Meantime the writer had started for Illinois the preceding summer, had been prostrated for four weeks with a fever, and late in the autumn of 1856 had returned to Kansas, there to remain.  The times were becoming quiet, the peaceful counsels of such leaders as Stringfellow and Abell were beginning to take effect, and it evidently would be safe for the writer to go to work on his claim.  But he needed a supply of corn, and had to go over into the Missouri River bottoms to buy it.  A heavy snow had fallen.  I had a heavy, well-trained yoke of oxen, and my faithful riding horse was obedient in every place.  Myself and brother-in-law had made a heavy Yankee sled that would hold all the load that was put on it.  I borrowed from my neighbor, Caleb May, two additional yoke of oxen, but they only knew how to pull in a big freighting team, and were not leaders.  But putting my own heavy oxen behind, my wild steers in the middle, and my horse in the lead, I made out a good freighting team.  But I had to pass through Atchison.  The business men of the place had already made this overture to me.  They had said:  “You can come to Atchison during the day time and we will guarantee that you shall not be molested, but we would rather you should not be here in the night.  The South Carolinians are here, and there are other desperate characters here, and in the night we do not know what might happen.”  And so, on the strength of such an agreement, I had done business in Atchison, and to get my corn across the river had gone over one day and back the next.

I had yet one more load of corn to haul.  There had been a thaw, and then the snow had frozen again, making it in many places slippery traveling.  The river bank, from the top of the bank down to the ice of the river, was about twenty feet, and very steep; and this by much traveling had become a perfect glare of ice, so that teams could not hold their footing at all.  I had gone over for my last load one day, intending to return the next day, but I had found unexpected hindrances, and when I got to the east bank of the river opposite Atchison, it was sometime after dark.  I got down as best I could and crossed over on the ice to the Atchison side of the river, and I was now to get up that bank of glare ice. [6] I placed my sled load of corn at the bottom of the bank, and taking my team up in an unfrequented place, I stationed them on the top of the bank directly above my load of corn at the bottom.  Before coming over I had cut a long, slender pole in the timbered bottoms, and in view of this contingency had also brought extra chains from home, and by means of the chains and this long pole I hitched my team on the top of the hill to my load of corn at the bottom.  The thing worked well, and I had my load well on the top of the bank on the level ground; but here the road turned suddenly to the left close along the river bank, and my horse, too eager to get home, turned too soon, and this brought my sled with a sudden crash against a rock, and down