Earning Money

To earn money without working for someone else, John and I went out in the woods and fell trees, cutting the wood and splitting it, hauling it out using a team of mules and a spring wagon. We'd take it to town and sell it from $3.75 to $4.00 a cord, which is 4'x4'x8', which took a lot of labor, but we were able to make a few extra bucks. We kept our axes so sharp, you could have shaved the arm on our hair. Once I found an axe in the woods, and I used that axe all the time. John had one called a Kelly axe. Once John was chopping a root and he missed it and cut his big toe - it went right through his good shoes. I went down and got the old bicycle and wheeled him back home. The bicycle didn't have a tire, but it served as something I could push him down the hill on. He ended up healing. I still have my axe.

One time I was crossing a log and I had my axe in my hand and hit my knee against my axe blade. That was a bad one, because you need your knee to flex. We didn't have first aid kids, we just had dish cloths.