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I was born in the Town of Keene, in Keene or Ausable River Valley, Essex County, New York, the 15th day of September, 1822, and usually resided there until I was past thirteen years of age. Nathan Ward, my father, was born November 3rd, 1786, in the Town of Wells, Rutland County, Vermont, and lived there until he removed to Essex County, New York, about 1809 or 1810. My Mother (Charlotte Beech) was born in Hartford, Conn., September 10th, 1791, residing there mainly until her marriage. She was one of the little girls that welcomed Washington when President, as he passed through Hartford, Conn., on his tour through New England, a story which she related with becoming pride. My greatgrandfather Ward emigrated from Massachusetts, as I suppose, and settled on the New Hampshire Grants, now Vermont, locating on or near Lake Champlain.

When Gen. Burgoyne came down that Lake from Canada in the Summer of 1776 or 1777, with his army and Indian followers, the white inhabitants fled South from the scalping knives of the Indians, into the Southeastern part of Vermont. On their hurried journey my greatgrandfather Ward was taken ill from the incident hardships and exposures

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and died on the way, leaving my grandfather (David Ward), then some eighteen years of age, to care for and manage the family.

My grandfather became a farmer, and a Baptist preacher, and lived and died in Wells, Vermont, at about sixty years of age, after bringing up a family of six sons and four daughters. The sons, my uncles, were named Eber, Samuel, Zael, David and John P.; Submit, Keziah, Charlotte and Rhoda were the names of the daughters, my aunts.

My grandfather, some years before his death, gave part of his children a farm, and the others, except Samuel, an equivalent in other property. My Uncle Samuel, being ungovernable, would not attend school, but ran away from home to Lake Ontario at seventeen or eighteen years of age, and never fully learned to read or write, but in his business life learned to sign his name in his way, being devoid of all literary attainments. The rest of my uncles and aunts received the ordinary district school education of their time. My father being "weekly," pursued his studies at an academy at Poultney, Vermont, until he became a good scholar. My Uncle David studied medicine at Castleton Medical College in Vermont, and was a surgeon in the U.S. Army during and after the Black Hawk Indian War. My Uncle Eber married a Potter, and some years after moved from Wells, Vermont, to Upper Canada, on the breaking out the War of 1812 between the United States and England. From there he moved to Conneaut, Ohio, thence to what is now Marine City, Michigan, thence to Bois Blanc Lighthouse, thence to Fort Gratiot Lighthouse, and

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finally back to Marine City, and died there at about 73 years of age.

My Aunt Submit married a Toby and settled on a farm that my grandfather gave her in Upper Jay, Essex Co., N. Y., and afterwards moved to and resided at Lower Jay until her death, which occurred in the 76th year of her age.

In view of making plain the helpless, distressed situation and surroundings in which my father's family was placed in my youth, and through my middle years, and its effects and results on us, I am obliged to give in the following pages short rehearsal of the acts, business and characters of some of my relatives which otherwise I would gladly have cast into oblivion and thereby kept my children from its painful perusal.

My Uncle Samuel left Lake Ontario before the close of the war of 1812, residing at Salina, N. Y., and boiled salt there for a while. He married there "Aunt Betsey," and afterwards moved to Northern Ohio at or near Conneaut, and finally moved to Michigan and settled at Newport (now Marine City) on the St. Clair River. He engaged there in farming, small merchandising, building and navigating small sail craft on the Lakes, and eventually in building, owning and navigating first-class passenger steamers, and buying much pine land from the United States. He died at Marine City at nearly seventy years of age, and willed nearly all of his property of about one million dollars to a son of Uncle Eber's, named Eber B. Ward, who was my cousin. This gave E.B. Ward, in addition, practically the franchises of the steamboat lake passenger

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and freight routes, as he largely monopolized these routes. These monopolized lake steamboat routes, fairly managed, were worth another million or two of dollars, as the passenger traffic to the West by lakes continued immense for some fifteen or twenty years afterwards.

After Uncle Samuel's death, his willed estate, in addition to a considerable property possessed before by Eber B. Ward, mostly given him by Uncle Samuel before his death, constituted Eber B. Ward comparatively a very wealthy man at about 1855, considering the poverty of then new West. Thus, at about 44 years of age, it came to pass, through he was largely so before that age, that E. B. Ward became an overbearing, egotistic, vainglorious, dishonest, tyrannical, vindictive, aggressive, energetic, selfish man, largely devoid of conscience. This tyrannical, envious, vain, selfish, grasping, energetic man soon spread out his then comparatively vast fortune in some legitimate investments, but mostly in illegitimate dishonest schemes, in view of showing his financial ability, power and consequence. His schemes were largely the grasping of others' property, paying therefor little or no equivalent.

At the time of Uncle Samuel's sickness and death E. B. Ward placed sentinels at the outer doors of Uncle Samuel's residence and would not permit any of Uncle Samuel's brothers, sisters, or any other of the relations, except his own sister, Emily Ward, to enter the house, but himself and his lawyer who drew up the will he desired giving about all of Uncle Samuel's property to E. B. Ward. leaving out entirely the sisters, brothers and other relatives of Uncle

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Samuel, some of whom were poor invalids unable to obtain the necessaries of life. Ever after these poor distressed relatives, who had thus been virtually robbed by E. B. Ward's management of Uncle Samuel's will, were followed by E. B. Ward and persecuted while they lived. Other relatives whom E. B. Ward envied, or was jealous of, he persecuted in the same way by all the power and influence he possessed. For some twenty years after the death of Uncle Samuel, E. B. Ward continued in the career above mentioned, dishonoring himself, the name of Ward and human nature, defying the laws of common decency, and at times defying and riding over the laws of his country. He raised a family of six children, four sons and two daughters. The sons followed largely in the footsteps of their father before and after the father's death, so that all but one, and he is said to be now a renegade, soon disappeared from the face of the earth.

About 1862, among other crimes, E. B. W. got up a false accusation against his wife, who being a niece of "Aunt Betsey," it largely assisted him in "scooping" Uncle Samuel's property by his will, and who also raised his family of six children. By false swearing and bribery E. B. obtained a bill of divorce in order that he might marry a blooming young woman, a niece of Senator Wade's, Kate Lyon, as she was called, with whom he lived some nine years, until his death in 1874.

A career filled with wrong doing and crime, energetically executed, usually results in financial ruin. This proved especially so with E. B. W., considering his wealth, and the royal opportunities he had in a

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new undeveloped country, containing large natural resources. Had he used his large monopolizing means in legitimate investments and business devoid of immorality, dishonesty, tyranny and crime, with his good health, energy and great physical power, the financial result should have been immense.

However, the result was that E. B. Ward's administrators (though his will proclaimed to the world that he had millions) found after his death that his estate was virtually insolvent and not sufficient to pay his debts by some two hundred thousand dollars. Thus was squandered Uncle Samuel's large estate, of some two millions of dollars at his death, and in addition the product of E. B. W.'s opportunities, equivalent in comparative value of from fifteen to thirty millions of dollars at this date of 1893.

My Uncle, Zael Ward, owned a farm adjoining my father's in Keene Valley, Essex Co., N. Y., and resided on it some twelve or fifteen years. On selling out he purchased and moved on to a farm in the town of Harmony, Chautauqua Co., N. Y., about the year 1828. The next year following my father's removal with his family to Newport, St. Clair Co., Mich. (now Marine City), in 1836, my Uncle Zael followed and settled also at Newport with his family of five girls and four boys, excepting his second daughter, Rhoda. The sons' names were Samuel, Eber, Zael and David, Samuel being about one year older and Eber one year younger than myself. After residing some fifteen to twenty years in Michigan, and a short time only after Uncle Samuel's death, Uncle Zael moved back to Chautauqua Co., N. Y., and died there at about 73 years of age.

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Aunt Charlotte married Amasa Rust, who with his family, consisting of children (three daughters and five sons# moved from Wells, Rutland Co., Vermont, to Newport some two years after my father's settlement there. Uncle Rust and Aunt Charlotte lived at Newport until their deaths, they being then both about 65 years of age. They were a good, honest and exemplary couple and taught their children good principles and set them good examples.

Uncle David (usually called Dr. Ward brought up three sons and one daughter by a second wife, lived some years at Green Bay (Navareno), and longer on a farm on Fox River, Wis., and died there in December, 1890, at just ninety years of age.

Aunt Keziah died in Chautauqua Co., N. Y., at about sixty years of age. Aunt Rhoda died in the same place at about 81 years of age. My Uncle, John P. Ward (the youngest of the family, died at about twenty or twenty-one years of age, in Wells, Vermont, before my birth.

My grandfather (named also David Ward died in Wells, Rutland Co., Vt., at about sixty years of age, before my birth. My father (Nathan Ward died in Keene, Essex Co., N. Y., in Sept. 1868, at nearly 82 years of age. Emily Ward (E. B. Ward's sister died in Detroit in August, 1891, at about eighty-three years of age.

Your mother's parents and grandparents were born and raised in Plymouth, Mass. Your mother's father (your grandfather, George Perkins, of Scotch descent first moved to Albany, N. Y., from Plymouth. After living at Albany a few years he removed to

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Romeo, Michigan, in about 1831, and after residing at Romeo a few years, he sold out and bought a half section of wild land on the "Ridge"so called, in the present town of Richmond, Macomb Country, and moved with his family on to it in the winter of 1835. By his great industry, energy and economy he cleared up the best farm and constructed the best buildings on it of any in the town, which he left to his children. Your grandfather Perkins died in 1876 at 76 years of age and you grandmother Perkins in 1890 at about 88 years of age. Your mother, Elizabeth Perkins, (the second daughter), was born in Romeo in the year 1832. You mother's two sisters' names were Lucy Bartlett and Hannah Sherman and George L., Bartlett and Charles H. were the names of her three brothers, your uncles. Your Aunt Lucy has now been dead upwards of 20 years, and your Uncle George about five years.

The East branch of the Ausable River in Essex County, N. Y., rises at the foot of the Southeast side of Mount Marcy, and runs North through Keene Valley in the town of Keene, and on through the town of Jay to the Au Sable Forks. The West branch of the Ausable River rises near the foot and at the West side of Mount Marcy, and by running a Northeasterly course it passes through the West part of the town of Keene (now North Elba), where John Brown of Harper's Ferry and Kansas War fame lived and is buried), and then passing on through the town of Wilmington and connecting with the East Branch at the Au Sable Forks (now quite an iron manufacturing town,) the united waters of both branches flow on Northeast through

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Keeseville, and finally into Lake Champlain at Port Kent. "White Face" Mountain is located in the Northern part of North Elba, and North of romantic picturesque Lake Placid, which washes the Southern base of said mountain, now a summer resort of many showy hotels. The landscape view from the top of White Face Mountain presents the most charming fascinating scene imaginable. The Saranac River and lakes lay some ten to forty miles South and West from White Face and Lake Placid, where are now also extravagant summer hotels. The Saranac River empties into Lake Champlain at Plattsburg, the scene of naval and land battles of the War of 1812 with England, my father being in the land battle. The St. Regis River lies still further West, and runs in a Northwesterly direction, emptying into the St. Lawrence River. All of the above mentioned rivers run from the Northern slope of the Adirondack Mountains, rising in the many lakes of that region. Sixty years ago this region was a wild rough country of high and low ranges of mountains, with valleys containing more or less marshland and lakes between the hills and mountains, little fitted for agricultural purposes or pasturage, and inhabited only by a few hunters and Indians. Forts Ticonderoga, Crown Point and William Henry (of Indian massacre fame), so celebrated in the French and Indian Colonial and Revolutionary wars, the two first named were situated on the West shore of Lake Champlain, South of Westport, and the latter at the head of Lake George, Lake Sacrament of the French, and Horicon of the English. The North or Hudson River rises on the Southern slope of the Adirondacks.

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Franklin, St. Lawrence and Jefferson Counties lie North and West of Essex Co., and Washington Co., on the South, and Lake Champlain bounds it on the East.

