If there are any settlers now left of the Iowa of that day (sixty-four years ago) they will remember the winter was bitter cold—the "coldest within the memory of the oldest inhabitant." On my trip back from the surveying party above mentioned to Eddyville, just before Christmas, I encountered one of those cold days long to be remembered. A companion named Vance rested with me over night in a cabin, with scant food for ourselves or the mare we led. It was thirty-five miles to the next cabin; we must reach that place or lay out on the snow. So a very early start was made—before daybreak, while the wind lay. The good lady of the cabin baked some biscuit for a noon lunch, but they were frozen solid in our pockets before we had been out two hours. The wind rose with the sun, and with the sun two bright sundogs, one on each side, and alongside of each, but slightly less bright, another—a beautiful sight to behold, but arising from conditions intolerable to bear. Vance came near freezing to death, and would had I not succeeded in arousing him to anger and gotten him off the mare. I vowed then and there that I did not like the Iowa climate, and the Oregon fever was visibly quickened. Besides, if I went to Oregon the government would give us 320 acres of land, while in Iowa we should have to purchase it,—at a low price to be sure, but it must be bought and paid for on the spot. There were no pre-emption or beneficial homestead laws in force then, and not until many years later. The country was a wide, open, rolling prairie—a beautiful country indeed—but what about a market? No railroads, no wagon roads, no cities, no meeting-houses, no schools—the prospect looked drear. How easy it is for one when his mind is once bent against a country to conjure up all sorts of reasons to bolster his, perhaps hasty, conclusions; and so Iowa was condemned as unsuited to our life abiding place. But what about going to Oregon when springtime came? An interesting event was pending that rendered a positive decision impossible for the moment, and not until the first week of April, 1852, when our first-born baby boy was a month old, could we say that we were going to Oregon in 1852. CHAPTER IV. OFF FOR OREGON. I have been asked hundreds of times how many wagons were in the train I traveled with, and what train it was, and who was the captain?—assuming that, of course, we must have been with some train.