Tuesday, September 6.
Mr. Curry’s folks have started to Helena. Mr. Bower’s to the Madison Valley, and Mr. Kennedy with them, to drive his team, leaving Mrs. Kennedy with us until to-morrow, when they will take the coach for Helena.
We moved into our cabin this morning. It does not seem as much like home as the wagons did, and I believe we are all homesick if we would acknowledge it.
The boys found a checkerboard nailed on the window where a pane of glass was broken out. We pasted paper over the place. They made checkermen out of pasteboard, and Sim and Winthrop are having a game. Hillhouse is reading the Montana Post. Mother is making bread, and initiating Mrs. Kennedy into the mysteries of yeast and bread-making.
As Hillhouse was on his way to the butcher shop, he passed an auction sale of household goods. The auctioneer was crying a beautiful porcelain lamp. He stopped to make the first bid. “One dollar” he called. There were no other bids and he got the lamp—his first purchase in Virginia City. (He has it yet.)
When he brought it home, with the meat he went to get, mother said: “What is the use of the lamp without the chimney?”
So he went to purchase a chimney after dinner and coal oil to burn in the lamp. He had to pay two dollars and fifty cents for a chimney, and five dollars for a gallon of coal oil, so our light is rather expensive after all. And thus ends our first day in Virginia City, and brings “Crossing the Plains and Mountains in 1865” to an end.
By S. R. H.
Transcriber’s Notes
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