It’s fun to let my mind’s eye watch characters and events come to life through windows opened to the past. So it was with the discovery of William Wade’s stories found hidden away on a dusty library shelf. Books play a large part of my life and were present in the home where I grew up. Many of them dealt with old west themes. For example, I believe Dad had collected most of the Zane Grey novels, in addition to many other books. He had always liked to read and said he would order a new book whenever he could put a few cents together.
Wade’s stories let me accompany a participant of events that interested me. For instance, he told of events you can’t read about anywhere else. How about General George Custer when he brought the 7th Cavalry to Fort Rice? He was a dog lover and kept a pack of hunting dogs with him that he sometimes let roam free on the Missouri River bottom. Woodhawks worked there cutting wood to sell to steamboats to use for fuel.
The workers’ diet depended on the wild game found nearby. However, when the dogs started running through the area, they scared the game off. That wild game supplied the woodhawks with their meat supply, something the hard-working men needed. We’ll let Wade describe what happened.
“We were cutting wood above Fort Rice. Nearly every day the dogs would come into the woods, unaccompanied by men, and follow deer trails and bay and bark. Well, one day when two of our men were coming in from a fruitless hunt for meat to eat, they met two of those hounds in the woods. They each picked one, raised their rifles and squeezed them off, and two deer chasers that came into the woods that morning didn’t go out at night. When the dogs showed up missing at the fort, soldiers hunted until they found the corpus delecti and Mr. Custer was very vexed.”
Custer ordered his men to go out and arrest the wrong doers. Wade followed with this, “Needless to say, they could never find anyone who saw or heard the shooting.”
Wade was a self-professed “squatter” on his ranch holdings, but that’s what any rancher was at that time. It simply means they began their operations before township and county governments became established and instituted such things as taxes for roads and bridges. We have ridden over some of the prairie, buttes, and gullies on that land where the Cannonball River cuts its path and saw it is best suited as grazing land. The operators of the ranch ran a large herd of bison on it and fenced it with strong, four-strand barbed wire.
His daughter, Mamie Weeden, urged him in 1926 to tell the stories included in the book and got him to sit still in his old age to dictate his passages of memory. Like so many of us, she wished she would have recorded her parents. She said, “Oh, I tell you, I’m just so sorry that I didn’t carry a notebook and a pencil and follow my dad around twenty-four hours of the day because he had so many stories to tell.”
He hired on to help cut logs and build Fort Yates. That tale reminded me of something I had seen in relation to it. They were to be on the lookout for the sacred relic stone shaped like an Indian woman with a child on her back that was highly revered by the Indians. Here’s my possible connection: in the early 1980s our family visited the little town of Shields, North Dakota, which is in the neighborhood of these thoughts. A lady named Carrie Weinhandl lived there and maintained an informal museum of artifacts common to the area.
She pointed to an upright rock, maybe three feet high, standing in the corner. “Don’t you think that looks like a woman with a baby?” she asked. It did. Had the rock for which the Standing Rock Reservation ended up there, I’ve wondered. It’s a moot question since we can’t go back to study it. A huge prairie fire in July, 2002, completely destroyed the town, including Carrie Weinhandl’s house/museum. Did the fire get so hot as to shatter the rock, or when cleaning up, buried in the rubble and pushed into a hole? A couple years ago, while in Fort Yates, I saw the rock they claim for Standing Rock, and to me it does not look like a woman with a baby.
Another story Wade told must be included in this context. It has to do with woodchoppers again. Two of them had been working and stacking wood north of Bismarck and found themselves surprised and trapped in a dense snowfall that stopped any travel. Their horses had run off and they were 50 miles from any community. They holed up in a shack that was not weather proof. The roof leaked and dripped onto their gunpowder. Now they could not hunt for food and sat languishing in their hut. Days passed and desperation started setting in.
The quick wits of one of them saved them when he saw a mouse run across the table where they were playing cards. He grabbed and caught it. His partner said, “Don’t tell me you are going to eat that mouse.” No, he needed it to bait their hook and line. He caught a large catfish in the Missouri River. I’ve enjoyed reading Wade’s book.
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