But to return to my childhood in Keene Valley, surrounded by a cordon of high mountains, overlooked by high Mount Marcy, where my father owned a farm on the interval of the Ausable River in Keene Valley, situated some four miles South of what was then called Keene Village, and about one mile North of where John's Brook empties into the Ausable River. Clear lakes, or ponds as they used to be called, were at the heads of the two branches of the East branch of the Ausable River, and many creeks and brooks ran into them, and into the Ausable, in which in my childhood there were plenty of brook trout, and in one of the lakes salmon trout. The County Seat of Essex Co., named Elizabethtown or Pleasant Valley, is located between Keene Valley and Westport, about twelve miles from the former, and eight from the latter. This town is now a thrifty summer resort, while the whole of Keene Valley, the early scene of my childhood, is now built up largely with summer cottages and hotels for resorters, and at the upper end of the valley the Vanderbilts have now a large costly, elaborate summer resort hotel, and surrounding cottages with varied improvements, that vie with Saratoga.

[But to return to my youth. I remember back to the time I was about two years of age. At about five and six years old, I attended school three months in the summer, and at seven years and after, three

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months in winter. My father being poor I had no books to read except my spelling book, and some "primmers" until I attended Sunday School in the summer months, commencing to do so when about seven to eight years of age. Then I had a little new book every week, a new world, as it seemed to me, which I read with great interest. Though the majority of the stories were fictitious all gave moral and good advice to old and young.] At six years of age I made a garden, planted corn and raked hay more or less when not at school. All the hay was then raked by hand rakes and the grain was cut by hand sickles. [At eight years of age my work increased to taking care of and foddering the cattle nights and mornings, cleaning out the stables during the winter and attending school on week days which was located three quarters of a mile South of my father's house, and short distance below "John's Brook," in a block school house, heated by a fire in one end.] During the two winters when nine and ten years of age I missed not a day or half a day at school, though the snows were often deep in that mountainous Northern region, with drifts higher than the rail fences, and the thermometer down occasionally to forty degrees below zero. My father had no horse, but usually a yoke of oxen, and a two-wheeled cart to draw hay and other things on. Consequently my sisters and I always had to "foot it" to school.] I had five sisters older than myself, and I was the oldest of the four boys; my elder brother, John Ward, born in 1813, having died in infancy. My brother Nathan was five years younger than myself. I did not see a pair of skates until I was about

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thirteen years of age, and never rode in a spring buggy or carriage of any kind until I was sixteen years of age. The summer when I was six years of age Harry Hull, a near neighbor of ours, hired me to drive home his cows every evening for four months from the rough mountains pastures, agreeing to give me therefor a penknife, which would have pleased much my childish fancy. Rain on shine my little bare feet tramped the stony thistled sidehills, and drove the cows home as agreed. But what say you to his cheating the child out of his knife, which he did? This same Harry Hull eventually moved to Illinois, and I was told the good Lord cancelled him there.

One fall, when I was about ten years of age, Roderick McKenzie, a boy about eighteen months my senior, and I made several "deadfall" traps for mink. We finally caught one mink, and the following March we trudged through snow some eight miles to and from a small grocery store at Keene Village to exchange the mink skin for raisins, which was done to the amount of one pound. Owning an equal share of the fur I supposed of course I was to have an equal share of the raisins, but on the raisins being weighed and laid out on the corner, Roderick made a sudden grab with his hands into the raisins and appropriated unopposed four-fifths of the same to himself, and then told me to help myself to the balance as my share, which I did and got no more. On my protesting against the injustice of his behavior he answered me only by a loud derisive laugh. This same Roderick McKenzie I kept watch

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of through life. He grew up an ignorant, worthless inebriate, and after much suffering from poverty and bad habits, he died a drunkard at about fifty-five years of age.

In September when I was seven years of age, I went with some other boys to a "training" at Keene Village, and while there this Roderick McKenzie and other boys older than myself coaxed me to go into David Graves' orchard with them to get some apples. We had only fairly gotten into the orchard when David Graves, a store keeper, appeared and ordered us to stop and not run away from him. However, all ran away except myself. When Graves came up to me he inquired whose boy I was; I replied, "Nathan Ward's." He then said, "You are a good boy," and advised me not to go with those boys that ran away as they, he said, are likely to remain bad boys, and grow up to be bad men. After picking me some good apples I walked out of the orchard with him, and on leaving he bade me goodbye. While this was going on, Roderick and the other boys with him were giving derisive laughs and yells at some distance from us. Graves was kind to me ever after. So far as I have had an opportunity to learn, all these runaway boys lived disputable lives and came to bad ends long, long ago!

When a boy and even a child, I fished for trout more or less up John's Brook, and often off from a steep ledge of rocks in the "deep hole" in the Ausable River, located a little South of my father's barn, and also up a small brook running down through my father's meadow. Southward of our house, beyond a ledge of rocks, in the Spring of the

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year for some years, I used to "tap" a dozen or two of sugar maple trees, gather and boil down the sap into molasses and sugar, as in my childhood it tasted so good. I trapped partridges every Spring on their "drumming" logs, but finally I caught my big toe (as I was usually barefooted) in the trap, while setting it, which pained me much before I got it released my older sisters, who laughed at me, which seemed to dampen my ardor some for that kind of recreation. Occasionally I built a little "forge" by damming some small stream. We had no creeks in that country, as well were name rivulets, brooks and rivers, ponds and lakes. In the berry season, from a child and on, I went with my older sisters, who were kind and devoted to me, to pick strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries and sometimes to the top of the "Baxter Mountain" for huckleberries. I was always barefooted, yet I did the best I could and usually gathered my share. We had "pin" cherries in July, choke cherries in August, and in September wild grapes, "nanna" berries and "horse" plums, the beech and hazel nuts, and high bush cranberries later in the fall. Much maple sugar was made in Keene when I was a boy, in the latter part of March and the fore part of April of each year. I assisted my father and others in this work from seven to twelve years of age, during the heavy "runs of sap," by attending the fires to boil down the sap, and was occasionally up all night. In the autumn when I was five years of age my father took me and my cousin, Samuel Ward, (Uncle Zael's son). about eighteen months older than myself, with him to a bend of the

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Ausable River to watch for deer, which were being "howned" off from the mountain sides into the river below. While Sam and I were sitting making sand houses behind a fence near my father, "a big buck" came dashing down the bank on the opposite side of the river, and while my father was taking aim to shoot, Sam suddenly jumped up and at the top of his voice yelled out, "Uncle Nate, UNCLE NATE! There's the deer! There's the deer!! Upon which the deer took fright, turned suddenly around, and quickly bounded off into the woods out of sight. Oh! it was then frightful to hear "Uncle Nate" scold that innocent child, "Sam," who had had no instruction or caution from my father as to his keeping still if he should see a deer. It struck me then as a child if anyone deserved scolding it was my father, and that impression remains with me still. We saw no more of any deer that day and Uncle Nate returned home without any venison.

When I was six years of age my father and a man by the name of Willard Snow went with me in June to the "upper pond," so called, of the Ausable River (an oil painting of the pond, or rather lake, now hangs in my parlor), a-fishing for lake or salmon trout. On arriving there the first day we caught some twenty-five, and after properly "baiting" the trout the following day, we caught one hundred and fifty. In the next three days we caught sufficient to make three hundred in all. We then returned home with the fish which raised a great excitement in Keene Valley as no lake trout had been caught there before; consequently, one half of the men in the valley rushed up to the pond a-fishing,

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and all caught only some twenty or thirty trout. Our trout weighed from four to twelve pounds, averaging about six.

I caught with a line twenty-two of the trout, my father assisting me in pulling them into the boat, and lost fully as many more that I hooked and hauled up part way, and some nearly into the boat, before they tore off from my hook. As a boy I imagined that this fishing expedition was a "big thing," and from their talk my father and Mr. Snow's opinion and feelings seemed to harmonize with mine.

I did not much excel my class-mates in school when a boy in Keene, unless it may have been in geography or arithmetic. The winter I was eleven years of age I went through Adams' old arithmetic and understood it fairly well, as my father assisted me more or less during the winter evenings. Geography and history I have always had a fondness for, and probably would have excelled in biographical, sacred and profane history if my memory had been good, as I have made the reading of it an instructive entertainment during the time I could spare from thirteen years of age onward to the present time. I consider this historical reading has been and still is of great value to me in several ways. It has kept me from idleness and from the ordinary fashionable amusements of the day which are usually varied for changed from year to year to amuse and entertain the average mind, and especially the semi-immoral and superficial minds. It taught me human nature early in my youth, and what the average disposition of mankind had been for the past four thousand years, and consequently what it largely now is in my own

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time. It informed me of the various religious systems, and the various priestcrafts, schemes and tyrannies, and consequently many of the great crimes inflicted upon mankind by these various religious, secular, and kingly despotisms during historic time. It has shown me the various advancements and retrograde movements from age to age of what has been named and practiced by past nations as religion, compared with the various practiced systems of my time.

I need not speak of the moral, political, artistic and scientific records of mankind since the dawn of history.

On entering and leaving the schoolroom, when a youth, the boys had to make their obeisance by a "bow," and the girls by a "courtesy." We were instructed that a bow or a courtesy was due from all the scholars on meeting grown-up persons on the streets, and if a teacher became aware that any failed in this observance such were in danger of getting what we did not desire,--"feruled" or "licked." I was not usually behind my schoolmates in swimming, running, snowballing or sliding down hill on hand sleds, or playing "gool" or "tag." I got punished very little in school. If we swore or got caught in a wilful lie, we were quite sure of having our "jackets tanned." Spelling schools were much in vogue, and our "exhibitions" following the last days of school were our delight. The teacher always boarded "around." Our clothes were "homespun," and made by our sisters and mothers from woolen for winter and from "tow," cotton and linen for summer wear. Shoes and boots we had for winter. We never

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had over six months of school in a year,--three in summer and three in winter. Male teachers usually received from ten to twelve dollars per month for teaching (Saturday and all) and board. Females received from seventy-five cents to a dollar and a half per week and board.

My mother and sisters "picked," carded and spun the wool, tow and flax by hand, milked the cows, and made the cheese and butter. Cooking was done in a "fireplace," the baking in brick ovens, as we then had no stoves or tin bakers. My oldest sisters, Emma and Charlotte, before I was large enough, assisted my father much in his farming, in spreading, raking and loading hay and grain, making and weeding the garden, digging potatoes, pulling flax, driving team, etc., and often in stormy weather. My mother who was always amiable, considerate and devoted to her children had her hands full in managing, clothing, washing and cooking for her ten children, with the assistance more or less of my sisters when of sufficient age. As soon as my strength would in any measure permit, I was put into the harness of work, and largely took the place of my sisters in doing men's work. I never milked a cow however.

In cutting holes in the ice during the winter months to enable the cattle to drink we found the ice usually from one to two feet and sometimes two and a half feet in thickness. In July, 1830, from continuous rains Keene Valley had a great freshet, and the sides of some of the surrounding mountains slid down into the valley causing the earth to rock, heave and tremble like an earthquake. Some persons were buried and killed thereby. All of our fences and

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crops were swept away and destroyed that year by the food.

The twenty-fourth day of May, 1831, or 1832, I was driving oxen for my father to plow when it commenced snowing from the Northeast about four or five o'clock in the afternoon, and continued to do so for twenty-four or thirty hours, when the wet packed snow was three and a half feet deep, evenly spread over the country. We only knew where the rail fences were by the stakes in the corners protruding above the snow. It froze the night after the snow ceased falling, but the young currants and the apple blossoms were so covered, that few or none were killed. The sudden melting of this great body of damp snow produced a second great freshet which swept our fences away, but it was too early in the season to greatly injure the crops.

In the latter part of May when I was five years old planted some corn about the beds in the garden. I went out each morning to see if the corn had come up, and after a week or more it came up nicely greatly to my joy. But soon the squirrels began to pull it up. I worried and cried about it, asking help from my mother and sisters to prevent the squirrels from pulling up my corn, but nothing stopped them. Becoming discouraged, I went one morning with my little tin pail and pulled up all that remained of the corn to save it from the squirrels and carried it into the house in my pail to show my mother and sisters how I had got ahead of the squirrels; but I imagine they did not appreciate my sagacious act of gathering my corn as they only laughed at me for my way of beating the squirrels.

