Bulldozing a hillside for $5 and cutting the first logs

And actually, about 15, 20 years, oh, at least 20 years later, finally my cabin was built. And it was built bigger and nicer by my husband. It took him a whole year to build, to cut the trees. I helped him peel the skin off from them trees, and we let him dry.

And he never built a log one, and now he was making the notches in the corner, and I didn't want to have nobody had expense with it. So I've been saving and saving, and so finally, I was hinting to my son to go and straighten out the little hillside where I want the cabin on, see, and he claimed he was too busy and everything, so he never got around to doing it.

So I was to my next door neighbors, and we was talking, and he asks, and the neighbor says, Dick, he says, what, uh, oh, what was you doing like this forenoon? Oh, I says, I was on the place where I'd like to have my cabin built, but, uh, there's no takers to straighten it out.

on the hillside. Well, he told me, he says, oh, I got a little caterpillar, I'll come there some evening, and I'll straighten it out for you.

So then, in two days, here comes my neighbor, and he says, come on, Agnes, says, well, bulldoze your spot for your cabin. So we went, and he went and pushed the trees and stumps the side and stones and whatever it was and of course if I would have known what I know now I would have him do a little more of it but he was there two hours and my husband before that oh maybe six seven months before Dick was doing this bulldozing he had another big bulldozer come and bulldoze a piece of field and he charged him $11 an hour.

So I had $26 saved up, so I was careful not to overdo two hours, you know. So I watched it when it was two hours of bulldozing, I told him, I said, you might as well stop. It's getting dark, and I says, it's flat enough and everything.

That'll work fine, and I was going to pay him, and he wouldn't take no money. I said, you can't put water in the gas tank and think that it's all right. I said, you've got to buy the gas.

So you have to take at least $10. So you can buy gas for your tractor, bulldozer. I says, even if you take your time free for me, which is a very nice thing to do. Well, Lee says, you know how when I was little you used to go tickle me to make me laugh?

Well, there you are. So I'm tickling you. I don't want to take no $10. So finally he took five towards the gas. So that left me enough money to go and buy several boxes of 50 pounds in each or how much it was.

It was quite heavy. Two, three of them I bought of great big nails for my husband to, when he gets the logs together and this, and that, you know. So I had the boxes of nails home. It was very happy.

So then I had quite a few logs already tealed and caught. Oh, yeah, I got to tell you about friends of mine from town. They work at the mill with the veneer, and they come one evening with a chainsaw.

Their dinner buckets from where they were in the factory, never went home even after the factory was released. They come straight to my house, and they ask, where's the trees you're going to cut, Agnes. Mr. Charles Evich, and I forgot, Leo Schlesinski, I think his name was, them too come.

So I had the trees already blazed, you know, chopped off a little the bark, so it could show that it's white, that them are the trees I wanted to cut. So they cut 18 of them, and by that time it got dark.

Well, I said, that's a plenty for now. I said, after I till these, then I'll have somebody else or something, cut some more. if necessary.