This column ran in the April 27 edition of the Prairie Post

Questions about roads are not new in North Dakota.
Back in 1941 Gov. John Moses said “We are maintaining the largest highway system in point of mileage per car of any state in the Union.”
And the roads were in tough shape. In 1939 the United States Public Roads Administration found more than half of North Dakota roads unsatisfactory. This at a time when North Dakota had only 1,700 miles of paved roads.
As with most problems, at least some people blamed the Federal government.
From 1916, when the Federal government first starting making grants for roads to states, only new construction was eligible for bucks from Washington. In many years North Dakota continued to build new roads, with Federal dollars, while letting maintenance slide.
But things changed after World War II.
The state took more responsibility for maintaining its roads. Gas taxes were raised and enforcement improved while vehicle registration fees were also increased. In a matter of a few years North Dakota increased state road spending to the point it spent the most of any state in the Union based on population.
In 1951 the state of North Dakota had 73,000 miles of roads and 43,000 miles of prairie trails. Of those totals about 6,500 miles were state roads, 18,000 miles were county roads and the rest were township roads. About 2,329 miles of roads, mostly state roads, were paved.
And in 1951 the state set a goal of having a paved road reach every county seat in North Dakota. This would require a staggering 4,121 miles of paved road.
The point I’m trying to make is that just 60 years ago a paved road in North Dakota was a rarity. Over those six decades there has been a huge amount of road construction, much of it in the 1960s and 1970s, bringing us thousands of miles of new paved roads at the state, county and even township levels.
Those roads were built at an ideal time. Construction costs were low and the tax base was sufficient to support the projects.
Now many of those roads need repair and it is less than an ideal time. Construction costs are high and the tax base insufficient to support the projects.
Which puts us in the same position, when it comes to roads, as we were at the end of World War II.
We can either put up with bad roads or decide to pay for the work needed to repair the situation.
Or go back to 1951.
 

This column ran in the April 20 edition of the Prairie Post

Medical care in the pioneer era could be a bit of a challenge. According to the book “The Challenge of the Prairie” by Hiram Drache, the medical professional in any pioneer community could be a “dentist, a medical doctor, a veterinarian or a fake, but if he carried the title of doctor he was welcomed.”
These doctors had a lot to deal with. They tended to child births although in this area they usually had help from midwives in the region.
And we should point out the mother was usually allowed a “laying in” period after the birth. This was a time after the child was born when the mother was entitled to bed rest.
It came to an end when the cookies and bread she had baked and all the meals she had prepared and set aside before the birth ran out and her husband and other children became hungry.
One of the most interesting “birth stories” from the Dakotas comes from 1808 in the area of Pembina. A colony of French traders and farmers had taken up residence along the Red River in that area and were among the first white residents of what is now North Dakota. This child may be the second white baby born in the state.
According to the legend a very pregnant Marie Anne Lagimoniere was riding with her husband on a hunting trip near Pembina. Hanging on one side of her saddle were some supplies and provisions. On the other side was her oldest child, a three-year old daughter, on a cradle board.
As she rode across the prairie at the side of her husband they spotted a herd of buffalo, a common occurrence at the time. Marie Anne was riding a buffalo hunting horse trained by the Indians of the area. The horse was trained to put the rider in the best position to fire a shot into a running buffalo and charged after the hairy beasts. The animal was so caught up in the chase he could not be reined in.
Marie Anne’s husband charged after them in hot pursuit spurring his horse in an attempt to reach the mount of his wife. Fortunately his horse was as fast as his wife’s horse. He managed to catch up and grab the reins. He brought the horses under control just as they reached the herd of buffalo.
As soon as the horses were pulled to a stop Marie Anne slid from her mount and in moments gave birth to a son.
We don’t know if this story is true. Obviously there is no proof one way or the other.
But it appears a fast horse is pretty effective at inducing labor, but probably wouldn’t be covered by insurance.

Watching an old movie tonight, Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii.

Pretty much a cinematic excuse for Elvis to break into song every once in a while which overall is not a bad thing.

Here is the moment to remember though.

Elvis’s mother (Angela Lansbury) askes her husband where they went wrong when Elvis ends up in jail after a Luau gone wrong.

He replied "When we got married."