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During that very cold, snowy winter when I was seven years of age my mother and sister Emma had severe and continued attacks of peritonitis, and their lives were despaired of for some two months, but finally both recovered. Every day of that long, dreary season for a child, I went to school through the deep snow, the thermometer standing from zero to forty degrees below. Majestic old Mount Marcy at times looked fairly blue with cold and added to this was my continued sorrow and worry for the lives of my mother and sister. This was my first experience of any long continued anxiety and sorrow. I tire my children by relating my childish experiences and pathetic troubles, which may now seem frivolous, yet at the time of their occurrence they were seriously important to the child.

In May 1832, when I was nine year old my father having a job of land surveying for Peter Smith, father of Gerrit Smith of Abolition fame, took me and one man into the woods to assist him in the work. After being at the job some four weeks, my father was taken suddenly ill with pneumonia, and lay three weeks in the woods thirty mile away from any inhabitant. I expected to see my father die as he was at times unconscious, and ate next to nothing, but finally he was able to walk towards the settlement, going along very moderately a few miles each day, accompanied only by myself and the hired man. After tarrying some twelve days at the settlement father, having largely recovered, returned with me only, as the hired man had slyly run away from us to avoid the hardships of completing the job. Consequently my father and I (at nine years of age)

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had to do the ordinary work of four men in completing the job. The main part of my work was carrying the "hind end" of the chain, an axe and a pack of from eight to twelve pounds, as we had to carry our provisions and our bedding, hunt up and bring water to camp,. "pick" and spread the hemlock boughs we slept on, and carry up the small wood my father chopped to keep a low fire during the night. My father's work was principally to run the lines with the compass, to carry the forward end of the chain and at the same time a pack from thirty to sixty pounds in weight of clothing and provisions, to chop the wood for night use, peel the spruce or hemlock bark to cover our temporary night camp, strike fire with steel and "punk," as matches were not invented then, "figure out" his mathematical calculations, and write the field notes of the work done. We continued this work for six weeks. Our food was good sea biscuits of my mother's make, fat salted pork, a little maple sugar with chocolate for tea, sometimes varied by "herb" tea, until we finished the job. As the work neared completion my father missed a town line reported to have been run which proved a mistake to our great dismay. Being then out of provisions, except a part of a hard tack biscuit, we were forced to return by a circuitous "back track" route to our depot of provisions, which took us nearly three days to accomplish, in our semi-starved condition. During these three days I ate in all what would be two and a half common crackers, a few ground nuts and chewed green beech leaves of a pleasant acid taste. My father ate but little if any more than I. The third day towards evening

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we reached our provisions, but for twenty-four hours afterwards my father "pieced" out to me what I ate, a small quantity, but increased the amount each time, until he let me eat all I desired. Our job being now finished the following day after we reached our provisions, we started for "out of the woods." The nearest inhabitant to us then was only about fifteen miles distant through the woods, with as usual no trail or road to follow, to one great panther hunter Meecham's log house, surrounded by a small new clearing.

Notwithstanding my late half-famished condition I travelled with father that day to hunter Meecham's house, and we slept there that night on a bed, the only one I had laid on for six weeks. The evening we stopped at Meecham's I was so tired and exhausted by my efforts to get out of the woods that i could not rise from my chair, and my father had to lift, carry, and put me into bed. From there we travelled towards home on the road then called the "new turnpike" (though not travelled by teams) with more than a gladdened heart to see my mother, brothers and sisters again where we had green corn, potatoes and milk to eat. Oh, the homesickness I suffered during the time of doing this work I shall not attempt to describe. I was so thin in flesh when I reached home that my mother and sisters hardly knew me at first. My sister deeply pitied me, and my mother mourned and sobbed over me like a child. Usually the mosquitoes and gnats tormented us badly. We say many deer, and wolves would howl about us sometimes during the evening or in early morning.

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Allow me to relate the following though it gives me and it may give you a deathly sensation when it may hereafter come to your minds. One evening on camping after our usual day's work of surveying, father sent me while he cut wood and peeled bark for our night's use, to follow down a new blazed line about half a mile to a sluggish, deep creek, with a tin pail to bring up water for our evening's use. On reaching the creek, in dipping up my pail of water, I accidentally slipped in up to my middle but got out with my pail filled with water. Just at this time a large crane flopping heavily in the water flew up and off with a terrific squawking noise to my childish ears, as I had never seen or heard one before. On my immediately starting up from the creek toward our camp trembling with fear a wolf loudly howled on the opposite side of the creek. My fright was now quadrupled. I ran towards the camp for life, expecting the wolf would be on me the next jump, as its repeated yells showed it close behind me. However, I reached the camp with the pail of water, the wolf continuing to howl and follow close behind me. But what of my father? Instead of running down the line to meet his child he remained at the camp pounding on a tree with his axe in view of frightening back the wolf as I supposed. In my crazy desperate fright I did not think to drop my pail of water. The wolf continued its howling around our camp. The sun being then about half an hour high, my father and I gathered all the dry wood we could and carried it up to the fire he had made for our night's use. About sundown we heard other wolves away off answering the calls of the one

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howling near us. Darkness coming on wolves from every direction came rapidly, howling as they came, until by their varied howls our camp seemed surrounded by an army of them. We placed our wood near our fire and as it was dry it blazed up nicely. My father stood up all that long night replenishing at times the fire, axe in hand, while his boy sat all that same long night between his father's feet, facing the fire. Many times I saw the fierce shining eyes of the wolves through the darkness as they howled and ran around near us yelling in a hundred different tones. My children may not realize how the nine year old boy felt, or his father, who stood astride me during all of that long, long night, seemingly more than an age of mine. But daylight, so longingly wished for, finally came and then after a general chorus of howls and yelps the wolves began to scatter in all directions, and in an hour afterward the last distant howl faintly died away and nothing more was heard of them. But the right and mental agony I went through that night sixty-three years ago still remains too fresh and vivid in my memory. At times in the woods we picked and ate wild berries, caught a few messes of trout, and ate the inside tender bark from black birch trees.

We did the mending and washing of our clothes, as we carried needles, thread and soap. On returning home through the "fifty mile woods," as it was then called, on the turnpike mentioned, we once travelled until about one o'clock in the morning, hoping to get out into the settlement and avoid camping out. But on its commencing to rain it became so dark that we lost the road, and then

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father made a fire by the side of a large spruce stub. I lay down near the fire and being very tired I was soon asleep. My father lay down beside me, and we slept till late in the morning. When we awoke we found the big stub had burned off and fallen in the opposite direction from where we lay without waking either of us. We escaped death by the bare chance of my father's making the fire on the right side of the stub; for if he had made the fire on the opposite side, I would have lain down and fallen asleep on that side.

The timber of this region was mostly hemlock and mountain spruce; yet in some places sugar maple, beech and black birch largely prevailed. There were in some localities, and more particularly in the region of the middle and upper parts of the St. Regis River country, streaks and groves of large cork pine. This was the first I had noticed of that kind of timber. My father informed me that it was a valuable timber and sought for the Quebec market. In fact, much had been taken already to that market from Vermont and New York regions bordering on Lake Champlain. My attention was drawn by my father on this trip, and afterwards, to the iron ore deposits which attracted or varied our compass needles, preventing us in such localities from running straight lines. This retarded our work considerably at times. These iron ores were usually of the Peru magnetic kind, though we encountered occasionally "bog" ore (sulphate of iron) in some swamps.

The Black Hawk Indian War occurred mostly in the summer of 1832, and in the same season occured the first of the cholera epidemics in the United States.

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For my labor performed and hardships endured during the surveying trip described my father made me a present of six dollars and a half, with which I purchased a yearling heifer and when it grew up into a cow I sold it for thirteen dollars which I brought to Michigan in silver half dollars in June 1836.

In the latter part of May, 1834, my father took me then eleven years old, with Samuel Scott and Samuel Anger, two young men, on another surveying trip for Peter Smith of some three months' duration. We went into some other parts of the Saranac and St. Regis River regions. Though this trip was trying at my age yet it was far less so than my first trip at nine years of age. Hard and continuous labor on our farm during the long summer days was comparatively a play spell to the fatigues, various exposures and hardships, incident to these surveying tours. My work on this trip was carrying the "hind end" of the chain, keeping record of the streams of water we passed, the nature of the soil, kinds of timber, and the face or surface of the land we passed over. The result of this early mental drill has been of value to me through life as it seemed to largely increase my faculty of memory over ordinary "land lookers," so that I could nearly always remember correctly the soil and timber I have travelled over for the past sixty years. My memory has largely served me in place of written record in this respect. In due time this job was completed. In the winter of 1835 my father sold his farm to Harvey Holt for six hundred and fifty dollars, reserving the privilege of using and occupying it until the Spring of 1836.

About the middle of May, 1835, my father having

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another surveying job for Peter Smith took me and my brother Nathan, then only between seven and eight years of age, and Samuel Scott, into another part of the Saranac and St. Regis region. Being older, I stood hardships better, notwithstanding my father made me at twelve years of age run part of the lines with the compass, and also make the required mathematical calculations under his eye. At such time my father carried the forward end of the chain, while my young brother carried the hind end. The art of land exploring and land surveying was practically and theoretically taught me at this early age and has not been forgotten. This art in addition to my general woodcraft knowledge, and a little mineral and geological knowledge, has been to me in my after life of large financial value. The whole of the Adirondack group of mountains is of hard granite rock, which takes on a beautiful polish.

Smith paid my father only a dollar and a half for each mile of line run, marked, and with corners made, which came only to about five dollars a day for himself and his three assistants. But what of my brother during this wild woods journey through swamps, and over ranges of mountains? He had to stand it, and finally arrived safely home, after the second tour of that season. Many times I almost drew him up the mountain side with the chain, as he held on to its end. One morning in August my father, with Scott, left us on the bank of the St. Regis River, to be absent until evening. After picking and eating our fill of huckleberries which grew there in profusion on a burnt patch, I took my fish line and fished off a ledge of rocks into a deep hole in the

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river. Soon I hooked a large trout. My pole breaking under the trout's weight, I caught hold of the line attached to the broken pole and by it with good luck I finally hauled the trout up on to the top of the rock to a place of safety, the fish flopping lustily on the rocks on its way up. Our eyes gazes and stuck out with delight as we looked on and viewed our big captive. It weighed about three pounds, and made a good supper for all four of us. But "no rose without a thorn;" I being excited, the next "bite" I had, I "twitched" so hard that on catching nothing the hook came swiftly round and entered over the barb into the palm of one of my hands. How shall I get the hook out, was then my only thought. I pulled on the hook as it pained me so severely, but the barb held it fast in the flesh of my hand. I knew it would not do to let the hook remain until my father came home in the evening, so I took the old dull jack-knife I had, and then pulled on the hook, and at the same time sawed the skin and flesh of my hand with the knife, probably an hour off and on, stopping and crying at times because it hurt me so terribly. After a time I had advanced the cutting sufficiently so that by a sudden twitch the hook came out. My hand remained painfully sore for a week or so afterward. This painful accident somewhat clouded the pleasure in the display of our big trout on the return of father Scott. My father having sold his farm and talking of moving to Michigan, on my hauling up the big trout my little brother excitedly exclaimed: " Have father move here! have father move here!" though we were then in the rough mountainous wilderness, some forty to

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fifty miles from any white inhabitants. We worked on the job some six or seven weeks, and then returned home without finishing it. In the fore part of September, my father, my little seven year old brother Nathan and I with saddened hearts returned to the woods again to finish the job without any man to assist us. My brother had been exposed to the whooping cough before our return to the woods and was soon after suffering severely with it. Fall rains and sleet coming on caused the underbrush that we had to travel through to be wet much of the time. My brother had to carry the hind end of the chain again, and I the forward. This cold wet weather in the Northern latitude, ending at times in moderate falls of snow and sleet, intensified my brother's severe paroxysms of coughing, making him unable to stand or walk part of the time, and blood would gush freely from his nose when coughing. Yet he had to stand it and go when he possibly could. I pitied and felt very sorry for him yet my father never displayed any pity, but went on as if all was well, until the job was finished in the latter part of October. My brother was convalescing at the time of the finishing, and father remaining behind on some business, he let me and my brother go home alone after we got out of the woods. We were so homesick and anxious to get home, that the first day we walked twenty-five miles on a hard travelled road, which so wore the skin off the heels of my brother's feet that they were bloody like raw flesh. Yet he complained so little while going towards home I thought nothing of it until I saw his feet at night. Yes! the boy seemed willing to bear most any suffering when on

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his way to his home and mother. The next day we travelled only six miles as walking pained my brother so severely and arrived in the evening of that day at Uncle Toby's brick at lower Jay Village. My brother's feet being so painful, I decided it best to stop over night (the little money my father gave us being spent) at my Uncle's house. Yes, we were ragged and dreadfully tired, yet I was made conscious that we were not desirable guests there. Our desperate necessities, however prevailed, and we were fed and slept there that night. The next morning, my brother's feet being somewhat better, we left for home now only some twelve miles distant. With the two packs on my back to relieve my brother so far as I could, and by encouraging him in his painful tread, we reached home that night, with more than tearful joy. This ended my land surveying in "York State."

