Adolph Peterson

ADOLPH PETERSON

1865 – 1941

Stories and Memories of Him As Told by His Son, Lawrence A. Peterson

Most of the stories told below were taped by Lyle Peterson on 6 May, 1981, in a conversation with Lawrence, Harlen and Lyle. Also included are some remarks made in a conversation with Ella and Leonard Magnus, And Lawrence, Gilbert and Lyle Peterson on 17 August, 1980. Reference is also made to Adolph in stories transcribed under the names of Olaf, Seward, and Lawrence Peterson, elsewhere in this book.

Lyle: Dad, …make some comments about highlights of Grandpa’s activities – what kind of a farming operation he had there, and like .. we were talking about some of the … work in blacksmithing.

Lawrence: Well, he was one of the best forge-fire welders that there ever was. He could, before we had these acetylene outfits, he would braze castings right in a forge-fire. He’d file brass, and then use borax, and he’d braze them in the forge-fire. … And he broke a shaft, about a four inch shaft in a steam engine – climbed the hill and hit a rock, and broke the shaft off – and he welded that in a forge-fire, and he, what they called butt weld; he drilled a hole in the center and both ends, and then he he’t those shafts ‘n’ pounded it so it got like a mushroom; and then it took several hundred pounds of coal to heat that, and that was all done by hand pumping the forge. They had one man on each end, and he hit that until it got all together, and then he forged it down again; then he put it in there, and it lasted out the steam-engine. … And he run the first steam engine in Cavalier County.

Lyle: Where did he learn all that?

Lawrence: From Grandpa (Olaf); Great-grandpa, would be, to you. … Of course the steam engine, they just come in there, so he just took that on himself. .. And he was the best steam-engineer in the country there for years. Everybody wanted him to run the steam engine in threshing. The first steam engines, of course, they pulled them with oxen; they wasn’t any traction or nothing to ‘em. … And then the steam engine come with the traction, but no steering apparatus. And they got oxen on front for to steer the engine, and the seat way up on front and top of the engine and the guy would sit up there and run the oxen.

Lyle: You think they’d have been able to figure that out?

Lawrence: Well, that was early; they didn’t have it yet.

Harlen: Guess that wasn’t a John Deere, then?! [Lyle was employed as an engineer by John Deere.]

Lawrence: And then, they was a little trick in feeding a separator, you know; and Grandpa, he was a great hand-feeder; that was before they had the self-feeder on it, you know, when they fed ‘em by hand. .. So, there was a smart-alec there and Dad (Adolph) was runnin’ the steam engine and firing it both; and he come up then, and the engine popped off.

“Yah, “ this guy said, “You can’t do that when I’m feedin’ that thing; I’m feeding it heavy enough.” “Oh,” Dad says, “I can pop that off any old time.” So the guy went to feed again and Dad, he got that just about up to a popping point, and he shoved in a few extra forks-full of straw, and he went down to the feeder. “Well, she’s going off now,” Dad says. It had just started to pop; and he thought the engine was blowing up, and everybody run and hid! And Grandpa (Olaf) come out from behind the separator, and he said, “By gons, what’s goin’ on here, anyway?” And Dad was lain’ on the ground laughin’! Grandpa thought that was too much monkey-works. …Yeah, they had a great time there.

But Dad was always scart of mad bull and stuff, you know. And he had a bull and he got out of our pasture and got over into one of the neighbor’s pasture, and there were two kids there, and they got teasin’ him; and, by golly, he did get mad. And they couldn’t milk the cows, you know, for a couple of meals, because the bull wouldn’t let ‘em around. And so Dad, he was gonna go over there and get the bull; and then the neighbor, a big Swede neighbor, come over there, and here Dad was just puttin’ his double-barrelled shotgun in the wagon. He was gonna get that bull! So the Swede says, “I’ll go with you; I ain’t scared of no bull.” So they come over there and the bull went out in the pasture, and he was going to get that bull then. “Oh, you don’t want to go out there; that bull will get you sure as the dickens.” “No,” he says, “I ain’t scared of no bull.” So he picked up a piece of an old oak fence post, looks just about like a bat, you know; and he walked out there, and the bull struck after ‘im, and bellerin’, his tail up in the air, and then the Swede was walkin’ straight for him, and just when the bull got even with him, he side-stepped and he cracked him one in the head, and he went down! And he took ‘im by the tail and he went round in circles a while! And he herded him out (of) there, and he run him into a small room, you know, about 12 feet square, and he wanted a bull ring then. He was gonna go in there and put the bull ring (on). “Oh, gee, you don’t wanta go in there!” Oh, he wasn’t scared of no bull. Pretty soon he went in there, with a little scuffle around, and he come leadin’ the bull out with the bull ring in his nose! “Ah,” he said, “A bull is nothing. He always shuts his eyes when he is going to hit you. …But,” he said, “The cow – a mad cow, you don’t want to monkey around with her, because her eyes is wide open all the time!” …So he knew his stock all right.

