1928 - A Bad Year

Roots. Transplanted.

1928 was a tough year for Herman Witte. The local farm economy near Crete in southeast Nebraska had just taken a sudden downturn that year, at least for one family. It was hard even in the city to make a new business grow and the brother-in-law’s business was failing.

Herman was a good farmer. He learned well from his father of German heritage and from his uncles who lived nearby. The soil was good and it rained quite often. Maybe not quite so often as it did in Aurora, Illinois, where his father had first stopped as he immigrated, but it was good enough for wheat and corn and soybeans. A good farmer could adapt. Herman married a local girl Augusta Bals, “Gus” to her friends, who was smart and even knew how to read. Don’t tell anyone, but she taught Herman how to read the newspaper. After that, he could win a lot of the arguments at the café in town. He would bang his huge right hand down on the table and say, “Well, my Omaha World Herald says . . .” and that usually left little to argue about.

Herman and Gus had a nice farm, paid for. Herman had a beautiful pair of workhorses. Paid for. He was mighty proud of that team. He fed them well and they worked hard for him. He could even rent a little more land and raise a good crop on that additional land with that good team.

Herman had mostly sisters. They were married but it seemed Herman was always helping them out in some fashion. One would have a sick child and the doctor needed to be paid. Another might have a leaky roof and shingles had to be bought. Herman and Gus could usually make it work out. One brother-in-law, Hubert, wanted to start a mechanic shop in town. Gas powered cars had been invented. Farm tractors had been invented. All those things needed tending to and needed repairs from time to time. Hubert liked the mental challenge of learning how those new things worked and how they could be fixed. He was excited to start but he needed tools and he needed a building he could use as a garage or repair shop. The old blacksmith shop just wouldn’t do.

The banker liked the idea of a modern repair shop in town. He wanted to help. But Hubert did not have the money to buy everything he needed and so he asked for a loan. As is true even today, the banker was not willing to loan the money until the Hubert no longer needed the money. Then the banker would loan him whatever he needed. (Sorry. I digress. The rules for making sound loans are sensible and have not changed for the lender or bank owner, but they sure seem backward from the borrower’s perspective.) In any event, Herman was finally talked into co-signing the note for Hubert and giving the bank a mortgage on the farm.

Hubert dived into the business and practiced his new trade for every customer that would come by. But not so many came by. Hubert cut his prices and got a few to come in. Hubert cut his prices a little more. That may have helped get one or two more customers. Hubert was sure business would pick up pretty soon.

But Hubert did not have enough money to make the monthly payments on the Bank note. The banker was getting nervous. Fall was coming and Hubert did not have any crop to harvest or sell because he always had his nose stuck under the hood of some Model T car. He gave Hubert one more month to get his business straightened out. Hubert failed to make the next payment and as promised, the bank demanded to be paid in full. Of course, Hubert could not pay off the loan. If he had that kind of money he would have paid the monthly payment.

Herman had a good crop this year. Prices seemed really good for commodities on the Chicago Board of Trade, according to the Omaha World Herald. Then one morning, Herman checked on his favorite team of work horses and found them both dead in the horse barn. Somehow they had gotten into a bag of bad feed and it killed them. Herman was heartbroken. He wanted to cry but he was a grown man and crying was not allowed. His only choice was to cuss. So he cussed. Long and loud.

When the banker came to talk about Hubert’s loan Herman was in no mood to discuss another disaster. The banker, after being called names, some he had heard before and some that were new even to him, went away empty-handed.

There was no more discussion after that. The banker did not waste any time and forced the sale of the Witte farm. Luckily, the farm sold well and its proceeds more than paid off the bank’s loan. Herman and Gus had money left over. They could buy another team, maybe not as good as the last horses but good enough. They could still rent land because Herman was still a good farmer.

