Rattlesnake Dan

I never met Dan Panko, but my wife did.  He lived in her family’s rural neighborhood on the west side of the Missouri River and on occasion would drive into their farmyard to visit with her parents.  In addition to the impression he made on my wife, he wrote a short biography from which we’ve learned much of what we know about him.  He triggered an episode that became a newsworthy event because of the unique action he took.  Here we’ll imagine him telling something of his life based on what is known, plus the episode for which he went down in history.

♢♢♢

I was born Dionis Potapenkowa in 1895 in Schenderovka, Russia.  Fortunately over here, I was renamed Dan Panko.  When I was ten my siblings and I accompanied our mother to the United States when she decided to emigrate.  We landed in the state of Virginia, but after a few months, the lure of free homestead land hooked us and we traveled to a wild-sounding little place called Dogden, North Dakota.  School was difficult for me because I spoke very little English, so I didn’t go.

I loved to run and entered every foot race I could find.  I kept in pretty good shape by hopping on freight trains, riding for several miles, and then getting off to run back home.  One day I didn’t return home but kept going, only to end up working on a farm in Minnesota.  The farmer said I wasn’t yet a man and paid only half-wages.  I never learned what more a man could’ve done for him; I’d get up at 4:30, feed and care for eighteen horses, milk ten cows, and clean the barn, all before breakfast, and then work in his fields the rest of the day.

Finally after a couple of years I’d saved fifty dollars and spent thirty of it buying a new bicycle.  One day I rode it into town and experienced a chance meeting with an acquaintance who told me one of my brothers had been killed in a horse accident.  Since Mother and I hadn’t been exchanging letters, the news was a shock to me.  It was time to go home.

It took me one day to reach Moorhead, Minnesota on my bike where at a fair I entered a bicycle race and won ten dollars.  From there it took me four hard days to pedal to Dogden, only to learn my family didn’t live there anymore.  They’d moved somewhere south of Mandan.  After a rest, I pedaled for a day and a half to Mandan where in a cafe I luckily found someone who knew where they’d settled.

On the road again, I only made it to the tiny town in the rugged country southwest of Mandan called Dogtooth where the next morning a Russian speaking man directed me to my mother’s home.  It was quite a homecoming, she and the others thought I was dead.  Well, that’s how my life began.  I went to work building railroads, cooking, even boxing and wrestling for prize money.

It is true that I had an independent spirit.  World War I came along and I joined the army.  It wasn’t long before I learned a lesson about discipline.  A corporal handed me a broom and told me to sweep the floor.  “Sweep it yourself,” I told him.  I got by with it, but only until a sergeant explained the facts of life about following orders.  I survived the battlegrounds of World War I and returned home after the war.  But then, was it something I’d contracted along the way?  I got very ill, was in and out of the VA hospital, and bedridden for several months.  I finally recovered, built a house, married, and began a political career.

In 1932, FDR won the presidency.  In our voting district, Hoover received just two votes.  When people wondered from whom, I told them, “It was my wife and I, and we don’t care who knows it, because I am still a Republican.”   That’s the way I lived my life, not afraid to let people know where I stood.  Now as for that overnight stop I made at Dogtooth, I’ll tell why it’s noteworthy in my story.  In one word - rattlesnakes.

I’d been elected to the state legislature and couldn’t sit still without getting involved.  A bill was introduced to establish bounties on wolves, coyotes, and magpies.  I wanted to amend the bill adding rattlesnakes.  I argued magpies don’t hurt children, rattlesnakes do.  The idea didn’t gain traction, but I didn’t give up.  I brought in a doctor who testifified he’d treated several cases of snakebite.  Still my amendment was in danger.

Those foot-draggers needed something to shock them into action.  I went out and collected about fifty rattlesnakes from their winter dens.  When I set their cage in front of the lawmakers and dumped some out, the warmth of the chamber woke them and they started crawling around.  It was enough to get my bounty approved and forever after I was known as “Rattlesnake Dan.”

