and small game, along with terries, nuts and wild fruit provided food while spring planted crops were maturing. Water from spring-fed creeks and rivers was pure and dependable,

Our great-grandfather, Nathaniel Cornell, walked to the Duhuque land office in 1853. He purchased land in western Bloomfield Township for $1.25 an acre. His farm included three military land grants awarded to soldiers in the war of 1812 and the Florida Seminole Indian action. William Joshua Barney was named as grantee on these documents. He apparently acted as broker for these soldiers, as his name is recorded on many of the earliest land transactions in N. E. Iowa. John Porter and Abriel Brooks purchased their farms directly from the federal government at this same low figure . However by 1854, the government land had all been taken up in the area. Mr. Nicholson writes that his father paid $4.50 an acre in 1855> buying from an early settler. Another of our great-grandfathers bought his farm from Francis Teabout, the founder of Frankville, in 1857. He paid $7-50 for Bloomfield Township acres, while a third, Elias Freeman, purchased improved land southeast of Ossian for 312.50 an acre in I856. Mrs. Frank Brannon reports her ancestor, Lars Nelson Tinderholt and his son, Soren, were able to buy farmland in southern Military for as little as $1 an acre in May of 1855; although the farm owned by Albert Tinderholt cost his grandfather, Even, $1.25 at an earlier date.

Selma Brannon tells of an early Indian scare. Pratt Nicholson's article reports chat many settlers, in panic, turned their stock loose to fend for themselves, placed their valuables in wagons, and fled to McGregor. The Tinderholts alerted their neighbors and prepared to withstand siege. Fortunately, the reports were false and no attack took place.

While Military Township's pioneers were spared from massacre by Indians, others were not so fortunate. Sampson Olson's parents were living in their prairie schooner, while building a cabin on their homestead in southern Minnesota, when they were attack by a war party of Sioux. The father was killed; the mother and her three children clubbed and left to die in their burning wagon.

Though seriously burned, Mrs. Olson managed to rescue eight month old Sampson. Traveling by night, and hiding during the daylight hours, she made her way to Fort Ridgely where she obtained assistance. After partial recovery, mother and baby found their way to the home of relatives in Ossian.

Life could be rough on the Iowa frontier. An epidemic of both cholera and diptheria almost wiped out the Norwegian settlement north of Ossian at Washington Prairie. Over fifty victims were interred in Pioneer Cemetery in a mass burial, large monument was erected over their grave some thirty years later.

Both the Nicholson and Cornell families recorded an unusually severe winter in 1856 & 1857. H. P. Nicholson writes: "Snow fell to a depth of four feet, followed by freezing rain which formed a crust encasing everything in its grasp. It became impossible to get horse or oxen off the beaten path. Firewood had to be carried by hand. Deer and elk were almost exterminated. These animals, with their large weight and small hooves, broke through the crust, floundered in the deep snow, and became easy prey for both hunters and predatory animals." The family of John Field, a mother-in-law of Nathan Cornell, nearly perished while traveling from Ossian to New Oregon, an early Howard County settlement. They found shelter in "Whiskey Grove", near the present site of Calmar, and waited out a blinding blizzard in their covered wagon. With the temperature plummeting to sub-zero readings, this family, including three small children, was fortunate to survive.

We find an account in the Monona Leader written by an early settler on log cabin : instruction. He wrote: "Only three implements were considered necessary to the frontiersman; these consisted of a rifle, an axe and an augur. Meat to eat, fur for clothing and tallow to make soap were secured with the rifle. The axe cleared his land and the augur played an important part in the building of his cabin; nails were blacksmith made only and expensive to all except the government workers.

The open spaces in the log cabin were 'chinked' and covered with a mortor of mixer clay and grass; the floor was either the earth packed hard with use, or 'puncheoned' with split logs; the roof was made of 'shakes' or split oak about an inch