A Story of Rehabilitation By a Cripple Who Is Not a Cripple

I think the chronology of this exhibit started February 17, 1866.He was frozen in a blizzard in Minnesota, December 4, 1880, which was known in Minnesota and throughout the west as the great snow winter.The next important event occurred on the second of October, 1895, when he married a very beautiful girl.He had no difficulty in courting her-and was not the only one.The next event of any great importance is yet to come.It is the writing of the epitaph.I was fourteen years old, almost fifteen, when I was lost in the blizzard in Minnesota, and up to that time there had not been much in life-since that time there has been a great deal.As a boy and before being overtaken by the blizzard in southwestern Minnesota, I had been making my own way from the time I was ten years old, that is since my mother died.Among other things which I did in preparation for this experiment of reconstruction was to fill the positions of cookee in a lumber camp in Wisconsin, cookee on several Mississippi steamboats plying between St. Paul and St. Louis, water carrier on the Dalrymple Wheat Farm, Cottage Grove, Minnesota, and for a time a kid cowboy on a large ranch, known as Lord White House Ranch in Wyoming, where I learned to shoot, and ride any horse that had four legs.I am willing to put up a wager that there is not a horse on the ranch that I cannot ride today.zThe blizzard can best be understood by you-if you have not been in one-by looking up a recent number of the Saturday Evening Post, in which the author of &dquo; Keeping up with Lizzie&dquo; describes &dquo;The Making of Mike,&dquo; having reference to me.It is the best description of a blizzard that I have ever read.The blizzard I faced on December 4, 1880, caused the ther- mometer to register 50° below, and I was out from about seven in the evening until sunrise the next morning.The sun did come up the next morning, and so did I-out of a bed in a straw-pile---and