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Letter: 4

February 21, 1993

      DEAR CHERYL & Family, We have had another good rain this weekend. We are still behind normal, but it does help a lot. I believe there is a lot of snow in the Sierras where it does the most good because it is stored and only runs off as it melts.

      Grandma and I are getting a new refrigerator — a 25 cubic foot one. It was supposed to be $1,300 but we are getting it for $900. The old one works fine until it needs defrosting and then shuts off. Its about time we got a new one.

      Grandma and I were talking about our ancestors and it came out that she thought it was my great grandfather who fought in the Civil War. I had to correct her on that. It was my grandfather Howard. Most people will say it was their great grandfather or great great grandfather. I thought you might like to have some information about him, since you are supposed to be interested in genealogy. His name was James Durkee Howard.

      As a relative, his life was quite interesting to me. He was born in 1829 — I think in Binghamton, New York. When the Civil War started he was living in Indiana. He was an Indiana Volunteer. He was in the battle of Shiloh. The war partially disabled him and he was discharged. He was entitled to a Civil War pension but was too proud to accept it for years. He was a tenant farmer in Illinois. Apparently they were very poor but he was very proud of paying his bills and "not being dependent on the government" for the pension.

      This kind of pride caused him to lose one foot. He had hired a thrashing machine to thrash their grain for an agreed-on price. When the last bale was thrown into the machine, he wanted to make the gesture of paying the man before he asked him. His foot slipped on the steps as he was dashing up the steps of the threshing machine and went into the auger, mangling it to the extent that they had to amputate it.

      The amputation took place on the kitchen table. The doctor had brought one bottle of ether but someone knocked the bottle over and most of it was spilled and the amputation proceeded anyway.

      They had five kids in the family. My dad was number four. Three girls were older than he was. Uncle Gus was the youngest. They now told the old man "To hell with your pride! You are now really disabled, so apply for your pension."The back pension amounted to about $1,000, which was a lot of money in those days. That was in 1884.

      The railroad had been built into South Dakota by then. They loaded their belongings onto the train. They had their livestock in a boxcar. Pa and Uncle Gus would go into the boxcar and sit on the horses while the train traveled which was quite a novelty to them. They went to the end of the line, Blunt.

      They went out northwest of town about 8 miles and filed a homestead. When Aunt Lu was old enough to homestead, she filed one too. They built a house to live in and planted crops. Everything they planted grew like a miracle. The soil had had nothing but grass on it since the ice age.

      The name Durkee was a family name of some Dutch ancestor. My dad thought the middle name was "Dergy" until he saw it on some document. He said Grandpa always went by James D. and never spelled out the middle name. Pa was born in 1870. Grandpa Howard was about 41 at that time. When I was born, Pa was 46. So you can see how three generations spanned the time from 1829 to the present.

      Blunt was kind of a boom town. They had 21 saloons at one time. It boomed because it was the end of the line for a while.

      When they settled on the farm, they couldn't find water at first and for quite a while Pa went to a neighbor's farm several miles away with a barrel on a stone boat to haul water every day. Later on they did find water and were able to quit hauling water.

      When they came to Dakota Territory, not yet a state at that time, Pa was 14 years old and because of Grandpa's loss of the foot, Pa considered himself the man of the family. He was always good with machinery and with repairing things. He sent away for blacksmithing equipment so that he could do his own blacksmithing and not waste time going 16 miles round trip to town. He was very good and the surrounding farmers who were closer to him than town preferred to have him do their Blacksmithing. He got so busy that he thought he didn't have time to farm and moved to town. They still kept the farm for years and let tenants farm it on shares.

      During the time they didn't have a well, they stored rain water in a cistern rather than just have it run off the house. I don't think they drank the cistern water, but it would be okay for livestock. Later they decided to salvage the bricks out of the cistern — not needing it anymore. It was warm day, June 5,1905. Grandpa Howard had wanted to do some work, and he suggested that they lower him into the cistern. He would clean up the bricks and they could hoist him out later. They went out to get him for lunch (they called it dinner — we had breakfast, dinner and supper in those days) and found him unconscious. He apparently had either a stroke or heart attack and died. He wanted to work in the cistern because it was comfortably cool. He was 76 years old— my age.

      At one time he was postmaster of Marston, South Dakota. He was a good Republican and one of the Republican administrations appointed him postmaster. He liked to quote an acquaintance when Grandma Howard asked him how he voted, He would say "Like old Smith, I voted like I shot —straight Republican."

      My chronology might not be too accurate because they probably didn't move immediately to Dakota. Uncle Gus, who was four years younger than Pa had seen lizards grow a new tail. He must have been considerably younger than the ten years he was when they homesteaded., because when they told him that Grandpa Howard had lost a foot, he remarked that he would grow another one.

      I don't proofread my stuff very well — so (there are) many errors. I thought I would tell you this stuff because the exciting life Grandma and I lead doesn't give me much to write about.

      With Love

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