USA > Minnesota > Redwood County > The history of Redwood County, Minnesota, Volume I > Part 50
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The Frederick Holt Family. After serving through the Civil War in Co. E, 22nd Ind. Vol. Inf., Frederick Holt came to North- field, Minn., with Fred Steincamp, Herman Hackmann and Hein- rich Schafer, young men he had known in Indiana before the war. From Northfield they came to Redwood Falls in 1867, and here Mr. Holt bought 160 acres of reservation land on section 26, in what is now Swedes Forest township. This tract had meadow land, timber and running water, advantages which caused him to locate in Redwood county rather than on the open prairie of Renville county, where his friends took up homesteads. That year he returned to Northfield, and remained there until the spring of 1869, when he married Henrietta Moeller, a widow with three small children, the oldest not yet seven years of age.
Mrs. Holt is still living in the county and is one of its most honored and respected pioneers. After recounting the facts given above, Mrs. Holt, in speaking of pioneer times says:
"After our marriage we at once made preparations to move to Redwood county. We were soon ready, and left Northfield the last week in May, all our possesions in a prairie schooner, drawn by a yoke of oxen. We came through Dundas, St. Peter, New Ulm and Sleepy Eye and made the trip in a week. We car- ried a stove with us and at meal time would set it up to bake biscuits and cook coffee. One day on the journey I baked bread. At night we slept in the schooner except once when we were near St. Peter, a farmer's wife took us in. It was raining and she gave us supper and had us sleep in the house. It rained so much and the roads were so bad that we often got stuck and then we would have to unload our things and get out of the mudhole
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as best we could. The latter part of the journey we came along the old government stage road and arrived on our land on the second of June, 1869. Redwood was a beautiful country then, with its miles upon miles of untouched prairie lands and the grass taller than the backs of our oxen on every side of us. Mr. Holt's friends came over from Renville county and helped him cut down trees and build our log cabin. They put it up in a week.
"That first summer we raised potatoes, pumpkins and ruta- bagas on breaking, but no grain, so Mr. Holt drove back to North- field to work in the harvest fields, leaving me and the children to look after our place. He brought back a milch cow he earned while there, and at St. Peter he bought enough rough unplaned six-inch boards to put floors upstairs and down in our little cabin. In the fall of that same year he made a trip to New Ulm for a load of wheat, which he had ground into flour at the old Rieke mill down near Franklin. During the first years we lived here our wheat had to be hauled to Sleepy Eye or to the equally dis- tant Wilmar. From the latter town we hauled lumber to put up a frame house. A few times we took our grain to North Redwood and loaded it on a steamboat which came up from St. Peter, when the river was high enough.
"When we came here we had as neighbors, two Swede broth- ers, bachelors, Peter and Nels Swenson. Their land joined ours and from its heavily wooded timber the township was later named. There were also Indians encamped in these woods, eight or ten tepees of them. We had raised so bountiful a crop of pumpkins and rutabagas that we told the Indians to help them- selves. They put pieces of pumpkin on sharp sticks, roasted them over the fire and ate them with much relish. They asked for potatoes and an Indian brought me several rabbits and prairie chickens in return. Once when I was sick, two Indian women came to see me; they shook hands with me and said, 'Squaw sick, squaw siek!' Often I would see an Indian dragging a deer over the snow to the camp. It was not uncommon in those early years to see herds of eight or ten wild deer roaming about. These Indians remained in our woods for two years, then they moved to lower Rice creek, and later to the Agency. We never had any trouble with them whatever. My children visited their en- campment. They often asked for things, especially if they were hungry, but I do not recall that they ever stole anything.
"When Swedes Forest township was organized, it included Kintire and part of Delhi. Mr. Holt was chairman of the board of supervisors for several years. He also helped organize school districts No. 10 and 55, and served a good many years on the schoolboard. He was a charter member of the German Metho- dist Episcopal church in Flora, Renville county, and a trustee
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of that church from the time it was established until his death. Together we fought fires in those dry early seventies and grass- hoppers afterward. Over and above it all we saw a wilderness peopled, a fair country grow more fair.
"To furnish the cabin, besides the stove already mentioned, we bought in Northfield, a table, a bedstead and two or three chairs; and we made some benches and a bed for the children and put up a row of shelves in one corner of the cabin, which covered by a calico curtain, served as a general cupboard.
