Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

HOME BUILDING IN MINNESOTA 235
quick and bright about everything, and as the Indians really
wanted the bread and we the venison, in the end all were
satisfied. People who were accustomed to seeing large bodies
of Indians estimated that there were about five hundred in this
camp. Before I leave this incident in our lives, I should like
to add that we always found the Stanleys our friends; more
obliging neighbors I never had. They, with nearly all the
friends I knew fifty years ago, are gone, passed from this life.
It is well that during the long winter of '61 and '62 we had
something to anticipate. First and greatest was the coming
of the rest of our family from Ohio — father and mother,
Brother Joe and Sister Ida and William's wife and Baby
Rosamond. Next in interest were the preparations we made
for sugar-making as soon as the sap should begin to run in the
maple trees. In early times there was a belt of timber running
from Rice to Meeker County which was fifty miles wide and
perhaps three hundred miles long. It was a strip of primeval
forest looked upon as a marvel, for it was surrounded by extensive
treeless plains. Great oaks and poplar, ash, cottonwood,
hackberry, and maple sprang from the prairie, and could be
entered as you would a wood lot in Ohio. In talking with
some friends at Fairhaven, William and Alvah learned that
there was a deserted sugar camp in a neck of the Big Woods not
far away, and that it might be worked for the season by entering
and claiming it for another year. Mr. Frost's people had
moved to Fairhaven, so his brother Levi joined them in opening
the camp. They declared that they would accomplish
their aim, even if they had to crawl over drifts to get to the
sugar grove. We had been struggling with the cost of living
in the new country, and had come to realize that as we could
obtain but three pounds of sugar for a dollar we must either
make the forest furnish us sweetening or do without. It seemed
that things we had once placed in the list of necessities were
now luxuries. Tea was two dollars a pound, coffee fifty and
seventy-five cents; calico was twenty-five cents a yard and
good bleached muslin eighty cents.
We tried various substitutes for food we had been accustomed
to have in our pantries. For coffee we made our own