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.

More about the cemetery and Pigeon Point

As a followup to my recent Facebook post describing our tour through the sandhills area a few days ago, I’ll now post the picture of the billboard at Pigeon Point we parked by. We dug through some old pictures and found a couple from the time ten years ago when Dennis Bjugstad, Larry Strand and I went to the site of the old way station at Pigeon Point. All that  remains are a few depressions in the ground, sort of semi-basements of the onetime log structures built above them. Hordes of pigeons lived in the area, so thick they could be knocked out of the trees with a stick. The meat of the bird could be dressed and eaten, and historical references tell me hunters salted them down and shipped them in barrels to markets.

The pictures of the Pioneer Cemetery I put up then showed a nice neat ground, mowed grass, branches and brush cleared out, and a surrounding fence to keep livestock out. The first time we visited was 40 years ago. Note the difference. A well-motivated community group transformed it some years back and did a good job. Now Roger Sandvig volunteers his time keeping things in order. (I hope I’ve not neglected naming anyone else who volunteers.)

The marker on which I’m resting my hand is the same one that Mary stood by 40 years ago, only it’s missing its tiptop. As far as the ground cover goes there is a world of difference between the two. It’s hard to imagine 40 years have passed from the first time we visited, or for that matter, that 10 years have passed since we three guys visited Pigeon Point.

Cooped Up

Cooped up long enough, we drove to the country yesterday and headed for the Sheyenne National Grasslands, better known to locals as the government pasture. It’s always pulled me to visit, probably because I have a lot of relatives buried in its old cemeteries. As we drove along I took note of the wet fields along Highway 46 on into Coburn Township. It will be late spring planting for too many acres.

Because it’s so late, not much green shows on the hillsides yet. But when we got to the sandy soil where the cemeteries are, the dead grass crunched underfoot. A fire would travel fast with the yesterday’s wind blowing strong enough to take my hat.

A few days ago Mary said she wanted to see some birds, and as we walked through the pasture we heard a lot of meadowlarks singing their songs. 

The Pioneer Cemetery sets back from the road and can be missed quite easily. People do get to it, though, as evidenced by the names signed in the ‘guest book’ stuck in the mailbox. When we’ve been there before we never thought to open the mailbox and notice one was in there, but now that we found we found it was almost filled up. The last visitors were there Saturday, the day before. In that burial ground I have a great-grandmother and her newborn daughter. The baby was stillborn, the mother died about one month later.

In the area where the Owego schoolhouse used to sit we saw farm machines working. It wasn’t too wet there. The Owego Church cemetery holds quite a few relatives, in fact the husband of the aforementioned great-grandmother is there. When she died, he remarried and they were buried together.

We started making our way home and came to Pigeon Point. We parked at the signs and stood there reading when another car driven by a single lady pulled in behind us. She said she was geocaching and was about .2 mile from her target. She had come down from Grand Forks to spend the day in the country like we had done. I thought she looked about college age, probably at UND, and said something to that effect. No, she’s an 18-year veteran in the Air Force and holds the rank of Major. I know I’m getting old and almost all the girls look young, but I missed the mark on her. 

Dedicated to a Cause

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to praise things you want to protect. Let me explain. Edward Abbey who became known for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies wrote a number of books in defense of his stance. In one of them, ‘Desert Solitaire,’ a million-seller, he told of working as a seasonal ranger in Arches National Park and loving its beauty and solitude interrupted by very few tourists. People strewing trash, trampling rare plants, damaging geologic formations, and endangering wildlife upset him, but since his writing extolled the park’s virtues and awakened public desire, people wanted to step into this beauty themselves. 

Partly because of his book, visitation rose from about 30,000 visitors at the time he wrote in 1968 to almost two million now, a number which prompted park officials to draw up a traffic congestion management plan in 2015. 

Although he authored several books and essays, one other title became very popular, ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang.’ If taken too seriously, it might encourage acts of anarchy and vandalism. The story centers around a gang of four people who set out to protect the wilderness and destroy or booby-trap heavy construction machines. A favorite pastime of the gang was sawing through posts holding billboards that blocked their view of the landscape.

An anecdote from Abbey’s younger self illustrates that a bit of deviltry and anarchy ran through his veins. As a college student at the University of New Mexico, he and a few others rounded up some old tires one evening and dumped them into a dormant volcano. After setting the tires alight, they enjoyed the worried reaction around town next morning when people spotted the dark smoke rising from the presumed-dead cone.

One of Abbey’s often repeated quotes states, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Some ranchers too near a burgeoning Denver, Colorado seem to agree because seven of them have placed conservation easements on their 86 square miles of shortgrass prairie, an endangered ecosystem.  

A picture accompanying this article in the Washington Post shows a housing development abutting this large parcel that’s surely left the developers salivating when prevented from gobbling it up. These easements will prevent any developers from ever building on this land.  Some call such agreements as “cows over condos” and currently protect about 5 million acres in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado.

I’ve commented before about my distaste of the spreading footprint in cities like Fargo which is covering oh-so many acres of the world’s richest land “where they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The option would be to grow upwards, but for now, city limits continue to swell outward. 

While a student at Stanford University, Abbey studied creative writing under a highly regarded voice of the West Wallace Stegner. In class, he joined other soon-to-become notable writers Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Larry McMurtry to name a few. Stegner earned a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in his own career and is considered “the dean” of Western writers. Stegner is one I would like to have studied under. We’ll look a bit closer at Stegner next week.

After living his mischief-making life, four of Abbey’s friends honored his request for burial. He did not want a normal burial. Friends followed his instructions and wrapped him in his sleeping bag, cooled him down with dry ice, placed him in the bed of a Chevy pickup, stacked five cases of beer beside his body, and sped off to a secret spot in the desert and dug his grave. His burial was much the same as the way he lived his life, fighting the norms. 

Family History Published

April 21 at 10:17 AM · 

Mary's worked toward this day for 10 years. She received the proof copy of her family history: Legacy of Felix and Braxada Leintz. 431 pages. All pictures and narratives are sharp and clear. After she approves it, the order goes in and next week we'll have copies in hand to send. Celebrate!

Bulls and Bears

I carved this scene for a stock broker back in 1997. For a good many years the bull was winning, but now it looks like the bear is drawing blood with his claws.