The Post-Hole Banks

In the days of the old west when ranches were huge affairs and financial institutions were few and far between, much cattle business was conducted with gold and silver coins. A historian and storyteller named J. Frank Dobie wrote a short piece called “The Post-Hole Banks” in which he told of Texas ranchers with coins on hand hiding them away from thieves who might come looking.  

     According to Dobie one method of safekeeping required pulling a corral fencepost from the ground, dropping a bag of coins in the hole, and then replacing the post. The location of the stash was sometimes forgotten because if the rancher had hidden them in the dark of a moonless night, he might need to pull out a number of posts to find it again. Possibly some bags of coins were still buried and forgotten when an owner died which caused treasure seekers to snoop around and start lifting posts.  

     Readers, please forgive the writer for what he is about to do when he construes a metaphor from the point of forgotten post-hole treasure with family history buried in graves. No matter the cost, we’ll run with it. It has to do with an unresolved line of family lost to me which my genealogy-inclined wife understood but I never quite grasped.

     Along Highway 46 at a spot between Leonard and Kindred stands the nicely maintained West Prairie Church and its cemetery on the north side of the road. It came to mind again when a posting on Facebook’s “North Dakota History of Cities, Towns, and Places” caught my eye. It pictured a large family dressed in their Sunday best. Placed there by a man named Norm Vangsness, he had added this description: “The Vangsnes clan about 20 yrs after settling in ND around the turn of the century.”

     I showed it to Mary who said, “Sure, they’re in the West Prairie cemetery and are your relatives. I think we took a picture of their gravestone.” Yep, after a short search we found the picture with the names Rev. Ole K. Vangsness and Christiana M. Vangsness carved into the marker; they were the ones on the picture; they are my great-great-grandparents. Then a clear picture started forming.

     They had a daughter named Helene, my great-grandmother. It so happens she is one of those few buried in that once almost forgotten Pioneer Cemetery in the sandhills east of Sheldon. She gave birth to my grandmother Clara and her brother Davy but died later after giving birth to a third child. Like so many gravestones of that era, hers was made of sandstone and the harsh elements of weather have taken a destructive toll on it. In the last few years we have made an annual visit to her grave to plant a flower. Happily and much to his credit, a volunteer groundskeeper maintains the site after a community group cleared and cleaned the overgrown site some twenty years ago.

     The blood line continued in my maternal grandmother’s life who was then buried in the nearby Helendale Cemetery and it has continued through my mother on to my grandchildren who we’ve updated about their great-great-great grandparents. 

     We haven’t yet met Norm Vangsness but have plans to do so in the future. He possesses a well-researched family history which he willingly shared with us. It arrived via email,  consists of fifty pages, and gave us some mighty informative reading.  From all its dates and names I can even prove that George Bunn and I are third cousins. The year 1500 points to the earliest entry which for me means fifteen generations ago. 

     Numbers of grandparents keep accumulating. Each one of us has four grandparents. Skip back, let’s say to the fifth generation where Ole and Kristianne reside on my family tree, that number now totals 128 grandparents. Hard to believe, but my personal genetics derive from that rather crowded field alongside the other relatives from my father’s side. Those people are buried in the past, much like a bag of gold in a post hole, valuable but lost, found only by digging.

Birthday Limerick

February 16, 2021 

Thank you all for the wonderful, much appreciated birthday wishes! It inspired me to write a Limerick.

Thoughts on turning seventy-nine:

For the shape I’m in, I’m feeling fine.

Some parts are gone,

But I get along,

And hope my brain’s not in decline.

I know, it was corny, but kind of true.

A Few More Train Stories

 

While thinking back to the first time these articles received ink in The Independent, I stopped to count on my fingers how many editors I’ve submitted them to. There have been four, maybe five, but for whatever the reason that they’ve moved on, all of them have been gracious in accepting my written offering.

     Sometimes, though, when sitting down to write, not much flows through my fingertips to the keyboard which can send me to the medicine chest to take a Tylenol. I have ongoing conversations with this little guy sitting on my shoulder who whispers, “Quit if you can’t do it anymore.”  Then, by chance, I might spot a word or phrase that makes me brush the little guy off and dig in again. So it was when I glanced at my recent book cover “Faint Echoes,” that sports a picture of an old time railroad engine.

     So many stories can be found about those old railroads, and I’ve got a collection of unused stories gleaned from old newspapers.  How about this one from 1883 when there was a traveling chapel on the Northern Pacific Railroad under the auspices of the Episcopalian Church. It held an altar and seats and would be sidetracked in some small town for a week or two. There it would remain for a weekend or more and services would be held for the people of the community who otherwise never had any sort of public worship. Mr. Fred Underwood recalls seeing this car in Sheldon twice in the summer of ’83.

