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My Fourteen Months on the Claim We (Hattie, her husband Krogh and two small sons, Norman and Grant) left
Highlandville, Iowa the latter part of March 1901, and came to Balfour,
North Dakota by rail in an immigrant car. The car was packed with homesteaders,
going out to file on land and get rich quick. Just so one got a title
to 160 acres of land, we would all be rich. That was the idea of the homesteaders
and there was quite a rush for a homestead. We drove from Balfour on a cold windy day, the latter part of March,
and stopped at a big ranch where the bath houses are now (by Brush Lake),
till we got our shack built. We moved into a 12x12 shack, as we called
it, with my husband and two little sons. We had three miles to my nearest
neighbors and I had never seen them. The grade (road) west of the schoolhouses
was all lake then, and we could hardly cross with a lumber wagon. Some
more homesteaders moved in, some had horses along. There were four neighbors
that had each a team. There were horse thieves around so the boys took
turns to watch their horses during the night. They kept it up a week and nothing happened. One night when they were
all sleeping the horses disappeared. They had a ranchman we stayed with,
and they had to pay $25 to get them back. He brought them the next day,
as they did not know where to find them. The homesteaders were moving fast now, and they were all nice people.
We were all there to make good and help each other. My nearest neighbor
(to the north) was a family by the name of Roberts. Most of the others
were bachelors and we started to bake bread for them. The other provisions
they had and would keep, but bread wouldn’t. I had a little laundry
stove, with a drum in a pipe, where I could bake six to nine loaves a
day and sold them. I was glad to have it to do, as there was nothing else
to do. The latter part of July my husband came home, and we went down to Washburn
to buy a cow from a man by the name of Sunstrum. Mrs. S couldn’t
speak English, so she talked Swede, and I talked Norwegian, and we had
a nice visit. They invited us to stay overnight, and we did. We went to
Washburn the next morning and got provisions for another month, and got
our cow home. We had our first blizzard the 12th of Sept. I got my cow and calf up
to our hay shack so I saved them, but there were lots of them that lost
cattle in the storm. One man lost his life going out to look for his cattle.
He walked 30 miles before he gave up. They found him the next summer.
My husband came home the day after the storm. We built a bedroom and
a coal shed onto our house, and fixed up for the winter. We had a long
hard winter. It started to snow Nov. 1 with 2 to 4 ft. of snow on the
level. There was so much tall prairie grass then the snow stayed. It kept
on snowing and blizzarding all winter. We had five steps in the snow from
our door step up to the level of the snow. It stayed until the 11th of
April. Easter Sunday was the first warm day. I was expecting a baby soon, I did intend to go to Harvey to the hospital,
but as the winter stayed on so long, and when the weather was settled,
I didn’t dare to make the trip. We got a lady doctor from up northwest
before anything happened. So on the evening of the 3rd of May, Martha
was born. I had provided for a layette, amongst that, all necessary safety
pins, but the lady didn’t have any use for them. When the time came
for her to dress the baby, she had found some common pins and commenced
to put them in the band and diapers and all over. How I begged her to
use the safety pins. She told me the others were fine, when one knew how
to put them in. she must have known, because I never found any marks from
them. But they disappeared when I got my hands on them. On top of that, my brother and sister back home (in Iowa) kept writing
my father was dying from cancer. He was begging for me to come back, but
I couldn’t leave the homestead until June 2nd. One morning a man stopped with three of the nicest and biggest horses
I have ever seen, he wanted breakfast. I gave it to him, but we knew he
was a horse thief. He had stolen horses up by Anamoose and traveled all
night. The next day the man he had stolen the horses from came trailing.
He told us he had paid $700 for the horses that spring. We heard later
he caught him and the thief paid the penalty. He was hung. He had stolen
too many. |
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