Iowa, I took up the harness-making business, not from choice but from necessity, as no other job could be found in Decorah, whither I went.
October 6, 1862, I, a lad of sixteen years and eleven months, enlisted in company D, Sixth Iowa cavalry. It came about this way. Timothy Finn, a hardware merchant of Decorah, approached me as a recruiting officer, telling me that I would pass anywhere for eighteen, I was so big. There had just been an outbreak of Indian hostilities with a terrible massacre in Minnesota, and the Civil War was raging in the South. I was fired with enthusiasm. I had heard the old folks in town reading and talking about the war and I wanted to go. I was especially anxious to go in a cavalry troop—a cavalryman and a hero seemed synonymous to me then—not now. My father, finding it out, objected bitterly, telling me that he had left the old mother country to keep me clear of military duty, and now I wanted to volunteer. Horrible! But this was the country of my choice. I had heard the sound of the fife and drum, I had seen the flying flags and the recruits marching up and down the streets, and I had caught the war spirit, so to the war I went. That is how I happen to be an old veteran now; three years of war service for Uncle Sam before I was twenty years of age.
Pioneer life in the wilds of Iowa during childhood; pioneer life again after fighting the wild Indians in the Dakota wilderness. Three years in company D, Sixth Iowa cavalry. An honorable discharge from service at the end of the war, October 17, 1865, at Sioux City, Iowa.
On May 18, 1868, I married Miss Anna Kuchta in church at Spillville, Iowa. I put my bride into a prairie schooner, a brand-new covered wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen, and leading a caravan of such westward over the swamps and prairies of Iowa into eastern Dakota we arrived in Saline county Nebraska. I located and surveyed claims for many new settlers in Nebraska, mostly in Saline county, and helped to build up one of the best Bohemian settlements in the state between the years 1869 and 1874.
In the fall of 1869, while gone thirty miles to a grist mill near Lincoln, to get some wheat ground, a trip which with oxen took two days and nights, prairie fire destroyed all my summer’s work except the dugout we lived in. On an election day in October, 1873, while at Pleasant Hill, then the county seat of Saline county, electioneering for Anton Herman a young man, son of Bohemian parents, running for the office of county treasurer, prairie fire for the second time swept away all my possessions. And this time it was more than the toil of one summer for me and my family. I was a heavy loser in property, but not in life. Starting on Swan creek, driven with the fury of a south wind, the fire swept a district over six miles wide and about nine miles long. In this fire a lady school teacher and some of her pupils perished.
I was standing in the main street of Pleasant Hill when I spied the clouds of smoke in the direction of my home. In the wink of an eye I was in the saddle and splitting the wind with my gray mare. She leaped through the air, blind to danger and knowing no fear, and I was in my own dooryard as my wife came out of the house with our first-born son, Victor, in her arras, meeting me with lamentations. But I wasted no time in that. I grabbed sacks and wet them, determined to stop the fire fiend at the road. Neighbors came running to help, but the wind carried bunches of flaming grass through the air over our heads and in this way lit five big stacks of wheat at the tops.
The fire consumed stacks of hay, a stable, a grain drill, the first in our
