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Tour guides say that the only Spanish-American War monument
in North Dakota is the one by the courthouse in Grafton, in Walsh County,
but that isn’t quite true. There may be others besides, but I know
that Kindred, in southern Cass County, has a Spanish War monument with
an interesting story behind it.
And so here’s the story. Most of it comes from the research of one
of my fine students, Josh Eslinger. To him and all my other student researchers,
I always preach the necessity of getting to the primary sources, the basic
documents about the subject. In this case, the most interesting sources
are military service records from the National Archives.
The Kindred monument to the Spanish War of 1898 specifically memorializes
a soldier named Ole Lykken, an otherwise obscure fellow who died in the
Philippines. The war was greatly popular across the United States, including
North Dakota, whose national guard units competed as to which would be
sent into action. They all expected, of course, to be sent to Cuba to
help free the Cuban patriots seeking independence from Spain. Instead
many, like Ole Lykken, found themselves serving, in the Philippines.
In fact, twelve men from the First North Dakota Infantry received the
Congressional Medal of Honor for service first fighting the Spanish and
then subduing the Philippine insurrectionists who turned their arms against
the American occupiers. Ole Lykken was not one of these twelve.
He was just an ordinary private soldier, a Norwegian bachelor farmhand
who had come over from the old country shortly before the war, gone to
work on a relative’s farm, and then gone up to Fargo to enlist in
the First North Dakota. He landed with the regiment in Manila on July
31, 1898.
His time there was not particularly distinguished. According to his service
record, he got into a little trouble for what was termed “conduct
to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” Given an
order by a corporal for routine fatigue duty, Ole, they said, “did
willfully disobey the same.” A court martial sentenced him to a dockage
from his pay.
Much worse, Ole fell victim to what killed ten times more soldiers than
did Spanish bullets, disease. He was hospitalized first for malaria, then
for typhoid. Pneumonia set in, and he died in a Manila hospital on November
21. The routine report from his colonel on the disposition of the personal
property of the deceased was brief and to the point: “No effects
found.”
Some years later people in Kindred spearheaded by Ole’s kinsman Iver
Lykken and fellow serviceman Carl Rustad raised funds and planted a memorial
obelisk to Ole Lykken in the Kindred cemetery. Governor L.B. Hanna and
US Senator William Purcell participated in the dedication of the memorial
on Decoration Day, 1916. There were crowds, band music, and a full slate
of observances. After that, there is no record of any sort of ceremony
or remembrance around this Spanish War monument dedicated to a patriotic,
unfortunate, somewhat obstreperous (and therefore typically American)
veteran from Kindred, Ole Lykken.
Historians during the past twenty years or so have become increasingly
interested in historical monuments and what they reveal about our collective
memory of our history. They write about the controversies and changing
meanings of monuments like the Lincoln Memorial and those of the Daughters
of the Confederacy. Few of our historical monuments in North Dakota, though,
have any sort of controversy, or even remembrance, associated with them.
They are just forgotten. That’s the way it is with Ole Lykken’s
monument in Kindred. We might think about that.
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