Traveling salesmen were some things for sure, but they were not primarily a joke in prairie farm country in Montana in the ’50s.

~They were  mostly unnecessary. Farmers did not plan to buy things from traveling salesmen because if they needed something they went to town and bought it and figured the business of acquisition was best handled that way. They didn’t think it showed good judgment to make unplanned purchases from an unknown source with limited inventory who showed up uninvited. That just didn’t makes sense on a lot of levels.

The one exception to that rule for our family was the Watkins man. His presence and the fragrance that wafted in the door with him was always welcome, along with his merchandise.

The smell of Watkins salve takes me back to the kitchen on a November night at the end of the day, or to a cold and windy April afternoon as Dad comes in for coffee. The chapping of his hands from the raw work of repairing barbed wire fences takes him to the old red can to spread on some farmer-style healing. After darkness falls on such a day, the pungent aroma lingers in the living room where he had spent the evening reading before heading to bed after banking the coal for the night.**

~They were a nuisance. They didn’t have a clue about how not to be a pest during spring planting, fall harvesting, evening chores or afternoon gardening. Half the time they didn’t know how to drive in the mud or change a tire, so the local farmers helped them out when they got in trouble on the roads. (more…)

Check here for a complete list of previous MBOBs.

This is a chapter from the book –  so I’m cheating a little today. 😉 Previous MBOBs are provided in the list above in case you are familiar with this story and would like to find one you haven’t read.

Palle Lauring has a two-page discussion in *A History of Denmark, in which he analyzes the historical reluctance of Danes to invest materiel, men, or money in a constant state of military readiness.

Those pages became an “Ah ha!” moment for me because he described the world view of our family with almost eerie accuracy. It had not occurred to me that any such understanding of our perspective existed outside of Montana.

Young people in a stable subculture have many advantages and blessings but the distant view of the microcosm they inhabit must be found elsewhere.  They truly don’t know that their particular family did not spring fully formed at the point of their own birth. Even the date of their parents’ marriage would be a mistaken starting point for something that actually began to take form a long time ago in a country far, far away. When they do discover the distant view documented by an author or an artist they may still marvel as I did, “He doesn’t know us. So how does he know us so well?” (more…)

Whether or not a person is able to stay warm has always accounted for the difference between life and death in the northern latitudes. Perhaps this is a tag line on last week’s post about cold things –

When winter weather is like it was across much of the country last week (and is in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota every year, often for weeks at a time) providing shelter and feed to the livestock is primary.

We had a large barn that could hold up to 150 head for a couple of days if necessary. The hay would be spread on the floor and they would just be closed in – close enough that their massive bodies were quite the furnace-on-the-hoof, but with enough room that they could move around a bit throughout the days and nights they were there. (more…)

This MBOB has a word picture about January thaws, a true story from the 1950s and a book recommendation.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in eastern Montana in the 1950s. It’s been bitterly cold for a long time, but the blizzard has finally moved on. The main roads have been plowed and things look like they might be settling back to normal for the season. While the temperature is still hovering around zero (F) every night, at least the everlasting wind has stopped.

When it’s dead quiet on the prairie after a storm and it’s really cold, everything crunches.

Every step crunches – sharply – boots squeaking against the surface of the tile-hard snow put in place by just slightly-less-than-hurricane-force winds, which then polished it smooth.

A glance out the frosted kitchen window reveals diamonds spread as far as the eye can see. A million facets of frigid, glittering carats.

The triangle of frost on every pane of glass documents the escape of precious heat but we didn’t know that. We just knew Jack Frost had paid a visit and had left spectacularly detailed art for our viewing pleasure.

By the time we were five or so, we knew not to touch the windows when Jack Frost had come, but just watch the kaleidoscopic beauty of each square of glass change over the hours. The frost was usually gone by evening and if we didn’t touch the window, it departed quietly and left clean glass behind. If we couldn’t resist and had touched the window there was a little fingerprint at every point of contact meaning that the windows had to be cleaned in the dead of the winter. Moms were happier if they didn’t have to do that job over and over again. (more…)

Spoiler alert: This MBOB crosses from the past to the present.

My brother wrote this about the two decades between the two world wars:

Economic conditions were worsening by 1927. In the early twenties crops were good, producing 25-35 bushels of wheat per acre, which sold for as high as $1.52 a bushel in 1925. In 1926 it was down a bit and continued on down to a low of 36 cents a bushel in 1936.

During the early thirties only 6-12 bushels per acre of wheat was harvested, but the worst was yet to come. In 1936 and 1937 there was no harvest. There was very little rain and lots of wind, producing blinding dust storms. There was rust (a fungus) in 1937. There were also hordes of grasshoppers infesting the fields. They ate everything.

In the late 1960s, my husband and I and our two little boys were living in southern California. We drove to Santa Barbara one day to go to the beach and while we were there, I walked into a little book store specializing in used books. It was one of those little spots-along-the-street that is nothing more than a doorway and a window display.

