It was our purpose to make Dubuque, Iowa, the point of destination, as the founders of that city, who were relatives, had visited us in the East and had given us glowing accounts of the city and the adjacent portions of the State. With this purpose in view we landed at Racine. 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 reached the shore, each received a generous "coat of mail" of the most modern style.