In November, 1835, my father left for Michigan at my Uncle Samuel's solicitation, with a view of purchasing a home and moving his family thereto in the following Spring. Hearing nothing from him for several months after he left, my mother and the children became mournfully troubled as to his safety, fearing that he had been lost in some of the late fall gales on Lake Erie in passing up that lake, as the storms and catastrophes had been unusually severe that fall. After waiting in dire suspense until about the tenth of February, my mother finally received a letter from father informing her of his leaving Michigan for home about the first of February with a French pony and "pung," as the winter was cold and sleighing good, and travelling thereby through

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Upper Canada, New York and into Vermont, and from there across Lake Champlain on the ice to our home in Keene. This journey he made in five or six weeks, the distance being from eight to nine hundred miles and the weather unusually cold. However, he came home safe and well with the pony and "pung," which he sold for forty dollars. I attended school that cold winter without having missed a day, and took care of our cattle, bringing in the wood etc. nights and mornings. Our schoolmaster was Thomas Trumbull, some twenty-two years of age whose home was at the "Forks" of the Ausable River. He was retiring and seemed modest at that time, managing the school fairly well, and, I imagined he possessed good and refined manners, and had full ordinary mental ability.

I thought of him many times in after years, but to my surprise, mortification and regret on calling on him at his office at the "Forks," after an absence in Michigan of twenty years I found him at forty-five years of age a lawyer by profession, assuming and rather discourteous in his tone and manner. The drift of his conversation was to inform me how profoundly learned he was in the law of "York State," "the foundation of all law;" that he had been a member of the assembly of the great State of New York, had been introduced to its Governor, and was at his reception in Albany, and that he was now Postmaster at the forks of the River. He was really a disgusting, ignorant, egotistical, bombastic "leather-head," from whom "Nasby" probably took the idea of his "postoffice business" at the "cross roads." He did not invite me to his house, though in my boyhood

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I knew his wife well as I attended school with her, she being the daughter of a Mr. Chase of Keene Village, who possessed courtly manners and considerable ability. This lawyer, assembly statesman, or "Cross Roads" Postmaster I have not again met, though thirty-five years have since passed away.

But to return. My father had purchased a long-since-cleared-up, well run small French farm, located on the St. Clair River, three quarters of a mile below Newport at the mouth of Belle River from Uncle Sam, for two thousand dollars, paying down at the time of purchase two hundred dollars on contract, the balance due running on interest at ten per cent per annum. Uncle Sam paid for the farm only six hundred and fifty dollars a year or two before, as it afterwards came out. Father purchased an eighty acre wild timber lot from the United States for one hundred dollars, located over the marsh from two to three miles southwest of the little French farm.

On the morning of the twenty-second of May, 1836, we bade our tearful neighbors good-bye. I shall not forget the sobs and the wringing of hands at the parting, as my sisters though of delicate constitution were mostly physically fair, of moral, intellectual and industrious training and habits, and with my father and mother, though poor, stood high in the community they had so long resided in. Yet the new climate of Michigan, with the continued neglect and persecutions they received from our powerful, envious, oppressive relatives in Michigan, combined with our poverty and sickness, caused not one of them ever to see again their native land, the home of

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their youth, from which they were torn as it were, on that pleasant May morning in such heartfelt anguish. Our streaming eyes caught and tenaciously lingered on every familiar object, now seemingly sacred, as we slowly passed along. Our neighbors in the adieus seemed also deeply affected. Only my father and three of us children have revisited the old home, myself and two younger brothers Samuel, and Franklin, who were respectively three and five years of age when they moved from Keene, I being the first to return after an absence of twenty years. All of my sisters but Elvira, eventually Mrs. Warner, my two younger brothers, my father and mother, have long since been in their graves. Out of that family of twelve, only three are now living: Nathan, Elvira and myself.

On looking back to sixty years ago, I can now perceive that the Keene "boy surveyor" was in his native town esteemed a favorite whether he deserved it or not. I speak of this in view of how I was treated by my rich and envious relatives, during the long years of my early manhood. The first night after we left our old home in Keene we remained with a Mr. Partridge up on "Partridge Hill." Being more resigned the following morning, we started on our journey with hope and better spirits. Yet my mother continued to have premonitions that she was leaving her home and friendly neighbors to fill a grave of martyrdom with her needy unprotected family among my father's unprincipled relatives, of whom she had known and seen enough of in her younger days. And so it turned out. The second night of our journey we remained at a friend of my

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father's at Westport, on Lake Champlain. Taking then a lumber scow, for my father's means did not permit him with his large family to take passage on a steamer through Lake Champlain, we passed Crown Point and "Tie," forts of French and Revolutionary War fame, and sailed in two days to White Hall. Then journeying by Northern or Champlain Canal we passed Fort Edward, Fort Anne, and the battlefields of Stillwater and Saratoga, where General Burgoyne surrendered to General Gates. Reembarking at the "junction" on a canal line boat, we travelled eight or nine days by the Erie Canal to Buffalo. As we passed near Schenectady, I then saw my first train of railroad cars running from Albany to Schenectady, a distance of twenty miles, this being the first railroad of any length built in the United States. The Erie Canal or "Clinton's Ditch," as it was then called, was finished in 1825. Washington explored a route with Gov. Clinton for a canal from Albany to Buffalo as early as 1790 or 1791, thirty-five years before the canal was completed. We wondered at the large aqueducts as we journeyed along. At Schenectady my father received two thousand dollars from Peter Smith, with which he was to look up, select and buy pine lands in Michigan, my father retaining one-quarter of the lands for his services. At the time of receiving the money father gave Smith a receipt written by Smith which stated only that the money my father received was to be used for buying pine land for Smith in Michigan without mentioning that my father was to have one-quarter of the land as payment for his services. I was with father when this transaction at

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Schenectady occurred. Father supposed that all would be right as he considered "Judge Smith' honest and his word as good as his bond, and probably it would have been if Judge Smith had lived. But eight months afterward in 1837 Judge Smith suddenly died, leaving his so Gerrit afterwards the abolitionist and generally supposed to be a great philanthropist as his principal heir and the executor of his estate.

Across the canal were many bridges which would not allow a person to stand upright on the deck of a canal boat and pass under safely, so that when the passengers were on deck a constant watch had to be kept to warn them of "bridge ahead." Even then occasionally passengers were knocked down and sometimes severely hurt by passing under these bridges. Yes, the Genesee Falls, where Sam Patch had made his last and fatal jump, we viewed as a marvel of nature, and then the many locks at Lockport were a wonder to us.

We came within hearing of Niagara Falls, which we did not see, as the canal passed some miles south of the Falls. Arriving at Buffalo, a town then of some eight or twelve thousand people, we saw there a forest of masts in the harbor as the commerce on the lakes was then large. We took passage on the steamboat Commodore Perry, having about eight hundred passengers on board, the majority being steerage passengers. The poor and dirty cabin for the latter was crowded but we had to sleep in it. I slyly peeped into the cabin passenger's department, well furnished, and only partly filled with comfortable well-dressed passengers. In those days

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the average captain in a lake steamer was a very great man in his own estimation, but was usually uncultivated, immoral, overbearing, and despotic toward those he considered his inferiors.--hia numerous steerage passengers. Very few in those days dared to speak to a steamboat captain.

But to return to our steamboat passage through Lake Erie: our boat touched at Erie, Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo and other ports, and was some fifty hours reaching Detroit. Unluckily, after being out some hours from Buffalo a severe wind storm came on and nearly all on board became seasick and it seemed as if I should die from th deathly, sickening, sinking sensation at the pit of my stomach. Yet it was no worse for me than for the other passengers. At times when the boat sank into a trough of the waves many supposed, and I among the rest, that we were going to the bottom of the lake. Such praying and screaming! Finally deeply, doubly thankful, to our great joy we reached Detroit in safety. Detroit claimed then (l836) six thousand and five hundred inhabitants. There were no paved streets. Jefferson Avenue was very muddy, its sidewalks were mostly planks laid down endways; the vehicles were largely French two-wheeled carts. The inhabitants were principally a mixture of French and Indians. There were some pure blooded Indians and a few unmixed French with some other whites mostly from New York State and New England. The apple orchards above and below Detroit were of large old trees, and many pear trees were monsters of a hundred or more years of age, as Detroit was settled by Cadillac in 1701.

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After tarrying all night at a poor hotel on Wood-bridge Street near the dock, called the Mansion House, we left for Newport on the St. Clair River, where we were to meet our relatives and make out future home. Embarking on a small, slow, squealing, high-pressure steamboat called the Gratiot, we reached our destination about five o'clock in the afternoon, on the fifteenth day of June, 1836.

The country about Detroit, Lake St. Clair, St. Clair River, and around Newport was flat, low, and undrained. In some places were open hay marshes and timbered swamps, some of which were filled largely with a great growth of timber, mostly of oak, elm and black ash. No hills or mountains could be seen to rest our longing eyes on, but everywhere a country monotonous, flat, and having a black, deep, rich soil. The creeks being largely stagnant combined to make a condition that produced malaria in the hot season of the year, causing much severe remitting and intermitting bilious fever to attack the unacclimated so that after our arrival in Michigan, half of the people emigrating from New York State, and the New England states, were from some years during the summer and early fall seasons ill at a time. The natives and those not dead by acclimating were usually in fair health, but not as robust as the average person in New York and New England where the country is rolling to mountainous, with good quick running water.

But how were we received by our rich relatives? I saw my father converse a little with Uncle Sam, how about fifty-two years of age, and E.B. Ward, now about twenty-five years of age; they constituted

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about all the financial and business ability of Newport at that time and largely of the whole length of the St. Clair River. Neither spoke to me, and but little to any one of our family.

