We came up through Medford. I begged to stay there, but Mr. Mott insisted on going to Faribault as they had planned. Our first house was a little cabin on the site of the present cathedral and later we lived in a house where the hay market now stands, but this was lost on a mortgage during the hard times in 1857.
Mrs. Kate Davis Batchelder—1858.
As Kate Davis, a girl of ten, I came with my brother, a lad of eighteen and a sister fourteen, from New York to Wisconsin. Our father was in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where his business as a millwright had called him, and it was thought best to have us go out to be with him. We came in a wagon drawn by a team of spirited horses. We came over the thousand miles between New York and Wisconsin, fording unfamiliar rivers, stopping in strange cities, through prairie and forest, with only rough wild roads at best, never doubting our ability to find our father at our journey's end and perhaps because of that unquestioning faith, we did find him. What a journey to remember. We camped in Chicago when it was no larger than Faribault is now, on the spot near the Lake front where the Congress Hotel now houses the most exclusive of Chicago's mob of humanity. Milwaukee as we passed through it was a tiny hamlet.
When I went to visit my brother who had taken the farm on the east shore of Cannon Lake, I made the trip to Hastings in a boat, and from there in a wagon. As we were driving along, I saw coming towards us, three figures which instinct told me were Indians. On coming nearer, I saw each of them had scalps dripping with blood, hanging to his belt. They reassured me by telling me they were only Indian scalps.
Mr. Berry, afterward a Judge on the Supreme Bench, started out on foot from Janesville, Wisconsin with Mr. Batchelder and after prospecting around and visiting St. Paul, Shakopee, Mankato, Cannon Falls and Zumbrota, they finally walked in here. Fifty years afterwards Mr. Batchelder went out to Cannon Lake and walked into town over the same road that he had come over as a young man, and he said that while, of course, the buildings had changed things somewhat, on the whole it looked surprisingly as it had the first time he passed over it. Mr. Berry and Mr. Batchelder opened a law office in a little one story frame building in the back of which they slept. While coming into town, they had met O. F. Perkins, who had opened a law office, and business not being very brisk, he had turned a rather unskillful hand to raising potatoes. At $2.50 a bushel he managed to do well enough and eked out his scanty income from the law. It was while he was carrying the potatoes to plant that he met Mr. Berry and Mr. Batchelder and having become friends, they all, together with Mr. Randall and Mr. Perkins' brother, started bachelor's hall back of Mr. Perkins' office, where they took turns cooking and washing dishes. I have heard Mr. Batchelder say that "hasty pudding" or what we call corn meal mush, was his specialty and I believe, partly in recollection of those old days when lack of materials as well as unskillful cooks compelled the frequent appearance of this questionable dainty, partly perhaps, because he had learned to like it, "hasty pudding" was served Monday on his table for all the later years of his life.
During one winter I attended several dances in a rude hall whose walls were lined with benches of rough boards with the result that my black satin dress was so full of slivers that it took all my time to pick the slivers out.
We always wore hoops and mine were of black whalebone, covered with white cloth. One day, when at my brother's house, my hoop skirt had been washed and was hanging to dry behind the stove and I was in the little bedroom in the loft. My sister called to me that some young men were coming to call and I was forced to come down the ladder from the loft, to my great mortification without my hoops. There they hung in plain sight all during that call.
At Cannon Lake, near my brother's cabin was a place where the Indians had their war dances. One night after we had gone to bed in the little loft over the one down stairs room, I was awakened by my brother's voice in altercation with some Indians. It seemed the latch-string, the primitive lock of the log cabin had been left out and these Indians came in. They wanted my brother to hide them as they had quarreled with the other Indians. This he refused to do and drove them out. The next morning the tribe came by dragging the bodies of those two Indians. They had been caught just after leaving the house. The bodies were tied over poles with the heads, arms and legs trailing in the dust.
Mrs. John C. Turner.
The Nutting Hotel was the scene of many a dance when settlers came from miles around to take part in quadrilles and reels to the music of violin. We used to bring an extra gown so that after midnight we might change to a fresh one, for these dances lasted till daylight.