Lyle: I s’pose when you were growing up, they didn’t have much in the way of binders, either, did they?

Lawrence: Well, they had; yes, the first binder I can remember – that was when I was very small, too – that was a 6 foot Plano binder, and that was pretty good; but it didn’t have any truck or anything on it; just, you had to have your pole, had to have it kind of balanced, you see, and that was hard on the neck and things.

Then he used to do a lot of boiler refluing [replacing a rusted out flue].

Harlen: How long did he work in the blacksmith up there, then?

Lawrence: Oh, he didn’t. The new style blacksmithing for him wasn’t the thing, you know; like with the trip hammers, pounding plow-lays and stuff; and, of course, he was a little bit old for this rough work, you know; like shoeing horses and stuff like that. Why, he wasn’t too much at that.

Lyle: Not even when you were smaller?

Lawrence: No, he wasn’t too much for shoeing a rough horse. …I know I come, they didn’t know that I’d been shoeing horses, you know, and Ole and him, they had a bronco in the shop, but o-o-oh, such a ..racket! They was a-hollerin’ and raisin’ Cain trying to shoe that …bronco, and I come in there, and I says, “My goodness, what are you doin’, anyhow? Getting that horse so excited?” And I said, “You should be able to shoe him all right.” …I went in there and then I told them to step aside and I went ahead and I talked to the doggone bronco and patted him a little bit, and put the shoes on. After that, Dad never touched a horse.

Harlen: Where did you learn that? …Horseshoeing?

Lawrence: I picked that up by myself up in Cavalier County. …I shoed horses a lot up there.

Harlen: I thought maybe you’d get quite a bit of that out at the 101. [The 101 was a cattle ranch located on Graham's Island, just east of Minnewaukan. Lawrence was employed there when he was young.]

Lawrence: No, no, we never shod any horses there. You see, you didn’t need to shoe a horse that wasn’t on the road much. …And, of course, up there in Cavalier County in them hills, you had to shoe ‘em on account of they’d slip, you see.

Lyle: Well, then, how many horses did he farm with then? On your place there?

Lawrence: Oh, we had 4 horses and 2 mules. But they were small, they were small animals, all of ‘em, and we used six on a gang plow, where big horses, they used four.

Harlen: How many acres did you farm up there in Pembina?

Lawrence: Not much. About 70 acres.

Harlen: Was that small for those days?

Lawrence: Oh, yes, it was. Well, it was all the land that was broke up; and he never bothered to rent any land. Well, we rented some there, …

Lyle: I suppose … those grain drills, they were only 6 or 8 feet, weren’t they?

Lawrence: Well, no, they were, well the early ones was 6; and then 8; but the grain drills we had was 10 foot. Yeah, we used 4 horses. And we had the mules and horses together; and the mules, if you was going to sow close up to a slough or something, you would have to take it on the horses’ side, because the mule, if you got ‘em around there, and he got to sinkin’ too far, he’d just lay down. …That was the same thing in the snow in the winter, you know. …It got too rough, why they just lay down!

And then the mules, you know, if you wanted to make an extra round in the field; they knew just what the time was, and when it was time to quit, when it was noon and night both; and if you was gonna make an extra round, you just had to pretty near pound ‘em, you know, til you got down to the end of the field, and when they’d go round back, why then they’d pretty near run away with it! …Because they was bound to get home, you know!

Lyle: Did Grandpa build all the buildings on that farm, then? ..Or did he homestead then?