We went (as the place my father purchased was leased for that season) and occupied immediately a small one-story old frame house of four rooms, located near St. Clair River at the upper part of the town, near where Uncle Sam built his new brick house the following fall and winter. At the time of our arrival at Newport, Uncle Sam was worth from sixty to eighty thousand dollars, a fortune comparatively in financial power and consequence much more than that of a millionaire of to-day. He owned two good schooners, the General Harrison and the Marshall Ney, considerable stock in the large steamboat Michigan, was running a store of general assortment, and had a large, well-cleared up and well-located stock and grain farm located between the St. Clair and Belle Rivers, the village of Newport being laid out on the South end of the same. He had lately made a sale to an Ohio company of another portion of his large farm for fifteen thousand dollars, and soon built a brick house at a cost of eight thousand dollars, and had other property and lands, and was out of debt. His family consisted of his wife "Aunt Betsey," who could neither read or write, and his son Harrison, "Hack" as he was called, then about twenty-one years of age, ................. and four of Aunt Betsey's orphan nieces named McQueen, at this time from ten to twenty-one years of age. Poly McQueen, the eldest, was the one

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E. B. Ward soon after married with a view of uniting Aunt Betsey's feelings with Uncle Sam's in order to manage and scoop Uncle Sam's property by will or otherwise. E. B. was about twenty-five or twenty-six years of age at the time of his marriage. His mother died early, and his father being poor, E. B. had come up roughly, largely among the French and Indians then inhabiting Michigan. He had been allowed his own way and being naturally egotistical, dishonest, brutal, avaricious, tyrannical, and of an immoral temperament, had but little respect for others's rights and feelings. At the time of our arrival at Newport, E. B. was employed in doing Uncle Sam's bidding in performing legitimate as well as many kinds of illegitimate work. Uncle Sam being then in chronic poor health, E. B. was in a few years "cook of the walk" in all he desired to do. A garden was made and a patch of potatoes planted for us by Aunt Keziah, one of my father's sisters. As soon as we were somewhat settled, father and I wet to surveying and laying out a part of Uncle Sam's farm into a village plat, making maps of the same, etc. We were engaged in this work fully two months for which Uncle Sam never paid my father a cent. When the job was about half completed Uncle Sam presented my father with a cow, as part payment for the surveying, but in the fall the cow was driven away from us by Uncle Sam's orders, his excuse being that "it was a favorite cow of Aunt Betsey's " which "she set so much by." But no other cow or other compensation was ever substituted. In the spring before our arrival at Newport E. B. W. caused

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a garden to be made on two sides of a new frame house he was then building for himself in Newport. A part of this garden, E.B. told me I might have if I would weed, hoe and take good care of it, while he gave the other to young Samuel Ward, Uncle Zael's oldest son provided he would do likewise. This Samuel Ward was the one who scared the deer for "Uncle Nate" in Keene, who was some eighteen months older than myself and now fifteen years of age, and who had been sent on from Chautauqua County, New York where his father (Uncle Zael) then lived, to Newport in the early spring, before we arrived there, ......by his father, who was selling out at the time to follow "Uncle Nate" with his family to Michigan. This removal Uncle Zael accomplished in the spring of 1837. I hoed, weeded and took good care of the garden given me by E. B. at odd times, and the rainfall being abundant that season I had a splendid garden while Sam's all grew up to weeds and produced next to nothing. About the first of August Aunt Betsey said she would like some of the products of my good garden which she ordered and gathered largely as she pleased, leaving me but little for my faithful work. I complained to E. B. about it but he took no notice of my complaint. Aunt Betsey had a fine large garden of her own behind the old brick house where she then resided.

I attended Sunday school that summer to obtain books to read. During July my father went up Elk Creek a western branch of Black River, exploring for good cork pine timber land in which to invest

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Peter Smith's two thousand dollars, and succeeded in finding what he wanted which he purchased at the United States Land Office at Detroit.

During the year we lived so near Uncle Sam, my father being poor having a large family, neither Uncle Sam nor Aunt Betsey ever entered our house or ever gave us any vegetables or fruit, though they had it rotting on the ground, nor a cent's worth of anything else at any other time. The first of September I went down to Algonac to "tend store" for James Peer, who had lately married my sister Harriet. I remained there alone in a general store for three months until the early part of December, receiving only a winter cap for my services. Deciding that I ought to go to school again I walked home one very cold afternoon, and being thinly clad I took a severe cold which gave me pleurisy on my right side the following night and which kept me from school until about Christmas. This was the first severe sickness I has suffered and the effect of it has remained with me through life ........... On convalescing from the pleurisy I began school about Christmas, reviewing my arithmetic and geography for the last time, and commenced the study of English grammar. School closed about the first of March. Being a stranger and unprotected I received some hard knocks from large ruffianly boys, and many slurs and low flings from the McQueen girls, Aunt Betsey's nieces, Betsey and Kate, respectively sixteen and eighteen years of age who were now learning to read. Kate succeeded in a way, but Betsey never. This was their first and last school attendance. Neither Uncle

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Sam nor Aunt Betsey could read or write, they claiming that they had gotten along better than those who were "eddecated," and consequently "eddecation" was a damage which "Uncle Nate" and his family were afflicted with. Betsey and Kate who were plain looking insulted me and set other scholars on to me during the winter, slandering "Uncle Nate's" family generally, and particularly my good looking, grown-up, marriageable sisters who avoided attending the school.

In April following we moved on to our little French farm at the mouth of Belle River. A malarious, stagnant marsh or slough-hole of some two to four acres being located across the road and directly in front of our house. Early in June, 1837, Uncle Zael who was better off than my father, and his children more of the healthy, tough kind, with all of his family (except one daughter, Rhoda,--Mrs. Stewart--) followed us to Michigan....

.... When Uncle Zael arrived in Michigan I was a boy fourteen years old and had gone through the hardships before mentioned as a child in New York State. Before Uncle Zael moved to Chautauqua he resided in Keene, New York, on his farm adjoining my father's farm.

Though Uncle Zael and some of his family obtained favors and patronage from Uncle Sam and E. B. which resulted in assisting them considerably, E. B. Ward took good care that in the end little or nothing of Uncle Sam's property should go to anyone but himself.

But to return. During the season of 1837 I

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worked hard on my father's farm, my brother Nathan helping me, and occasionally I accompanied father on a short trip of land surveying, as he had some employment in that line, having been elected County Surveyor in the fall of 1836. During the following winter of 1837 and '38, a very cold winter, I attended school again. This was the winter of the Canada "patriot" war. Next season I again labored on the farm and attended school during the winter of 1838 and '39, making fair progress. During the past two years I had read during all my spare time the books I borrowed, the principal ones being Carver's Travels, Priestley's Lectures, Plutarch's Lives, Rollin's Ancient History, and much of the Old and New Testament.

In the spring of 1838 Uncle Amasa and Aunt Charlotte Rust, with their three daughters and five sons, moved to Newport from Wells, Vermont. The names of the sons were Alony, David, Amasa, Ezra and John. Esther, Laura and Minerva were the names of the daughters. Alony, David and Amasa were grown up young men, Alony and David being from two to five years older than myself. Uncle Amasa was fairly well off for those days. His children were mostly robust and healthy, but Uncle Amasa and Aunt Charlotte were chronically in poor health.

David W. Rust possessed excellent business and financiering ability, and his brother John is not far behind him. Uncle Zael's Rhoda (Mrs. Sardeus Stewart) was, and is now an exceptionally fine, intellectual, good-principled, moral, well-meaning,

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hard-working woman. She was kind to my father's family in their long distress whenever she had an opportunity, which did not often occur on account of her residence being continually in New York State, so far from us. Submit (Mrs. Captain Cottrell) also one of Uncle Zael's daughters, was kind in her moderate way, and mourned that "Uncle Nate's" family should be made to suffer through neglect and persecution.

After Gerrit Smith had written father, and father had declined to deed over all the land of him, as he had requested, after his father's death, in the spring of 1838, Gerrit then sent an agent of impressive manners to personally demand of father of deed over all the pine land to him purchased by his father's two thousand dollars, according to his construction of the receipt given by my father at Schenectady. My father declined to yield at first, informing the agent of his bargain with Judge Smith which was that my father was to have one-quarter of the land for looking it up, selecting and buying it. But on the agent's insisting that this instructions were to sue father in chancery if all the land was not deeded over, father being poor and a large part of his family ill, reluctantly deeded over all the pine land he had bought which consisted of nineteen eighty acre lots. At the purchase price of ten shillings per acre the two thousand dollars would have bought twenty lots so father having used one hundred dollars of the two thousand in expenses in exploring, looking out and buying the land, and as Gerrit must have the last "pound of flesh," father deeded over in addition his own eighty acre wood lot before

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mentioned, located two or three miles from his little French farm, thus stripping himself of all the land he hd a title to in order to settle the transaction with Gerrit Smith, the heir of Peter or Judge Smith, to the great damage of himself and his family poor, persecuted and distressed as we were.

I probably have profited somewhat by this transaction in my dealings for the past fifty years by having all contracts of importance, and especially land contracts, fully expressed and executed by written agreements, the result of which has largely protected me from losses by dishonest parties. This nationally advertised great philanthropist Gerrit Smith eventually donated with great newspaper and national notoriety--all of the poor lands owned by his father, of little to no value, that were in the tracts that my father and I had surveyed in North Elba, Essex County, New York, ...... to a negro settlement, run and managed by John Brown of Kansas War notoriety, and who was afterwards executed in Virginia for his Harper's Ferry raid, and was buried on the North side of a rock about seven feet high on his farm in North Elba. After John Brown's execution, his family still resided in North Elba a few years, but eventually were starved out on account of the sterile soil and rigor of the climate of that high northern altitude causing killing frosts to occur in nearly every month of the year.

The result of this reputed great philanthropic Gerrit Smith's scheme of giving lands to the emancipated and runaway slaves, was that the black men

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from the Southern states were soon all starved and frozen out of North Elba, and thereby lost all their investments and labor. But few know the inwardness and result of this so well advertised philanthropic scheme, and it is now dead to history. The last time I visited John Brown's grave in North Elba was in 1876. The altitude of North Elba is from fourteen hundred to two thousand feet above Keene Valley where all crops flourish, even Indian corn.

The little clothing I had in 1837, '38 and '39 was procured by raising some garden vegetables, melons etc., and selling the same to the wind bound vessels anchored in St. Clair River in front of our house. During the summer season of 1838 Uncle Samuel accosted me in the street one day and asked me to loan him the thirteen dollars in silver I still retained for the cow I sold in Keene. I forget the reply I made, if any; but this I know, he did not get possession of my little thirteen dollars for if he had I was aware I would not see it again. During the cold winter of 1837 and '38, as before mentioned the Canadian Patriot War occurred, and prices for provisions being very high we were at times largely destitute of the same. I remember our living on boiled peas principally for weeks at a time. My father "traded" a little at that time at a store in Newport owned by James Robinson, Uncle Sam having no interest in it. Being sent there one evening for something, I saw Uncle Sam in the store and after I had bought what I was sent for Uncle Sam cautioned Robinson in my presence "that it would not do to trust Uncle Nathan" for it he did

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he "would not be likely to get his pay." I have sometimes thought that the venomous, persecuting, inhuman spirit shown by Uncle Sam to my father's children, and especially to myself, I being the older of the boys, might largely have been occasioned by low, narrow envy, considering the natural brightness and good looks of some part of my father's children.

During 1838 and '39 I purchased a book on natural philosophy, astronomy ad chemistry which at odd times I read through thoroughly. These branches of science were not then taught in our common school. I also learned to manage a canoe and an sail boat in heavy winds and rough seas on St. Clair River, an art which has been of value to me many times.

In December, 1839, I commenced teaching my first school in the Westbrook, district, about two and a half miles above Newport, being then past my seventeenth birthday, at ten dollars per month and "board around." I taught five months with success. We had a nice exhibition at the close of the school. I then returned home early in May and labored again on the farm. During a part of the past year I had been afflicted at times by a dull heavy pain in the region of my right lung, the seat of my pleurisy attack in December, 1836. As time passed on in the summer of 1840 this pain increased. I was at Ft. Meigs at the great Harrison celebration and called on Dr. Pitcher in Detroit on my return for examination and medical treatment. E. B. Ward, happening in the office at the time heard the

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opinion of Dr. Pitcher as to the disease I was afflicted with, which was, as the Doctor pronounced, a deep-seated chronic bronchitis. Dr. Pitcher ordered severe counter-irritation on my chest by continued Spanish fly blisters, tartar emetic irritations, and setons, in my right side, and internally tartar emetic solutions three times a day. I used this prescription for six years, during which time I had no less than two hundred blisters on my chest, and twelve setons on my right breast and side, and I continually kept up also during that time tartar emetic irritations which the sea of scars on my chest and right side now fully attest.

The first of October following I was taken down with a severe run of bilious remitting fever which greatly reduced me, the result of which, in conjunction with my chronic bronchitis, incapacitated me for school teaching the following winter. My health being poor, and my strength exhausted by a severe chronic cough, severe dull pain in my right side and having little or no appetite, I was able to do but very little physical labor, yet I continued my reading so far as I could. With other reading I perused thoroughly the anatomy and physiology of the lungs and their diseases from books borrowed from Dr. Pitcher. E. B. Ward, Uncle Sam, ... Aunt Emily and their "lackeys" (the people under their thumb, in their employ), and other toadyists, on learning of my chronic diseased condition incapacitating me for physical labor, commenced a clamor in Newport and up and down the St. Clair River that "Dave Ward had become a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow, and was devoting his time to making

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a quack doctor of himself." This sickening, insulting report was continued with additions for years afterward. Some of the combination boasted to some of my friends that the "quack doctor," meaning me, "had consumption and his days would be short here." This style of unfeeling inhuman persecution was now added to the other inflictions imposed upon me and our family before mentioned, and probably was the main incentive to my finally graduating in medicine and surgery at the Michigan University.

