I was born and raised on an Iowa farm where I worked for my board and room and a little spending money until I was 21 years old after which I received wages of $20 a month for a few months. But it didn't take me long to make up my mind that I would never own a farm of my own at that rate, so I asked for a week's leave and bought a round-trip homeseeker's ticket to Culbertson, Montana. I had seen an advertisement of homesteads there in an eastern paper.
As my ticket allowed for stopovers, when I reached Williston, ND, I got off the train and took a look around. It was about 4:00 one bright, cool morning the 21st of June. After the crowd had cleared away from the depot platform, I noticed a young man I remembered having seen on the train looking about as lost as I felt. Accosting him, I found out that his name was August Hills and that he had come out from Illinois and was also looking for a homestead.
We ate breakfast together and about 8:30 went to a real estate and locator's office, where they told us there wasn't much homestead land left near Williston without going a long way out, but there was some land across the river near Sidney, Montana and offered to locate us on homesteads there for $25.00 each. As we were both total strangers to the country we took them up and sending a man with us we took the next local to MonDak.
The June rise in the Missouri River was on and when we got there we found they had taken the ferry out for a few days, but looking around we found a man with a rowboat who for $1 each was willing to risk his life and ours to take us across in his boat. There were logs, trees and most everything else floating down the river, which we had to dodge. On the other side we hired a man with a team and spring wagon to take us up to Sidney where we arrived that evening. That night we parted with four bits apiece for a chance to sleep on a cot in the loft of Mrs. Ball's hotel.
The next morning we hired a team and buggy from Billy Ball's livery barn while our other team was getting rest and drove out to what they now call Mt. Pleasant, where we each picked out a homestead. We got back to Sidney in time for lunch, when the man who brought us up was ready to start back to Williston. We stopped at Ridgelawn to file our homesteads before U.S. Commissioner Guy Rood just 47 years ago this June, and got back to MonDak in time to catch the next train east.
When I got back to Iowa I had made such a quick trip my folks wouldn't believe me when I told them I had got a farm. Late that fall I bought a one-way ticket back to Sidney. I had corresponded with August Hills and we met in St. Paul and came on out from there together.
Hiring a would-be carpenter, we figured out some lumber bills to build cabins on our homesteads, and hired the lumber hauled out, one load for each cabin. Walter Quilling Sr., who had filed on a claim cornering mine had shipped out an emigrant car from Wisconsin earlier in the fall and had built a small house and a sod barn. He had brought four horses and four cows, they hauled their water from the creek a mile or so away.
We engaged board and room with them while we were building Mr. and Mrs. Quilling and two girls slept upstairs and there were five of us sleeping on the kitchen floor. In the morning we would have to roll up our beds and get them out of the way before Mrs. Quilling could get breakfast. The temperature got down to 20 below zero before we got through with our building. Around the first of the year Bert Coon drove over from his ranch on Lone Tree creek with a team and sled. He had been called to Glendive to serve on the jury and was looking for some one to run the ranch while he was away. As I didn't have anything holding me down I went with him and in and in a couple of days he left for Glendive on a saddle horse and I was left there on the ranch alone with Mrs. Coon and a little girl three or four years old, now Mrs. Lester Putnam, and a baby, now James Coon of Sidney, with 150 head of cattle to feed and weather getting colder and the snow deeper. That was the winter of the deep snow. Old timers still tell about it, we were just about completely snowed in before the spring thaw came.
When Con got back from Glendive the weather was getting so rough he hired me to stay the rest of the winter and when spring came he hired me for the rest of the season.
Joe Kelly was one of the first men or boys I got acquainted with that winter. He was working for Al and Charlie Obergfell, the Coon's nearest neighbors.