     In 1885, a man who rode in a sealed box car loaded with salmon from Portland, Oregon was heard crying for water in the N.P. yards in Fargo. He was promptly arrested. Something about the lure of a locked car kept people interested. In 1901 a couple of hoboes broke into a refrigerator car at Enderlin and appropriated a head of cheese and some crackers.

     In 1909 the papers reported this about the state prohibition of alcohol and the unquenched thirsts. It could be said where there was a will, there was a way. Railroads surreptitiously shipped the desired goods in sugar barrels which held 72 bottles of beer. One Moorhead agent of a big brewing company claims to have shipped 133 rail cars filled with barrels of “sugar” into North Dakota since the first of the year and asserted the business was growing. 

     Hoboes who rode the trains when answering the call for labor in the harvest fields faced dangers. In 1915 we find the story out of Anselm on the Soo Line that reported a tough bunch of gun men were frequenting the harvest fields of the vicinity. They were waylaying laborers and robbing them of their earnings. When the train was well underway from the station, the gun men who at first blended in with the rest of the hoboes in the boxcar would flash a gun and begin their dirty work. They’d take whatever valuables they could find and then make them jump from the moving train.

     Near Fingal the same stunt was tried, and one of the robbed men suffered a broken arm plus other injuries after he jumped. He then managed to walk back to town from where he was taken to the hospital in Valley City for treatment. 

     News from McLeod reported transient laborers were moving west in great numbers and every train had a capacity load. Some were heading back east but the majority headed west. The writer stated there should be no shortage of men this fall judging from the large numbers coming into the state. We’re not told if these men had simply hopped on the train or were paying customers.

     In 1917 the passenger train on the N.P. ran into the freight train at Buttzville and completely demolished the the cow catcher on the engine and smashing up the caboose of the freight. The freight was running ten minutes ahead of the passenger and bucking the snow off the track. When it reached Buttzville the passenger train was so close that a flagman could not stop it. The day was blizzardy and when the engineer of the passenger train saw the danger ahead, he applied the brakes. The cars slid over a hundred feet on the frosty rails. The passengers were shaken up somewhat when the trains hit but were soon on their way again after the freight engine took them into Lisbon. Later the east bound freight towed the crippled engine into Fargo.     

     We have a copy of the Grant County history book that relates one of my favorite railroad stories that would never happen today. Quote, “The first Milwaukee train arrived in Shields in 1910. They had to stop to open and close gates where the railroad went through Charley McLaughlin’s pasture and the Parkin’s lease.” Imagine that scene! And that will be enough train stories for awhile.  

The Greatest Generation(s)

 

The veteran newsman Tom Brokaw recently announced his retirement which set me to thinking about some of the stories he’s reported. A big one I remember was that night in 1989 when he stood at the Berlin Wall and brought the news of its fall to television viewers. It so happened he had the “scoop” on that event because he was the only newsman present. His competitors had turned in for the night.  He worked at reporting for 55 years and was a familiar face on NBC news programs.

     What he might be most remembered for are his books, especially the one titled “The Greatest Generation.” It’s familiar to many people since it has sold almost four and a half million copies. He received inspiration for writing it after visiting the site of D-Day on its 40th anniversary and walking the beaches with veterans. He said at that time he “underwent a life-changing experience,” that he’d come to understand what this generation of Americans had meant to history. He came to call them the greatest generation any society has ever produced.

     Brokaw took some inspiration from the work of Stephen Ambrose, a historian who wrote several books dealing with the experiences of military people in World War Two. His story “Band of Brothers” earned a lot of attention with big sales and went on to be developed into a popular HBO video series by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Maybe the argument can be made they became interested because of the potential for making money. That aside, it did bring some of the war to us who had never participated in one. 

     A statement Ambrose made and thought so apt that he quoted it in three different books went like this about the veterans, “They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1.” He is credited with the founding of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans which I’ve visited briefly, but our time schedule didn’t permit a lingering view.

     Ambrose wrote several based on World War II including “The Wild Blue” about the men who flew the B-24s over Germany. It featured a one-time senator of South Dakota George McGovern who piloted a bomber on 35 missions. He spoke in Bismarck one evening, we went, and afterward I was able to ask him how he coped during those missions? He answered very simply, “I was scared all the time.”

     Since Band of Brothers, other books about Company E, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne have appeared. Mike Ranney, a man from Sheldon was a member of that company. He is mentioned in most of the books about Company E.