Lawrence: Yes, he homesteaded that. First he had just the small log cabin, and then he built on to it, and then they built a pantry, out of lumber; that was all that was on that house. And then in 1912, why then he built the new house you see. He sawed a lot of the lumber, for the dimensions, and then, why in the winter, he’d work out in this lean-to in the barn ‘n’ cut all the rafters and everything. When it got time to build, why, by golly, everything was there; it was marked, and he had everything all figured out, and it was just throe ‘em up there and start nailing.

Lyle: So you were born in a log cabin, then?

Lawrence: Oh yes, I was born in a log cabin. ‘See, now, Willie was the first one that was born in the new house. The rest of us was all born in the log building .

…And there’s no chimney in the log building, you know; just pipe up through the roof; and hot – and, by golly, the last spring we lived there, why the blame, had a soot fire, set fire to the roof; burnt a great big hole in the roof, you know, and we had a heck of a time.

That was regular there; they’d catch afire, no chimney. One fellow there, his house caught afire, and the neighbors was out there, and the stepson was carryin’ water and throwing on that thing, and he stood over on the ground smoking his pipe, and watchin’ them, and so the stepson come runnin’ over there. “Hans!”, he says, “Come on, and help us get that fire out!” “Oh, let them bren [Norwegian for burn], I never can care,” he says. He had a lot of insurance on it, you know, and he wanted it to burn down!

Lyle: Grandpa probably made more money, at least as much money workin’ on those steam engines and blacksmithing, as he did on the farm?

Lawrence: Yah. Well, it didn’t take so much those days, you know.

Lyle: He did enough farming to take care of the feed, the food in the house, and I imagine that would go a long ways.

Lawrence: Of course, when the kids got big enough they’d always work out someplace. But I never did work out much. It turned out so that I was the one that had to do the farmin’; I don’t remember him doin’ much.

Lyle: He didn’t do much farm work after he found somebody else to do it?

Lawrence: Well, him and I used to be out there plowin’ sometimes. We’d have a gang plow and a walking plow; and, of course, it was my job to handle that walking plow. He’d ride the gang plow. He’d have four horses on the gang plow and I had three on the walking plow.

Harlen: When you moved down here, you sold the horses and all that?

Lawrence: We sold all except the span of mules and two horses – the one horse was blind, and then another horse, and them mules.

Harlen: Were they yours, too?

Lawrence: No, they were Dad’s. And I drove them down from Vang – Gordon Braaten and I.

Harlen: Well, did you have some place to move to when you came down here then? Or did you have something set up?

Lawrence: Well, Dad and them was down first, you see, and they –

Harlen: Where was that at?

Lawrence: That was right over there where that new house (is), by them evergreens, a block south of here.

Harlen: Well, that’s where the blacksmith was, too?

Lawrence: No, the blacksmith shop was across the street, in an old livery barn. .. And then they had the garage upstairs in the barn; they had a ramp and they drove upstairs; and Ed was runnin’ the garage upstairs.

Lyle: I thought all his blacksmith work here was always down there west.

Lawrence: No, I moved down there. That was his. And he didn’t want to blacksmith in town anymore, so I moved uptown there. You see, he owed some on this here old blacksmith up here and the thing was not very good anyway, and he said to try to pay that up, why I’ll move down there and got ahold of that stuff; more for a blacksmith shop, anyway, because Ed had quit the garage business and moved away. …Well, he moved up to Vang, and farmed for a while on Inga’s father’s place. …Then he moved back to Devil’s Lake.

Lyle: I bet after living in those coulee hills there, this must have been kind of a wide open country around here?

Lawrence: Yeah. You see that at the time we come down here there wasn’t any shelter belts or nothin’ like that. There’d be a grove around some of the places; and some of ‘em didn’t.

Harlen: Small trees around town?

Lawrence: Yeah. Well, we missed the coulees, especially in the winter, because, gee, it was fun to go down there and hunt, you know; hunt rabbit and hunt partridge. And then, in the summer, we’d fish there, too, you know. We used to get a lot of fish there. But now, why that river is dried up, so there isn’t much there; I don’t know why.