"As for clothing, I had some good worsted dresses, brought over from Germany, both for myself and the children. At North- field I bought some calico for myself and German print for the little ones. I spun the wool and knitted the stockings and mittens we needed, and made the underwear from flannel or muslin, as the season required. The children went barefoot in summer.
"We brought with us some tea, coffee, flour, a ham and some live chickens. In the fall we got a milch cow. Soon we bought a few pigs and later two sheep. There was an abundance of wild fruit and hazlenuts in the woods, and plenty of game. The river was near for fishing. Old settlers had told us about using prairie tea, and finding it grew here we picked and dried the leaves and made the tea by pouring boiling water on them. I rather liked the taste of it. For coffee we roasted wheat or barley. The price of tea and coffee was almost prohibitive, but butter and eggs were very cheap, at least in summer. In the fall we would make pumpkin butter, without sugar. Mr. Holt had seen the Indiana settlers make it that way. In the late fall when we took a load of wheat to the mill for our winter's sup- ply of flour, there was always a sack of well-dried shelled corn along so that we had corn bread and mush and milk to vary our fare. Then, too, we always had a good garden. I do not recall that we ever went hungry.
"Our cabin was right in the woods and so protected that we had less to endure either from the severe storms or the pro- longed cold than the prairie settlers. I do not remember that the blackbirds did us any especial damage. The mosquitoes were so thick at times, especially in the tall grass, you had to keep your mouth shut. We covered the windows with netting and built a smudge at dusk right near the door to keep them away."
Marion Johnson's Experiences. George Johnson and his son Marion, then a youth of fifteen years. arrived at the stock- ade in October, 1864, spent the first night in the stockade and then moved into an Indian hewed-log house, on the south shore of Tiger lake. This lake was so named from the fact that before the massacre the steamboat "Tiger," during the high water, had gotten out of the channel of the Minnesota river into this lake, and being unable to again reach the Minnesota, was beached
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on the shore. The Johnsons came from LeSeuer county, they brought a pair of horses, a wagon, some household furniture and some provisions.
While the winter was hard, the man and boy were quite comfortable. The Indian cabin was snug and warm, having been well built by the government, with a good door and window. Their provisions consisted of flour, pork and tea, though the tea was used exclusively by the man. In the fall prairie chicken were plentiful. In the winter, deer and coon provided plenty of fresh meat. A deer was killed about once in two weeks and hung up in a tree, where it froze solid, and was thus preserved in the best condition for use. A maple tree felled in the yard provided more than four cords of wood, a great convenience during those weeks where the thermometer reached forty de- grees below zero, and the snow lay four feet deep on the surface. Sometimes the winter was warm enough so that the man and boy could get out a few logs on the river bottoms. The horses were well cared for in a snug shed.
A dog furnished companionship and was also of much assist- ance. Marion Johnson tells, with great glee, of the day when the dog assisted in a fish hunt. The lake at that time was filled with pickerel and pike. So thickly was the ice frozen that the fish were in danger of extermination by suffocation. A bubbling spring beneath the water, however, kept the ice open at one point of the lake near a steep bank.
One morning the attention of Marion Johnson was attracted by the barking of the dog, greatly excited over the masses of fish in this open hole, where they had swarmed to get air. Cold as it was, the boy, after calling to his father, jumped into the water and began throwing the fish on to the bank, where his father quickly dispatched them. In this way several bushels of good food were secured and the open water at that spot be- came a source of constant fish supply throughout the winter. Thus, with many hardships, but with many interesting adven- tures as well, the winter was spent. In the spring the family arrived, consisted of two sons, Harris and James, Mahala, Eva and Delma. The male members of the family at once proceeded with farming operations and that year got in five acres of oats, five acres of corn, fifteen or sixteen acres of wheat, quite a few potatoes and a good garden. Somewhat more fortunate than many of the other pioneers, Mr. Johnson had some forty head of stock, including six yoke of oxen. His farming equipment consisted of a breaking plow, a stubble plow, a home-made "V" harrow, and the necessary hoes, shovels, and axes. He was fortunate in having had some of his land broken by the Indians. It was impossible to raise wheat the first year after breaking, the usual procedure being to break the land and then to raise
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potatos, rutabagas, or sod corn the first year. The procedure of planting potatoes and rutabagas was to place them in the furrow and to turn the sod of the next furrow over on them, which made digging them in the fall a long and laborious prog- ress, but which affectively prepared the land for a wheat crop the next year.
