I’m trying to compile a list of the community celebrations in the Jamestown Sun readership area this summer.

Things like 125th Anniversary Celebrations or just community days.

If you know of any let me know. My email is knorman@jamestownsun.com.

We’ll try to do a little something about the history of the community on this blog and the Prairie Post column as well as highlight the celebration in the Jamestown Sun.

Can’t guarantee the level of coverage. It all depends on schedules and other events but we can’t consider your town’s party for coverage unless we know about it.

Keith

Tom Mix was a popular movie draw in the 1920s. One of his big movies of the silent era played at the Ruby Theatre in Jamestown in 1925.

“The Deadwood Coach” was set in the Dakota badlands. It was based on a novel by Clarence Mulford who was the chief writer for the Hopalong Cassidy series of western novels. Later on Louis L’Amour wrote a few stories for the Hopalong series as well.

The movie The Deadwood Coach took a few liberties with the Mulford novel The Orphan. The book was set in the American Southwest and dealt with the Apache. For anyone interested, and with an ereader, the book is available as a digital download on the Internet.

The movie, as I’ve mentioned, is set in the Dakota Badlands with the Sioux as a protagonist.

Tom Mix, of course, was the headline star. The leading lady, Doris May, was a little farther down the show bill.

Right below Tony, the Wonder Horse.

The film was billed as “a thrilling romance of the Dakota Bad Lands with Tom at his best.”

Tom should have known a little about romance in the Dakota Badlands.

From 1909 to 1917 Tom Mix was married to Olive Stokes. According to Stokes’ biography she had married Mix in Medora, North Dakota. She had traveled there from Oklahoma to buy horses for the family ranch.

Mix had followed her there after knowing her in Oklahoma. After several weeks of courting and enjoying the Medora night life they were married in the home of the local Justice of the Peace.

Of course Mix wasn’t a movie star back then but may have ridden in some of the wild west shows of the era.

And it may have been his advance to movie stardom that ended his real life Dakota Badlands romance. He divorced Stokes in 1917 and married wife number four, Victoria Forde , in 1918.

Forde had starred with Mix in some of his early movies.

Evidently she figured the only way to get billing above the horse was to marry the star.

Movies were very good to Tom Mix.

Even during the low wage days of the 1920s Mix was making wages approaching $20,000 per week. Total pay for his 336 movies was over $6 million. Adjusted for inflation it amounts to about $400 million today.

But a lavish life style and five wives, he divorced Forde in 1931 for wife number 5, Mabel Ward, left Mix pretty much broke during the Great Depression. His last exposure came when he sold his name to a radio series. Although the main character was called Tom Mix the actor never appeared in the show.

Tom Mix died in 1940. A convertible car he was driving at about 80 mph went into a washout in an Arizona road. A metal suitcase filled with cash and jewelry broke loose from its moorings on the back luggage rack of the car and flew forward and broke his neck.

If only he had been riding Tony the Wonder Horse.

Knowing your audience has always been a part of marketing. The businesses of Jamestown back in 1925 were no exception. They set out that spring to hold a “Sales Day” that drew customers from all segments of the area population.

And there were some good bargains to be had.

White Clothing Company was offering silk shirts for $3.85 and men’s suits for $9.95 so dressing in style came to less than $14.

And to dress from the inside out you could get a union suit for 69 cents.

I’ve never bought a silk shirt and it’s been quite a few years since I bought a suit but I know the prices have gone up a bit for those items.

Starched collars were still sold separate from the clothes back in 1925. They sold for a dime each but regularly cost 20 cents. Men’s dress shoes were on sale for $2.95 while work shoes were available for $2.85.

Head gear was included as well. Felt hats, various colors, sold for $5.45 while a straw hat sold for $1.39 and a cloth cap went for 98 cents.

But the bargains were just part of the attraction of Sales Day back in 1925.

White Clothing Company would reimburse the gas for any of the “out of town folks,” that shopped their store. The allowance was good for one gallon of gas for every 15 miles the person traveled.

