The first wheat grown in Ransom County was seeded by Helmuth Schultz. After a successfulgrowing season, he and John McCusker cut the ripened straw with their scythes and gathered itup. When it had dried, they repeatedly drove their oxen over it until all the kernels had been trampled from the heads. We can imagine the next step in the scene by watching the men tossing forkfuls of it high in the air for the chaff to blow away on the breeze. Finally, with the wheat kernels separated, they sacked and hauled it forty miles to Fargo.
According to the historian Hiram Drache this all happened in 1875. He includes a chart titled “Population growth of Northern Pacific Railway Counties in North Dakota,” where we learn in
1880 only 537 people lived in the county. After the railroad came through in 1882, the number
jumped to 4,282 in 1885.
The slow trip taken by Schultz to Fargo was necessary if pioneer farmers wanted to sell their wheat or have it ground into flour. For several years the settlers faced this hindrance, and not until the railroad came through did they have an option.
In a meadow on the farm where I grew up ran a pair of tracks cut by wagon wheels. Inquisitive, I asked Dad why they were there. He’d been told it was once the wagon trail between Owego and Sheldon where settlers traveled to do business in Sheldon. When I placed a ruler down to connect the two locations, I proved to myself
the wagon tracks in our meadow lay right on the line.
The progress of the early railroads was followed closely in the newspapers. The March, 1882 Bismarck Tribune reported “The Fargo & Southwestern has fifty miles graded to New Lisbon,
the county seat of Ransom County, no work having been done this winter.” Later the same article stated, “Emigrants are pouring in to the country at an astonishing rate, making it an object to
build railroads rapidly.”
Perhaps the old proverb about haste making waste applies here. In September of 1882 as the construction crew kept pushing forward and lengthening the track, a horrific accident occurred five miles out of Davenport. A steam engine backed up too far, dropped off the end of the new track, and tipped. The escaping steam scalded the engineer to death. Work did not stop for long
and soon the crew returned to its work.
The Northern Pacific immediately saw benefits in catering to farmers. So-called emigrant cars delivered farm families, their equipment, and their animals to a new life. It shipped lumber and
other building supplies to them as well as to the new businesses setting up shop. When the train headed back to Fargo it carried the wheat and animals that farmers had started producing.
In March,1882, the superintendent of the local line said they were grading up convenient and ample driveways on side tracks where farmers can load wheat into cars. He went on explaining that in many cases the grade will rise to where the top of the wagon will be level with the boxcar door. In spite of the railroad’s effort to accommodate the farmer, this was still shovel work.
As people arrived in the county to settle on the land, the landscape of this tall grass prairie began
changing. Moldboard plows cut into the dense sod and turned it over to prepare for crop seeding.
As the amount of tilled acres increased, the classic clash of cattle and crops was inevitable.
Farmers didn’t appreciate their cattle or those owned by their neighbors walking over their
promising wheat crop. Nor would a farmer’s wife hold her temper when the neighbor’s bull
stood in her garden. The answer came down to two choices: herd the animals or fence the fields.
A brief mention in an 1886 edition of The Enterprise pointed to the preferred solution. “Barbed wire is going off so fast that Karl E. Rudd ordered his second carload this week. He is selling it
very low and farmers are taking advantage of it.”
Watching a man plowing caused one of the western artist Charley Russell’s Indian friends to remark, “Wrong side up.” That was the case in those severe drought years in the 1930s, especially in the fragile sandy soil in the eastern part of the county. The sand dunes created by the wind have now been tamed with a grass cover, but the undulating landscape remains. Letters sent to someone in McLeod in its early days actually went to the town of Sandoun.
While the land was blowing away, residents also had to contend with the historic depression that strangled the economy. The election of 1932 brought Franklyn Delano Roosevelt to the presidency. He soon set out to bring relief to the country suffering from this “double whammy.”
Part of his attention turned to areas like these sandhills in Ransom County where the sod was“wrong side up” and farmers had begun leaving. Roosevelt’s response was to create the Resettlement Administration (RA) which resettled farmers on more productive land, promoted soil conservation, provided emergency relief and loaned money to help farmers buy and improve
farms.
The politics of his actions aside, the foregoing outlines the county’s beginnings. We must conclude and skip to the present day where we recognize the land is filled with farm families, the
Fargo & Southwestern still rolls down its tracks, the fragile sandhills have healed, and fences keep livestock in. Modernization and improvements have delivered the area to its present status,
that of being one of the nicest in the state.
