Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/63

Rh the hardest of it. Up White River four hundred miles to Laffer Creek, and took a place in White River bottom which was covered with native cane and much good timber of various kinds. It was hard clearing. When we got settled my father and uncle, Sam Hess, went hunting in the mountains. They came back with three horses loaded with buffalo meat—the last buffalo found in that country.

Arkansas was just settling when we got there. Game was very plenty and also fish in abundance. The first two years we secured wild meat in plenty—bear and deer and wild turkeys. My father was a good hunter and killed bear enough to fill the smokehouse. I was too young to know or do much. If it had not been for the game, we would have been hard pressed to have a good living. After two years we had enough cleared so that we were almost independent. We raised cotton to pay the store bills; cotton was our best crop to make money. When I was twenty-one I enlisted in the army in the time of the Seminole war. We had no trouble with the Indians.

In 1836 I was married to M. C. Keizur. In the fall of 1842 I moved to Missouri to get ready to emigrate to Oregon. Wintered in Bates County, went early in the spring to Fisher's Mill. There we laid in our supplies for the trip. We started the 20th of May.

I started with two horses and a small wagon and one cow that gave us milk all the way. We got along wonderfully well, till we came to Kaw River, where we came up with the company ahead of us. They made two large dugouts of which they made a ferryboat to cross wagons. My father-in-law had a fine horse he hired an Indian to swim across the river. He failed to get him in the water. I proposed to get a man on each side and one behind, but the Indian was afraid. "Take the Indian off and I will swim the horse over the river." I got on him. "Now