Story Under a Stone - Cliff Black

Story Under a Stone - Cliff Black


While attending the recent Community Day event in Sheldon, I took pictures of the veteran photos attached to the wall in the community hall. There are many stories the faces on that wall could tell, but few of them left much information about their service in uniform. It so happened the granddaughter of one of them was sitting close at hand, so by the simple process I use for selecting the next subject for a “Story Under a Stone,” I chose her grandpa, Cliff Black. He, by the way, did leave a diary of his time serving in World War I, so we can draw in part on that.


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A book titled Ransom County’s Loyal Defenders lists all of our county’s World War I participants and includes Cliff Black. In it his brief biography tells us he ended his service as a private first class with Co. C, 303rd Field Signal Battalion, 78th Division, a unit that fought in St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. A signal battalion’s primary job was maintaining combat communications under direct fire. They ran telephone lines between headquarters and front-line trenches, or flew carrier pigeons with messages or sent human runners to maintain lines of communication with headquarters and the front lines.
Cliff demonstrated the ability to write well and left us an informative diary he composed while in active service. He enlisted in the army along with a few others in Lisbon on February 13th, 1918 and soon headed to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, then on to Camp Dix, New Jersey. Their trip continued to England landing in Liverpool, England; boarding crowded trains; crossing the English Channel on a large barge; and setting foot on European soil near Calais, France.
Company C was an “outpost company,” which meant this small group found themselves very near the action on the front lines where their job was to furnish information about the enemy to the commander. I found an interesting document on the internet, a service record booklet titled “The Journal of Exploits of Company C: 303rd Field Signal Battalion.” Curious as to whether Cliff’s name would appear, I found it at the end where all members of the company can be found. Cliff’s was home address - R.R.F.D. No. 2, Sheldon, N. D., entered service on 2-24-8, promoted to private first class 6-1-8, gassed 10-20-8. His name was alongside Leo J. Billing, Lisbon, N. D., listed as killed. Two other names in Company C with whom Cliff enlisted were Harvey Cole, Enderlin and Francis McCann of Verona.
Food was an issue, and apparently the food including the steaks prepared by the cooks tasted fine, that is until they discovered the steaks had been cut from the carcasses of the dead horses which covered the battlefields.
Returning to his diary entries, he wrote of an early incident that shook them. One man turned on a flashlight for a short time, an act for which their captain ordered them to get up and move out, immediately. And immediately did the German spotters direct artillery down on them. Next morning they noted that their campsite had been totally destroyed.
When the order came to attack on September 26th, the battlefield filled with its sights, sounds, and smells of death and destruction. His quote came through clearly, “There’s no use to try to tell you of the things that happened; it just couldn’t be done. The best writer or orator could never make it clear to you, dear reader.”
Another quote from his diary outlines what he and his fellow soldiers experienced: “Death and destruction had tramped through ruthlessly, leaving in their wake the muddy clay trenches, strewn with tangled barbed wire, mangled bodies of our buddies and those of the enemy, unused ammunition, guns, shattered dugouts and desolation, with shell holes everywhere.”
There’s no need to list everything from his several pages of diary since the reader can find the diary in its entirety in the history titled Sheldon, North Dakota: 1881-2006 - 125th Anniversary. We can only imagine what the soldiers went through on these battlefields, but the family and friends waiting back home for news suffered, too. The army sent this letter to Cliff’s parents - “Mrs. J. E. Black, Route 2, Sheldon, ND. Dear Madam it is with the deepest regret that we inform you of the ‘missing in action’ on the Argonne Front, of your son Clifford R. Black, Co ‘C’, …” It must have been a happy occasion when they found out he was alive and coming home. He went on to work 30 years for the Soo Line railroad out of Anselm.
A few facts of the war gathered from Edward Lengel’s book state that before the U. S. entered the war we were woefully unprepared with only 137,000 men in the regular army who carried out-dated weapons. The Meuse-Argonne “sucked in 1.2 million American soldiers, leaving 26,277 of them dead and 95,786 wounded. Almost all of these casualties came in a period of about three weeks of heavy fighting…”

WELL-WORDED

 WELL-WORDED

I enjoy reading Clay Jenkinson’s essays. Today, on his “Listening to America” site he laments the Death of the Letter. Short messages, sometimes coded, sent digitally have replaced it. We have a few old family letters saved that have become valuable assets in defining who we are and from where we have come. When I run across a well-worded idea in a written piece, I might copy it down.

