Interesting Reads

         In 1885 Lars & Sigrid Negstad, accompanied by one year old Albert moved from Lac Qui Parle County, MN to take a homestead in western Brookings County, Dakota Territory. They travelled by a wagon carrying their earthly goods, pulled by oxen with a milk cow tied behind the wagon. The ox yoke used on that trip hung in the granary on the farm as I grew up. Now I'm filled with questions I wish I would have asked before my father, Albert, died in 1969.

      Reading two books by local author Chuck Cecil, A Pictorial Journey with Grandpa's Horses and the Machines They Powered, and Bull Trains to Deadwood, by Chuck Cecil awakened those unasked questions. As white settlement came to Dakota Territory steamboats would climb the Missouri River from St. Louis, MO, to Fort Pierre, Dakota. With the discovery of gold in the Black Hills development there expanded necessitating the movement of freight from Ft. Pierre to The Hills. 

     From the time gold was discovered in The Hills in 1874 until the railroad  reached there in 1885, bull trains pulling heavily laden wagons moved the freight. Many of these bull trains had 20 oxen yoked to do the pulling. Bull trains is a misnomer as the oxen were in fact former bulls. They were attached to the wagons by chains which meant that they could pull but not stop the wagons. A variety of brake systems were employed to handle the wagons down hills. Typically there were three wagons linked together, the lead wagon might carry 8,500 pounds, the center one 5,500 pounds and the last wagon 3,500 pounds. It is 200 miles from Ft. Pierre to The Hills and teams tried to make 15 miles a day. Oxen could feed off the land and did not need to be fed grain as did horses and mules making them suitable for these long treks.

  Grandpa's Horses, is filled with pictures of horses and the machines they pulled. Some of the machines pictured I have seen in use. Others answered questions for me like "O that's how that worked." It's an important pictorial history.  (Thanks, Mark, for lending them to me.)

Takk for alt,

Al