My father continued to survey a little as the business was then small, obtaining sufficient from it and our little farming to support his family in a way, and pay the doctor's bills incident to continual sickness in the family. But he never got ahead so as to pay any more on our home, the little French farm he purchased of Uncle Sam. Being the oldest son and now grown to manhood, and having commenced to teach school with success, to follow me by their continued persecutions and slander with the object of preventing me from obtaining any profitable occupation that I might be able to undertake in my diseased state; in short, to crush me, and with me our family's only hope, by continued lies and scandals seemed now to be the great object of our persecutors. I was now in the nineteenth year of my age and was at times more than discouraged. With no friends who dared act or speak out for me, on account of my persecutors' power influence and sway being so great, with no health nor money, and our family still in their sickly helpless condition, none of them capable of much labor except

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my father who was now an old man, somewhat acclimated in his younger life to a malarious climate. It was dark, dark and sometimes I quite despaired! That malarious marsh located in front of our house was largely the cause of our family's more than usual ill health. Uncle Samuel completed his first steamboat, the Huron, in the spring of 1840, E. B. Ward going as captain, though he had sailed on no steamer before, and was only accustomed to a fishing boat when with his father as a boy at Bois Blanc Island near Mackinac where his father kept a lighthouse for many years. This was a specimen of E. B.'s cheek, forwardness, and presumption at twenty-nine years of age. Yet he was energetic, ambitious, selfish, egotistic, overbearing, cruel, immoral, with "not a lazy hair in his head." It was said that E. B. invested from five hundred to a thousand dollars in the steamer Huron which induced Uncle Sam to allow him to sail her. E. B.'s small but rapidly increasing army of employees and other "tools" were ever ready to do his bidding in dirty criminal work. The Huron made little money that season though the route and business were good, it being presidential election year. On account of the lack of proper knowledge and skill E. B. banged the boat on to the docks and other places, so that the expense of repairs and loss of time ate up the profits.

My health improving under Dr. Pitcher's severe treatment I decided to try and teach a small select school in Newport, as a few friends advised me to do, during the winter of 1840 and 1841, but on E. B.'s hearing of the move, he commanded and scared the

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promoters out of the project. I was soon after invited to open the same kind of a school in Cottrellville, some two and one half miles below Newport, in an old French settlement. I began the work before E. B. was aware of it, the result being that I had there quite a large school for two successive winters. My two younger brothers, Samuel and Franklin, attended my school during the time. Efforts were made by my persecutors to break up my second winter's school in Cottrellville which worried and troubled me but the majority of my patrons being well to do French farmers stood by me like ticks, as they were aware I was making fair scholars of their children. Some of those scholars have remained my firm friends through life. But few are now living.

All I received for those two winters' teaching was from thirteen to fourteen dollars a month, and my board. During this time, my spare hours were devoted to medical and historical reading. On the whole my health slowly improved as time passed, and after the close of my last term of school in Cottrellville in March 1843 I attended an academy at St. Clair, the Rev. O. C. Thompson being principal. I remained there most of the time until the following November working in a seed garden nights and mornings for my board and washing. At this academy I took up algebra, Latin and some other studies with fair success. Early in November I commenced a six months' district school in Port Huron, Michigan, for one dollars a day and boarded myself. This left me seventeen dollars per month. My school was large and very fatiguing as I had

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one hundred and nineteen scholars on my roll, averaging some eighty in daily attendance, and had no assistance except what I obtained from my advanced scholars.

Aunt Emily, E. B.'s sister, lived then with her father at Fort Gratiot lighthouse, two and one half miles above Port Hudson. I being a stranger in Port Huron, Aunt Emily slandered me to her acquaintances in the place, she having considerable influence there on account of her election to E.B. and Uncle Sam, who had then under their control the passenger traffic of the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers and some points on the lakes, and as Uncle Sam owned soon after some of the leading passenger steamers on the Lakes, which were earning money rapidly on account of the great emigration to Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. Remember there were the no railroads. Aunt Emily's influence gave me trouble and worry, yet I got through with my school with seeming credit to myself and fair appreciation by my patrons.

During my term of teaching in Port Huron I continued to pursue my Latin reading, and also read through Blackstone's Commentaries on English Common Law. My health still slowly improving, in May 1844, now twenty-two years of age, I accepted Dr. Hamminger's invitation to read medicine in his office during the summer of 1844, and work in his large nursery nights and mornings to pay for my board and washing. The fall and winters following I again taught another six month's term of school at Port Huron, Aunt Emily continuing to inflict on me her injurious slanders, and worrying me as during the winter before. At the close of this

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term my patrons solicited me to set up a select school, offering me the rent of a proper building gratis. I accepted the offer and taught two months, when my sister Emma being about to die of pulmonary consumption, I adjourned my school to the first of October following. During the interim I read medicine with Dr. Hamminger again. My health improved so that I performed in addition some jobs of land surveying at odd times about St. Clair County.

The first of October, 1845, I resumed my school at Port Huron, but on finding a good opportunity to sell out my furniture and lease I did so, so that I taught there only two months and then entered on a four months' term of school in the upper district of Algonac at eighteen dollars per months and board. I passed through this school work pleasantly and with little trouble as I was some thirty miles away from Aunt Emily. Feeling that I might wear my life out in school teaching and save but little, there being then but very small demand for land surveying, I decided to knit a set of gill nets with my brother Nathan and fit out a two-man Mackinac fishing boat rig.

In the Spring of 1846, my brothers Nathan and Samuel, and I went to Swish Swaw, a white-fish fishing ground located on the North shore of Lake Michigan about sixty-five miles West of Mackinac. I was then in my twenty-fourth year, Nathan eighteen or nineteen, and Samuel thirteen years of age, this being the year of the Mexican War. We fished until the latter part of October making eight more trips than any other boat on the beach. There

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were about seventy other boats manned mostly by French half-breeds. To set and take up our nets we sailed or rowed when the winds were unfavorable from four to seven miles out and in Lake Michigan nearly every other day. We caught and salted over one hundred barrels of white-fish, besides some lake trout. We shipped the fish from time to time to Cleveland, Ohio, and I followed them there early in November, and reshipped then to Akron and Masillon, Ohio, by the Portsmouth and Cleveland Canal. About the time I had my fish stored to be sold towards spring, when the farmers made their purchases, the weather turned terrifically cold, the canal and Lake Erie froze over, and navigation closed suddenly, preventing me from returning home, and leaving me at Masillon, Ohio, some two hundred and fifty miles from home with every rough roads to travel over if I returned before lake navigation opened in the spring. Recollect there was not a mile of railroad then in Ohio.

As the weather was very cold, and it being now December, I decided to teach for three or four months until lake navigation opened in the spring. I did so by engaging in a district school among the Pennsylvania Dutch, located some three miles southeast of Masillon, in a rich old farming country. The great barns were located near the highways in front of the dwellings. [The school director, Uncle David Jacoby, drove with "the little Yankee school-master" eight miles to Canton, the county set of Stark County so he might be examined for a teacher's certificate by the County superintendent of schools. I met the superintendent, and instead of examining

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me in the branches to be taught he quizzed me an hour and a half on the topography, settlements, business, resources, inhabitants, etc., of Michigan, Wisconsin and the western territories. I answered as to what I did and did not know, evidently to his satisfaction, and perhaps instruction. When he had finished quizzing he inquired the branches I desired to teach and then wrote out a certificate for the same and handed it to me without asking me a question as to my qualifications as a teacher. ] I have not seen or heard of this official though forty-seven years have since passed away. We returned and I remained that very cold night at Uncle Jacoby's large two-story brick house, where I slept in a very well furnished room. On turning down the cover to get into bed, a filled feather tick turned up with it, there being another well-filled tick under the upper one. Thinking that I might freeze, I slipped in and slept between the two feather ticks, warm and comfortable, and in the morning I smoothed down the ticks very nicely, so that Mrs. Jacoby might not know that I had slept between her two feather beds. Afterwards, on learning their practice of sleeping between feather ticks in cold water without much other covering, I informed Mr. and Mrs. Jacoby of the trick I had played on their bed the first night I remained at their house, which caused them to laugh heartily ever after whenever the subject was mentioned.

All the time I could spare from my school duties I devoted to reviewing my medical studies. I bargained for sixteen dollars per month with board and washing. Jacoby, the director, observed that

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I was right stiff in the mouth on price, as the highest wages they had ever paid before was fourteen dollars per month, with board and washing. All sent their children, large and small, whom they said, I advanced more rapidly than any other teacher before me. Nearly everybody requested me to board with them all the time but I boarded around as usual, assisting and pleasing all my scholars thereby, as well as their parents. No party or other gathering was complete that winter without the "little Yankee schoolmaster." No old Aunt Emily worried me as I was too far away. I dreaded to go home in the spring, but my father, mother, brothers and sisters were all there in Michigan, and the largely unsettled forest states of Michigan and Wisconsin offered me the prospect of a good paying business in land surveying and pine timber exploring, my health being now fair.

Consequently, after settling up my fish business, with deep feelings of regret I bade my kind sorrowing patrons and pupils a last adieu, many eyes being filled with tears. Forth-seven years have since passed away, and but two only of these people have I seen since. We made just fair wages on the fishing trip, but would have done well if Hiram Bacon, the man who induced us to go into the enterprise, had furnished us salt and barrels as he agreed to do. But the long continued hard rowing of our fishing boat to and from the shore in that healthy northern summer climate improved my bronchitis, my general health and my strength for physical labor and hardships in the future. I travelled by stage to Clevaland, and from there to Newport

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by steamer, reaching home in the early part of April, 1847.

Some surveying jobs were awaiting me as the lumber and other business had commenced to revive after the long prostration occasioned by President Jackson vetoing the re-chartering of the U.S. Bank. I pursued my land surveying until well into June, often going with wet feet and wading in water for weeks together, as the swamps were filled by the unusual rains. From overwork and exposure I had another "run" of bilious remitting fever in August following, which reduced me so that for ten days I was unable to walk. But convalescing through tonic treatment, by the fifteenth of September I was off to the woods again with my compass and chain, and remained there until about the twentieth of October. This spring's, summer's and fall's work increased my finances by two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars. By my going a-fishing on Lake Michigan my envious persecutors had supposed that their persecutions, combined with my poor health, had so discouraged me that I had given up the idea of completing my medical studies. Uncle Eber, father of E. B. and Emily Ward remarked to one of my friends as follows: "The Doctor" (meaning me) "is of course amiable, but we will look to it that he never gets money enough to get through his medical studies."

Early in November, 1847, I quietly left Michigan to attend a course of medical lectures at the Cleveland Medical College without my persecutors having any knowledge of my whereabouts. My health being fairly good I attended six lectures

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each of an hour's length every day, except clinic days, and studied hard nearly every night during the whole course, and so was pretty well worn out at the close of the term. Our class was composed of three hundred and sixty students. I left Cleveland for home on the first boat up from Buffalo, Gen. Cass and his grown-up son and myself being the only passengers on board. Gen. Cass was at that time either U.S. Senator, or Secretary of State under President Polk. The remaining ice in the lake delayed our passage some days. For the first forty-eight hours on board Gen. Cass remained sealed up in his official dignity and national importance and renown. But in time he began to unbend a little, and finally became very talkative to me. This gave me an opportunity to inquire of him, as we passed up the Detroit River, the point where Gen. Proctor crossed with his army to besiege Detroit in the War of 1812, with many other question about the surrender of Detroit by Hull to Proctor. At the time of the Surrender, Cass informed me that he was out on a foraging expedition, and consequently did not "break his sword over a cannon in the fort on account of the surrender," as he was erroneously reported to have done.

