about fourteen feet square.  The family had crowded into one bed, part of the surveyors occupied the other, and the rest were on the floor.  We had not eaten a bite since morning.  The cooking stove was in a little, cold, floorless shed, and there mother baked some corn griddle-cakes for our supper.  The surveyors gave their bed to mother and me, and the men all crowded down on the floor—­nineteen in one room.  The next morning we drove on to our own house before getting breakfast, glad to find it had not been burned.

On Sunday, May 10, 1857, a meeting was held at our house, at which it was agreed that a Sunday-school should be organized the next Sunday, in Mr. Cobb’s grove, near Pardee.  There we met nearly every Sunday that summer, and father usually preached.

Much of his time that summer was spent in improving forty acres of his farm, on which he raised some sod corn and vegetables, Our corn for bread was ground in Mr. Wigglesworth’s treadmill, turned by-oxen.  We had no fruit for many years, but a few wild sorts, and the vegetables were a welcome variation in our diet of meat and molasses.

August, 29, 1857, the Pardee church was organized, at the house of Bro.  A. Elliott, with twenty-seven members.  In October a frame school-house was finished at Pardee, which was thereafter used for church purposes.  During father’s absence the meetings were led by our elders, Dr. Moore, Bro.  Elliott, and Bro.  Brockman.  We often rode to meeting in the ox-wagon, as did some of our neighbors.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

REMINISCENCES—­CONTINUED.

Father again preached in Illinois from October, 1857, until New Year.  He preached in Pardee the rest of the winter; but in the spring he began traveling and preaching in various parts of the Territory.  It was the wettest summer I ever knew, and he was continually swimming streams.  Mother often told him that a man who could not swim ought not to swim a horse.  But he continued to do so until the streams were bridged, many years later.  The last time he did so was in the spring of 1871.  He was riding a little Indian pony, and carried some bundles.  The Stranger Creek was full, and very cold, and when his heavy overcoat became water-soaked, he saw that the pony was about to be swept down the current.  Sliding off from its back, he kept his arm about its neck, thinking the water would hold part of his weight.  But he soon saw that he was pulling it down stream, so that it was likely to be tangled in some willows, and he reached back and caught hold of its tail, and it pulled him safely to shore.  He reached home very wet, but with bundles and overcoat all safe.

He then determined to have a bridge on the road along his boundary line.  But every man, up and down the creek, wanted a bridge on his own line, and so there was much opposition.  But he at length succeeded in obtaining a bridge.  This was the only one of father’s many contests in which he contended for a personal benefit:  his other contests were all for the good of the public.