The Madison, a crazy old steamer that could lay on more sides during a
storm than any water craft that I had ever seen, landed us on a pier in
the night, and from the pier we were taken ashore in a scow. We reached
Racine in June, 1844. Racine at that time was a very small village, but,
like all western towns, it was in the daily belief that, at some time in
the near future, it would be a very large city. We spent the Sabbath and
enjoyed the pleasure of attending religious services in a school house.
The pastor of our church at the time was Rev. Milton Bourne, of the Rock
River Conference. We were favorably impressed with Racine, and
especially with the evidences of civilization it afforded, in the fact
of a school house and the establishment of religious services.

At Racine we engaged a man to take us, six in all, with our trunks to
Delavan. The roads were almost impassable. The rains had fallen so
copiously that the streams overflowed their banks, the marshes were full
and the prairies inundated. With a good team, however, we made an
average of about fifteen miles a day. Our conveyance stuck fast in the
mud eighteen times between Racine and Delavan. Sometimes we found these
interesting events would occur just in the middle of a broad marsh. In
such case the gentlemen would take to the water, not unfrequently up to
the loins, build a chair by the crossing of hands, as they had learned
to do in their school days, and give the ladies a safe passage to the
prairie beyond. But woe worth the day if the wheels refused to turn, as
they sometimes did, in the middle of some deep, broad mud-hole. The
light prairie soil, when thoroughly saturated, is capable of very great
volatility and yet of stick-to-it-iveness. While the team and wagon,
buried deeply in the mud, found the soil as yielding as quicksand, the
passengers, on alighting, were no more fortunate. To make the chair and
wade ashore with its precious burden, at such a time, involved a very
nice adjustment of balances. If the three went headlong before they