It wasn’t passengers that had the top priority on the rails back in 1924. The item that traveled the fastest from coast to coast on the rails of that era was the raw silk produced in the orient and destined for the textile mills of the east.

It was also one of the highest valued commodities in the world.

The Jamestown Alert carried a headline to a smaller front page story that read “Ten Million Dollars worth of Silk Went Thru on Two Trains,” in 1924.

Silk was as fragile as it was valuable. Heat, humidity and even too much vibration could damage the material. Insurance was often purchased on a per hour basis. The quicker the silk was delivered to the mill the less cost and possible damage.

This need for speed resulted in a streamlined process of getting the silk from Japan to the east coast of the United States as quickly as possible.

Ships carried the silk at the fastest possible rate across the Pacific where special crews of longshoremen would unload the materials to rail cars. According to Internet reports the process averaged less than 2 hours from the docking of the ship to the time the train headed east.

And these were not the standard mixed trains or even the expresses of the era. The cars were lined with stainless steel to prevent snagging the silk. Only the crew road the train, which would run 24 hours a day, and have priority over any other rail traffic.

Even the fast express trains of the day pulled onto the siding and let the silk train pass.

 The trains noted by the Alert had left Seattle on January 31 at 2:40 p.m. and passed through Jamestown at 9:40 a.m. on Feb. 2. That’s half way across the continent by rail in about 43 hours even though the Alert suggested it had been slowed by winter weather further west.

A silk train was expected to cross the continent and deliver its goods to a textile mill in New York City in about 90 hours. That’s about 24 hours quicker than a passenger express would have made the same trip.

And what drove this high value of silk and made it queen of the rail?

In two words, shorter skirts.

As women’s fashion moved the hemline up the leg the ladies bought more hosiery. In the 1920s about 10 percent of a woman’s clothing expenses were made up of silk stockings.

Silk was replaced by nylon in the years after World War II although the demand for the material fell drastically during the 1930s due to the economy.

But in the years from about 1900 to the Great Depression you could say the fastest trains in the country were delivering short skirts and zipping right through Jamestown.

It was murder by blunt force trauma, and a little bit of a CSI case, even if it occurred in Jamestown back in 1924.

In the fall of 1923 the bodies of two itinerant laborers were found partially buried at a farm near Jamestown. The bodies were not of local residents and could not be identified due to the advanced state of decomposition.

Local law enforcement officers gathered what evidence they could but really had no leads or suspects in the case. The only evidence seemed to be the fact the men were killed by blows to the head presumably from an iron pump handle found nearby.

The bodies were buried and the case largely forgotten until that January when the conscience got the best of Joe Berger, an itinerant farm worker from Richardton, N.D. He confessed the crime to the Bismarck Police Chief.

Berger confessed he used an iron pump handle to bash in the skulls of the two men after a night of drinking home brew. He had met the men while working together on a threshing crew in the Jamestown area. The three had drawn their wages and walked away from the crew and bought a bottle to celebrate.

He said the men teased him which made him angry. The Jamestown Alert described Berger as “sub-normal.” When the men fell asleep he killed them and covered the bodies with straw. He also said he took the cash the men had and destroyed all personal letters before moving on to work on other threshing crews.

But along with details of the crime Berger gave the authorities the name of his victims.

Winfred Stookey and James Keown were both from Gilman, Missouri. They had been working across the country at various farm jobs. The authorities notified the families and exhumed the bodies.

The fathers of both men came to Jamestown to bring their sons home. They also brought along Stookey’s dental records from his time in the army which matched the skull that had been exhumed.

Despite the evidence the paper questioned whether Berger was admitting to the crime because of his diminished mental capacity. They did note the Stutsman County officials were taking all precautions to avoid asking leading questions that could put the details of the crime in Berger’s mind.

In the end the evidence won out and Berger was sentenced to life in the North Dakota penitentiary.

The time the fathers spent in town was made easier by the assistance of the Jamestown American Legion. The organization had been contacted by the Gilman Legion with the request for any assistance the organization could lend the grieving fathers.

But the new information yielded another mystery. Stookey and Keown always traveled with a third man from Gilman that was still missing. The Alert even suggested this mystery traveler may have been the real murderer.

And this third traveler, as far as I can tell, is still out there. So keep an eye out.