The Story of a Stranded Wagon Train

In our grandparents day serialized stories ran in the newspapers and provided reading pleasure for many. Pay a visit to the state archive library in Bismarck where you can read them in the microfilms of old newspapers. Since we’ve already experienced too much snowy weather this year, a story came to mind of another winter when a three-day blizzard trapped a slow-moving wagon train near present day Lisbon. It is December, 1867, and it will take a few issues of this newspaper to tell it.

The Story of a Stranded Wagon Train, Chapter One

We always start rolling early, as long as it isn’t snowing sideways like it does sometimes. Ox teams don’t cover much ground in a day, so we get them hitched up and start making those leather bullwhips pop.  It was a brittle December morning that made thick clouds of steam rise from their backs.

Today we headed east from Fort Ransom with an ox train of forty empty wagons. After they’d finished building the fort, their warehouse stood bare and needed stocking with supplies. The owner of our outfit, Don Stevenson, held a government contract to transport goods to the new fort. We’d come all the way from the Mississippi docks at St. Cloud where we’d loaded forty covered wagons with freight a few days ago. We hauled blankets, pots and pans, towels, flour sacks, sugar sacks, bags of dried beans, cases of canned peaches, ammunition, firearms and plenty more odds and ends I can’t even remember. 

Since the frontier kept edging westward, Fort Ransom had sprung up to protect settlers, gold miners, and railroad construction crews from Indian attacks. They named it after some Civil War general who nobody seemed to know much about, but Grant and Sherman thought he deserved the honor. Word was about two hundred men would live and patrol from here. It seemed like a nice location with access to a plentiful supply of spring water.

At any rate, it was good to get moving again. We’d had plenty of time to make repairs on our wagons and rest up. Besides everyone was getting restless and sick of the squabbling with the soldiers. It might not have been long until gunfire would start and somebody’d get hurt. Did I say we hauled cases of whisky to the sutler. Well, those bored troopers got into it. A lot of those uniformed men were what they called galvanized Yankees, in other words turncoat Southerners who’d been in Northern prison camps and thought maybe the Northern army wasn’t so bad because they seemed to eat pretty regular.

Our drovers are a mixed lot - Metis, freed slaves, even some Irishmen who couldn’t find work anywhere else, plus a couple like me who don’t know where they belong. Stevenson, the fellow who owns the outfit, he’s a Scotchman. At nighttime around their campfires, they separate into tight little birds of a feather groups. The wagon boss is big and strong and keeps a tight rein on the outfit, so even if the men don’t get along, they mind their manners because they don’t want to face him after he lays down his law.

It’s a good thing the boss has never tried to tone down our language. I think my mama would faint if she heard just a couple minutes of what came out of the mouths of these vulgar old bullwhackers. When I was still home she tried to raise me up right, and if I ever slipped a cuss word out, she’d scream blasphemy and shove a bar of soap in my mouth. All her efforts have gone to naught because this outfit’s salty language has rubbed off on me, and I can cuss with the best of them. 

In the next installment, Chapter Two -  the wagons move out.