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

LIFE IN THE 'SIXTIES 267
state to live, though our brother taught in various places
within its limits.
The last fifty years is a record of growth which would do
credit to any state; indeed the triumph over adverse circum-
stances in this period of Minnesota's history seems to me to
stand without a parallel in the history of northlands. In our
libraries are many accurate histories of men who came early
into this fair land and saw that it "was good," and when the
savage red man with fire and tomahawk drove out those first
settlers, still they remained of unconquered determination.
It is true that the savages killed over two thousand of these
brave frontier men, but those who remained fought on, and
fought it out, and bought peace with the sword. Farmers
came back, built again their cabins and barns, followed the
plough and planted once more their burnt fields; they survived
drought and insect pests, and laid the foundations of a great
and prosperous state. If one could read all that those brave
hearts felt and minds determined, of the tragedy and disappointment,
of the successes they carved out with their own
hands, of all that they wrought and all they dreamed and
never told save in their beautiful farms and their cattle in a
thousand meadows, their great barns and trees on sometime
treeless prairies, their fine roads where once was but the mark
of dragging tepee poles,— if one could know all that they initi-
ated and brought to perfection of what we see to-day, then each
family of the pioneers would possess as stirring a record as
any pen of fiction has ever written. We see to-day but their
monuments in the deeds they have done, leaving their descendants
leisure to advance their school systems, to build hospitals
and libraries and churches and universities; shall the pioneers
be forgotten as long as the highways they constructed remain.?
It is difficult to think to-day how poor were the means of
transportation in those days; the freighters' carts were a sight
to remember, and I shall never forget my first view of a Red
River cart. Early one spring morning in 1863 we were out
on our side porch at Pearl Lake Place, when from over the
lake we heard a strange noise, unlike anything we had ever
before heard. Soon our entire family was out to divine if