Sod Houses

We watched Tom Isern’s Plains Folk presentation last evening on Facebook. He sang an old folk song “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Plains,” and spoke of window wells so deep they could be sat in. My mother-in-law told stories of her youth living in a sodhouse and how she’d sit in the deep window well and watch for her parents to come back after milking the cows.

Isern and his wife Suzzanne are both NDSU professors who lend attention to the history of pioneer life on the Great Plains. Their show has appeared several times to date and can still be found archived on the Great Plains Facebook site. Given the comments they’ve received, it’s obvious it’s starting to catch on around the country.

Broken and Gelded

One line from Conrad Richter’s Sea of Grass remains in my memory: “That lusty pioneer blood is tamed now, broken and gelded like the wild horse and the frontier settlement.” 

I was reminded of it while researching a Western character who just happened to be a woman in Shields, North Dakota where she and husband Ott Black lived at one time. On the day the first Milwaukee train arrived in town, it was obvious the country wasn’t yet tamed, broken, and gelded. The train had to stop so the gates could be opened and closed where the railroad went through Charley McLaughlin’s pasture.

This town and area were bicultural. The Standing Rock reservation was close by, as was my wife’s childhood farm home. She tells about being in Shields with the family one Saturday night while they went shopping and she grabbed onto an Indian lady’s red coat thinking it was her mother’s. She doesn’t remember how long she tagged along with her but got scared when she found out.

Gone With the Wind

I carved several plaque/shelf pieces like this, and now I don’t even know where some of them ended up, including this one. Gone with the wind…

Mother's Day, 2020

An NDSU history professor, Tom Isern, and his wife, Suzzanne Kelley, the director of NDSU Press, have started producing a weekly Facebook program from their  home called Plains Folk. He’s folk-oriented and sings the praises of the old North Dakota settlers. Last Friday evening one tune contained the line about someone who trapped gophers for the bounty on their tails: “I’m gonna get a new outfit with my gopher tails this fall.”

After hearing it, my wife said don’t you remember the story your mother told about her brother, Marion (Sonny). Written on the back of this picture was her remembrance of how he’d trapped gophers until he got enough money - about $8 or $10 -  to buy the suit he is wearing in this picture. My mother is the oldest girl in the family and is seen sitting on the left.

Now, this Mother’s Day, 2020, I can’t help but think how young she was on this picture and how quickly her life passed. She was 94 years of age when she died and has already been gone six years. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

A Reversal

People who’ve lived their lives in concrete jungles do things like what we read in this headline from the New York Times: “The Trump Administration Is Reversing Nearly 100 Environmental Rules.” This doesn’t square with global warming, clean air, or protection of the wild things. - This old proverb comes to mind - “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Time to Take a Break

“…and now I didn’t seem to be finding other people who had done any of that.” So said Ivan Doig in the introduction to his popular memoir This House of Sky. He was referring to having done such things on the ranch where he was raised in Montana as working with lambs, picking rocks, bucking hay, digging wells by hand, and other manual labor jobs that few experience anymore.

I understand what he meant. Dad performed most of the jobs a veterinarian would be called to perform today. I held the lambs while his knife made wethers of the rams and  barrows of the boars. Shade tree mechanics, I helped overhaul engines and weld broken machines. We had a clipper mill, a hammer mill, scoop shovels, manure forks, hay forks, bale hooks, wire stretcher, and knew how to use each one.

The world is much different now, and I won’t pretend to criticize it, that’s just the way it is now and was then. To survive we performed many tasks manually, but today’s world features digital gizmos on which we punch buttons to operate. 

My wife and I got restless and felt we’d sheltered in place long enough and when the weather finally turned springlike a few days ago, we drove to the countryside. Our destination was the large Sheyenne National Grasslands south of Leonard, east of Sheldon, and north of McLeod to give a sense of location and about 110 square miles of public land to give a sense of size. We always called it the government pasture or sometimes the sandhills, and many times as a young boy I’d go with my mother and grandmother picking berries in season. I wasn’t any good for that but remember climbing the sand dunes and sliding back down for fun.

A small cemetery some call The Pioneer Cemetery sits back about a quarter mile from the road and where my great-grandmother and her stillborn daughter rest since 1892 beneath a weathered sandstone marker. A few miles down the road in a cemetery called the Owego Church cemetery her husband lies. A total of four cemeteries in the area hold several relatives on my mother’s side. The two mentioned, the one on Highway 46 by the West Prairie Church, and the Helendale Church cemetery south of Leonard. Things such as this make a person feel attached to an area.

The pioneers who lived and died here had to work with their hands and squeeze out a living by their wits. Things such as cars and airplanes hadn’t even entered their vocabularies yet, and there we were leaving the car on the road and walking in just for a little exercise. And talk about walking, we ended up at the Pigeon Point Preserve maintained by Nature Conservancy where bull whackers stopped overnight as they walked beside their ox powered wagons between Fort Abercrombie to Fort Ransom.

I need to set aside this weekly column because I have another project that I want to complete. My brain doesn’t handle doing too many things at once. If this paper wants my articles again, we’ll see how things look in the fall. Check out my blog - lynnbueling.blogspot.com - for up-to-date entries that I place in it occasionally. I can be reached at lynn.bueling@gmail.com (note the dot in this email address) if you come across something of interest that we could shape into a story for future telling. Adios!

Notables

Over the past few years I've enjoyed a journalistic and friendly relationship with Allan Burke who publishes the Emmons County Record in Linton, which I will add is a very good weekly. We recently corresponded with a pleasant exchange of information and he told me they were printing the following story I'd written awhile back:

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 upstanding citizen, what was that all about?

The stories just keep coming.

Another Trip to the Countryside

Yesterday (5-2-2020) we took another drive to the countryside, this time headed west on Highway 46 and drove to the Standing Rock site. How many times have we driven by it and never pulled in. I’m glad we did now. We learned the hill on 
which the stone stands was pushed up by glacial action, pushed from the northeast to form the depression for that large water area we could see off in the distance. Then we drove to Little Yellowstone Park, but there really wasn’t much to see yet, only the faintest blush of green on the trees. 

We headed south to the Fort Ransom area, missed a turn, and ended up west of Englevale and the Englevale Slough. That mistake wasn’t so bad though because it reminded me of the area where the haycutting crew put up their hay supply which 
burned up in the big prairie fire in 1867.
On the right road again, we came on the fort and made the requisite stop at the site where facts of history always play on my imagination. The writing rock is west of the fort and we drove down to where the sign pointed; we still haven’t found the darn thing. Again, I tried imagining how the fire roared down on the Metis encampment located down there someplace and how two little girls couldn’t outrun it after their pony cart turned over. In all, twenty of them burned to death.
As we neared Lisbon we made another stop - the Harris Ford. It’s significant because it works in tandem with the Shin Ford in Shenford Township. Because of these two river crossings wagon trains could head west from Pigeon Point in Owego Township via the shortest route. The option would’ve been to go around the big bend of the Sheyenne, thus adding more miles to their trip, like the wagon train did in the winter of 1867 and was stranded in a three day blizzard.
There is a lot of history in this area if we’d only go out to find it. There was only one little hitch in the giddy-up, one might say. At a hilltop site where a “point of interest” took us, I’d parked the car, got out, read the signage, took pictures and got back in. Here’s where it was pointed out I’d neglected my wife. With the car parked so her side was on the north, she couldn’t get her door opened in the strong wind that blew against it.