The presidential election in the fall of 1848 aroused a good deal of interest, for Wisconsin had now become a state, and citizens could vote for national candidates.  I was in Jonathan Piper’s store one evening, with my father, when about a dozen men were present.  A political discussion sprang up and grew hot, and finally a division was called for.  Two or three voted for Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate; one for Lewis Cass, the Democrat; and the rest for Martin Van Buren, Free Soiler.  The State went with the lone voter, for Cass carried it by a small plurality.

Good health was the rule among the hardworking, plain-living pioneers, but plowing up the soil released the poison which nature seemed to have put there on guard, and every one at one time or another came down with the “shakes.”  However, the potent influence of sunshine, quinine, and cholagogue speedily won their way, and in a few years malaria had become a mere reminiscence.

In November, 1848, my parents moved to Beaver Dam, and thus our life in the Rock River country came to an end.  The splendid primeval forest has now gone, and even before we left much of it had been converted into log heaps and burned.  Every night scores of fires would gleam out where the finest hardwood logs, worth now a king’s ransom, were turned into smoke and ashes.  Even the mills which that grand pioneer, Andrew Hardgrave, had built in 1844, to the great rejoicing of all the people, are gone, and the river flows on over its smooth limestone floor, unvexed as of old.  But fine brick buildings have taken the place of the old log structures, and land brings at least twenty times as much per acre as then.  Who can argue against that?

THE BUCCANEERS

During the seventeenth century there were a great number of pirates who committed serious ravages upon the settlements in the West Indies and upon the mainland adjacent, and whose expeditions extended even to the coasts of Chili and Peru.  These men were called buccaneers; and the meaning of the word gives some intimation of the origin of the buccaneers themselves.

At an earlier day, many of the settlers in the island of Hispaniola, or Hayti, made their living by hunting cattle and preserving the meat by the boucan process.  These hunters used to form parties of five or six in number, and arming themselves with musket, bullet bag, powderhorn and knife, they took their way on foot through the tangled forests of the country.  When they killed one of the wild cattle, its flesh was cut into long strips and laid upon gratings, constructed of green sticks, where it was exposed to the smoke of a wood fire, which was fed by the fat and waste parts of the animals.  The grating upon which the meat was laid was called a boucan, and the hunters were called boucaniers.  Later these hunters were driven from Hayti by the Spaniards and took refuge in some of the neighboring islands, where they revenged themselves for some of the ill-treatment by preying upon the possessions of their oppressors wherever they could find them.