My good aunt nursed me well and in three days I was quite well and was sent for by Mr. Goodhue to meet him at Elgin, which I did and he took me to Chicago with his team. For miles before we reached Chicago the prairie was on an average one foot under water. I remained but a day or two in Chicago, stopping at the Tremont House. I took an old steamer back to Milwaukee. I boarded at the Leland House on the west side until September, when I started again for Beloit by way of Watertown and was accompanied by a young man by the name of Sanborn, who was or had been a medical student but had come west to seek his fortune. (He afterwards returned to New England and finished his studies and became very eminent in his profession in Keene, New Hampshire.) We borrowed a horse or pony of Colonel Parks, receiver of the land office, and rode and tied to Watertown, and there we spanseled the pony and turned him out to grass. The next day the Indians had stolen him and he was found some weeks after at Green Bay. We stopped with a Mr. Johnson, the first settler there and then the only family there except one in Goodhue’s camp.[109] They gave us a bed separated from the bed of Mrs. Johnson and her daughter by a blanket hung between us. Mr. Johnson slept on the floor. The house was about 12 × 12 feet, in one room. We had for food salt pork, potatoes, and blackberries, and good appetites. We remained one week and labored diligently with adz and axe in cutting down a basswood tree and fashioning a canoe from it, and at the end of a week we hired Mr. Johnson’s yoke of oxen and drew the canoe about a mile to the river. Neither of us were acquainted with the use of tools, and the canoe was not artistic. We launched it, and on entering it the first time it shot from under me and left me in the river. But we soon got the hang of it and we set sail. On entering Lake Koshkonong we found the wild rice so high and thick that we could not find a way out of it, and we returned to an Indian encampment on the river and hired two Indian boys to go before us and pilot us through the rice (about half a mile) to clear water. We reached the outlet about dark and it was then by the river about twenty miles to Janesville, and we knew there was a log hut with a man and wife in it somewhere before reaching Janesville.