When I needed flour, there was no man to take the wheat to mill. The only one who could, wanted to charge $1.00 a day and I did not have it, so I left my darlings with a neighbor, got him to hist the sacks aboard for me, for says I, "I'm not Dutchy enough to lift a sack of grain," and long before daylight I was beside those oxen on my way to the nearest grist mill, fifteen miles away, knitting all the way. It was tough work, but I got there. I engaged my lodging at the hotel and then went to the mill. There were a number there, but they were all men. The miller, Mr. Goodnow, said "It's take turns here, but I won't have it said that a 'soldier's widow' (as they called us) has to wait for men, so I'll grind yours first and you can start for home at sunup, so you can get home by dark; I want you to stay at our house tonight." After some demurring, for I wan't no hand to stay where I couldn't pay, I accepted his most kind invitation. In the morning, when he saw me start, after he had loaded my sacks of flour on for me, he said, "Get the man living this side of that big hill to put you down it." I said, "I came up alone, alright." He said, "Woman, you had grain then, you could have saved it if it fell off and your sacks broke, but now you have flour." When my boy was three weeks old, I drove fourteen miles to a dance and took in every dance all night and wasn't sick afterward either. Of course, I took him along. When I came to sell my oxen after my husband died in the army, no one wanted to give me a fair price for them, because I was a woman, but Mr. S. T. McKnight, who had a small general store in Blue Earth gave me what was right and paid me $2.50 for the yoke besides. We had company one Sunday when we first came and all we had to eat was a batch of biscuits. They all said they was mighty good too and they never had a better meal. We all raised our own tobacco. I remember once our Probate Judge came along and asked, "Have you any stalks I can chew?" It was hard to keep chickens for the country was so full of foxes. Seed potatoes brought $4.00 a bushel. We used to grate corn when it was in the dough grade and make bread from that. It was fine. In 1856 and 1857 money was scarcer than teeth in a fly. We never saw a penny sometimes for a year at a time. Everything was trade. Mrs. Duncan Kennedy--1856. My father moved from Canada to Minnesota. He was urged to come by friends who had gone before and wrote back that there was a wonderful piece of land on a lake, but when we got there with an ox team after a two days trip from St. Paul, our goods on a lumber wagon--we thought it was a mudhole. We were used to the clear lakes of Canada and this one was full of wild rice. It was near Nicollet Village. The road we took from St. Paul went through Shakopee, Henderson and Le Seuer. They said it was made on an old Indian trail.