We are approaching another election cycle. We are about two and a half months away from the end of all the annoying political ads.

In our modern election process we make every effort to involve every voter. We allow absentee voting about a month and a half before Election Day. We even allow early voters two weeks early at the courthouse. About 30 percent of our voters cast their ballot ahead of the formal Election Day.

We may not urge people to vote often but we do encourage them to vote early.

That was not always the case.

Even back in the 1980s when I worked at the courthouse you had to certify you were not able to go to the polls on Election Day to get an absentee ballot. And no one even mentioned the idea of early voting.

That attitude goes way back in North Dakota history. If you wanted to vote you were supposed to go to the polls on Election Day. The only excuses were physical impairments that prevented travel and physically being out of town.

But there was an effort to ease those restrictions just a little bit in 1912. A Senate bill was introduced to allow women who reside more than a half mile from the poll to vote by absentee ballot. The vote was shifted to the June primary ballot where it failed.

I guess the men were expected to walk or travel by horse or wagon to the poll.

And it wasn’t like women had a lot of reasons to walk even less than half a mile to the cast a ballot. National women’s suffrage, the 19 Amendment was ratified in August of 1920 and became the law of the land on Aug. 26, 1920.

Prior to that women in North Dakota were only allowed to vote on school elections. This was the concession to women’s rights in the North Dakota Constitution.

So this election will mark the 90 Anniversary of women having equal access to the polling place. Women and men may want to pause and think about the relatively short history of women casting votes.

And we all need to take voting a little more serious. Voter turnout on elections without a presidential race have historically been less than 50 percent in recent years. And our voting process has been made about as simple as possible.

You have to wonder if half those women who first got the right to vote 90 years ago turned up to vote. Even if they had to walk more than half a mile.

I was slaving away over a hot keyboard late Sunday afternoon. To pass the time I had the TV on and caught the Jimmy Buffet Concert on CMT.
I am a landlocked parrot head who attempts to visit Margarittaville as often as possible.
The concert was down in Alabama as part of an effort to rebuild tourism along the gulf coast post oil spill. The crowd went wild when he substituted BP for “my own damn fault” in Margarittaville.
The problem is CMT used the entire show to promote Taylor Swift.
I have nothing against Swift. I suppose I would be considered a Country Music fan but Swift’s music seems a little juvenile to me. I can’t say I’ve ever intentionally listened to her stuff and probably never will. Bring back Willie and resurrect Waylon and I’ll be right there. The constant promotion of a teen country sensation kind of turned me off on the Buffet concert.
But not enough to stop me from firing up the blender and making a margarita.

After a lot of problems I’m trying to get my blog up and running.

This column ran in the Aug. 10, edition of the Prairie Post.

The Pike County Ballads are an American Civil War era epic length poem about Maj. Bates, an American soldier wounded in the line of duty and rescued from the battlefield by a black man. This black man brought Maj. Bates home to his family in Pike County, Illinois where a racist mob threatens to send the black man back to the south and his owners in the Confederacy.
The poem was written by John Hays, no other than the personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln, and a former resident of Pike County.
I bring this up because about 25 years after the incident a resident of Pike County, and a friend of Maj. Bates, came to Jamestown and purchased the Jamestown Alert.
William Ross Kellogg arrived in the Dakota Territory in 1882 from Illinois. His intent was to locate and purchase “cheap farm land” and then sell the land. It was the classic real estate business. Buy land cheap, sell land high.
But there was a little bit of a problem. The Federal Homestead act allowed people to get Federal land simply by living on it and filing a claim. For Kellogg, and I’m sure a lot of others in the real estate business, it was tough to sell high if the government was giving it away.
So Kellogg turned to another occupation. He carried a letter of introduction from an old Civil War friend, possibly Bates, to Maj. A. W. Edwards who was publisher and editor of the Fargo Daily Argus. Edwards gave Kellogg a job traveling the Dakota Territory chasing down people who had let their subscription to the Argus expire. His job was to get them to renew their subscriptions.
While traveling around the territory in 1883 he decided he liked the town of Jamestown. He even decided he liked the Jamestown Alert, the community’s weekly paper.
Kellogg served as publisher and editor of the Jamestown Alert until the 1920s when he sold the paper. Shortly after that the paper had a name change and became the Jamestown Sun.
Kellogg operated a very successful paper. Over the 40 or so years he owned the paper he traveled around the world. He even wrote a self-published book telling the tales of all the exotic places of the world he saw.
He distributed the book Sightseeing in the Seven Seas and Plain Tales of the Plains to friends and acquaintances. He may have even given copies of the book to business associates in Jamestown. Enough copies existed so quite a few still remain. A copy found its way into my hands a few years back.
He tells his own story about how he came to the Dakotas.
And how he succeeded in business even if he couldn’t buy farm land cheap and sell it high.

This column ran in the Aug. 2 edition of the Prairie Post

I don’t know whether to believe this story or chalk it up to the tall tales that sometimes found their way into the newspapers a century ago.
Anyway, the story is that in June, 1912, a crate arrived at the Andre home in Jamestown with a letter that included $1 bill and explained the crate should be held until it was picked up in a few weeks.
It wasn’t until those weeks past, and curiosity got to Mrs. Andre that they opened the crate and made a rather strange and grotesque discovery.
Inside the crate, again, according to the story in the Jamestown Alert, was a mummified black woman, we won’t go into the terms the papers used 98 years ago, and a note explaining the circumstances.
If we believe this story, and I for one don’t, back in 1865 a hunting party was camped along the Snake River in Marshall County, Minnesota. One of the men, possibly a guide or teamster, went crazy and killed Countess De la Jeune and her servant girl. Both were buried in some boggy land along the trail between Pembina and St. Paul.
Then the story jumps ahead to 1894 when the bodies, naturally mummified by the minerals in the slough water, were discovered during road construction. The body of the servant girl was then transported from county fair to county fair around the region.
On the other hand, Countess De la Jeune’s body was included in a display in a Chicago Museum proving once again that royalty and title has its privileges.
The story gets a little bizarre about 18 years later when the servant’s body is supposedly transported to Jamestown. For this story to work we would have to believe the body was shipped to Jamestown to be picked up by someone for display during the Stutsman County Fair.
The report does say the mummified body was wrapped in a canvas banner reading “Human Petrified Body Found Along the Old Pembina Trail on the Snake River in Marshall County, Minnesota.”
And the reader is asked to believe that the party who had planned to operate the mummy display at the Stutsman County Fair didn’t make it to Jamestown.
Not wanting to waste a good mummified dead body the Jamestown Alert announced that the body of the servant girl would be displayed at the Stutsman County Fair anyway.
Whether the story was just a good tale or an attempt to boost attendance at the county fair we’ll never know. I looked ahead in the 1912 papers and never found another mention of the mummified servant girl.
But I did note the Stutsman County Fair of 1912 was considered a success, just like this year’s event. And they managed to accomplish this year’s success without a mummified black woman.