 

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Lawrence: Then when selling the farm out there, why this man who wanted to buy it, and another man of Icelandic origin, live down in the coulee there. They had trouble there (between them) you know; and I think it cost (the buyer) something, you know. They got into some raw deal. Anyway, the Icelander come up to Vang, and he was inquiring about our family, you know. Well, somebody told him at Vang that we was over at Sam Braaten’s now; and that’s a mile from Vang. He said, “He’s … over there; they’re dickering on the farm.” By golly, the Icelander didn’t stop at all; he jumped in the cutter and he didn’t even sit down in the cutter, and put the whip to the horses, and he got over to Sam’s, and he just walked right in. “Have you sold the farm yet?” “No.” No they hadn’t sold it yet. “We’re just dickering”, he says. “W---- offers $5,500.” “I’ll give you $6,000.” And W----, of course, wasn’t going to let that go; he put another $500. “$6,500.” “Well, that’s good enough,” the Icelander says, “I got even with him now!”

Lyle: So Grandpa, he got a thousand dollars more on his house!

 

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Harlen: How many years did Grandpa live on the Island, then?

Lawrence: I suppose about ten years.

Harlen: Did he build that?

Lawrence: No, that jail was there first, see.

Harlen: Oh, he moved it out there?

Lawrence: Yeah, I moved that jail out there. …It’s curved, you see. It’s curved like an elevator. ..And heavy; oh gosh, it was heavy!

Harlen: How did you move that, then?

Lawrence: I had an old Chevy truck, and I put a cross piece on the top of the bed, and chained the timbers on that; and then I had two trailers on the back end, carrying the back end of the timbers. .. And then we drove; oh gosh we went to beat the dickens with it. But then I got over by Ramsey, and I got out from Ramsay; well, I blew out a tire on the old truck, you know, because it was pretty heavy. And then I had to leave it overnight there; got it off the road and left it overnight and then got another tire and struck out and we drove straight where that road that goes to Ziebach’s Pass, we drove straight out there, and I got down, clean down to the flats, and then come up through the flats with it, and got it up there. .. But that thing was heavy.

Lyle: I can remember that. I was –

Lawrence: Yeah, you was along; you got hit with a ---; someone was there and let loose with a pry, ad it hit you. Remember that?

Lyle: Yup. I know I got that jail on that old truck and those springs was bent around. … You were going up those hills out there, seems to me I was walkin’ along side that thing with some blocks, too. ‘Cause you didn’t, somethin’ happened to the truck, you didn’t want that thing rollin’ backwards. Your brakes wouldn’t ‘a’ held it!

Lawrence: No …No, but that thing, you see, we got that down to super low, you had pretty good power.

Lyle: Yeah, that was pretty slow on that thing.

Lawrence: Then he got that garden spot goin’ up in there, and he raised a nice garden; but anyway, Leon used to come out there, and there was a lot of pheasants out there at that time; and Leon, he’d come out there ‘n’ he’d take a .22 and he’d go out there and shoot a pheasant, and then he’d dress it and cook soup up. … And “Confound it, I don’t see how you can shoot them things, they’re so pretty,” he (Adolph) said. So, anyhow, he was plantin’ his corn up there, ‘n’ it got hot, so he went in and laid down then til later on in the evening. He come up there and here were two pheasants out there and they knew just exactly where he’d planted that corn, and they’d go over there, and they’d scratch and they’d pick up the corn, and then they’d go in there. Boy, he got mad then, and went in and hot his .22 and he shot ‘em! Game warden come out there ‘n’ got talking, and “Well,” Day says, “I’m a law-abidin’ citizen” and all this and that, “but,” he says, “when those confound pheasants start diggin’ up my seeds in the garden,” he said, “they end up in the soup kettle, and I don’t care who knows it, either!” …Game warden didn’t say anything.

Harlen: Did he have any cattle out there or anything?

Lawrence: No.

Harlen: Just the garden?

Lyle: And the dog.

Lawrence: No, he didn’t have a dog. …Well, Duke stayed with him there for a while. ..But Duke, they were comin’ into town and stayed over night ‘n’ by golly, somehow Duke got ahold of some poison and he got killed, and he died. …That was a nice little (dog) , but sassy! Oh! ….I’ll tell ya, you had Duke was in your car, nobody’d get in that car, that was all there was to that. And the neighbor lived right across the street there, and he would feed Duke pretty near every morning, and yet he could never touch him. …He’d call Duke, and Duke would come over there and he’d eat, but, by golly, he couldn’t touch him. He went and was putting his hand down there, Duke’d growl at him!

