No one who has seen the Indians play a good game of Ta-kap-si-ka-pi has ever forgotten it. Major Eastman of the old army, who was quite an artist, attempted to depict the scene on canvas, and while he made an excellent picture which would please the eye of anyone who had not seen the real thing, he found it impossible to convey an adequate idea of its best points. The picture, I think, is now either in the rooms of the Wisconsin Historical Society, or in the Cochran gallery of Washington.
One of the noticeable results of a game of this kind, played on a virgin prairie, was the great number of huge snakes the players would kill. I have seen as many as would load a wagon piled up after a game, some of them ten or twelve feet long. They were called in those days bull snakes, and were considered of the constrictor species, but not venomous.
MAKING A POSTOFFICE.
I had settled on the frontier, where Traverse des Sioux and Mankato were the extreme border towns in southwestern Minnesota. About the year 1854 or 1855 a German settlement was commenced at New Ulm. It originated in Cincinnati, with an association which sent out parties to find a site for a town, and they selected the present site of New Ulm. The lands had not been surveyed by the general government, but our delegate in congress, Henry M. Rice, had anticipated that by obtaining the passage of the law allowing settlement and preëmption on unsurveyed lands. Under the law a town site could only embrace 320 acres, but the projectors of New Ulm laid out an immense tract, comprising thousands of acres. Many of the settlers had not taken any steps toward becoming American citizens, which was a necessary preliminary to preëmption, and everything among them was held in a kind of common interest, the Cincinnati society furnishing the funds.
It was not long before they discovered that they needed legal advice in their venture, and called on me to regulate their matters for them. I was deputy clerk of the court, and always carried the seal and naturalization papers with me, so that I could take the declaration of intention of anyone who desired to become an American citizen anywhere I happened to find him, on the prairie or elsewhere. In this way I qualified many of the Germans for preëmption, and took them by the steamboat load down to Winona to enter their lands. I would be furnished with a large bag of gold to pay for the lands, and sometimes, with the special conveniences furnished by the land office, I would work off forty or fifty preëmptions in a day. I became such a necessary factor in the building of the town that, if any difficulty occurred, even in the running of a mill which they erected and ran by the accumulated water of many large springs, I was immediately sent for to remedy the evil.
The nearest postoffice was at Fort Ridgely, about sixteen miles away, and it soon became apparent that one ought to be established in the town. I was, of course, sent for to see if it could be accomplished. It was a very easy thing to do with the very efficient and influential delegate we had in congress, Hon. Henry M. Rice. Having agreed upon a Mr. Anton Kouse as postmaster, I at once wrote to Mr. Rice to give the new settlement a postoffice. It was not long before I received an answer, which contained the postmaster's commission, his bond for execution, a key for the mail bags, and all the requisites for a going postoffice.
The New Ulm people were a very social lot, and my visits to the town always included a good deal of fun, so I concluded to make a special event of the establishment of the new postoffice, and, as the weather was fine, I invited half a dozen friends to accompany me in a drive to New Ulm, to participate in the opening ceremonies.
One of the earliest settlers in the town was Francis Baasen, who became Minnesota's first secretary of state, and was a gallant officer in the First Minnesota Regiment, so celebrated in the War of the Rebellion, and has recently been appointed by Governor Lind as assistant adjutant general of the state. He had a claim about two miles below the town, just where the ferry crossed the Minnesota river, at Red Stone, and had erected a log shanty there, in which he lived. Of course, we always called on Baasen on our way up, and also on our way back, when we visited New Ulm. Baasen was a charming gentleman, and while his shack was destitute of any of the luxuries or elegancies of life, there was a door, or hatchway, in the middle of the floor, which led to a kind of cellar, the contents of which supplied all the deficiencies of the house, and, flavored with the generous hospitality of the proprietor, made everybody happy.