On my arrival home I began a tour of surveying for Francis Palms and Joseph Campau of Detroit, and finished the same about the middle of June. Being in Detroit in the latter part of April to see Mr. Palms and Campau, I called on Dr. Pitcher who presented me with a diploma as a physician and surgeon, which I now have, dated April, 1848. In the latter part of June and the early part of July

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I remained with a Dr. Sabin at Well's settlement, now Memphis, after which I was again engaged in land surveying. In the early part of October the Democratic party of St. Clair County nominated me as their Candidate for County Surveyor, an office which would be of great value of me in my business of land surveying and land exploring. My persecutors, taking advantage of this, had a fine opportunity to spend their forces and venom in slandering and vilifying me to gratify their envy by causing, if possible, my defeat....

.... A general organized clamor was kept up on election day at the polls at Newport against that ... "mean, low, good-for-nothing, lazy Dave Ward." I had never injured one of my relatives in any way. I had always lived a studious, industrious, moral life. For safety I kept out of Newport on election day and did not vote. Gen. Cass was run for president of the United States at that election on the ticket that my name was on; Dr. Parker and William L. Bancroft were running for members of the Michigan Legislature on the same ticket. All of these with the St. Clair County officials running on the same were largely defeated except myself, I being elected by a fine majority. This result was not so much on account of my ability, capacity, honesty of purpose, or good moral character as on account of the overdoing of my persecutors in displaying such a vile, low, vindictive, envious, venomous spirit against me, which seemed to incline the better class of voters of both parties to quietly vote for me. On learning the result of the election it was said that

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there never was a "madder" hornet's nest for a while than were my persecutors in Newport. I did not venture into Newport for the following three weeks, although I had agreed to commence a four months' school there the first week in December, the School Director, James D. Brown, being a warm friend of mine. I noticed for months afterwards that some of the better class of the "tools" and "lackeys" in Newport seemed ashamed to meet me. However, I quietly commenced my school as agreed, in the early part of December.

At first the number of my scholars was large, but soon it became evident that old Aunt Emily who then resided at Newport had organized her forces, backed by E. B.'s influence, to break up my school. In short, she used all her numerous arts of slander and low cunning, united with the power of E. B.'s great patronage and influence, as he and Uncle Sam built all of their steamers, in addition to running a large saw-mill at Newport. The result was that Aunt Emily and her cohorts had the gratification of nearly breaking up my school by their slanders, and by frightening, and in some instances commanding, the parents of my pupils to take their children out of my school. Soon many of the scholars, especially the grown-up ones, reluctantly left, leaving me with but few. However, my fast friend, James D. Brown, the director, told me to go on and keep my term of if only one scholar remained, and he sent two. But I could have no comfort, and the district no benefit from my teaching the term out with so few pupils so finally after a good deal of persuasion I induced the director, Mr. Brown,

to let me off at the end of three months. Having usually taught full schools, time passed slowly and heavily with so few in the school. My health had gradually improved so that it was usually fairly good. My old bronchial affliction had by degrees given way. But to the credit of Uncle Zael, let it be said, he did not take out of my school his son David, then about fifteen years of age, whom I took through arithmetic for the first time, nor did Uncle Rust take out his two sons, John and Ezra, who were respectively thirteen and fifteen years of age. They also went through arithmetic for the first time. Thus ended the last school I taught, the last of February, 1849, I being at that time, twenty-seven years of age.

Henceforward calls on me for surveying and pine land exploring became numerous and urgent. By the fifth of March, (the snow being then one and a half to two feet deep in the forest), I shouldered my compass, went on and finished mostly through the snow and slush, a two months' job of surveying in the town of Ira and western part of Cottrellville for my patron and friend Francis Palms of Detroit. My feet and legs went wet with melted snow water most of the time as the country was low and swampy. For my land surveying services my usual pay was three dollars per day and board.

After doing other jobs until about the middle of June, the mosquitoes and severe hot weather then coming on, I located for the hot season at "Beebe's Corners," now Ridgeway, employing myself a part of the time in reading and looking after my sick neighbors, and a part of the time in short local

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jobs of surveying. By the seventh of September I was again on my surveying and land exploring tours which I followed up during the fall and winter. As one of my jobs in the winter, I did for the Rust boys some land surveying and pine land looking on Pine River in St. Clair County, Michigan, they accompanying me. The Rusts then for the first time seemed to appreciate my efficiency and skill in my work and ever after entertained a high opinion of it. About the middle of March, 1850, I changed my residence to St. Clair, that being the center of my official business.

During the spring, summer and fall up to November of 1850, I was pushed with my surveying and land exploring business, giving myself no interval of rest during the hot weather. A part of my land exploring was for Charles Merrill of Detroit, and the Rust boys, Alony Rust always accompanying me whenever I explored for them. For a part of this service I received one-fourth of the land I selected, as in the contract that my father made thirteen years before with Peter Smith at Schenectady, on our way to Michigan, with the difference that I had a specific written and signed contract with the parties I engaged to serve, stating fully the compensation I was to have for my services in exploring, selecting and purchasing pine lands.

I was the pioneer in establishing the custom of receiving one-fourth of the land for exploring and selecting in Michigan, which custom eventually extended to the Pacific coast, and to the southern pine states. I continued in this employment for some years afterward, and not one of my patrons

Michigan Agricultural College.
EXPERIMENT STATION.
CHEMICAL DEPARTMENT.
R. C. KEDZIE, M. D., Professor.
F. S. KEDZIE, M. S., Adjunct Professor.
L. H. VAN WORMER, Assistant.
AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, MICH., Aug 16" 1900

M.G Ward

Dear Sir
Your favor & copy of containing a sketch of the life & work of your father, we received, for which accept thanks.

Perhaps your personal recollections of your father may be of interest.

In the fall of 1849 I went to Ann Arbor to take my second course in Medicine. The Med. Dept. was just opened & I was a member of the class (7) who first graduated there. Our amoving at Ann Arbor I was informed that a student had already engaged room & board for me at Mr. Nests in south park of the village "because he wanted to live with the best student in the College as it would help him in his studies to have such an associate," flattered by such an estimate from a I accepted the position & thus cause into very intimate relations with David Mand, for we the same table & shared the same room & board for many months.

Michigan Agricultural College.
EXPERIMENT STATION.2
CHEMICAL DEPARTMENT.
R. C. KEDZIE, M. D., Professor.
F. S. KEDZIE, M. S., Adjunct Professor.
L. H. VAN WORMER, Assistant.
AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, MICH.,    1900

He was an earnest faithful student & were mutual helps, & the friendship thus before never failed. Most struck we were his determination to succeed, whether as a student or wave of business, at Active David Mand was poor & felt keenly the "the Detroit Mands" looked upon lives for his week of money; best I'll show 'em! I'll show em!! I'll be as rich as any of 'em before I die! Prophecy literally fulfilled.

Our lives have been in diverse fields, but where we met a clasp of the hand showed that the feelings of the all student days had not withered.

I am glad of this reminder of my old friend by the hands of his son.

Yours very truly

R. C. Kedzie

M. G. Ward

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proved a Gerrit Smith philanthropist, but all were pleased with the work I did for them which resulted in their becoming wealthy.

Among my patrons in the pine land exploring business beside the names before mentioned, were U. Tracy Howe, J. W. Brooks (Treasurer and President of the Michigan Central Railroad Company), Francis Palms, Newell Avery, R. C. Remick, Col. Eddy, Alfred A. Dwight, Wm. A. Howard, Deacon Smith of Detroit, Deacon Barnard of Algonac, N. W. Brooks, David Preston, Dr. Kibby, Dudley & Wheeler, Arnold Henry and others. During the years 1850, '51, '52 '53 and '54, much more money was offered me to invest in pine land purchases than I was able to use.

About the first of November, 1850, one month after the commencement, I adjourned my pine land looking to take my last course of medical lectures in the medical department of Michigan University. It required a review of one month's lectures already given, as the session commenced about the first of October, in addition to attending the passing daily lectures and other duties, which nearly doubled my mental work. Taking a room by myself, after rooming a short time with the present Prof. Kedzie of the Agricultural College of Michigan, I put my mind squarely at the work during the day, and until half past nine in the evening, including Sundays, until the end of the term, except for some ten days at the Christmas vacation. Commencement day being on the sixteenth day of April, 1851, I then received a diploma which I now have, from the hands of Dr. Pitcher, at this time President

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Pitcher of the Medical Department of the University, who had treated me so long for chronic bronchitis, and who three years before had given me my first diploma from the State Medical Society. I received my University diploma with a glad heart, and bidding adieu to my classmates and Ann Arbor I soon arrived at the home of my wife's father, George Perkins, who became my father-in-law during the Christmas vacation, some four months prior to my graduation. I married your mother because I liked her and she, being industriously and economically brought up and unpracticed in the arts of fashionable folly and frivolity, has proved a true helpmate to me and a devoted mother to our children. My mental application at Ann Arbor, notwithstanding my sharp walks of from three to eight miles nearly every evening after lectures, was trying so that I became pale and somewhat emaciated, finally losing almost all appetite. But being relieved by escaping from the rut of mental drudgery, I gained so rapidly that in a few days I was off again on a pine-land exploring expedition which I followed the greater part of that summer and fall.

I first made a trip of some two or three weeks on Mill Creek, surveying and land-looking for Buckminster Wight of Detroit, then to Saginaw, accompanied by Bartlett Perkins, both of us travelling on foot and carrying our packs of provisions from Saginaw up the Tittabawassee River to the Forks, now Midland, and then following the Pine River Branch of the Tittabawassee to a little above where the flourishing village of Alma now stands. After

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spending a few days looking up the pine timber in that locality, and the locality of the village of St. Louis we returned home, partly by going down the river in a canoe, and partly by an Indian pony trail, travelling altogether one hundred and forty miles. At the time the settlement extended only some twelve miles above Saginaw City, Midland then being a forest, except that there was German missionary residing at what was called the "New Fields," located about two miles below the present site of St. Louis. The Indians were friendly; they hunted and had their rough villages in all the Saginaw region. The number of inhabitants claimed for Saginaw City in the spring of 1851 was two hundred and fifty, while East Saginaw only a heavy unbroken forest.

Accompanied by my father-in-law (George Perkins) I returned in July to Saginaw, passing up in a kind of board skiff the main Tittabawassee River to the mouth of the Tobacco River branch, and then followed an Indian poly trail up said branch some twelve miles, and thereabouts selected some fine lots of cork and bull sap pine, a part of which I lumbered off ten or twelve years afterward. My father-in-law on account of the fatigue and exposure in the hot, wet, July weather was taken with cholera morbus, consequently we left the job unfinished and returned home. Afterward I did some surveying for Palms and did not return to the Saginaw region to explore for pine timber again until the following October. . . . A man by the name of Coffin, a hardy Main lumberman accompanied me up the main branch of the Tittabawassee some eighty

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miles from Saginaw City to Township number 19 North of Range 1 West. In this region there was then a vast forest of sap pine, and a very few forties of cork pine which I selected, and a little of the best bull sap, as my patrons would only purchase cork and good bull sap pine. Let me say here that ninety-nine hundredths of the pine timber originally in MIchigan was sap and Norway pine, but mostly sap, and the cork pine was generally in scattered patches, not large in extent, and usually located toward the headwaters of the various pine timber streams. If I had been permitted at that stage of the pine land exploring business to have also selected sap pine, I could have easily chosen hundreds of thousands of acres, usually in large bodies, which were afterwards located by other parties not so particular, and which were eventually worth more money per acre than the cork pine I did select on account of the comparatively large amount of sap pine on a lot. Consequently I did much tedious travelling and exploring about the headwaters of the various long pine timber rivers on both peninsulas and in Wisconsin, resulting in the selection and location of a comparatively small acreage of pine land from what I would have done if I had been permitted by my patrons before the pine lands were "gobbled up." Again, sap pine was usually found in large bodies from the mouths of the rivers up, occupying largely the middle regions of the streams, easy of access, and cheaply explored, with much less labor. I had to travel up through the most of these large sap pine tracts in going up and down the various rivers without selecting any of them. Yet all the

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lands I explored and that I and others bought in these usually small cork pine tracts amounted to some one hundred and twenty thousands acres, in the aggregate, in Michigan and Wisconsin. No other person ever explored and selected over a twentieth part of this amount of cork pine land in these States but many explored and selected many acres of sap and yellow pine. In subsequent years, when I explored for myself only, I selected and purchased some sap pine lands and a few lots of yellow or Norway pine. The trouble was I had little or no money myself to by land with, and had to depend on a commission allowing me but a small part of the cork pine lands which I explored. During the few years of the "pine land craze" th railroad, the "Soo" Canal and other land grants, and actual purchases going on, a large part of the desirable pine tracts were rapidly bought up, or covered by the land grants.

