Here are more stories from John Muir’s The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. Muir moved here to Wisconsin when he was 11 with his family from Scotland. This part describes his family’s move from Fountain Lake to new land his father moved them to that needed to be worked from the ground up. At Fountain Lake, there was a wealth of water, and they had built a framed house, out buildings and created tillable fields, so it was hard hard work all over again.
We’ll hear his description of digging a well 90 feet deep in the higher drier land, that they called Hickory Hill, with a heavy hammer and chisels and almost died from gasses that accumulated at the bottom of the well. He plowed the prairie with 3 or 4 yoke of oxen, and he mastered the tricky setup of the huge prairie busting plow so that he could sit on the crossbar and ride with no trouble. All of his writings are available at sierraclub.org. I hope you will take the time to read more of Muir’s stories.
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