another of fourteen in charge of the cattle and cabin and went home to get his wife and other children. But he was balked in his purpose because of the setting in of an early winter and consequent freezing of the river highway. The boys had to stay alone in the woods caring for the cattle until spring made travel possible. When the family arrived they found the boys and cattle in good shape, the boys evidently being excellent Yankee pioneers.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Somerset County was full of Bixbys and Westons. When Rufus Bixby entertained at Thanksgiving dinner on one occasion he had one hundred fifty-six guests, all kinfolk. He was a brother of my grandfather, Amasa Bixby, the two of them having married sisters, Betsey and Fanny Weston. A third sister, Electa Weston, married William Reed Flint and became the mother of the two cousins who were father’s business associates all during his California life.
The Maine farms were becoming crowded and there was no land in the neighborhood left for the young folks. Father was one of an even hundred grandchildren of Benjamin Weston and Anna Powers, a sample of the prevalent size of families at that time. The early American farmers were not essentially of the soil, but were driven by the necessities of a new country to wring support from the land. At the first opportunity to escape into callings where more return for less physical output promised, they fled the farms. I remember that my uncle Jotham who had rather short stumpy fingers used to maintain that he had
