This Monday evening I attended the regular monthly meeting of the Westerners Corral and listened to the guest speaker Mr. Curt Eriksmoen. He writes a weekly column that discusses some historical character in North Dakota and appears in the Bismarck Tribune, The Fargo Forum, and a Bottineau paper. A retired man, this has become his pastime, and someone asked if he ever runs out of topics to write about. He answered that his pool of possible material is now larger than when he started writing.
One of the sources Eriksmoen mentioned was that of Clement Lounsberry and his three volume history of early North Dakota and some of its characters, copyrighted in 1917. I randomly opened volume 1 to page 255 of my own set and came on this entry: The mosquitoes were almost unbearable in the timber and the valleys. Maj. Samuel Woods speaks of them, and of the terrific thunder storms and the condition of the prairies, in his report of his expedition to the Red River Valley (1849). He writes “They were driven from the timber by the mosquitoes, and being on the high, open prairie, ‘the thunder broke over us appallingly.’” Now, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to write an essay based on that information and anyone with some writing experience could have a lot of fun expanding on that passage.
I can’t say that my own pool of ideas is larger now than when I started writing, but I think I’m more aware of things that can be written about. For this week’s Musing I let my mind’s eye wander and caught this memory when it came floating by. When I was growing up small farms were a fact of life and very few farmers had trucks or trailers to haul their cattle, hogs, or sheep to and from market. Our community depended on a man, Clark Douglas, who owned a small fleet of trucks for the express purpose of hauling livestock. Vivid memories rise to the top, I see one of these trucks with the large wooden rack appear a mile down the gravel road being chased by a large cloud of dust, and as it draws closer the stock rack and the chute gates strapped to the rack’s sides rattle and vibrate on the wash board bumps. It turns into the driveway which sets the dog to barking and pulls to a stop waiting for Dad to tell him where to load. When the driver gets his instructions he backs up to the loading point and Gene Jaster jumps out of the cab, pulls and slides out the ramp, sets the chute gates in place, and the livestock is hollered and prodded into the box. The whole process usually takes just minutes and the driver straps the ramp and gates back up and drives off to West Fargo. This little tale took a lot longer to punch the computer keys than it did to think it up. When the memory opens up stories come easily.
A picture hanging on my wall conjures up another scene. My Uncle Russell sits on his horse on a cold, snowy day by our bullet-holed mailbox with a 1948 Fraser Manhattan parked behind him. This snapshot recalls the day he rode to my Grandpa’s funeral because the roads were blocked tight with snow. Others in the family, if they could not drive in, flew in by private plane, and the snowplow came out to open up for Dad. I was only five at the time and had to stay with a neighbor. Whenever I see old pictures I wonder who they were of and what was the occasion. Often no one survives to remember. Some day that will happen to knowledge of this picture, and, for that matter, to the memory of the large, rattly stock trucks coming for a load of cattle.
