Читать книгу Old Rail Fence Corners - Various - Страница 13

Captain Hanks, now in his ninety-fifth year, hale, hearty, a great joker and droll storyteller, as an own cousin of Abraham Lincoln should be, says: In the spring of 1840, when a youth, I came north from Albany, Illinois, with some cattle buyers and a drove of eighty cattle, for the lumberjacks in the woods north of St. Croix Falls. We came up the east bank of the river following roads already made. In the thick woods near the Chippewa Falls, I found an elk's antlers that were the finest I ever saw. I was six feet, and holding them up, they were just my height. The spread was about the same. Of course, we camped out nights and I never enjoyed meals more than those on that trip. The game was so delicious.

In our drove of cattle was a cow with a young calf. When we came to a wide river, we swam all the cattle across, but that little calf would not go. We tried every way that we knew of to make it, then thought we would let it come over when it was ready. We rested there two days. The mother acted wild and we tied her up. The morning we were going to start, just as it was getting light, she broke away and swam the river. The calf ran to meet her but the mother just stood in the water and mooed. All at once, the calf took to the water and swam with the mother to the other side where it made a hearty breakfast after its two days fast. I thought I had never seen any animal quite so human as that cow mother.

When we got to St. Croix Falls, I thought it was a metropolis, for it was quite a little town. I was back and forth across the river on the Minnesota side too. In 1843, I helped cut the logs, saw them, and later raft them down the river to St. Louis. This was the first raft of logs to go down the St. Croix river. Lumber rafts had gone before. Our mill had five saws—four frame and one muley. A muley saw was a saw without a frame. It took a good raftsman to get a raft over the Falls. It took four St. Croix rafts to make one Mississippi raft. I got sixteen dollars a month and found, working on a raft. I was raised to twenty after a while and to two dollars a day when I could take charge.

In 1844 we had been up in the woods logging all winter on the Snake River. The logs were all in Cross Lake in the boom waiting for a rain to carry them down to the boom at St. Croix. There was a tremendous amount of them, for the season before, the water had been so low that it was impossible to get many out and we had an unusual supply just cut. One day in May, there was a regular cloudburst. We had been late in getting out the logs as the season was late. The Snake River over-ran its banks and the lake filled so full that the boom burst and away went all those logs with a mighty grinding, headed straight for the Gulf of Mexico.

They swept everything clean at the Falls. Took the millrace even. The mill was pretty well broken up too. We found some of them on the banks along and some floated in the lake. We recovered over half of them. We built a boom just where Stillwater is today, in still water. Joe Brown had a little house about a mile from there. There were the logs, and the mill at St. Croix was useless. McCusick made a canal from a lake in back and built a mill. The lumbermen came and soon there was a straggling little village. I moved there myself one of the first.

I used to take rafts of lumber down the river and bring back a boat for someone loaded with supplies. The first one I brought up was the Amulet in 1846. She had no deck, was open just like a row boat. She had a stern wheel.

In 1848, Wisconsin Territory was to be made a State. The people there wanted to take all the land into the new state that was east of the Rum River. We fellows in Stillwater and St. Paul wanted a territory of our own. As we were the only two towns, we wanted the capitol of the new territory for one and the penitentiary for the other. In the Spring—in May, I think, I know it was so cold that we slept in heavy blankets, the men from St. Paul sent for us and about forty of us fellows went over. We slept that night in a little hotel on one of the lower bluffs. It was a long building with a door in the middle. We slept on the floor, rolled up in blankets. The next day, we talked over the questions before mentioned and it was decided that we should vote against the boundary as proposed and have a new territory and that St. Paul should have the capital and we the penitentiary. This decision was ratified at the convention in Stillwater, the last of August 1848.

The hottest time I ever had in a steamboat race was in May, 1857, running the Galena from Galena to St. Paul. A prize had been offered, free wharfage for the season, amounting to a thousand dollars, for the boat that would get to St. Paul first that year. I was up at Lake Pepin a week before the ice went out, waiting for that three foot ice to go. It was dreadful aggravating. There was an open channel kind of along one edge and the ice seemed to be all right back of it. There were twenty boats all waiting there in Bogus Bay. I made a kind of harbor in the ice by chopping out a place big enough for my boat and she set in there cozy as could be. I anchored her to the ice too. The Nelson, a big boat from Pittsburg was there with a big cargo, mostly of hardware—nails pretty much. There were several steamers that had come from down the Ohio. When the ice shut in, it cut the "Arcola" in two just as if it was a pair of shears and she a paper boat. She sank at once. It shoved the "Falls of St. Anthony" a good sized steamer way out of the water on the niggerheads. The "Pioneer" sank. It broke the wheels of the "Nelson" and another boat and put them out of commission. I stayed in my harbor until morning, then steamed away up the little new channel. The "War Eagle" locked us at the head of the lake and held on. I was at the wheel. When we came to Sturgeon Bay, I took a cut in through the bar. I had found it when I was rafting so I knew they did not know about it. That little advantage gained the day for us. As it was, we burned several barrels of resin and took every chance of meeting our Maker. We got to St. Paul at two o'clock in the morning. Such a hullabaloo as there was—such a big tar barrel fire. We could plainly see "Kaposia" six miles away.

Christmas the company sent me one hundred dollars which came in handy, as I was just married.