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.
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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!
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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.
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