The Coons lived in a three room log house with a dirt roof, and the barn was of the same construction. One day toward spring a couple of men rode up to the ranch while Coon and I were out working around the barn and after a bit one of them puled a whiskey bottle out of his pocket and passed it around. I was just trying to get over a bad cold and thought a little drink would either make me feel better or worse so I tipped the bottle up and took a big swallow and nearly choked to death on it. But one cold night one of his prize Herefords had a calf and it was nearly dead when we found it but we took it in the house, by the stove, and fed it some whiskey with a spoon out of the bottle they kept in the medicine cabinet and it was soon up and wanting to run around. So whiskey seemed to be good for calves any how.
Lois Young, whose folks lived over on Mt. Pleasant, worked for Mrs. Coon most of that summer baby tending, etc. I think she was about 15 years old at the time. I got to take her over home and back once in awhile which was about the only diversion I had. Sidney had a 4th of July celebration that summer and the Coons drove in to town with a team and buggy and rode a saddle horse. About the middle of the afternoon a big wind and rain storm came up and put an end to the celebration. It raised the Lone Tree creek so high the Coons stayed in town over night but I went home to do chores and I could just barely make it across without swimming my horse. Of the more than ten months I worked for the Coons that was the first and only time I got to go to Sidney. We farmed that year but it seemed like we spent most of the summer making hay. He hired August Hills as a second hand for making hay. About the first three weeks we hayed up near the Wm. Pinkley ranch (Coon's brother-in-law). Coon drove home night but Hills and I stayed with the Pinkleys. We slept in an old log shack, and had not been in bed very long when we both began to scratch and Hills said there is something alive in this bed, so one of us got up and struck a match and we puled the covers back and there were bedbugs running for cover in every direction. We shook out the bed clothes and went outside and made our bed under the stars where we stayed for the rest of the time we were there. The mosquitos made it pretty interesting but we preferred them to bedbugs.
When we got back to the ranch any hay on the creek that was near we hauled up and stacked in the hay corral.
One day Hills let his team run away and busted up a nice basket rack and a new set of harness. The boss was pretty hard to live with for a few days after that. That fall (1907) Coon, Charlie and Al Ogergfell and two or three of the smaller ranchers gathered together about 170 head of fat cattle and we drove them to Glendive to ship to Chicago. Six of us went along on saddle horses, Al Obergfell, Billie Marshall, Harry Steel, Joe Crawford, Joe Kelly and I and Bert Coon drove the bed wagon. You could usually get something to eat at ranches along the way, but if you wanted to sleep in a bed you had to take it with you. We watched the herd at night in relays, two of us being with them all the time as we never knew when they would want to break for home. It took four days to get to Glendive and get them loaded. We had to cross the bridge over the Yellowstone river with them in bunches of not over twenty at a time. After we got the first bunch over we had cattle to hold at both ends of the bridge besides the bunches going over which kept us right smart busy for a while. Al Obergfell, Harry Steele and myself went east with the cattle. Steele left usat St. Paul and Al and I went on to Chicago without any mishap.
I took the train from Chicago back to where my folks lived in Iowa having been gone year and that was the first time I had ever been away formy sister Cora (now Mrs. Jay Swisse) came out from Iowa with me and kept house for me. As soon as the crop was in we found her a homestead out about eight miles from where Richey now stands, or 40 miles from my place, and for three years we migrated back and forth from my place to her's and then in 1913 I rented my homestead and moved my outfit out to her place where I farmed for three years. In June 1912 the railroad reached Sidney and there was quite a celebration over the event. The first crop I raised on my sister's place I had to haul 47 miles to Sidney to market and it took three hard days to make the trip. Wheat was from 60 to 75 cents a bushel then. In 1914 Richland County was carved out of Dawson county and an election was held the 16th of May for the voters of the proposed new county to decide whether they wanted to break off from Dawson county, the proposal carrying by quite a majority. The county commissioners of Dawson county at that time were Andrew Larson, W.K. Adams and L.C. Faltermeyer, Jon Bowden, W.B. Gibbs and C. P. Collins were the first elected county commissioners of Richland County.
