Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/75

Rh had to burst his yoke; every ox at the same moment lowered his head, lashed his tail spitefully, and with all his ponderous bulk and mighty strength advanced. The power exerted now was almost irresistible; something must give way or the sled move. For just one second there seemed to be a doubt, then the tongue parted from the sled. This trial of sterngthstrength [sic] suggested a fact which we well knew, but had not made a practical use of in this case, namely, that a load of stone is much heavier than a load of wood of like bulk. Putting the team into position again, we attached the tongue to the sled with logchains and began throwing off rock; and after the load had been considerably reduced in this way, we started up the team again but as the sled did not move, we threw off more rock. We continued to reduce the load in this way until we had thrown off all but about two washtubs full of rock; and with this load we managed to reach home late in the afternoon. Since the broken sled could not be hidden, an explanation was demanded which led to our making a full confession of this very foolish affair.

The pioneers in the beginning had to make their own agricultural implements, such as plows, harrows, and all kinds of implements to clear and cultivate the ground. My father, Lindsay Applegate, was handy with carpenter's tools of the few and simple kinds they had, and Uncle Charles was a rough blacksmith, who shod horses when it was necessary, made bars, shears, coulters and clevises for plows; rings and clevises for ox yokes, and repaired broken ironings of wagons; and generally speaking, did all kinds of frontier blacksmithing. Father did the wood work in making plows and harrows and in repairing wagons. Every part of the plow was wood except the bar, shear, coulter and clevis. Tough oak was used in the beam and the mould-board was of ash timber. Ash was also generally used in ox yokes.

The prairie lands fenced for cultivation were more or less heavily sodded and set with tufts of brushwood and strong roots of various kinds, and it was necessary to have very strong plows to break the lands. A strong two wheeled truck, with a large strong plow attached to it, drawn by four yoke of oxen, was an outfit often seen breaking prairie. To the largest plow supported by a wheel attachment, which was