of Rochester and Kenyon. We carried enough provisions
with us to last most of the trip. We had some sixteen yoke of oxen, many
cows, calves, and six colts. We slept in the wagons and we baked bread
in iron kettles by burying them in hot ashes.

Our first home and the Prehn's was built in this way: We dug down in the
earth four feet, very much as we would today for a cellar, but into a
side hill. Above these four feet, logs were built up, plastered together
with mud. For a roof, logs and branches of trees were placed across the
side walls and then plastered together with mud.

Coming up through Kenyon we saw many Indians camping along the road. The
colts and oxen were deathly afraid of them and would turn way out of the
road when passing, keeping just as far away as possible.

Among the earliest marriages recorded in Rice county is that of William
Bierman and Augusta Prehn 1857.

Mrs. Ann Alexander.

My husband with his father and a brother, Jonas, came in '54 and took up
claims adjoining the present site of Northfield. They drove two ox teams
and brought cattle, a couple of sheep and some pigs.

My husband's parents kept boarders and had some sixteen or eighteen all
of the time and each day brought many extra from the stage coaches
plying between here and Hastings and here and St. Paul.

Every mouthful of food consumed that first year was brought from
Hastings, twenty-eight miles away, and it kept one man and an ox team on
the road all the time.

Pork was purchased by the barrel and it would seldom last a week.

By the following spring, '55, when I was married and came to Minnesota
some of the land had been broken, so small gardens were planted and
potatoes and other vegetables raised. I believe it was about the time of
the civil war that butter sold as low as 5c a pound and eggs 3c a dozen.

In these early days the Indians received annuities at Red Wing and on
their yearly pilgrimages they would often camp in this vicinity as long
as five or six weeks. The chiefs spent their time in hunting and
fishing. The west side of the river was then not settled at all and
there they had their camps. The squaws would come to the settler's
homes, set their papooses up against the side of the house and walk into
the house to beg. I have seen the large living room of mother's boarding
house lined with Indians, smoking one pipe--each man taking a few puffs
and then passing the pipe along. In those days the mosquitoes were