♢♢♢

A headline in a Eugene, Oregon newspaper proclaimed, “Legislators Are Rattled.”  As for the town of Dogtooth, it no longer exists.  It sat in a rugged area west of Flasher called the Dogtooth Hills because they look like a dog’s jawbone and teeth.  Rattlesnakes like it there.  Dogden was a little town in McLean County now known as Butte.

Fred Underwood's Escape

The sun slipped from the sky and spread a palette of colors across the clouds.  Fred Underwood knew it was one of the things he loved about this place.   Decisions made as a young man to accomplish something good with his life were fulfilled here, and tomorrow he would be recognized for it.  He’d been selected as the grand marshal of a parade and ride his horse at its front.  But this evening he was relaxing and memories as colorful as the sunset played in his mind.  

♢♢♢

You can’t imagine how good it felt to breathe fresh air after cooler heads talked a lynch mob into taking the rope off my neck.  It’s quite a story, just a postage stamp of a moment, but it’s stuck with me.  Thank goodness I’m still here to tell about it, because when a bunch of frenzied men take a notion to hang a man, they’re mighty unreasonable.  It was a beautiful August evening in Sheldon, Dakota Territory in 1887 and harvest was about over.  Field hands, we called them hoboes, gathered in town to celebrate   before hitching their next ride on a freight train to search for other work.

About 200 of them loafed around town that night, almost as many as the entire population.  Some of them were older Civil War veterans who had never found stability in life after the war and young men with wanderlust and Minnesota lumberjacks wanting work in their off-season and maybe a fugitive or two running from the law.  Two hundred men, two hundred different stories.  When they congregated like this, the ladies dare not hang their clothes on the line, or forget to lock their chicken coop at night, or answer the door if their husband wasn’t home.  When they finally moved on, the townspeople breathed a collective sigh of relief.

I had steady employment in town and at the end of the day was outside visiting with friends where  I soon found myself involved in an awkward event. Three meals a day for the crew and one depleted pantry had caused the wife of one farmer, a Mr. Gullickson, to write out a long list of groceries to buy when he took the men to town in his wagon.  One of them who went by the name of Frank Wills, carried a grudge against Gullickson after being reprimanded for mistreating a bundle hauling team. 

Some of the hoboes liked their liquor and now, when they had a few dollars in their pocket, headed for the liquor store.  Wills bought a bottle of whisky, and as he drank from it, his resentment of Gullickson’s scolding grew.  In his drunkenness, he went looking for trouble and saw the farmer’s team and wagon in front of the grocery store.  Seeing an opportunity for spitefulness, Wills untied the horses, jumped in the wagon, and started shouting and slapping the reins on their hides. This provided quite a show, especially after he ran into a hitching post, overturned, and caused groceries to scatter all over the street.  One of the horses tangled in the traces and fell beneath the wreckage.

I ran to the scene, but pulled up short when Wills stood there shouting and waving a pistol.  He looked right at me and said, “Stay away from me!” Our town policeman Ed Vie soon appeared and asked me to help.  When Wills turned to look behind his back, we ran up and grabbed him.  You might say, “It was a peach of a contest!”  He fought us, but when Vie slapped him on the head with his sap, we finally got him throttled and led off to the little jail.  He struggled again when we  tried pushing him through the door, and believe me, I was glad when that was over, my heart was beating double-time. Vie thought things would quiet down now and went back home to bed.  Little did we know, there was more excitement to come.

A half hour later a cry went up in the crowd, “The jail’s on fire!”  Everyone ran to it, but the smoke and flames kept us out.  Vie and I should’ve emptied Wills’ pockets when we locked him in because in his rage he’d set fire to the bedding with his matches.  He died in the fire.  