Every husband should remember this.

This column ran in the April 12, 2010 edition of the Prairie Post

The pioneer farm family worked hard. In fact, it was such a family effort that it was said that a single man, or woman for that matter, couldn’t operate a farm alone in the days of horse powered agriculture.
How the family efforts played out varied from family farm to family farm. In some cases the farm wife and children toiled in the field alongside the husband.
But as the years advanced the standard changed at least for better off farm families. By the 1920s the men and older boys worked the fields while the wife and older girls cooked the meals for the family males and any hired men the farm employed.
This had to be quite a change for the immigrant farmers from Europe where a woman working in the field was the standard.
At least according to lore in some European countries it was perfectly acceptable to substitute your wife for an injured ox in the yoke being used to pull a plow in a field.
That doesn’t mean the American farm wife had things easy.
There was her own large family to cook for along with any hired hands the farm would employee. Large farms could have a large crew because labor was cheap. Keep in mind the yield from an acre of wheat would pay the wages for a hired hand for one month.
Some farms employed hired girls. According to some historians the hired girl made about half the wage of the farm’s hired male laborers. These teenage girls, most were married and working as a farm wife on their own family farm by the time they were 20, worked as hard as or harder than anyone on the farm.
The farm wife’s labor was so intense that the United States Department of Agriculture did a study on their efforts in 1920.
This study found the average farm wife in the United States worked 13 hours per day. According to the study 60 percent carried water from a well that was at least 40 feet from the house, 80 percent fed poultry and 40 percent milked the cows.
Of course these chores were on top of cooking meals for the family, the hired men and, during some seasons, large crews of seasonal labor. During threshing an extra 20 to 30 men would spend time on the farm harvesting the crop, and waiting to be fed.
It was a lot of work, but it had to beat being yoked with an ox in Yugoslavia.
 

One of my favorite summer passtimes is cruising the backroads and touring the refuges of the Jamestown area.

Took my first trip of the summer this weekend, it may have been a little premature.

This was the road to the headquarters at Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge.

And the birds were shy.

This column ran in the April 6 edition of the Prairie Post

The word from the National Agricultural Statistics Service is that the farmers of the area will get in the field in a couple of weeks. This is 13 days earlier than last year and about the same time as the statistical average for North Dakota.

Of course that is when the farmer of today, with modern tractors and tillage equipment, will start his toil in the field.

Back in the days of old, when the muscle of man, ox and horse powered the farm field work, the conditions necessary to start spring field work were different.

According to the book The Challenge of the Prairie by Hiram Drache some of the earliest farmers of the region hand broadcast seed on the ground. One of the advantages of this was seeding could begin as soon as the ground could be walked upon by a man.

Evidently some of the farmers would push the season a bit. The book Challenge of the Prairie quotes Mrs. Woodward, a farm wife as writing, “Everything is mud, and such mud, black and heavy and sticky like glue. I pity the men trudging through it all day on foot.”

Woodward said the boys managed 18 miles that day.

I’m guessing those boys slept well that night.

Still the drawback of broadcast seeding was the pace of planting the crop. On average a farmer planting a crop by hand broadcasting covered about two acres of land per day.

Some farmers would have had access to horse drawn seeders by the time settlers were working the land in this area. The first seeders were manufactured in 1857 and the better equipped farmers would have been using them by the time of the large influx of settlers to the Dakotas in the 1880s.

But these seeders had a drawback. They did not close the furrow after the seed was dropped into the ground. It was common for the farmer to drive a three- or four-horse hitch pulling the seeder while an older child, boy or girl, drove a two- or three-horse hitch pulling a harrow or drag followed along.

The seeder and drag was more efficient. Up to 16 acres a day could be planted with an eight foot seeder and drag. Of course this operation took two people and somewhere between five and seven horses.

But things were getting better for the farmer. About 1890 the drill, which closed the furrow after the seed was placed, was becoming common on the farms of the Dakotas.

An eight foot drill still planted about 16 acres a day but it was now a one man operation.

Even with the best equipment of about 1890 it took about 10 days to plant a quarter of land; which is an awful long time to be looking at the backside of a team of horses.

And besides, the operator position on the horse drawn drill didn’t even come equipped with satellite radio.