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It was one of those wild hairs. Coming home from Montana,
I decided to go looking for cable cars. In North Dakota. Obviously not
cable cars of the San Francisco sort.
I’m talking about platform-cars that hang attached to pulleys on
cables strung across the Little Missouri River, a little stream that lies
at the bottom of a big valley running through the hills and badlands of
far western North Dakota. These precarious, home-made conveyances are
used in places far from any bridge to carry people and goods across the
river when the water is too high to ford.
The most famous of these is the Kruger cable car, not far north of the
South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. With a good map of the
Little Missouri National Grassland I made my way to the site, pulling
up on the east side of the river.
The frame of the rectangular car is of angle iron, the floor steel mesh.
There is a plank seat on each end. A pair of automotive wheel rims on
each side ride the two half-inch steel cables that stretch across the
river. A gas engine belted to a shaft turns one pair of wheels for motive
power in crossing. To come back you have to loosen the belt and reverse
the drive.
The car is pretty stable on the twin cables, but that was not much comfort
to my Labrador retriever, forced to sit on the swaying car and pose for
the camera. After taking photos we descended the steep bank and waded,
thigh-deep in cool cappuccino, unforgiving rocks on bare feet, toward
the ranch on the west side. This is the place that used to be known as
the Bellows Ranch.
Kermit and Cassie Kruger, owners since 1970, weren’t home that day,
but I got them on the telephone to ask about the story of the cable car.
It seems Kermit and some neighbors built it in 1971, using a cut down
Javelin auto body for the original car. In the mid-1990s they replaced
the Javelin with the angle-iron-and-mesh car. They use the cable car about
half the year, fording the rest of the time.
“The biggest need was school,” Kermit answers in response to
my question, Why? When the Kruger kids started school, at what was known
as the Meyer school, it was on the east side of the river. The teacher
and the Krugers lived on the west side. The teacher would ride horseback
to the Kruger yard each morning and take the cable car across the river
with the kids. After a couple of years they moved the school into a mobile
unit on the Krugers’ side.
The Krugers still had foster kids on the place, and used the cable car
to catch a school bus on the east side to grade school in Medora or high
school in Belfield. How do they like it, I asked. “It’s a big
thrill for them,” Kermit says.
Occasionally too big a thrill. One day in about 1975 the river was running
bank full. Kermit was away, attending his brother’s wedding. Cassie
and a Kruger son were aboard the cable car in mid-river when it flipped
and dipped, putting them into the river. Fortunately, the force of the
water held them into their seats. It was hard to get out, but they did,
and they walked the twisted cables to shore. “We almost met our maker,”
Cassie recalls.
Kermit continued to make improvements, including a transmission on the
engine, so you no longer have to reverse the drive manually. Crossing
the river sitting high on a cable car would be fun, I think. The first
couple of times. This is one of those inconveniences, however picturesque,
that go with living in a beautiful, barely accessible place on the plains.
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