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monotonous and harsh, even to the point where it caused "many tears and complaints." 7

The autumn of 1866 brought these settlers their first harvest, the fruit of heavy toil. Early in the spring the fields had been furrowed by ox-drawn plows, and the virgin soil had been sowed by hand with wheat, the money-producing grain. For their own use the farmers planted oats and corn, which was new to the Finns. Around the planted fields ditches were dug to halt possible prairie fires. The crops were harvested with sickles, and the threshing was done by ox: the sheaves were placed in a circle, with the heads facing the center, and the oxen trampled the grain from the ears. The chaff was separated from the grain by tossing it into the air. For home use, the grain was ground with a hand mill.

The home larder was also enriched in autumn with many kinds of berries. Because of its expense, hunting with rifles was rare, for guns and ammunition cost money, always in short supply among these settlers, but wild turkeys and prairie hens were snared, as were muskrats, whose pelts brought in money. Foxes, minks, weasels and otters could also be caught by snares. 8

Antti Rovainen died in 1867, leaving a wife (Maria Matleena nee Helppi) and two children behind him on a homestead where life had just seemed to begin. The energetic and resourceful widow was not disheartened. She soon had two teams of oxen and continued the hard farm work by herself until the legal title to the homestead was assured. Besides that, she had time to be a midwife, to read a great deal, and to teach other Finns how to read, with the Bible and the Catechism as the only Finnishlanguage texts available, both usually brought along from Finland in the settlers' baggage. Even more, the other Finns soon began to believe that this clever woman also had supernatural powers.

A few years later Maria Rovainen was married again, to Gust Friska (Kustaa Sukki) whose first wife Briita had died of the cholera in Red Wing. This new marriage did not last for long in May 1872 Friska and his stepson, John Abraham Rovainen, went to Dakota, where a new homestead was taken; Maria's homestead in Franklin was sold, and the next winter, when Friska went to Franklin to fetch the money due from the sale he vanished on his trip back to Dakota in a severe snowstorm, and no trace of him was ever found. Maria was a widow once more, with even more children to feed, for another child was born after her hus

7. Ida Juhanna Rovainen interview, op. cit. 8. Curtiss-Wedge, op. cit. pp. 335 and 339.

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