And then there were the prizes.

Each purchase entered the customer in a drawing for a bunch of big prizes.

The grand prize was a brand new Ford touring car. The top prize went to any resident of North Dakota, resident of Jamestown or not, who shopped on Sales Day.

The vehicle was valued at about $800 back then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $10,000 now.

Which, oddly enough, wouldn’t buy you a new touring car today.

First prize for a shopper from Jamestown was $50 in gold. Probably about 3 ounces given the gold prices of 1925. That would be worth over $3,000 today.

There were a couple of prizes for customers from the rural areas. To win these you had to be from outside Jamestown.

Second prize for the farm crowd was a registered heifer. The flyers didn’t identify the breed of the young cow so I’m guessing the winner could specify what type of cow they wanted to add to their herd.

And the top prize for the farmers attending the June, 1925, Sales Day was a registered bull.

The Jamestown merchants promoted the sales event as the best value in retail goods ever offered in North Dakota.

And that ain’t no bull.

I think we’re a little bit less creative when it comes to naming things.

Take, for example, the way we name roads.

Now every road has a number. It is a sign of a true local to refer to a road as the “road past Fred’s place,” rather than by the number established by the government and displayed on Google Earth or by any of the multitude of Global Positioning Systems.

But back 86 years ago Jamestown existed at the crossroads of the Sunshine Highway and the Red Trail. And both were scheduled for some updates that summer. Like today the Federal government was picking up a big part of the road construction bill.

The Jamestown Daily Alert announced in May of 1925 that the county was bidding graveling two sections of the Sunshine Highway and one of the Red Trail. The plan was to upgrade to a gravel surface the road from Jamestown to Kensal and the stretch of road from Mill Hill to a bit south of the Midland Continental Railroad. These were segments of the Sunshine Highway that now roughly travels the route of U.S. Highway 281.

The other segment was from Jamestown to about eight miles west and was part of the Red Trail. This trail ultimately became the route of U.S. Interstate 94.

Back in the early days of automobile transportation national and even state roads were not common. A route was organized by people along the road. Each community along the route would identify the local roads or trails that connected to the routes identified by other communities. In this way a route clear across the region would be created.

The Red Trail connected parts of Montana with North Dakota and into Minnesota. The road was part of a national network that connected Seattle, Wash., with New York City.

The Sunshine Highway ran north and south across much of the Dakotas and connected to other roads that created a network from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande.

In each case the roads were gravel in some segments interconnected with what would now be considered prairie trails similar to what is now found along seldom used section lines between farm fields.

If you owned a car and wanted to travel great distances you would follow one of these “highways.” It would lead across the land with gravel roads mixed with trails only farmers and hunters would follow today.

Some of the highways were marked by signs but often traveling was more of an adventure than most people would tolerate today. In some cases the traveler had to buy a map published by the highway association of that particular road in order to find their way across the country.

The highways and vehicles of today are much more refined than the roads of 1925. We zip along on paved roads that would have been unheard of given the technology of 86 years ago.

But I still think placing Jamestown at the intersection of the Red Trail and the Sunshine Highway sounds more creative than at the intersection of U.S. Highway 281 and U.S. Interstate 94.

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.

This week marks the start of the Major League Baseball season. A little more snow will need to melt before the boys of summer will take to the field at Jack Brown Stadium.

We have to look back to the 1930s  to find the great days of baseball in North Dakota.

In 1934 Bismarck and Jamestown had been the great rivalry as they and other teams in the state recruited stars from the Negro Leagues and played some of the best baseball in the country. An all-star team of players from North Dakota defeated the Major League all-stars in three straight games played in Valley City, Jamestown and Bismarck that fall.

Pitching great Satchel Paige from the Bismarck squad combined with Double Duty Radcliffe and Steel Arm Davis from the Jamestown squad played a big part in local teams from North Dakota blowing away the big stars of the big leagues.

