The land-looker was as much an occupant of the road as the emigrant.
He was the advance-picket who had preceded on foot every family that
passed, and had located his quarter-section, built his preëmption
shanty, and inhabited it three days, which allowed him to hold it one
year, while he could return for his family. These men were passing
daily, winter and summer, and the tavern near us was crowded nightly
with them and with emigrants. Our house, too, was a shelter for many.
Father saw the enterprising home-seekers daily, and heard the accounts
of those who were returning from their prospective homes after having
located; and their glowing descriptions of the country, the climate,
and its freedom from ague, gave him the "Wisconsin fever." Mother,
however, looked distrustfully on the favorable reports brought back
daily, and she pitied the people moving north.
Father had provided a fair living for his large family--sumptuous,
indeed, compared with that of our first year in the West. We had
friends and neighbors and schools. The owner of the farm wished my
father to hire it for two years more, but father would argue that this
was his chance to get a home, and here was an opportunity for his
boys; he could make nothing on rented land, and he had only been able
to keep his family alive for three years. Mother said: "Supposing we
do preëmpt, it is only for a year or two, and then the land must be
entered and paid for at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. Where
is the money coming from?" Father told her that many of the emigrants
who had no money got friends or speculators to furnish it for half the
land. Mother was not enthusiastic, but she finally consented to go if
father could get his sister in Connecticut to enter the land for him
when due, and to hold it in her name until father could, at some future
time, pay for it.
My aunt consented to this, and in February there came a letter from her
inclosing a draft for one hundred dollars, with which to buy a yoke of
oxen and a wagon with which to work the farm.
So my father was fitted out as a land-looker, and mother worked all day
and all night to make his knapsack.
Father had been gone three weeks when a letter came telling us that he
had located a farm in the town of Alto, the southwest-corner township
in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin; that it had a log house on it, twelve
by fourteen, which he had bought; that ten acres had already been
broken by the man of whom he had bought the claim, and that he would
return at once with his wagon and oxen for the family.
In March, 1847, we started for the new home.
We were soon in the long line of dust, making our proportion of what
we had been accustomed to see for two years. I was to help drive
the cows and pigs. Whoever has attempted to drive a hog knows the
discouragements with which I met. Whoever has never attempted it can
never know. It seemed that if we had wanted them to go the other way
it would have been all right. They scattered in different directions
several times, and some of them succeeded in getting back home. My
chagrin was increased by passing or meeting other emigrant boys whose
pigs and cattle kept quietly near the wagons and walked gently along.
It took all day to go about six miles. We stopped overnight near a
farm-house, and father, after getting the cattle and pigs in the barn,
built a fire by the roadside and prepared our supper. He made tea, and
with the cold chicken and bread and butter which mother had given us
for the journey, we fared sumptuously. Father brought an armful of hay
from the barn near by, and with plenty of coverlets he made up a bed
under the wagon, where we slept soundly. This was my first camping out.
At Fort Atkinson we met the first band of Indians I had ever seen.
There was a chief and three or four young buck Indians, as many squaws,
and a number of children, all of the Black Hawk tribe. They were on
ponies, riding in single file into the town as we were going out. I was
so frightened that I cried, and as the chief kept putting his hand to
his mouth, saying, "Bread--hungry--bread--hungry," father gave him a
loaf of bread. It was not enough, but it was all father would let him
have. Homer and I were in favor of giving him everything we had if he
would only move on.
After leaving Watertown we came out on what is known as rolling
prairie--for miles in every direction a green, wavy sheet of land.
No ornamental gardener could make so lovely and charming a lawn,
gently rolling, and sloping just enough to relieve the monotony of the
flatness of the long stretches of prairie and openings we had passed
through. Father told us that these great prairies would always be
pasture-land for herds of cattle, as the farmers could not live where
there was no timber. To-day the finest farms I know of in America
are on these great prairie-lands, but at that time the prospectors
avoided such claims and preëmpted only the quarter-sections skirting
the prairies, where the oak openings supplied timber for log houses,
fences, and fuel.
Trails were now branching in every direction, and after five days
of this travel it seemed as though we had been wandering for months
without a home. That day we had started at sunrise, resting for three
hours at noon, the usual custom at that time. It was ten o'clock when
we reached our home.
We were in another log cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, with
hewn log floor, one door, and one window containing the sash with its
four panes of glass which father had brought on his journey.
We boys slept in the low garret, climbing a ladder to go to bed. Owing
to the exhaustion and excitement of the night before, we were allowed
to rest undisturbed, and the sun was well up and shining through the
chink-holes in our garret when we awoke. Father had gone with the team
to a spring a mile west for a barrel of water. There was no water on
our claim, and we were obliged to haul it on a "crotch," a vehicle
built from the crotch of a tree, about six by eight inches thick and
six feet long, on which a cross-rail is laid, where a barrel can be
fastened. The oxen were hitched to it, and they dragged it to and from
the spring.
Two beds were fitted across one side of the single downstairs room in
our cabin, and father had to shorten the rails of one bedstead to get
it into place. Under it was the trundle-bed on which the babies slept,
and when this was pulled out, and with the cook-stove, table, four
chairs, wood-box, and the ladder in place, there was very little spare
room. By father's order, the lower round of the ladder was always my
seat.