That crowd started acting like their brains were connected, kind of like a bunch of startled prairie chickens taking off together.  “Whose fault was it?”  “What did he do to deserve this?”  Their whisky-addled answers stood no further away than me.  “There’s the one who locked him up!”  “Why didn’t he mind his own business?”  Their anger reached its high point when one said, “Find some rope, string him up!”  As intense as the situation was, they just might have rigged a noose, but when things really got intense, the constable heard the noise and came on the run.  There’s something about a man of authority wearing a badge and a gun that gets your attention.  Thank God!

♢♢♢

Fred Underwood grew to prominence in both Sheldon and Enderlin as a banker deeply involved in community affairs.  A picture of him mounted on a chestnut mare shows him riding straight and tall and proud at the head of Enderlin’s Golden Jubilee in 1941.  Factual elements of this story were gathered from his short autobiography on file in the archives of the North Dakota Heritage Center.

Contact the author: lynn.bueling@gmail.com.

Conspicuous Consumption

A recent article in the newspaper caught my eye, an article that probably raised the eyebrows of anyone who read it.  A private residence is under construction in West Fargo that carries a price tag in excess of four million dollars.  That is the amount listed on the building permit needed to build the structure which will encompass 14,368 square feet of living space.  It will be about ten times bigger than the 1500 square foot condo I presently live in, a place where we feel very comfortable.  With its double attached garage and not a stair in the place, we intend to live here  in comfort for the rest of our golden years. 

A 14,000 square feet home needs furnishings, lots of it, plus draperies, carpets, wall hangings, light fixtures, and more to complete the package.  More power to whomever has the finances to build it.  I suppose some people need pretentious gilded towers to proclaim their success.  Having been raised in a modest setting, I’ve continued to maintain a similar lifestyle for reasons of being satisfied with my lot in life as well as the fact I don’t have multi-millions of dollars.

Since I’m interested in the pioneer/frontier period of history, I let my thoughts go back to the structures those people lived in.  This past summer we accompanied a small family group to a spot in the sandhills where they placed a marker commemorating the first home of an ancestor who settled there.  Four walls, pitched roof, lots of windows? Nope, his residence consisted of a dugout shoveled from a dirt bank on the Sheyenne River over which he laid poles cut with his axe.  To overlay the poles he used brush, long grass, and dirt to seal it up.  His only window was probably a small one set beside a doorway in the crude front wall.  His simple tools consisted of a shovel, an axe, and a saw, all that he needed.

We can even find reference to a simpler shelter than that, even though it was very temporary.  When a large influx of German-Russian immigrants traveled to the west to establish new homes, hardship came with them.  Immigrants could have ridden on trains as far as Aberdeen, but for many their journey hadn’t ended.  They needed to continue beyond the reach of the railroad.

One family’s story took place in the wintertime where the man of the family purchased a team of horses and a wagon in Aberdeen.  A young lady hitched a ride with them, a lady whose husband had died aboard ship.  She intended to keep going to the promised land.  They all wore heavy clothing to ward off the cold winter weather, something which hid her pregnancy.  She kept it a secret, even as they started making their way.  She found herself ready to give birth after a time on the trail and her secret became known.  

She needed help in open country, miles away from a doctor and warm buildings.  An emergency shelter needed to be found so the man made use of the only thing available.  He turned the wagon box over and spread their straw and blankets underneath.  The horses were kept nearby where they welcomed their body heat throughout the night.  There in its shelter she gave birth and the family including the new mother and her baby started traveling again the next day.  

There is one step below the overturned wagon shelter.  That would be the homeless people with no roof at all who seem to multiply each year and populate the streets and intersections, often holding a crudely lettered sign asking for help.  Often we hear them being admonished with statements like, “I don’t feel sorry for them.  They can go find a job like I did.”  Then there are those who flee for their lives in waves across deserts from dictators.  I don’t forget all the Hispanics who travel northward to our southern border.  Here is where I stop and count my blessings and appreciate even more the nice accommodations I live in.