     I have several books on my shelf that talk about other wars and other veterans, too. David Halberstan’s “The Coldest Winter” offers a picture of fighting men in the Korean War and doesn’t forget to discuss the politics surrounding it along with the complications of China sending soldiers.

     The Vietnam War spawned many books and movies. Since I’ve known several people who served then, I wanted to get close to its history. Tim O’Brien’s personal story titled “The Things They Carried” interested me enough to reread it several times. So has “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young” by Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway. They were both present at the particular Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam, one as the commander and the other as a journalist.

     Another Vietnam story, “A Rumor of War” by Philip Caputo, can send chills down your spine when reading it. The mood of the book can best be described with something he stated in his prologue, “I have made a great effort to resist the veteran’s inclination to remember things the way he would like them to have been rather than the way they were.”

     There have been more wars and military engagements since Vietnam and they’ve inspired more literature. But this will end the big circle taken since we first talked about Tom Brokaw’s retirement. Even though he will no longer will appear before a camera, he promises to keep writing. I would imagine he will not forget the people who do the heavy lifting in this country. As a final note, the letter “s” has been added to the title making it a plural speaking of more than one generation.

Where Did That Name Come From?

 

In our estimation television programming suffers for quality, except for public television, namely the Prairie Public station in this area. They produce a lot of thoughtful and satisfying viewing for our household. One program that always gets checked out on Friday nights is Austin City Limits as well as other music shows that follow it. Recently the one called Songs at the Center featured a singer/songwriter with the interesting name of Erin Enderlin.

     I’ve heard stories that Enderlin’s city name refers to the progress of building the Soo Line and is simply an alteration from its one time “end-of-the line.” So if it was such a unique made-up name, it probably does not exist elsewhere. Wrong! 

     A family member named Dean A. Enderlin posted a lengthy article in 2000 titled “The Origin and Meaning of the Enderlin Family Name.”   He concludes the name is Germanic in origin and literally means “The Line of Ender.” Elsewhere we can find where a man named Henry Enderlin arrived in South Carolina in 1738, and the family grew to the point where Family Ancestry found 42 Enderlin families living in New York. Someone in the early days must have thought it was the right name for this new town. Furthermore, if you want to hear see and hear Erin Enderlin sing, find her videos on Youtube.

     We’ve written before about Ransom County’s being named after General Ransom which seemed appropriate in 1873 at the time of the county’s formation. Towns sprung up and all needed an official name for post office purposes. Here’s a bit of name history. For instance the county seat Lisbon was founded in 1880 by Joseph L. Colton who named it after Lisbon, New York, his wife’s hometown.

     Sheldon came into being with E. E. Sheldon’s purchase of the land and having it surveyed and platted in 1881. He never lived there, instead maintained his residence in Michigan. Sheldon only held title to the land for a year or so before selling it for a probable profit.

     Mail to McLeod was originally addressed to Sandoun for the many sand dunes in the area. It was renamed McLeod for local realtor J. J. McLeod. Many other town sites have been identified on maps through the years: Elliott, Englevale, Owego, Buttzville, Jenksville, Plymouth, Ruscoe, Brockway, and maybe more. Some still exist, each has its own history. We don’t have room to get into more depth on them but we know somebody had reason for giving them their name.

     A question arose after the recent article I wrote as to what I meant by calling the old railroad engines 4-4-0s. It refers to the wheel arrangement where the front four wheels of the undercarriage pivoted to help guide the engine into curves followed by four powered wheels to propel the engine with no trailing wheels. As engines developed many other configurations came into being. One of the biggest was the Union Pacific’s Big Boy engine with a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement.

     At any rate the 4-4-0s had quite a history in the United States. This region developed rapidly after railroad tracks reached into the countryside. The photo displays my model of one of them that was commonly used to pull trains filled with people, livestock, merchandise, and machines that allowed towns and farms to grow.

     About 25,000 engines of this type were built. In 1882 to demonstrate the strength and safety of the new railroad trestle over the Missouri River at Bismarck the Northern Pacific Company parked eight of them. The bridge held.

     Two 4-4-0s sat parked head to head in 1869 when the golden spike was driven at the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad line. In the movie The Great Locomotive Chase a 4-4-0 engine was seized by Union volunteers to raid and destroy Confederate infrastructure. The Bonanzaville Museum in West Fargo displays one built in 1883 that remained in service until 1945.

     I’ve not been a railroad buff except for being interested in some of its history, and only recently I came into possession of a model engine which clearly illustrates the wheel arrangement. The accompanying picture of it happens to be featured on the front cover of my latest book titled Faint Echoes. They will cost $24.50 which includes tax and postage. If interested in ordering one, email me at lynn.bueling@gmail.com.