside out
of logs. We dug potatoes and picked them up that fall until I was nearly
worn out, but in the spring the demand for potatoes was so great that
father sold bushels at $1.05 a bushel. This gave him a large amount of
ready money and he bought a pair of horses.

There were plenty of Sioux Indians living in the vicinity of Shakopee. A
reddish colored stone, about two feet high stood a half mile west of our
place on the Indian trail leading from Minnetonka to Shakopee. Around
this stone the Indians used to gather, engaged apparently in some
religious exercise and in smoking kinni kinic.

My cousin William and I raised that summer a quantity of nice
watermelons, the seeds having been brought from Springfield. In the fall
we loaded up two wagons with them and with oxen as the motive power
started one afternoon for St. Anthony. We had to make our way down
towards Fort Snelling until we came within two miles of the fort. Then
we turned towards our destination. It was a long and tedious trip. We
camped out over night and did not reach the west bank of the Mississippi
River opposite St. Anthony until three o'clock the next afternoon. We
fed our cattle in a grove not far from where the Nicollet House now
stands, then started for the ferry, which swung across the Mississippi
River about where the ston