To add some gusto to our food, we add seasoning. Even though salt gets a thumbs down from doctors and dietitians, it remains a guilty pleasure. And I don’t remember ever hearing that pepper is harmful and often shake it liberally over eggs and meat for a little tang.
I like a few salty characters adding spice to my life, too. They’re easy enough to find, whether in the literature we read, the coffee shop where we hang out, our travels, or places we least expect to find them. It’s hard to imagine a life filled only with dull, bland people, or animals for that matter, who say or do little to set themselves apart and make our imaginations soar.
An area rancher named Don Stevenson owned Hell Diver, a horse that gave a few of his would-be riders something to remember. Hell Diver owned the reputation as being a tough horse to ride in those days in the early 1900s before rodeos became organized with a rulebook. This is the horse that threw one cowboy, ran off over the horizon, and when found, three weeks later, he had fattened up on prairie grass. He’d never been able to shed the saddle that kept tightening with each pound of fat gained.
Accounts tell of another cowboy who was injured when thrown from Hell Diver’s back. What kind of injury was it? I imagine it to have been a compound fracture with bones poking through his skin. Why do I think that? Well, a Doctor Shortridge from Flasher was called to treat him and needed an operating table that was promptly created with the help of onlookers who turned a wagon box upside down.
A movie could be made from facts of Ben Bird’s life that equals those of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, those famous characters Larry McMurtry patterned after Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. Bird, born in 1864, was raised in Texas and traveled north to Montana and North Dakota with three different trail drives. One of them caused him to shoulder a terrible burden. While taking a herd of horses to Ekalaka, Montana, rustlers ambushed them and killed his sixteen-year-old brother. He eventually settled in Almont, North Dakota. where the community recognized his strength of character.
In 1909, Almont drew laborers to work on the Northern Pacific which was just coming through. Bird now served as deputy sheriff and learned of a broad daylight holdup committed by one stranger upon another. The robber made his escape over the hills, but Bird caught up to him on horseback and shot in front of him to make him stop. The thief dropped to the ground as though dead and would not get up. Finally, Bird ordered him to get up or he would shoot him, whereupon he got up to be dealt with.
Saturday nights proved exciting with cowboys riding up and down main street spurring their bucking horses. In this scene rode a Norwegian named Ole Ramsland who embodied the wild west by riding his bucking horse, rolling a cigarette, and shooting his pistol, all at the same time. At times like this, because the boys respected Ben Bird, things calmed down when he walked into the middle of the street.
Many times people must take the situation in hand and act. This was surely the case when a young lady name Hulda Krueger was on the receiving end of a bull’s horn that gored her face. Her father brought the girl to a neighbor’s place thinking the farmwife could sew it up. She couldn’t, but since only oxen were available to transport her to Fargo, a trip that would take two days one way, they convinced her husband to set a needle and silk thread into boiling water and sew the girl’s face back together. The report stated she recovered quite nicely even though she sported a noticeable scar.
Sometimes, nothing can be done but to grin and bear it. A boy from the now extinct town of Buttzville, North Dakota, kept his wits about him to seek help in a farm accident. In the year 1898 when binders cut ripe grain, a fifteen-year-old boy was working alone in a field and when finished, reached down to disengage the gears. Too many exposed gears and chains in those days meant danger to a careless hand; it caught and jammed between a sprocket and link chain. He couldn’t extricate his hand and, in pain, had to drive his team of horses home with the other. Luckily a passerby on a township road heard his distressed shouts for help and stopped to help free him.
In those days when woodhawks camped along the Missouri River to chop and sell wood to passing steamboats, two men found themselves trapped in their rude shack by the unexpected onset of winter. To make matters worse, the leaky roof spoiled their gunpowder and left them powerless to hunt wild game. With the passing of time, they faced starvation unless they could find food. Deliverance came in the form of a mouse which one of the men grabbed. His partner asked if he was going to eat it. No, he placed it on a fishhook and caught a large catfish.
Extraordinary people and events add gusto to our thoughts and imagination. It’s fun to sprinkle them liberally over our stories. Dee Brown said, “Sometimes there isn’t enough material. There’s a story there and you can’t fill it in with facts, so you let your imagination run wild.” In the above examples I’ve listed all the available facts, but using Dee Brown’s philosophy, we can imagine each scenario in living color.