In December, 1851, John Mellen accompanied me on a trip up Pine River, the southwestern branch of the Tittabawassee, the one that Bartlett Perkins and I travelled up in the spring of the year. We had to "foot it," and carry our provisions the whole distance of some ninty miles. We struck a good cork pinery about six miles above the present village of Alma and "looked out" and selected the lower part of it, but the weather becoming very cold, the snow being deep, and rheumatism attacking one of my knees, we judged it advisable to take our back track to the settlement, as soon as my lame limb would permit. While doing so my painful knee delayed us much on our long, slow tramp to Saginaw. During

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the remainder of the winter, after my knee recovered, I surveyed again for Mr. Palms as there was but little snow in the region North of Lake St. Clair.

In the early part of April, 1852, we moved from my father-in-law's by sleigh to Port Huron, Henry being then some six monts old. We occupied a small, one-story frame house with only three rooms which I had purchased with a small lot it stood on, for two hundred and seventy-five dollars. A few days after our arrival in Port Huron, I left home with John Bailey and Frenchman, to assist in packing, to explore pine lands on the headwaters of Cass River. The streams were high and the swamps were full of water from heavy spring rains and melted snow. However, we succeeded in finding and selecting some twelve lots of very fine cork pine after an absence of seventeen days. In the early part of May following John Bailey and I left for the headwaters of Pine River in Saginaw. We commenced to explore where Mellen and I left off in the previous January on account of the cold weather, deep snow and my rheumatism. In a few days we found and selected twenty-five eighty-acre lots of a very fine quality of cork pine. My first lumbering was done in 1857, '58 and '59 on a part of this tract. We then returned rapidly down Pine River in a canoe to the forks of the Chipaway, and after poling the canoe up the Chipaway some twenty miles we then "footed it" through the forest for fifty or sixty miles up that river to about thirty miles above what is now called Mt. Pleasant. We found and selected twenty-six lots more on that stream of nine cork pine,

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and then returned home as rapidly as possible, having travelled by canoe two hundred and fifty miles in looking out the pine and in going up and down the Pine, Chipaway and Tittabawassee river, and were absent from Port Hudson only nineteen days. My commission-share of these fifty-one lots selected on this trip was one fifth,or a fraction over ten lots. I bore all the expense of looking up and buying the lands, th purchase money only being furnished by the patrons.

In July I made another trip, my brother Nathan accompanying me. On this tip I followed to its source the Big Salt River, a lower western branch of the Tittabawassee, and continued west until we came to the main Chipaway, and then followed the same down on its north side to the present site of Mt. Pleasant, selecting on the way ten lots of fine cork pine, three to four being the present site of Mt. Pleasant. These lands I bought with my own money, and eventually lumbered them twenty-eight or thirty years ago.

In August following I started from Ionia north through the woods to Pine River with Amasa Rust, through the pineries I had previously looked up. We found only a few scattering forties. One evening on our return, the moon shining bright, we travelled until one o'clock in the morning making eleven or twelve miles through the dense forest after dark. We struck a new settler's clearing of five acres, the farthest clearing back in the forest. From there we went on and looked over some five thousand acres for Charles Merrill, being paid wages by the day for the work. The three Rust boys

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went with me more or less in looking pine lands for them. Alony died about twenty-two years ago David eleven or twelve years, and Amasa a few days ago. At the time they accompanied me the three were stout, healthy men. They all lived to be men of large property.

Afterwards I went with James H. Bacon to Mackinaw Island, and sailed in a fishing boat across to the mouth of Pine River on the Upper Peninsula. We spent seven days in following up the river through a continuous windfall, the forest being all turned up by the roots. We crawled over and under hedges of fallen trees, not making over three miles each day, in order to reach or cork pinery said to be near the headwaters of Pine River. Finally becoming discouraged we retraced our steps to Mackinaw, and from Mackinaw Island we sailed over the Cheboygan, them by a sail-skiff up Mullet and Burt Lakes and Maple River, but did not find enough cork pine, as I judged, to be worth looking out. Consequently, we returned home without selecting any land, and our expenses and labor were all lost.

Hoping to repair the losses of this trip I went with Bacon in the latter part of November and followed up the main southern branch of the Tobacco River which is a western branch of the Tittabawassee. This trip was prolonged into the middle of December, notwithstanding the snow-water and slush we had to wade through two thirds of the time, as the country was largely composed of swamps and swales interspersed with low pine ridges. We succeeded in selecting a fair number of lots of very good bull sap and cork pine. Whole passing down the Tittabawassee

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in our canoe on our return and when some five miles above where Midland now is, I was shot at by an Indian secreted behind a tree on the river bank. The ball struck the water close to where I sat. This was the only attack I ever received from the Indians, and thus ended my pine exploring efforts for the year 1852.

In January, 1853, I bargained with Charles Merrill to go over to White River which runs into Lake Michigan north of Muskegon, with William Sanburn, a nephew of Merrill's, a young man nineteen years of age, to relook with Sanburn a large tract of pine land before selected by him, and reported to his Uncle Merrill for purchase as all first-class cork-pine land. I had instructions from Merrill to reject all of the forties that had on them less than one hundred and fifty thousand feet of good cork pine; my bargain with Merrill also being that whatever further pine land I might find on the trip Merrill was to buy and give me one quarter of said land. On my examining this tract I threw out one half of the land Sanburn had looked up, but found and selected ten or twelve more good lots of which I received my quarter interest.

On this trip we took a man along to help "pack." The snow soon became deep and the weather very cold which so delayed us that our job was not completed before our provisions gave out. Yet I stuck to it, determined to complete the job. For the last three or four days we had only one small cracker for a meal for each of us with some broiled smoked ham rind in addition to hot tea mornings and evenings. Some would have laughed to have heard us brag

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about "how well we lived," "that kings might envy us" etc., to keep up our spirits by mirth, as travelling through the deep snow kept us very tired. We completed all, however, and finally reached a tavern on the Muskegon River after dark in the early part of February, tired and nearly famished. We devoured a pile of victuals that evenings as the cooking seemed so good.

I was satisfied that more cork pine could be found on White River, so about the twentieth of March following I returned there accompanied by a strange young man whom I picked up to go with me, his home being near the Muskegon River. This man proved of little value to me as he would remain at camp day times smoking his old pipe while I travelled each day alone through the deep snow looking up the pine and tracing the lines. On reaching camp at night exhausted and sometimes near to fainting, I yet had to assist in getting up our night's wood or lie cold, and usually did what cooking there was to be done. But with patience I finally finished about the twentieth of April and then we left the woods, I "footing it" to Grand Rapids, there being then in that town only one brick building. From Grand Rapids I had a long, muddy stage ride to Port Huron. I found and selected fifteen or twenty lots of splendid cork pine which I bought with my own money as I was engaged to no one on this trip.

In the early part of May, 1853, with my brother-in-law Bacon, I travelled up to Houghton Lake by a "pony trail" leading from the mouth of the Tobacco River. On passing up this trail I found a nice cork

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pinery of some nine lots on the middle branch of the Tobacco in Town 18 north, Range 2 west, which I looked out, and then passed on the Houghton Lake where Judge Burt, an old United States Land Surveyor and the inventor of the solar compass, had informed me that there was a fine pinery on the south side of that lake; but it proved to be only a nice yellow or Norway pinery of no account then to me. On my return I had a severe attack of the ague, and the rheumatism returned again in my knee, but by the application of spirits of turpentine which I carried with me, and by a swinging motion of my foot and "sick" leg, I travelled slowly along and in time arrived at the mouth of the Tobacco River, and there we reached the canoe we had left on our way up and quite easily poled and paddled down the stream fifty miles to Saginaw City. Eventually I purchased with my own money the nine lots I found on the middle branch of the Tobacco River which I lumbered during the winters of 1876 and 1877, and received for the logs from Folsom and Arnold thirteen dollars per thousand feet scaled at Bay City. After I arrived home I repeated my surveying for Mr. Palms.

In the latter part of August in the year 1853, Alony and Amasa Rust and myself went by way of Chicago, which they then claimed had fifteen to twenty thousand people, to the mouth of the Menominee River, which is the boundary line between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for the purpose of exploring that large long river for pine land. But on arriving at Menominee, the principal owner of a saw-mill there, on learning our

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mission, showed us some twenty-five thousand acres of Military Bounty Land Warrants which he said he would use in buying the best tracts of the pine land, and which they had caused already to be selected, if we or any other party should go up the river to explore for pine lands. This information caused us to return home and we were out our time and expenses for the trip. After years proved that we ought not to have turned back, as from one hundred to two hundred thousands acres of good pine land was eventually found and located on that river and its branches. Before starting on this trip I had engaged James and John Bailey to go during my absence and look for cork pine on the headwaters of the Boardman Rive. They selected east and north of where Kalkaska now stands from the three to four thousands acres of fair to good cork pine, which Charles Merrill entered in his own name in my absence, and then sent the Baileys back to look for him alone, ignoring my right of discovery. On Merrill's paying me two dollars and a half per acre for my quarter share three or four thousand acres entered by Merrill, I said nothing more about the matter although the Baileys selected a nice lot of pine land on their second trip, one-quarter of which rightly belonged to me, according to my bargain with Merrill, on my paying the expenses and wages for the Baileys' second trip. This pinery at the headwaters of the Boardman was Boardman was afterwards sold and lumbered twenty years ago by Dexter & Noble of Elk Rapids, they drawing the logs on sleighs an average distance of fourteen miles and sliding them into the floatable water of Rapid River.

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In the fall after returning from Menominee I learned from an old Indian chief that there was an Indian trail starting at the mouth of the Upper Peninsula Pine River, which by taking a circuitous route avoided entirely the long extended windfall I had encountered on my trip before, and in consequence I decided to take the old Indian chieftain along with me to follow the trail to the reported cork pinery located towards the headwaters of Pine River. On reaching the pinery we selected only ten lots of cork pine, all there was of it, there being a large tract of sap and yellow pine farther up which I did not select as it was at that time of no value to me. Charles Merrill entered my selected land and paid me one dollar and a quarter an acre for the one-fifth share of the ten lots. This tract was eventually sold for fifty-five thousand dollars to Arthur Hill of Saginaw, and lumbered by him, he paying more than it was worth.

Let me here mention that the nineteen pine lots bought by my father for Peter Smith, were some twelve years after traded off by Gerrit Smith for a farm in New York State to a man by the name of Pack. On my way up to explore for pine for the Rusts on Elk Creek in June 1849, this Pack with his wife and three small boys (George W., Albert and Green) were then living in a log house in a small new clearing made by Pack and his elder son, G. W., located a little below the forks of Black River and Elk Creek, a mile or two from the nineteen lots looked up and bought by my father for Peter Smith in 1836. In a few years the Packs lumbered the tract, the proceeds making the whole Pack family wealthy. Two

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of the sons, George W. and Green Pack have long been of the firm of Pack, Woods & Co., one of the wealthiest lumber firms in the United States.

During a considerable part of the winter of 1853 and '54, I was again land surveying and sub-dividing sections into forties for "Monsieur Pomp," (Palms) as the Frenchmen then called him, John Mellen assisting me, each of us running a compass with a separate crew. During this winter Mellen informed me that in company with another man some years before he had travelled from Cheboygan through the unbroken forest to Saginaw some one hundred and sixty to seventy miles following a part of the way the north and south Town line between Ranges 3 and 4 west. In so doing he said he passed from one to one and a half miles west of Otsego and Bradford lakes, and that on travelling on a ridge west of these lakes he had passed through several miles of good cork pine, and also through other good cork pine about two and a half miles southeast of where the village of Frederic now is. Mellen's opinion was that there could be found and selected a large area of cork pine in the vicinity of the above mentioned localities. After studying the subject with a map I concluded to go into that region which comprised the headwaters of the upper ma