Lyle: Yes. As I recall, Grandpa even hauled Duke back out there and buried him out there.

Lawrence: Yes. And, I don’t remember just where it was, but there was a great big cement ball that he used to roll and bark; and he put that for a marker; but I don’t remember just exactly where it is now. That probably follows the road, too. …

Lyle: Ole was telling about Grandpa, some problem with some pig or something, over in the livery barn? … I guess there was quite a commotion around there?

Lawrence: Yes, we had an old, great big old sow, and she was mad, ugly, you know; so Ole and I was gonna butcher the blame thing, and he was using a pen in the back there, and he figured that we’d get her out of that pen and closer to the door; she was big, and Ole went to shoot her, and he shot and she just shook her head and she ..just crawled up in the manger. I happened to be down on the foot and I run around; there was a water tank for waterin’ horses, and ..it went around and it was real close quarters and she kinda got stuck in there, and there was an ax there that we used for cuttin’ ice in the winter, and I hit that thing with that axe as hard as I could, and she backed up and she come out again after me, and got out through the window, and Ole told me to go and get the shotgun. I got the shotgun and handed it to him, and he got down and she come after him and he let her have it with his shotgun; that stopped her right there!

And then, he used to get skunks, you know; and Ole was out huntin’ skunks there in back of that barn, pretty close to the neighbor’s, you see; it was right across there. ....

…Oh, you know, early in the fall, we used to go out in the flats and hunt them skunks, and you could tell pretty near where the dens was, because the snow would be meltin’ on top. …You could just punch a hole there, and you’d have a stick to press the tail down, and the tail started to come up first – they always wanted to get the tail up first. And, by golly, catch a tail …and they’d stick the head up and wonder what happened, and you’d shoot them and then hold ‘em for a while and then throw ‘em out, and then another one would come.

Harlen: What was you huntin’ them for?

Lawrence: For the hide.

Harlen: Oh. Money in them?

Lawrence: Yeah. Well, there wasn’t much money in those days; you got two, two and a half dollars apiece. I was the first one that started huntin’, you know. We had hay out there; we put up hay out on the flat at one farmer’s on the shares, you know; we was out dividin’ that hay, and they (were) comin’ in back with a jag o’ hay on; the old farmer was riding ‘n’ I seen these skunk tracks, you know. Then I said, “Why, let me off at this; I’m gonna stay huntin’ a little here.” The Farmer says, “Ah, darn kids, so crazy about huntin’ they’d do anything!” I tracked that down, tracked the skunk til I got to the den, and, by gosh, I got four skunks out o’ there; and I got a stick then, I took a stick on it, and carried ‘em then that way. They was heavy, you know, four big skunks; and I walked into town with them. I skinned them, I think, in that barn, too, but I didn’t cut any musk.

Lyle: Did Grandpa do very much hunting, then?

Lawrence: No, not much. …Dad was always the one you know, from a kid up, until he died, he was a good gardener. He like to garden. He was just a young guy gardenin’; and then the brush country, you see, just little patches in the brush, and by golly, the Indians would come out in the garden and there’d be an Indian woman there, helping themselves to his garden stuff. That didn’t bother him any.

Lyle: Yeah, as far as I can recall, like out in the Island, there was plenty of Indians around there; he seemed like he got along o.k. with them.

Lawrence: Yeah, he got along good with anybody.

Lyle: I imagine he had a pretty good reputation.

Lawrence: Yes. …And then we put up hay down here by the dump ground, and the mosquitoes was terrible; and it looked like rain and he wanted to cock this hay up in big cocks so it would drain; and we went down there after supper and cocked this hay, and I got some mosquito dope, and put on. I forget what they called it now; it was a stinking stuff, anyhow; it came in a little bottle, and I rubbed that on, and I was cocking the hay there, and he was just fightin’ the mosquitoes all the time. He asked how I could stand it, ad I said, “Well, I got that dope on”. Well, he didn’t believe much in that dope, but he put it on; and by golly, that was the end of the mosquitoes.

Lyle: Poison ivy never bothered him?