Herman thought about his choices for about a minute and slammed his huge right hand down on the table. “No Sir! We are not going to buy another workhorse again in my life! My Paper says there is beautiful farming country in Montana, called the Gallatin Valley. That’s where we are going now! And, it’s far enough away that it will take at least a month for a letter from home to find us.” Gus liked the idea and so it was settled.

With the loan paid off, the banker warmed up to Hubert and his business idea. Hubert did not have to quit the business. He could still repair cars and equipment. The banker gave Hubert some friendly advice. He said, “Hubert, I know you are new in the business and new in managing a business. I know you think you should charge less for your work. And you will charge less for your time even if you do as I suggest.

“You must tell the customer that your finished product will be just as good as is any other mechanic’s. You should charge the same price charged by any other mechanic. You will get more customers because the customer will expect you to do the job. And you will do the job! However, you will work twice as hard and twice as long on these first jobs while you learn how to do the jobs correctly.

The next time you do the same job it will be easier because you will have learned which tools work and which steps to take first. So you will get paid half as much for your time, but just as much for the total job.” The banker was right. Hubert did get customers. Hubert liked his work so staying late and starting early was easy. And pretty soon he had more customers than he could handle. And his wife started talking to him again.

Herman was not afraid of a challenge. He was six feet tall and nearly as wide. Gus said Herman weighed 425 pounds all his life. Took two bathroom scales to weigh him. One for each foot. He looked like a walking keg of beer. But he didn’t drink. Or smoke. Or chase women. But he did talk loud and was not backward about cussing. Except in mixed company. He never hit a man. Nor, of course, a woman. People remarked on the size of his hands and his fingers. His hand was about twice as wide as a normal hand. His wrists were similarly large. Heavy boned, the doctors would say. His sons too grew up with remarkably large hands.

The roads west were generally passable as far as Grand Island and Kearney along the Platte River. The north fork would be a decent trail to follow all the way to Cheyenne and Casper in Wyoming, which offered the northern pass over the Rocky Mountains. A lot of gold rush miners followed that trail in the 1850’s.

But the Gallatin Valley was farther north, in Montana. North from the Platte meant The Sandhills. The Sandhills looked a lot like the Sahara Desert to anyone raised east of the Mississippi. Texas Longhorn cattle just couldn’t survive the weather. Until the cattlemen found that Herefords could survive a winter in Nebraska, very little use was made of the land. Only an occasional buffalo wandered through the Sandhills wasteland, Wild prairie fires often ravaged the tall, usually dry grass. A dry thunderstorm often triggered the fires. A dry thunderstorm is a storm with the thunder and lightning and wind but without sufficient rainfall to drench the fires that could result. The fires left bare the sandy soil. The sand moved with the wind like waves on the ocean.

As ranchers found ways to effectively fight such wildfires, the tall reedy grasses could grow to maturity and then fall down in the winter snows to catch the sand and allow the seedlings to sprout and grow next spring and renew the cycle. The Sandhills never became loamy, tillable, or good for anything but grass. But with good fire management, cattle could thrive.

The sign of a good rancher today is the lack of yucca. But in prior years, yucca was a friend of everyone. Fires damaged but did not destroy the hardy yucca. Its roots dug deep into the sand, far below the roots of grass and weeds. The basketball-sized clump of wax-covered stiletto-shaped blades contained the chlorophyll needed to convert sunlight and minerals into food for the plant. The leaves (the stiletto blades) could withstand the constant wind. The yucca bush was like a brick wall behind which sand could enjoy a respite from its wind-driven travels. Grasses could sprout in the immobile sand and take root. Only when ranchers controlled the fires was yucca no longer needed as the savior of the Sandhills. Cars just cannot traverse the sandy dunes. The slopes are too steep. The car won’t tip over but its wheels will slip in the sand and will dig into the soft dune and be stuck, unable to climb the hill and unable even to roll back down the hill. The North Loup river valley could get you to the middle of the dunes but who wants to be left there? The Dismal River is aptly named. The Calamus makes a valiant attempt but just can’t complete the trek.

