Pioneer Life

By Eliza Hopkins Leavitt

(No date was indicated on this paper found among items at Waupaca Historical Society)

 

 

            Eliza Ann Hopkins who was born in Belfast, Maine, January 29, 1830, married Marshall Leavitt on November 10, 1847, in Baugn, Maine; came to Oshkosh, Wisconsin May 8, 1850 and hired a team to bring us to Mukwa.

            No railroad or boats at that time.  A rowboat came from Gordon’s Mills and took us to that place.

            There were just three white women from Mukwa, at the head of the Little Wolf.  All the rest were Indians and squaws.  They were thicker than the mosquitoes.  Seventy were camped where the light of their campfire shone on my bed all night!  Then was when we lived in fear.  It was perfect wilderness.  The roads were an Indian trail and no land surveyed at all.  The first meal was at Mukwa.  It consisted of salt pork, Indian sugar, bread and a cup of tea.

            After a time there was a man came to Mukwa by the name of Davis and kept a little store with plenty of whiskey for the Indians.  We bought our provisions at the store and my husband packed it on his back eight long miles through mud and water on an Indian trail.

            I think I knew what a pioneer life was.