Читать книгу Old Rail Fence Corners - Various - Страница 23

We took a steamer from Galena to Stillwater, as everyone did in those days.

They were paying the Sioux Indians at Red Wing. A noble looking chief in a white blanket colored band with eagles' feathers colored and beautifully worked buckskin shirt, leggings and moccasins was among them. He stands out in my mind as the most striking figure I ever saw. There was so much majesty in his look.

We took a bateau from Stillwater to Clouse's Creek. My uncle came the year before and had a block house where Troutmere now is, four miles from Osceola and we visited him.

A little later when I was seven years old, we went to Taylor's Falls, Minnesota, to live. There were only three houses there. We rented one end of a double block house and school was held in the other end. Our first teacher in '51 and '52 was Susie Thompson. There were thirty-five scholars from St. Croix Falls and our own town. Boats came up the river to Taylor's Falls on regular trips.

In our house there was a large fireplace with crane hooks, to cook on. These hooks were set in the brick. We hung anything we wanted to cook on them. The fire was directly under them. My mother brought a crane that was a part of andirons, with her, but we never used that.

I was married when I was sixteen. My husband built a house the next year. The shingles were made by hand and lasted forty years. The enamel paint came from St. Louis and was as good as new fifty years afterward. The paper, too, which was a white background with long columns with flowers depending from the top, was good for forty years.

In Osceola there was a grist mill that cracked the grain.

The Delles House looks the same now as it did in '52 when I first remember it.

In '52 I saw a party of Chippewa Indians hiding in the rough ground near Taylor's Falls. They said they were going to fight the Sioux. Some white men came and drove them away. They killed a Chippewa. A Sioux warrior, looking for Chippewa scalps found the dead Indian, skinned his whole head and rode away with the white men, with the scalp in his hand, whooping and hollering.

There was a road from Point Douglas through Taylor's Falls to Fond du Lac. It went through Stillwater and Sunrise Prairie, too. I used to watch it as the Indians passed back and forth on it and wish I could go to the end of it. It seemed to me that Adventure waited there.

We used to go to dances and dance the threestep waltz and French four with a circle of fours all around the room, and many other old style dances, too. We put in all the pretty fancy steps in the cotillion. No prettier sight could be than a young girl, with arms circled above her head, jigging on the corners.

My wedding dress was a white muslin, made very full around the bottom and plaited in at the waist. My traveling dress was made the same. It was a brown and white shepherd check and had eight breadths of twenty-seven inch silk. That silk was in constant wear for fifty years and if it was not all cut up, would be just as good today. My shoes were brown cloth to match and had five or six buttons. I had another pair that laced on the outside. Nothing has ever fitted the foot like those side-lace shoes. My traveling cape was of black net with bands of silk—very ample looking. I wore a white straw bonnet trimmed with lavender. The strings were white lute-string and the flowers in front of the flaring rim were small and dainty looking. There was a wreath of them on the crown too. When I tied this bonnet on, I felt very grown up for a sixteen year old bride.

Mr. Luther Webb, Indian agent, used to visit us often.

The Indians were always very curious, and spent much of the time before our windows watching everything we did. In time we were as calm with those glittering black eyes on us as we would have been if a gentle old cow had been looking in.