In the early days the principal drawback were the cranes and blackbirds. Even as early as the late sixties the grasshop- pers began to put in their appearance but not in such numbers as in 1873, when they almost entirely destroyed the crops.
During his boyhood days Mr. Johnson at one time entered the employ of Maj. Joseph R. Brown, who had a government contract to deliver provisions to Fort Wadsworth, which has since become Sisseton. A large number of soldiers were then located at the fort and camp provisions were brought to Redwood by boat and taken across the rest of the distance by ox trains, about two hundred teams nsnally being used in a train. The entire company was subject to military organization and supplied with scouts by the government. After the Dakota line was crossed and the region of the Kota hills entered this escort of the soldiers was very necessary, as there were still many hostile Indians in that section.
The trip was a tremendous undertaking considering there were no "good roads" and no bridges, every stream having to be forded, and sometimes wagons, teams and men swam the streams. Major Brown, who held the contract for the delivery of the goods, was the founder and sponsor of the present city of Brown's Valley.
Another vivid recollection of Mr. Johnson's is the grasshop- per plague, which struck the country in 1865, and didn't entirely disappear until 1877, twelve long years when it took superhuman pluck to hang on, and the settlers would have starved utterly had it not been for the abundance of game. As it was, many of them moved away, and it took those who remained years to recover from the onslaught of the pests.
During this period, when starvation stared the pioneers straight between the eyes, Marion Johnson and his brother, two years younger, were sent by their father to Olmstead county, where crops were good, there were no grasshoppers and plenty of work. Upon their departure, the father gave each boy fifty cents, telling them to seek food and shelter from the farmers along the route. It speaks well for the humanity of these same farmers that the boys, when they reached Rochester each had a dollar and a half. Every one had helped, giving them lodg- ing and food and occasionally small pieces of money.
The entire trip, one hundred and fifty miles, was made by the boys afoot; and barefoot at that. Mr. Johnson still speaks of
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the stone bruise he acquired while en route, and the peculiar gait he acquired because of it.
At Rochester they attended P. T. Barnum's circus, which was exhibiting there that day, which only goes to prove that boy-nature is boy-nature, fifty years ago, today and forever! This was the first circus they had ever seen and the best they have ever seen.
After the season's work the boys stayed with the same farmer until frost made further work impracticable, when they returned home each the possessor of five dollars given him by their employer in addition to the summer's wages, which must necessarily be given to the support of the family. "I shall never forget those people and how kind they were to us," said Mr. Johnson, looking backward down the avenue of years, with a look that proved that no time can deaden the memory of a friend.
The game fifty years ago was a source of income as well as the basis of the food supply. Some buffalo were still to be found and there was an abundance of the small fur-bearing animals. Mr. Johnson has upon several occasions earned an income of eighty dollars per month from his traps. The occupation had one serious drawback : it necessitated early rising to get to the traps before the silent Redskin made them an early morning visit.
Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, who have been residents of Redwood Falls since 1876, have a store of delightful tales of the early days of Redwood Falls and vicinity.
In the year mentioned, Mr. and Mrs. Ferris made the trip from a Wisconsin town, ten miles southwest of Madison, to Red- wood Falls, in a covered wagon, bringing with them their son, of three years, and their daughter of two months. The trip took three weeks, and during that time the family slept in the wagon every night except the last, when they stopped at the home of a farmer. However, the wagon was a large roomy one of the platform type and more comfortable than many used.
Just how valuable such a wagon and horses were in those days is shown by the fact that Mr. Ferris later traded the outfit for a hundred and twenty acres of land, which now lies in about the center of the Gilfillan farm. This land Mr. Ferris after- wards traded for land nearer Redwood Falls.
Two years after the arrival of the Ferris family the North Western railway was built to Redwood Falls. That spring look- ing from the windows of her home, Mrs. Ferris could see thirty- six new houses in process of building and scarcely a tree in sight ; nothing but flat rolling prairies everywhere.
In the winter of 1880, the family moved to the W. Baker farm, south of what is now the Winn farm. During this winter Mrs.
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Ferris saw no other woman from December until March, when Mr. and Mrs. Jones, then living on the Winn farm, drove across the fields for a visit. This was an exceedingly cold winter with an abundance of snow and traffic was almost impossible. About once in two weeks Mr. Baker sent a man to the farm with mail and provisions, and this was practically the only means of com- munication with the outside world. The rural telephone service was even less efficient in those days than it is today.
