Honoring an Ancestor

Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! focuses on the main character of Alexandra who one day travels in a wagon with some companions to call on the man called Crazy Ivar.  Ivar’s residence is a dugout that blends so well with the surroundings that they do not spot it until the sun glints off a solitary window set in the front wall.  If not for a rusty stovepipe sticking out, you could have walked over the roof without knowing someone lived below.  In fact a cow had run onto the roof thinking it part of the prairie and one of her legs broke through.

Ivar’s home could well have been the model for the one Kristian Hansen Bjugstad made in the sandhill area southeast of Sheldon in 1881.  In what is now government owned pastureland, descendants of Kristian have searched for and found the site of that first residence he shaped with his hands in a hillside.  Since a depression in the ground is all that remains, family members used other available clues and determined this spot is the one that gave him shelter. 

Maybe Kristian’s life isn’t so different from other people in the 1880s who came to homestead, but it is singular in the minds of those descendants who commemorate him and the fortitude he exhibited by living in such harsh conditions.  He stayed, thrived, and begot generations of relatives, of whom two great-grandsons came to the site this day to place a memorial honoring his memory.  

As sharp lightning ripped through the darkening clouds, Dennis Bjugstad, Lance Bueling, and a USDA forester Cory Enger proceeded to set wooden posts and fasten the memorial to them.  Though he was not present, Jim Winsness, another relative, had sent the display case that they hung to enclose and protect Kristian’s family information.  Enger contributed a metal sign stating, “Ancient ruins, archaeological resources, fossils and historical remnants in the vicinity of this notice are fragile and irreplaceable.  The Antiquities Act of 1906 and Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 protect them for the benefit of all Americans.”

In brief, Kristian left his wife and child in Red Wing, MN after hearing of land to homestead and boarded a train for Fargo, Dakota Territory.  From there he walked to Owego Township and on May 13, 1881, filed on the piece of land where we now stood.  While no picture exists of his residence, we’ll surmise the depression found by the family was a modest room he shoveled out of the hillside, covered with cottonwood branches, blanketed with grass, and then overlaid with sod.  Imagine the spring rains that brought the sod to life and grew swaying grass where, in my mind’s eye, wild animals walked on it as though it were part of the prairie.

Dennis Bjugstad and Lance Bueling

The Memorial Plaque

Antiquities Act Notice

Included as part of the memorial the Bjugstad descendants left on the prairie is a poem called “Speak To Me, Ancestor” where a sampling of its lines say “Help me to know some clues to this mystery that began long ago.”  If old Kristian could sit down with them today, he could tell them plenty.