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Growing up in western Kansas I had a few unhappy brushes
with skunks, but I never went looking for them on purpose. From what I
was told by old Ernie Zahn, of Velva, North Dakota, though, skunk hunting
was a pretty lucrative, if aromatic, occupation for his generation on
the plains. “Skunks were the number one fur-bearer in the country,”
he explained. “They were worth from $2.50 to $5.00 apiece. They were
graded short-stripe, long-stripe, and broad-stripe, and the shorter and
darker the skunk, the more it was worth.”
Ernie was born in 1915 to a German-Russian farm family in Dickey County,
North Dakota, the 12th of 13 children, and his father died when he was
just 3. So he and his brothers did all sorts of things to make a little
money and carry the family through.
“The first thing we would do in the fall,” he said, “after
the season opened November 1, was hit the culverts to take the skunks
out. We would start at 12:00 midnight, and then we would go all night
and all day.
“We got very efficient about this. We would go to a culvert, and
in fifteen or twenty minutes we could have the skunks out and be on our
way and find another one. We had equipment fixed up to get the skunks
out; we had barbed wire we would wind into the skunk’s hide or tail
and pull it out. We got as high as 16 skunks from a culvert, so this was
big business.”
How big? Ernie said, “One night we went out and we had 43 skunks
by morning, at 3 or 4 dollars apiece.” Darned good wages for the
1930s.
The job was not without risk, though. Once he and a brother checked out
a particular spot and, he recalled, “We looked in this culvert and
it was full of skunks. But the township crew had mucked one end of the
culvert shut.” The skunks were way at the plugged end, wedged in
tight, and the boys couldn’t get them out. So they dug out the end
of the culvert.
Then, “My brother, who was older than I was, he had a lot of guts,
he would get down and throw the skunks out. Then he got to one and he
couldn’t get it. He braced his feet and he gave another pull, and
when he let up, the skunk let go and scented him right in the face. He
went over backwards, couldn’t get his breath, he couldn’t see,
and he hollered, ‘He got me!’
“I went down and grabbed him by the hand and led him up onto the
road, opened up the pitcock on our Model T, drained some water out of
the radiator, he washed his face and we sat around until he recovered.
But we made forty or forty-five dollars for that bit of work.”
Believe it or not, Ernie found a woman who overlooked his skunk-hunting
proclivities and saw enough virtues to marry him. One fall he drove his
wife over to the normal school in Ellendale to get her teaching certificate
renewed. On the way home he cruised some fields and coulees for skunks,
digging into three dens and taking 18 skunks.
When he got home, a fur buyer drove into the yard just ahead of him, ready
to buy skunks. “He didn’t have to ask me if I had any, because
he could smell that I did.” The man bought Ernie’s skunks on
the spot for 52 dollars.
Subsequently his wife got a school to teach in McIntosh County—and
got forty dollars a month.
“So you see,” concludes Ernie, “furs were a very important
thing to us back in those days. We always had a lot of skunk. There wasn’t
too many people who went out and trapped skunk because of the scent and
all, but once you got used to it, it just didn’t seem to happen.”
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