The good roads of Redwood county may be directly traced to the activities of Mr. Ferris, who was the first street commis- sioner, and is directly responsible for the graveling of Bridge, Mill and Main streets, doing most of the actual work himself. Mr. Ferris has always been connected with the best interests of the city and is at present one of the strong members of a strong council. With Mrs. Ferris he has always been identified with all movements that tended toward the uplift of the city and its people.
James Aiken's Reminiscences. "My first acquaintance with Redwood Falls was formed about the first of May, 1880, two years after the North Western railroad was built into that town. My mother and myself put up at the Commercial hotel, occupy- ing the same location as the McAllister, the old hotel having gone up in smoke many years ago. Mr. Bunce, father of George and Ed. Bunce, was the landlord, but was succeeded not long afterward by the late H. D. Everett, father of our present county treasurer. There were no business houses fronting on Washing- ton street at that time, to the best of my recollections, except the blacksmith shop of Fred Hotchkiss, a livery barn south of the hotel, and Capt. Dunington's United States land office, a one-story frame shack, near the site of the present Asleson store. The Gazette building of that period was on the present Fred Thompson block corner, and was so open to winter's blasts that the office was removed that fall to the second floor of a frame block of two stores on Mill street (opposite the present Japs garage), which also went up in smoke many years ago, but long after the first-mentioned Gazette building had been removed to Third street, opposite the present Kumm block, had been con- verted first into a photo studio for N. B. Anderson, and later into ashes. I think at the time of the Commercial hotel fire.
"The winter of 1880-1881 was of a character so unique that I assume that it will be adequately described by some of your local pioneers, in detail. To have mails as well as all freight and express matter come at intervals of six weeks or so, was only one of the many extraordinary phenomena of that wonder- ful winter of snow blockades. I would rather take up the rest of my allotted space with more or less at random notes about the men and women, who, in Redwood Falls, dominated the busi-
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ness and social life of the period between the years 1880 and 1890.
"A group of the personalities that most strongly impressed me at that time, would include H. D. Chollar, a man of energy and ability, whose tragic death by a fall from the eastern ap- proach of the Redwood bridge to the rocks below, while leaning over the cliff to inspect the effect of a threshing separator pass- ing over the bridge, was a decided loss to the progressive ele- ment of Redwood Falls. Mr. Chollar was mayor of our little city at the time of his death in 1888, or 1889 I think, and his widow, the late Mrs. Ella Chollar, was one of the lovely women of the Redwood Falls of that period.
"Mr. and Mrs. James McMillan constituted another couple who ranked as business and social favorites in the period I am trying to recall. 'Jim' McMillan was the owner of the pioneer Redwood Falls store, a genial and popular man. Mr. McMillan died prior to 1890, I think, but Mrs. McMillan disseminated sun- shine and good deeds for quite a number of years later.
"W. P. and James Dunnington were prominent to some ex- tent, during this decade, the former first as register of the United States land office for a time, and a local political leader, while J. M. continued in the grocery business from 1880 until compara- tively recent years. The brothers were quite different in their outward characteristics, but alike in kindly traits as well as in certain combative tendencies. J. M. was best known to me, and I shall always cherish his memory as a loyal, kind-hearted friend and neighbor.
"Other business men of that period were: Philbrick, Fran- cois, King Bros. and Robt. Wilson, in the dry goods line; Mckay and Race Lechner, and Ackmann, grocers; Dr. Hitchcock and Son, and C. C. Peck, druggists; Laird and Dornberg and E. A. Chandler, hardware dealers; H. N. Bell, furniture; Geo. Drake, and Leo Truesdell, harness makers. In the banking line W. F. Dickinson and G. W. Braley divided the business up to the time of the death of the latter, after which Clarence Ward and H. D. Baldwin organized the Redwood County Bank, and later O. B. Turrell and associates organized the Citizens Bank. Aune and Ringdahl also opened their clothing store during this period, Mr. Thune succeeding Ringdahl a year or two later. Early in the eighties, C. W. George succeeded G. Bohn in the lumber and grain business, as a competitor to the Laird-Norton yards, man- aged by Mr. Chollar up to the time of his demise. Other old- timers like the Tenney Bros., Geo. Crooks and Bishop Gordon, belong to the period antedating the eighties, rather than to the time I am trying to recall.
