278 MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTIONS. 



of flour that I felt we had sent out more tonnage on one boat 

 than the cranberry crop would have furnished in a month. I 

 remember how proud I was to ride up on the last dray bringing 

 up the procession. 



I remember the first corn that was shipped. People did not 

 generally believe that corn would grow in Minnesota, but Gen. 

 Sibley had a corn-field on the bottomland above Mendota and 

 raised some 250 or 260 gunny-bags of corn. It was regarded 

 as of sufficient importance to justify taking the St. Louis steam- 

 boat up to Mendota, to load this corn for St. Louis. I thought 

 the General was rather a plucky man in sending out the corn 

 and paying the rate of freight demanded ; I think the rate was 

 35 cents a hundred to St. Louis. Although the shipment to- 

 day would not be called a large one, the boat could then rea- 

 sonably well afford to go on from St. Paul to Mendota in order 

 to get 250 or 2GO gunny-bags of corn. 



I remember the first threshing machine and the first agri- 

 cultural implements we had here, the Manny reaper. There 

 were about as many of them sold to Winnipeg people as we 

 used in our own state. At that time Winnipeg was known as 

 Ft. Garry. "Settlers came down and they particularly wanted 

 a machine that would cut hay, and used to buy these Manny 

 harvesters or reapers. The first threshing machine that came 

 here, I believe, was run by John Cormack. Now some of you 

 may not know who John Cormack was, but a great many will 

 remember him as a river raft pilot. The Pitts Company of Buf- 

 falo came up here to establish an agency, and the house for 

 whom I was working at the time made a contract with them 

 to try to sell three threshing machines, separators, and they 

 asked me .if I could go out and set one up. I told them I 

 thought I could, if I could first go and see John Cormack's run- 

 ning. I took an old horse that we used to drive in a dray, went 

 up back of Ft. Snelling, and found Cormack threshing, on what 

 we used to call Eden Prairie. After looking over the machine 

 and noting it carefully, I felt quite competent to set one up in 

 running order, and within a few days a customer came along 

 and I sold him a machine. I had to go a short distance this 

 side of Shakopee to a place called Burnsville, there was no 

 village there then. I was young and felt a good deal of confi- 

 dence in my ability to run a threshing machine; but at the 



