Читать книгу Old Rail Fence Corners - Various - Страница 35

Mr. Rye, eighty-six years old, hale and hearty, who still chops down large trees and makes them into firewood for his own use, says:

I left England in a sailing vessel in 1851 and was five weeks on the voyage. My sister did not leave her bunk all the way over and I was squeamish myself, but I see the sailors drinking seawater every morning, so I joined them and was never sick a minute after. We brought our own food with us and it was cooked for us very well and brought to us hot. We did not pay for this but we did pay for any food furnished extra. Some ships would strike good weather all the way and then could make a rapid voyage in three weeks, but usually it took much longer. I stayed in the east two years and came to St. Anthony in 1853.

The best sower in our part of England taught me to sow grain. After three days he came to me and said, "Rye, I don't see how it is, but I can see you beat me sowing." I hired out to sow grain at $1.00 a day as soon as I came here and had all the work I could do. I would put the grain, about a bushel of it, in a canvas lined basket, shaped like a clothes basket and fastened with straps over my shoulders, then with a wide sweep of the arm, I would sow first with one hand and then with the other. It was a pretty sight to see a man sowing grain. Seemed like he stepped to music.

Once I saw twenty-five deer running one after another like Indians across my sister's farm where St. Louis Park now is. I was watchman for the old mill in St. Anthony the winter of '53. It was forty degrees for weeks. I kept fire in Wales bookstore, too, to keep the ink from freezing.

I made $34.00 an acre on the first flax I sowed. A man had to be a pretty good worker if he got $15.00 a month and found in '53. Most farm hands only got $12.00.

I used to run the ferry with Captain Tapper. It was a large rowboat. Once I had eight men aboard. When I got out in the river, I saw the load was too heavy and thought we would sink. "Boys", I said, "don't move. If you do, we'll all go to the bottom." The water was within one inch of the top of the boat but we got across.

I graded some down town, on Hennepin Avenue when it was only a country road. There was a big pond on Bridge Square. The ducks used to fly around there like anything early in the morning.

I cut out the hazelbrush on the first Fair Ground. It was on Harmon Place about two blocks below Loring Park. We cut a big circle so that we could have a contest between horses and oxen to see which could draw the biggest load. The oxen beat. I don't remember anything else they did at that Fair.