In the Grande Ronde Valley we tasted our first green vegetables. I went to a strange-looking house beside the road to buy some peas for mother. It was the first sod house I ever saw. A little girl was there, and while her mother was getting the peas ready I talked to her and looked and looked at the queer house with its brown earth walls and roof and floor. It was all very neat and clean, the inside walls covered as they were with white canvas. I would not have thought a dirt floor could have been so hard and so clean. "It is pretty in the spring," the little girl said. "Then the whole house is covered with bright-green grass. I wish it would stay that way all the time."

Those vegetables were so good; one would have to take a journey similar to ours to know how good they tasted.

Mother's hope that I would start growing and Father's prophecy that she would have to start sewing before we reached Oregon were both fulfilled. My dresses became so short and so tight that some of them I could not wear at all. One day Mother opened a chest and from it took a beautiful piece of orange-and-black-checked gingham. The checks were tiny and so pretty that I was delighted when I learned that I was to have a new dress. She made it evenings, sitting on the ground. We had brought one chair with us for Mother, but only for a short time did she use it. Long after we reached the new country, when we wanted to rest we sat upon the floor.

Clothes were a problem to us traveling. We wore linsey dresses most of the time and I often wore little gingham aprons over mine. The linsey dresses, woven from linen and wool, could hardly be worn out, so they were good for the plains. Keeping them clean was the great problem. Mother's and Carrie's were so long and so wide and so much in the way that I could not understand why they wore that kind.

There was one party at which everyone looked askance. The women did not wear dresses. Their clothes did look strange and funny, but I could never see why all the women did not wear that kind anyway. They wore long basque-like coats and ankle-length trousers and climbed about as easily as I did in my short dresses. But how they shocked the rest of the train! How the poor women were snubbed!

Rarely was there a day during that long trip but something interesting or something alarming happened. When we were leaving the Grande Ronde, Florence and I as we so often did were running ahead of the wagons as they climbed the bluff. Lying in the road, we found a pistol. We were looking at the queer little one-shot weapon to see if it was loaded when suddenly we heard rifle shots, and bullets began singing over our heads. Sure that someone was shooting at us, we scurried behind some big boulders and remained hidden, thoroughly frightened, until the wagons reached us. Father told us some men were having rifle practice and had been careless enough to shoot toward the road. "It wasn't very decent of them," I said. "They'd kill us just as dead as if they shot at us."

Here and there we passed Indian camps and rank-smelling places they were. The tanning deerskins, the drying meat, the piles of dried fish, the careless disposal of refuse, all in all their camps were not pleasant places. Even long-deserted camps where the floors of the lodges were grass-grown retained the odor. We children insisted that we could smell an Indian camp a mile.