    “Now, the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language and send it into battle.” said Edward R. Murrow re Winston Churchill shortly after he rose to leadership of England in WW2. Churchill was known for his ability to stir people to action with the power of words; he was a master in his use of the English language.  

     Jenkinson is pretty good himself in his use of the English language. We’ve seen him appear several times in Ken Burns historical documentaries, and his responses are always well-worded. 

Community Day - Aug 22, 2026

 Pleasantly surprised today when we visited Sheldon and found a large turnout for the festivities at the Community Day. We started early with the Lions breakfast and then started looking at some of the vendors who had set up their tables. A few garage sales needed checking. While at the first sale here came a westbound train of grain cars. This train was a long as any I’ve seen come through Fargo - two diesel engines pulling and a single engine at the rear. I’ve counted 120 cars in long trains at Fargo and I think this one was about the same length. Garage sales yielded a few gets and then to main street for the classic car show. Here again surprised, I counted about three dozen shined and polished cars on both sides of the street. Among them sat Mougey’s nicely restored 1948 Chevrolet cab-over truck that we often saw around town. In the park a pen filled with animals was a draw for the young ones. A dozen or so Nigerian Dwarf goats bleated, maybe begging to be picked up and petted. A little dog in with them kept thinking he needed to herd the little goats making it a constant riot of motion. Many other activities were planned. One physical “get” I brought home with me were the snapshots I took of Sheldon’s veterans’ portraits that have been attached to the south wall. Lots of activity filled the day, I think a street dance would end the day. Just maybe the movers and shakers down there have started something  that will hopefully continue for a few years. I’ve always thought that even though Sheldon doesn’t have much for businesses, it possesses a strong community identity that has not diminished.

Story Under a Stone - William Hutchings, Teamster

Story Under a Stone - William Hutchings, Teamster

Today,  drivers behind the wheel of those big trucks hauling freight can belong to the union named International Brotherhood of Teamsters. That word “teamsters” comes  from a time when freight was hauled by wagons pulled by teams of animals, whether they be oxen, mules, or horses. Of course, their driver became known as a teamster. 

     A man buried in the Sheldon cemetery, William Hutchings, was a teamster.   He was a member of a class of teamster nicknamed  “bullwhackers” who could pop their long whips over the heads of the oxen to encourage them to pull. He freighted long distances with a hitch of three yoke of oxen. We don’t know if he could crack a long whip, but most likely he could. 

Hutchings and his wife and family lived in the Coburn area, and later moved to Owego.

His father George had enlisted in the Union army at the age of 38 and rode in a cavalry regiment for the duration. He was the first veteran to enter the Old Soldiers Home in Lisbon in 1893.

   When the town of Sheldon started establishing itself, it needed lumber to build homes and businesses. The railroad hadn’t reached it yet, so teams and wagons hauled the lumber from a distance for construction. The newspaper ran this short piece from a  man named Frank Connelly: “In 1881 Lumberyard was started at Buffalo. From this yard I hauled the first load of lumber that started the building at Sheldon.”

     Many interesting stories come from that period. In these stories Under a Stone we’ve already featured one man, J. T. Hickey, owner of the livery barn, buried alongside his wife in the Sheldon cemetery, who made his mark as a teamster with the ill-fated Custer expedition. 

     A solitary stone setting apart from the others in the Owego cemetery interested me. The name James Kinney had been inscribed into it and informed he’d been a wagoner (teamster). A little research uncovered the fact he drove teams with General Sibley through North Dakota in 1863. The newspaper editor thought it remarkable that he walked 16 miles in less than six hours to Sheldon so he could catch the train to Lisbon and spend the winter at the soldier’s home.