###

A note in passing: I’ve been asked how I can be contacted.  Simply email me —  lynn.bueling@gmail.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Notable

For several years I’ve enjoyed sifting a few notables from a larger batch of characters who lived and worked in these places we call home.  I have a particular fondness for the pioneers and settlers who learned to cope in harsh surroundings even though few lifelines except their own wits were available to bail them out of difficulties.  Their names can be found in community and parish history books, old newspapers, even tips from like-minded lovers of local history.  They’ve battled  natural disasters and catastrophes the likes of which we can’t imagine such as prairie fires, blizzards, epidemics, droughts, grasshoppers, lawlessness, and loneliness.

Maybe it was thirty years ago when I happened upon a small book with two staples in the fold in the college library in Wahpeton titled Paha Sapa Tawoyake: Wade’s Stories.  I enjoyed reading it and took the notion to make my own photocopy.  Then maybe five years ago, I took another notion to translate the meaning of those words in the title and visited with a couple of Lakota Indians at the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck.  From them I learned it means something like “Searcher for the Black Hills.”  It was the Indian nickname they dubbed on Wade the day he rode with a party of them to a treaty signing in Nebraska.

One day I said to my wife, “Maybe I should republish that book.  William Wade ended up in your part of the country.  The ranch he established was next door to the one where your parents raised you and your siblings.  Maybe I could sell a few copies.”  The book found an audience that surprised me, in fact, I printed 400 copies to fill requests.

West of the Missouri River in the little town of Flasher, the first child born there - Hilaire du Berrier - arrived in a blizzard in November, 1906.  His father had come to the little town to open a grocery store when William H. Brown of the Brown Land Company invited him.  After maturing and leaving Flasher, he learned to pilot airplanes which he flew in wartime.  When the Spanish Civil War began he rushed to enter the action on the side of General Franco.  His career included spying, journalism, and writing his exploits.

Elizabeth Preston Anderson made her mark in North Dakota as a deeply involved prohibitionist and promoter of women’s rights.  She had suffered a nervous breakdown sometime in the 1880s and her doctor prescribed liquor as medicine to lift her spirits.  After several weeks she started enjoying it but stopped drinking when she realized she was becoming addicted.  Working as a teacher in Page, North Dakota, she lived in a room facing the alley with a view of a saloon’s back door.  One morning she looked through the window and saw a young man passed out in the alley.  As flies crawled over his sick face she thought this is “some mother’s boy.”  I don’t know if that’s the incident that set her on the road to prohibition in North Dakota, but it is surely one of them.

Then there is the story of the unpopular legislator who took an unintended flight through the window of a saloon in Yankton, Dakota Territory, an act witnessed from his office by the newspaper editor.  That was in the days of Alexander McKenzie around whom dozens of stories circle like flies on manure.  Another good story was collected in South Dakota about a rancher whose stolen horse herd caused him and his grandson to pursue the rustlers and retrieve the horses from across the border at the rustlers’ hideout in North Dakota.   And I loved the one about the state legislator who wasn’t making headway getting his fellow legislators to levy a bounty on rattlesnakes.  To make his point he brought a box of hibernating snakes that started waking and crawling about in the warmth of the capital floor.

And then there is Fred Underwood, an area pioneer who came, stayed, and died through the birth and settlement of the community.  He left some informative observations.  Take this one when he talked about the scene in Sheldon during harvest time: “On a wonderfully moonlit night in late fall of 1887 there were perhaps 200 of these hoboes in and around the village of Sheldon, enough of them to have looted the entire town had they so desired.  As night came on they were settled for the evening lying scattered about on lumber piles, elevator driveways, sidewalks, depot platform and even in choice places on the ground, visiting among themselves, singing songs, telling their troubles to each other and making plans for the future.”

A favorite is the J. T. Hickey story, the owner of the livery stable in Sheldon whose obituary headline proclaimed, “J. T. Hickey, Reno’s Freighter, Died Suddenly Last Friday.”  In reading more about the above mentioned Underwood, however, I now see where he was almost lynched on Sheldon’s main street.  For a man who came to be such an an upstanding citizen, what was that all about?  The stories just keep coming.