Lawrence: No.

Lyle: What about your other uncles, then?

Lawrence: Not Seward, either. …Yeah, they’d take that stuff and chew it! They could lay right down in the poison ivy. I don’t know how that could be. …Seward said that would make good toilet paper!

Harlen: Boy, he’s lucky he didn’t react to it! That’s all I got to say!

Lawrence: Well, they were big leaves, you know. …One of us would do that, we’d be in a heck of a shape! …Well, I was immune to poison ivy til I got east of Fort Totten cuttin’ logs in there, and by golly, I got into poison oak; and that started the thing goin! That poison oak, that’s worse than poison ivy!

Lyle: Grandpa sure liked living in the woods, though, didn’t he?

Lawrence: Yeah. Well, of course, they was always used to the woods. He sure enjoyed living there.

Harlen: He stayed out there all winter, too?

Lawrence: Oh, yes; he stayed there all the time. He just come in over a weekend, sometimes, or just sometimes over night. Lot of the times he’d just drive in and drive right back out again.

Lyle: He had that old International truck, didn’t he?

Lawrence: He traded garden stuff, you know, for groceries, in the summer. …Then he’d shoot rabbits and stuff, too.

Lyle: He used to go to Devil’s Lake once in a while and stay with Ed, didn’t he?

Lawrence: Not much. Well, you see, Ed .. moved to town here about the time Dad moved to the Island, right shortly afterwards. But he’d go, he lived in Devil’s Lake there, for a while he’d go there and stay overnight. …But he got a big Mitchell [a car], you know; that was … so big you know, a great big monstrous thing; and we was goin’ up to Vang, and I was drivin’ the thing; we was driving along, there was some cars ahead. Of course the road wasn’t worth a darn, and the car wasn’t very fast ahead of us. “Ah,” he says, “pull down in the ditch and pass him;” I turned down in the ditch and opened that thing up and gee, we passed him in a hurry, and back up on the road again. But then them blame tires, was so hard to keep tires on; and I don’t know what, I guess he blew out a tire over by Devil’s Lake – I wasn’t along that time; but by golly, he traded it off for an Overland with a box on behind. …That was a pretty nice little outfit.

Harlen: That’s what we got the picture of him, I think?

Lyle: No, that’s the old Model T.

Lawrence: Anyway, he traded it off, and then sold that Overland to John Knutson. That had a spark plug that had a whistle in it. … You’d pull a string: “toot-toot, toot-toot, toot-toot!”

Lawrence: Old John Knutson, he got great fun out of drivin’ through town and then pull that whistle. “Toot-toot, toot-“. Every time it fired it blew. …By golly, that was funny!

Lyle: And he (Adolph) didn’t believe in workin’ on Sunday?

Lawrence: Oh no, no. That was out. …When we was thrashing, of course, he’d work on Sunday, if it was rainy weather. …But anyway, we owned a thrashing machine; there was a Seventh Day Adventist up there, he was so strong you know, that you couldn’t do anything on his place when it was (Sabbath); and so, it was getting’ late in the Fall, too, and they was movin’ back in there again, and well, he didn’t want to thrash on Saturday, so they moved over to the neighbor, then and thrashed on Saturday; and then, Saturday night, the snow started comin’; and it snowed, oh, gee whiz; well, we thrashed all winter that winter—shovelled out for the steam engine. And the Seventh Day Adventist, he tried to make it out that he just done that so they could make some more money, instead of because he didn’t want to …

 

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Comments about Adolph by Lyle Peterson in a conversation 11 April, 1981.

Adolph used to go fishing with Lawrence’s family a lot. They went to the river once, and Adolph was a good swimmer. He swam across the Red River when he was age 9.

He was an expert on sewing machines. He would come into town and fix them for people. He also worked on clocks and watches. He didn’t have prescription glasses, but would end up wearing two pair of glasses when working on those clocks and watches!

Adolph had an old Buick automobile – a classy old car – a convertible, with a top that would go down. The standard “H” shift style was in reverse, so if you shifted the normal way, you would go in reverse!

Adolph was an easy-going person; never as lively even as Lawrence is now (at age 81). Lyle says Adolph’s boys always thought they had one of the finest fathers. (But it was a problem if he ever got mad at you!)