The rivalry continued in 1935 but with a bit of a twist. The Jamestown squad became an all white team that year while the Bismarck squad continued with many of the Negro League players.

The first game of the season was between the two squads with Jamestown picking up the win. Ed Brady, a touring pitcher with the House of David squads in previous years, got the win over Satchel Paige.

The Jamestown squad had a few other pros.

Ray Starr, known as Iron Man because he had pitched both games of about 40 doubleheaders in his career, had spent parts of a couple seasons with the New York Giants and Boston Braves before he came to Jamestown in 1935. He got back in the big leagues in 1941 when the 35 year old made the roster of the Cincinnati Reds. It’s possible he was one of the older players who made the bigs during the WWII years when more of the younger players ended up playing for Uncle Sam.

The next year he made the National League All-Star squad although it appears he didn’t participate in the game.

The rivalry came to a head in a late July came that got more than a little ugly. A Jamestown pitcher by the name of Schmidt, his first name appears lost to history as he never made the Major Leagues, bounced a fastball of the head of Double Duty Radcliffe.

Radcliffe had been the player manager for Jamestown in 1934. Now he was diving for dirt from a Jamestown fastball.

This led a bench clearing brawl that took about 15 minutes to clear on the field. No word on how long it took break up the fights in the Bismarck stands.

The game got under way when Hilton Smith hit a long fly for Bismarck. The Jamestown outfielders argued the ball bounced over the fence. The ump ruled with Bismarck and called it a homerun and another brawl broke out.

Leading the charge for Bismarck was catcher Quincy Trouppe. Trouppe spent the off season as an amateur boxer and had a reputation of hitting hard.

The Jamestown squad walked away from the game and lived to play another day.

The Jamestown Alert called it “The Great Mouse River Country Expedition” and stated the group from Jamestown was going to explore and attempt to write a “complete description of the yet unpopulated part of the northwest.”

The Mouse River is more commonly known now as the Souris and loops in from Canada before returning north. It flows through Minot, among other North Dakota cities, while in the state. Back in 1885 there evidently weren’t any people up in that neighborhood.

The paper treated the expedition in a lighthearted manner.

It was lead by Sheriff Alex McKechnie, a 43-old immigrant from Scotland who had made Stutsman County his home. Also on the trip were Detective Lewis Fox and the “celebrated land explorer John Nichols.”

Nichols was a local farmer involved with land speculation in North Dakota. Nichols was born in Indiana in 1847. According to the state census he was married to Josephine and the father of six little Nichols ranging in age from 15- to 5-years of age. The older children were born in Minnesota while the younger children were listed as native to Dakota in the census.

Nichols had a town named after him to the northwest of Jamestown called Nicholsville, also called Scriptown, which was part of the route the group planned on their way to the Mouse River.

Nichols had made a previous trip to the Northwest in the late 1870s as part of a buffalo hunting expedition with Johnson Nickeus. That trip was the butt of jokes in the Jamestown Alert when the ox used to pull the wagon ran off and joined the heard of buffalo. The problem was compounded when Indians from Fort Totten killed not only the buffalo but the oxen leaving Nichols and Nickeus walking back to Jamestown.

This trip went better, for the most part.

A cold summer storm came up one night when the group was near Carrington. The storm blew down the tent and soaking all the party to the skin. The 50 mph winds made setting the tent up again difficult if not impossible. The article said the group finally managed to pitch the tent over top of the wagon. I imagine they used the wagon as anchors and supports rather than trying to drive stakes or set up tent poles in the storm.

The winds and rain continued the next morning although Nichols managed to get a fire burning. The group had “premature coffee,” but no food.

“Life’s too short to fool away cooking a fancy breakfast,” the article wrote.

The group moved on toward Pony Gulch west of present day Carrington. The sun came out and the weather warmed. By the evening the group dined on fresh shot ducks for supper and all was forgotten.

Except for the article poking fun at the trip in the Jamestown Alert.