     Teamsters lived in the open and slept under their wagons when they worked. This story illustrates their hardship. In 1880 a small party of land seekers headed for Fort Ransom in November with their wagons. They slept on the ground under their wagons. In the morning one of the men with very long hair could not get up because his hair had frozen fast to the ground. His companions cut him loose with their knives.

     Of course, the term teamster can be loosely interpreted to mean quite a broad spectrum. There was a time when everyone, men, women, or young people could take the reins of a team and drive to their destination. I’ve even held the reins of a team of workhorses, and maybe you have, too. Today, a different kind of horsepower powers our wheels.

     We’ll conclude with one teamster story that we find humorous today, but probably not so much for the actors. Two boys, Lou and Hans Sorenson, from the family of local flour millers, took a load of flour to Valley City. While there they bought some fireworks and thought they could speed up the slow walking oxen by shooting a rocket into their hind ends. These critters proved they could move, even gallop, and took off, wrecking the wagon and beating the boys home by several hours. 

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The pictures show a variety of types of wagons I used to build.  

RANDOM THOUGHTS - Friday, August 7, 2026

Random thoughts swirl about … A scribbler at the Forum wrote “put the dirt back in the hole” after the fund raising debacle stalled construction on a military museum in Bismarck … After writing a series of “Stories Under the Stone,” I find a lot of people like local history stories … U.S. Attorney  Pirro quick to cover her tail after acting on bad information fed her by Interior Sec Burgum about a pool of water… It was fun reading a 1970 edition of the local weekly newspaper with all its little community news columns … “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you,” Wendell Berry … Today in1782  George Washington ordered the creation of the first U.S. military decoration, the Badge of Military Merit, today called the Purple Heart … In a couple of weeks next “Stories Under a Stone” appears featuring George Hutchings  … The new Teddy Roosevelt museum in Medora has been popular … Football is back … Simple things still excite like butterflies coming to our flowers … To pay for Civil War people were taxed, hopefully, “proportionate to his ability to pay.” … And finally, some words of wisdom I found: find your happiness in what is available, not from what is promised.

 

Story Under a Stone: Frank Shaw

 Many of those interred in the Sheldon cemetery have gone to rest with a skimpily written record while leaving their parents’ life looking more significant. Only a few readers of this article will remember a man named Frank E. Shaw. I remember him as a portly figure with a shock of white hair as he hurried along the street, usually between the post office and his office. Frank lived a life of community importance as a lawyer and a board member of the Ransom County Immigration Association. 

But let’s step back and consider the life of his father, Alex P. Shaw, who fought and survived in many Civil War battles, most notably the Battle of Gettysburg. The casualties in this battle numbered over 50,000. We know the elder Shaw was in the thick of it. While attending a reunion of Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary he walked around the battlefield and found a little wall of stones still standing that he had hastily piled to provide protection from the bullets flying around. His life must have been charmed because after participating in 22 battles he never received a wound.  

Although the 140th New York was successful in assisting the defense of the Little Round Top, it cost the regiment 133 total casualties. On two different occasions I’ve walked on the summit of this hill where mature trees stood and dropped acorns. I picked up three to bring home and wrote a poem about them thinking they’s been nourished by the blood shed there. (More about that at another time). The encounter with Confederate forces interested me, and when I returned home I read about it.   

Now after seeing whom Frank descended from, we can turn attention to him. He sat as a board member on the Ransom County Immigration Association that was established in the latter 1890s at Sheldon. Its initial purpose was the promotion of immigration and the development of lands in the immediate locality of Sheldon. The Association succeeded in bringing over 200 families into the state from southern Minnesota and Iowa, and located them on lands in Ransom, Sargent and southern Cass and Barnes counties. A fire in 1921 destroyed their building. It was rebuilt looking much like it did originally.

Pictures include the following: Frank Shaw’s gravestone; three acorns picked from Little Round Top; a long shot from the old days of Sheldon’s main street; two buildings lifted from that picture as they appeared about 125 years ago (Note the wording “Ransom County Immigration Association” can be read.); and a recent shot of the two buildings still standing.

Ithaka

 Many years ago I ran across the poem “Ithaca” and have returned to it many times since. I found myself within those lines. Now the movie “Odysseus” brings it to mind again.

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.