In the fall of 1914 the railroad got into Lambert, building through from Snowden. The farmers around Lambert had hauled lumber out from Sidney that summer so that the Occident Elevator Co. had an elevator all built when the railroad got there. Lambert was just 20 miles from my sister's place and could make a round trip in a day by getting up early enough in the morning. The railroad stopped a while when it got to Lambert, not building on to where Richey now stands until the summer of 1916. My sister was married the winter of 1914-'15, but I stayed on and farmed the place in 1915. That fall I went back to Iowa again and persuaded a girl I had been keeping track of to quit a $40.00 a month job of teaching school and take a chance on me and Montana. The folks back there still thought Montana was just for the Indians and coyotes to play in. We were married on the 5th of February, 1916 and when we got out to Montana that spring I moved my outfit back to Mt. Pleasant. I had bought what they called the Jim Wright section the fall before, which had a small house on it down by the creek. We lived in my homestead cabin until after seeding when we dug a basement by the road and got the house moved on it and fixed up, and then moved into it just before harvest time. We had some pretty good rains that summer but black rust hit about the middle of the summer and damaged the crop pretty bad, some of the late wheat wasn't even worth cutting. 1918 was a pretty poor year and then when harvest was about over we had 10 inches of rain in a week and what grain wasn't washed away wasn't fit for much but feed. 1919 was a real old time dry year and the grain was so short you couldn't tie it in a bundle. I was lucky enough to get hold of a header, the first one on Mt. Pleasant which helped a lot. The dry years hit harder those years when we farmed with horses My first car was a second hand model T Ford, and I got my first truck in 1927 and first combine in 1929. We and other farmers in general had our ups and downs as the years went by: we got caught in two bad failures, experienced several hail storms and in 1927 had one of the worst storms and blizzards and number of livestock killed I had experienced since coming to Montana, the 12th and 13th of May. But the dry years were hardly as bad as the low prices of the early thirties when the farmers really took a beating. Wheat was down to 25 to 30 cents a bushel and hogs and cattle were $2.00, $3.00 and $4.00 a hundred for long stretches. 1934 was a really old time dry year and the government bought up a lot of the cattle (some whole herds) at $20.00 a head for tops. 1936-37 were real dry years again: 1937 being the only year in my farming experience that I did not get back more grain than I sowed. Then in 1938 we had some pretty good rains and crops were looking pretty good when one day we noticed some clouds darkening the sky and when the weather cooled off that evening the clouds began to drop to the ground in the shape of hungry grasshoppers and in a matter of a few days they had nearly everything eaten up; some farmers didn't thresh a bushel The hoppers would keep moving on when the weather was right but more swarmed in behind them.
I think that fall was about the low for the farmers and we would all have left the country if we had known any place to go.
But as they say, it is always the darkest just before the dawn and things began to pick up. Most farmers had tractors by this time and had acquired larger acreages and were doing more fallowing and strip cropping and it began to rain a little more and the prices started getting better. About then Uncle Sam came along and says, boys, you are making too much money ;I will just take what you have left.
But it's been a great experience, most of us have raised families, we have watched Sidney grow from a wide place in the road to a modern little city, and here I am living in town and letting somebody else do the work. And just about to get my feet all greasy with oil.
Margaret Williams adds: Ralph Blair took over as secretary of the Mutual Rural Insurance Company in 1924 and held that position until June of 1959 and continued to serve as a director for another 10 years. This took considerable time when he was on the farm, but helped to keep him occupied after his retirement from farming in 1950. He helped organize and served as secretary of the Farmers Union Company for many years. He was a long time member of the Methodist Church. He was a board member of the Sidney hospital for 30 years, the fair board for 20 years, served as president for several years. He served as Montana State Senator from 1947 to 1951. He was a stockholder and director of the Sidney National Bank.
Ralph and Myrtle had a son Floyd who moved to California and married and a daughter Hazel whon married Orvald Norgaard.
Myrtle Blair was killed in an automobile accident enroute to Arizona on October 31, 1962.
He married Margaret Amundson Williams on September 5, 1964 in Sidney.
Ralph Blair died July 19, 1976
Reader Comments(0)