It may have been the last time the cavalry camped in the Jamestown area. The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry who had been stationed at Fort Totten were being transferred to Fort Meade in the Black Hills of South Dakota in July of 1887. About five days into the trip they camped for the night near Jamestown.

None of the names associated with the history of the 7th Cavalry were along for the ride. After all, most had perished along the shores of the Little Bighorn River 11 years earlier.

The commander of the troop was Capt. Nolan who had been acting quartermaster in 1876 but had not been part of the column into Montana.

It seems most of the cavalry troopers were new recruits and the trip across the region was part of their training. They had taken five days to travel from Fort Totten to Jamestown.

That’s a progress of just 20 miles a day for a cavalry that bragged it could travel “40 miles a day on hay and beans.”

But not all the troopers were new to the army. One of the old timers was a farrier, a fitter of horseshoes, who claimed to have been the last person to see Custer alive.

He claimed to have been ordered by the boy general himself to accompany Reno at the last minute.

And Jamestown residents sought him out to hear his tales.

Local residents were also allowed to tour the camp and see the McClellan saddles and Sibley tents of the army. I suppose it was something like the Fort Seward reenactments we hold every fall just on a larger scale and modern for the time.

And while the residents of Jamestown checked out the army at least some of the army was checking out Jamestown.

“The privates made the most of their opportunity yesterday,” wrote the Jamestown Alert. “Following the immortal customs got as much liquor aboard and as quickly as possible.”

The army officers spent the late evening and early morning hours rounding up their charges and getting them ready to ride west the next day.

The saloons of Jamestown had served the soldiers of Fort Seward from 1873 to 1877. They got another chance on a summer night 10 years later.

And I’m guessing a bunch of troopers got an early morning ride with a hangover for their trouble. Knowing the legends of the top-kicks, the top sergeant of a cavalry unit, they started them with a mile at the trot, too.

Baseball is just getting under way for the season. The big leagues are in spring training in places like Florida and Arizona and the colleges and high schools are anxiously awaiting green grass and practicing indoors.

Baseball has always been popular in the Jamestown area. The community has been fielding a team or teams pretty much ever since the town could find a bat, ball and four bases.

The highest level of baseball was probably played in the 1920s and 1930s when Jamestown had a professional team.

In the spring of 1922 the Jamestown Jimkotans published its financial records in the Stutsman County Citizen. That took a little nerve; it listed an overdraft hanging at the bank of $283.73.

The team’s expenses the previous year total just a bit over $22,000. Of that the team had salaries to players of $10,313.61. Doesn’t sound like much but adjusted for inflation that’s equivalent to $130,863.91 today.

While that is probably less than players like Joe Mauer or Derek Jeter make while standing around during the seventh inning stretch it’s still a pretty big chunk of change.

The Northern League, where the Fargo Redhawks compete, has a salary cap of $105,000 per season.

According to the website Baseball Reference the Jamestown Jimkotans were classified as a Class D minor league team competing in the Dakota League. While most players on the team were journeymen minor leaguers one of the 1922 Jimkotans went on to a career in the big leagues.

Mark Koenig was born in California in 1904 but by the time he was 16 was playing minor league baseball in the Midwest and Canada. The 17-year-old played 97 games at third base for the Jimkotans. He had a .254 batting average with two homeruns. The stats aren’t terribly wonderful but he kept moving up in the minors. The next year he was at Class A Des Moines and in 1924 was in Class AA St. Paul.

And in 1925 he made the New York Yankees where it appears he fit in quite well. In 1927 he started as shortstop and batted second in the lineup known as “murderers row.”

His batting average hadn’t improved much. In 1927 he batted .285 with three homeruns. But when he did get on base there was a pretty good chance he’d come around to score.

Batting third was a player by the name of Babe Ruth who was followed by Lou Gehrig.

Within five years Koenig moved from the Jamestown Jimkotans to Murderers Row. And it appears he never did bat above .300.