I poked around the dusty shelves a bit and then saw a table in a back room stacked high with random volumes. As I glanced over the pile I saw this title on the top layer: Next Year Will Be Better. My heart flipped a beat and I felt like I had been called back home.

Who on earth wrote a book titled Next Year Will Be Better? It had to be someone from back home. (more…)

Dad included this Christmas thought in a letter to Mom dated December 15, 1925 as they were anticipating their marriage in April of 1926:

“Now we are nearing the beautiful Christmas time when we shall pause and see our Christ as the little child who came to save us.  May we be as children and accept Him in our hearts, to dwell there through the years that may come for us.  Christmas always means more to children than to grownups, so I guess we should all be children again for a day or two in order to receive the true Christmas gift.”
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Ten days before Christmas in 1941, Dad paid $2 for two tons of coal for the furnace. He also spent 19 cents for food – perhaps a bag of his favorite lemon drops – on his way to the coal mine south of the river where the coal was brought out of the tunnel in a small wagon that ran on rails, pulled by a single horse.
It was eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, CIC of the Pacific Fleet, still has two days to go before his rank reverts to Rear Admiral and he is replaced by Admiral Nimitz.
As the sun rises in Holland on this day, the Dutch learn that their use of gas and electricity is subject to new restrictions. In Lisbon, Portugal –

…the port was a madhouse of clamoring humanity, with thousands trying to flee Nazism. The last ship of the American Export Line was about to set sail for the United States before the harbor closed. Only Americans and British subjects with passports and transit visas were allowed aboard. No Germans were allowed, even if they opposed Hitler, and all those German citizens in Portugal wanted nothing to do with the Third Reich. The “pitch blackness of Nazified Europe” was what they now faced. (more…)

When Thomas Jefferson was asked to write the Declaration of Independence in late June 1776, he did so in just a few days. The document we know isn’t terribly long, but the draft he delivered to the Second Continental Congress was much longer, and the original draft was heavily edited, revised and diluted by committee. One phrase that was in both the original and final versions is, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“

Why did this phrase appear in both versions? Jefferson was a well-read person; his home Monticello was filled with the works of contemporary and historic philosophers. In fact, one of Jefferson’s favorite thinkers was English philosopher John Locke. Locke originally posited (in “Two Treatises on Government”) the idea that a person’s right to live a healthy life, free to amass and maintain property — “life, health, liberty and property” — is one granted by God. Locke also reasoned that our fates are determined by God; no other individual may interfere with that fate
Locke….cites property as a natural right. Clearly, Jefferson took Locke’s concept of the right to life and liberty and applied it to the fledgling United States and its citizens in the Declaration of Independence.
(http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/pursuit-of-happiness-meaning1.htm)

Ownership of property can be simply expressed as, “This is mine; that is yours” or “This is mine; it is not yours.” The ability to make a distinction between what is mine and what is yours is necessary to individual liberty, and the land surveys that preceded the settling of the the country were the result of a basic truth:  if we cannot establish where my ownership ends and yours begins, no one can effectively claim to own anything.
Land surveys were necessary precedent to the Oklahoma Land Rush, necessary to the development of the farmlands of Iowa and eventually, Wyoming ranches – as they moved beyond open range grazing of herds of cattle numbering in the tens of thousands.  http://okgenweb.org/~land/

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The following is from Story of the Great American West (Reader’s Digest Association, 1977)

Surveyors–Forerunners of Orderly Settlement

The surveyor of the late 1700s relied principally on his compass and chain. The compass, mounted on a tripod, gave the direction of survey lines; the 66-foot chain, with links of standardized length, measured distances. A plumb bob hung from the tripod marked the starting point for measurement. In the field, the surveyor sighted on some prominent landmark, or his sighting pole, while his chainman measured the distance.
….A well-trained surveyor could get accurate results even with his simple instruments; however, errors often occurred, giving rise to disagreements and lawsuits among later landholders.

Somewhere in our seven hundred acres of pasture was a geodetic survey marker. One day our Dad took us to the place where it sat countersunk in the short prairie grass and gave us a short history of the business of the surveying of the prairies, circa eighteen hundred and something.
Seeing that marker anchored in the sod and trying to understand that it was linked by measurement to every other such survey marker in the west stirred a conscious effort in my thoughts that day, and I tried to peer through the little I understood to understand something new.
I could not comprehend the unknowns or the vastness of the land but knowing all those markers were out there changed my understanding of the bit of prairie on which I stood. No matter how vast our almost twelve hundred acres seemed – it had been measured. That was interesting to think about.
In the spring of 1805 Lewis and Clark went through our neck of the woods as they headed west. Their return trip brought them back to St. Louis on September 23, 1806. Then the government and the railroads  geared up for the opening of the Great American West to the pioneers and their plows, and surveying was essential.

Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862, the Homestead Act encouraged Western migration by providing settlers 160 acres of public land. In exchange, homesteaders paid a small filing fee and were required to complete five years of continuous residence before receiving ownership of the land. After six months of residency, homesteaders also had the option of purchasing the land from the government for $1.25 per acre. The Homestead Act led to the distribution of 80 million acres of public land by 1900.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Homestead.html

It’s remarkable that the surveying which would become the linchpin of secure land descriptions and the basis for settling and owning land was completed as early as it was. I think that’s quite an achievement no matter how you cut it.
Not all surveying was well done, of course, and there were occasional zippy criticisms of certain individuals published in the local papers which went into some detail about the sloppiness of their work.  On October 26, 1877, one such critique appeared in the Weekly Journal in the home town of my husband’s great-grandparents in west central Minnesota.
One J. R. King had done serious disservice to the good citizens of Otter Tail County, Minnesota in earlier days. The writer of this dripping-with-sarcasm piece was not about to let him quietly skulk off and impose his surveying skills on Ramsey County, which includes present day St. Paul.
Consider the utterly civil use of language clearly intended to do serious damage to Mr. King’s reputation in his new environs. Apparently Mr. King was a flat out liar and this well-equipped local wit who knew the whole story made good use of his opportunity to share.

We notice that down in Ramsey County, one J. R. King is running for county surveyor.
Can these things be? And is he really the gentle galoot who, in the high old democratic days before the flood, surveyed some of the towns in Otter Tail county?
Take Aurdal, for instance. A town full of lakes, and with the Red River running through it, in which – as competent surveyors assure us – no foot of meander surveys were made on the ground, although some 40 miles of such appear on the map and of course, were paid for by Uncle Samuel.
When Mr. Jones, who owns a quarter section on the west side of the Red River ascertains definitely that his land is on the east side of the river, and that Mr. Smith owns it, then Mr. Jones swears. There are many Mr. Joneses in Aurdal and profanity is on the increase.
We tremble for the morality of the rising generation in that district.

….and now the writer warms to the revelation of  Mr. King’s fraudulent descriptions of woodlands and forest where there was actually a huge lake. I suggest you read this out loud to get the full benefit of the writer’s work.

Over in the northeast part of the town, the township plat and field notes show a fine beautiful tract of land, covered with forests of stately oak and juicy maple, where the antlered deer and the bob-tailed rabbit roamed in peace and security through the undulating wilds.
The surveyor’s notes revel in gorgeous description of the beauty and fertility of this remarkable tract of land, and the minuteness and fidelity of his delineations merit volumes of praise.
At his section corners, he tells us with a truly remarkable precision the size and character of each tree and the exact distance and direction of the same from the section corner.
Alas, that sweet and soft illusion must be dispelled.
William Tell was a myth. John Smith was not saved by Pocohontas and Shakespeare was Bacon. Daniel Webster didn’t say, “I still live.” George Washington could tell a lie, and J. R. King could see him and go one complicated official oath better.
All that beautiful region in northeastern Aurdal is known as Big Fish Lake, a deep and beautiful sheet of water, some three miles across. We have no heart for comment.
When that bold surveyor made that comprehensive oath – the pre-curse, so to speak, of many others – he must have been only Jo. King. Which, of course, was nothing to speak of.

So not all surveyors were good guys, and not all surveying was lawsuit-proof or accurate even under the best of efforts, but it was an amazing effort that was necessary to the building of our nation. Skills. Math. Truth. Equipment. Years of effort. Lots of paper and documentation.
It’s good to engage with things that elicit wonder and present mystery. Sometimes the wonder and mystery may rise out of incomplete knowledge that can be corrected by a few years of growing up or reading a book. Sometimes the wonder and mystery can be chased for a lifetime.

A pragmatic giving of thanks is what went on in farm country – knowing that we had that for which to be thankful (the seasons and the crops) and knowing Who to thank.  Our thanks-giving included an acknowledgement that the Gracious God who oversees  earth and time is also a staple of the foundations of our nation.
Such thanks-giving has taken many forms and found many expressions, but it always rises from thankful hearts who  know their dependence on God. It has molded itself to a variety of liturgies, fractured children’s plays about the pilgrims, and – in farm country – it found a place in the annual Harvest Festival in our country churches.
Near the middle of November an evening was set aside to decorate the church with the harvest.
Sheaves of wheat arranged to spray out just so were attached to the side windows of the sanctuary which in mid-fall were also occasionally covered with thick frost in the morning. They might be attached to the pews like so many decorations for a fall bridal display. (more…)

Last week I asked for help to have an MBOB ready to go for your Sunday reading. Stella jumped right in when I asked, and shared some of her mailboxes and some of her old barns. Created quite the discussion, too – thank you again, stella.
Since October 18 when my husband had a routine hernia repair, we have been on what sometimes looked like a wild goose chase. I imagine that some days we have sort of looked like Gilligan’s three hour tour – we set out on a simple outing and have been quite unable to find our way back to the shore we left. Finally, a week ago this last Friday, we understood that we were in an entirely different world, not of our choosing. (more…)