We bought a team of pintail old age bronchos of Harvey Ransier with harness and wagon and were to pay for them in getting out one hundred houselogs and I don't know how many posts. We had no money -- the grubstake we had raised at Sidney was less than twenty dollars. We had worked six days at $1.75 per day each and paid out for our board so together we had about eighteen dollars to buy our axes, shovel, pick, and winter's provender as far as it would go.

As my father had determined to follow into the west we got out a set of houselogs for him and erected a house 1Sx28 with a board roof. After that I made me a new log house for my homestead claim 16x26 and a story and a half high. It was floored, roofed and finished with native lumber which I had myself taken from the hills and had reduced to lumber at the old Ben Cross sawmill.

In those days it did not seem to me that we worked very hard. We seemed to have plenty of time for visiting, exploring and re-creation, yet when we sum up the quantity of work that was accomplished in the time that we had to do it we must have worked like Trojans of old. We

must have been full of the "Fires of Youth," a vitality of which the young are possessed but wholly unconscious of its existence. The hardest labor of all were the trips to Sidney for lumber which took three days to the trip.