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.