We presume, then, that Herman and Gus avoided the Sandhills and instead drove north from Crete along the Big Blue River, bridged across Platte River near Columbus, and turned northwest along the peaceful, lush Elkhorn River valley south of the Winnebago and Omaha reservations. From O’Neill they could follow Highway 20 north of the Sandhills along a loamy ridge that is like a solid shore above an ocean. At Valentine, they had choices. They could turn north to Highway 18 in South Dakota. But that trip, relatively short by today’s standards, would mean driving 30 miles on unpaved, ungraveled, roads through the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, with very little chance of finding help with mechanical difficulties along that stretch of road. Even then, Highway 18 turns west and traverses 100 miles through the Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation of Shannon County (now Oglala Lakota County) in South Dakota, separated by Bennet County, which is sandwiched between the two reservations.

Alternatively, they chose to continue west on Highway 20 to Chadron, Nebraska with its Chadron State College (to become my alma mater 45 years later) lying at the northern foot of the Pine Ridge swathed in pine trees and steep cliffs rising to the Table above the White River and the famous/infamous Fort Robinson, the site of the 1879 Cheyenne Outbreak and the death of famed Sioux Chief Crazy Horse. From Chadron, they drove north through rolling hills of shorter hard-grass prairie peppered with pronghorn antelope on old Highway 385, over White River and across the South Dakota border. They passed Oelrichs where meets Highway 18 just west of the Reservation. They followed the road beside the railroad track through Smithwick and Oral. They drove across the Cheyenne River Bridge and hugged Fall River as it races through a narrow valley that slices through the towering mountains of the Black Hills, past the Allen Dude Ranch to beautiful Hot Springs, South Dakota and its healing hot spring mineral waters feeding Fall River. They drove on north, bypassing Custer to the west and its rugged terrain in the Black Hills and instead traveled on the east side of the Black Hills through Buffalo Gap and Hermosa and on north to Rapid City. From there they could drive northwest to Spearfish, SD, and choose between Gillette, WY to the west or head northwest to Billings, MT and on to Bozeman, MT the county seat of Gallatin Valley. But they did not make it.

The car broke down in Rapid City, South Dakota. The repairs took several days to fix. Not so many people that far from “civilization” knew how to make a gasoline engine run. Sure, every blacksmith could shoe a horse, repair a wagon, or rebuild a leather harness. But whoever replaced a piston in a water-cooled engine? So there they were. Tired children, many days of travel ahead, and it was getting late in the season. Snows might be falling soon. Even less humanity along the way and towns were even more sparse.

“We are darn close to a reservation,” Herman learned. “ A reservation for Indians. “Wasn’t it only thirty or forty years ago they were scalping people around here? How savage are they anyway? We beat ‘em pretty bad. Not because they weren’t good warriors. We just outnumbered them. And we had guns. But can’t let’em have likker. Drunked up, they go crazy. Hurt themselves. Hurt their families. Their bodies just can’t digest the stuff. Europeans have been adapting to alcohol for centuries. Indians never had it. They never adapted to it. So it is like feeding sweet poison to a baby. Just shouldn’t do it.”

“Don’t know what I would do if I was cooped up on a reservation forever, he mused. “S’pose I would go crazy too. Nothing to do. Sure, the government feeds ‘em cows, but sometimes not as regular as you would want. Sometimes they need to steal a little to fill the stew pots between cattle deliveries. Sometimes the younger boys steal a little just to avoid dying from boredom.”

“Gus, I heard at the café that the government is giving land for lease for a dollar a year. All we have to do is to farm. We are s’posed to show the Indians how they can make a living by farming. All we have to do is be successful. What do you think?”

Augusta said, “I heard the Gallatin Valley is expensive. Hard to buy good farmland. Everyone wants to farm in that valley."

So, they decided to stay, at least for a while. “We can always move on if we want to. And I am sure it will take at least a month for any letter to get here.”

So, they stayed. And then things got interesting