"The legal profession in 1880 included H. D. Baldwin, Alfred Wallin, Frank L. Morrill and J. H. Bowers. Judge Baldwin be-
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came district judge by appointment of the governor in 1880 or 1881, and Mr. Wallin, after an ineffectual canvass for the same position at the subsequent election, when Judge Wehber of New Ulm begun his long judicial career in that district, moved to North Dakota and eventually became a supreme court justice of that state for a series of years. Morrill early removed to Minneapolis, later to California, where he led a checkered career. Mr. Bowers was a progressive and conscientious citizen, for some years associated with the late J. B. Robinson, his brother- in-law, in the real estate business. The writer remembers both of these men as loyal and helpful for many years.
"Perhaps the best-loved citizen of that decade was that good physician, W. D. Flinn. I doubt whether any other pioneer resident of Redwood Falls was ever able to serve so many peo- ple in so many beneficial ways as Dr. Flinn.
"In church organization work, Rev. R. E. Anderson was pas- tor at the time of the destruction by fire of the first church building of the Presbyterian denomination, the winter of 1882- 1883, remaining until after the erection of the new church on the present site, of which he was the first pastor. After him came that fine old soldier of the cross, Dr. J. G. Riheldaffer, and later Dr. John Sinclair early in the nineties. Dr. Riheldaffer and family were strong factors in the social and religious life of Redwood Falls in the eighties. In the M. E. church, I recall the ministry of Rev. C. S. Dunn, Rev. John Pemberton and Rev. Hanscomb, the latter being associated in my memory with the erection of the present M. E. church in the nineties.
"Notable events during the eighties were the big fire in the fall of 1884, which cleaned out the buildings on Second street, opposite the Gazette office of today, and was followed the next year by the erection of most of the brick buildings on Wash- ington street, as well as those west of the Anne & Thune block on Second street; the entrance of the M. & St. L. Railway into Redwood county in 1884; the series of murder trials, beginning with the Alexander homicide on the streets of Redwood Falls and followed by the dramatic Rose trials-three of them-the last ending with the only hanging in Redwood county during my thirty-one years of residence; the Holden murder trials, wherein Judge Baldwin did effective work for the defense, was the last of the series, both the accused and his victim being Morton resi- dents.
"I am not at all satisfied with the crude outline of memories of thirty years ago, but realize that it is too long for a newspaper sketch. The development of the school system of Redwood county, to which S. J. Race as county superintendent, aided by his faithful helpmate, devoted twenty busy and fruitful years, deserves more than passing mention, and this is only one of many
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progressive movements, which I hope will be brought out in your Old-Home week celebration and anniversary issues.
"Memory at this time recalls many kind people I first knew in those ten years, which those of us who lived in Redwood Falls then 'have loved long since, and lost awhile.' Dear old Father Swift, Donald and big Archie Stewart, Dr. Riheldaffer, Aunt Ella McMillan, Father and Mother Mckay, Jim Robinson, Nick Hunter, Mrs. Chollar, Squire Chapman, Robert Parker, Mr. and Mrs. Pond, Mr. and Mrs. Van Schaak, and others, but I must bring this to a close or be too late for next week's Gazette .- Jas. Aiken, Whittier, Cal., May 17, 1914." (In the Redwood Falls "Gazette."
John Mooer Killed. In May, 1865, a son of John Mooer was shot accidentally ; this was the second death. The circumstances of his unfortunate death were nearly as follows: A number of government scouts were encamped, with their families, near Rice creek, at a point about seven miles northwest of the stock- ade, at Redwood Falls. John Mooer, Alexis La Frambois, Joe La Frambois, and Tom Robinson were the leaders and prominent men of the party. Though it is probable that they never had an encounter with the Indians, encamped as they were in a hostile attitude, it is not strange that they were on the alert and some- times received a scare. One night John Mooer's son was on guard, serving his turn, as a guard was constantly kept. Find- ing it cold he wrapped himself in a blanket and wore it on his beat. Coming into the tents at the end of his patrol, a squaw waking suddenly, screamed when she saw him dressed so much like the hostile Sioux, and Alexis La Frambois, who was lying on his gun, raised it, and, taking him for an Indian, shot and killed him, the charge passing through him from side to side. He was brought to the stockade and buried just outside .- (His- tory of the Minnesota Valley.)
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