Talking About Books

The other day I sat visiting with a friend over a cup of coffee and our discussion came around to books.  He asked, “What are you reading now-a-days?”  Now that question can generate hours of talk, and I would never want to make light of my answers.  I believe reading is basic to living a well-rounded life and is closely akin to drinking water and eating food.  Electronic screens - computers, televisions, smartphones - can be fun and interesting, but I’ve found little of substance to approach the lasting benefits found in well-written books.

I took a sip of coffee and told him recently I’ve been reading several books from two authors - James Lee Burke and Ken Follett.  Reading Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth took time to plod through because it’s nearly 1000 pages long, but I gave assurance it was well worth the effort.  In fact, I have to place this book near the top of my list of favorite books.  To Kill a Mockingbird stands at the top, and I don’t think it will ever move from that spot.

Simply put, Pillars centers around the building of a cathedral in England’s 12th century.  My friend sniggered a bit, so I knew a bit of explanation was necessary.  How was it that so many towering cathedrals could be built 800 to a 1000 years ago without using powered devices we use. Furthermore, those buildings are still standing and serving their intended use. Chisels, levers, and pulleys plus inventive minds served them well.  The author even brought up the fact that paper wasn’t available to them, so how could plans be drawn and translated to the workmen?  According to Follett, the master builder scratched his designs on thin layers of mortar spread on a flat surface.

In addition to craftsmen constructing the building, Follett weaves a story of love, hate, intrigue, and most anything else a well-crafted novel contains.

James Lee Burke caught my attention a short time ago, and I’ve now read about a half dozen of his books.  His favorite setting is New Orleans inhabited by a variety of good and bad characters he weaves into his stories.   He is a master at planting social commentary in the characters’ thoughts or his own thoughts as an omniscient observer.  

John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth and their spy thriller stories make for excellent reading.  I hate to admit it, but I just picked up Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, a book that’s been around for a long time.  Better late than never.  The story takes us through  attempted assassination plots of the French president Charles de Gaulle.  And his Jackdaws, man, what a story that was about a team of English lady demolition experts sent to France to destroy a Nazi communications hub.  Men hadn’t been too successful, so they thought women should try.  

My friend asked, “Don’t you read books in the western category?”  Certainly, James Lee Burke’s House of the Rising Sun contains elements of the familiar western story.  Two other books just arrived for review from the office of my editor in Santa Fe, New Mexico.   One, a novel about Teddy Roosevelt appears to be light reading, but the other looks meaty, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.  Every month or so the editor sends me two or three for review.  One year I sat on a panel judging the best book of the year in one category, and I received about seventy of them to review and pick what I thought was the best one.  

As for Western literature, I’ve spent many worthwhile hours absorbed in stories of the West written by Elmer Kelton, Louis L’Amour, Jack Schaefer, Charles Portis, Richard S. Wheeler, Johnny Boggs, Dorothy M. Johnson, and so many more.  Johnson’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence contains a line I’ve not forgotten.  In the movie version, it’s Jimmy Stewart who says to a reporter, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”  

The historians such Wallace Stegner grab my attention.  Stegner was a good writer in the fiction vein, too.  A short story of his, “Genesis,” might just be the best short I’ve ever read.  In it a young man from England comes to Canada to start a new life and finds work on a large ranch.  He learns hard lessons from herding cattle in a blizzard and saving the life of a man he detested.  

Kelton’s The Good Old Boys and Schaefer’s Monte Walsh both feature characters who love the old way of cowboying, and just can’t conform to the loss of the open range.

Well, friend, I hope that answers your question.  Do I get paid for reviewing books?  Nah, although one time my editor did say that while he couldn’t pay me for doing it, he would buy me a drink at the next convention.  That was a few years ago.  I’m still waiting for that drink.