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Letter: 6

March 31,1994

      DEAR CHERYL & Family: As I have said before Grandma and I lead such an exciting life that I have to write you about other things — I wouldn't want the excitement generated from the accounts of our adventures to cause you to have a heart attack.

      Since Mormons are supposed to be interested in genealogy, I thought I would tell you about some of our recent ancestors — Grandpa and Grandma Spencer. They were tenant farmers in Illinois before coming to South Dakota. It was Dakota Territory then. Grandma thought they should get some land of their own instead of farming someone else's land. Dakota territory was being opened up for homesteading and it was the logical place to go. They came in the early 1880s. Mom was just a baby. I don't think the railroad had been built yet, and I believe they came by horse and wagon — maybe a covered wagon.

      Grandpa homesteaded a quarter section in Hansen County and that's the quarter section that Irma and I own now. It is very good land but no one can do well with only a quarter section in South Dakota. I don't know the particulars of how he acquired thousands of acres of land adjacent to the Missouri River but a good guess is that he bought up other people's homesteads after they "proved them up."Some people didn't intend to farm but would file on a homestead and after nine months prove it up and get title to it. They could then sell it to someone who wanted to buy more land adjacent to their own land. I had heard that Grandpa's ranch was bigger than the Reinecke's which you and Craig rode horses all over.

      They lived on the Fairbank Ranch well before 1890 because Mom learned to read before she was four years old. An older cousin visited them and said Mom wanted to learn to read. The place was so remote and lonesome that Mom had to read to have something interesting to do when not working. The cousin taught her to read. Unfortunately reading material was limited and what they had she read several times. She read Uncle Tom's Cabin seven times. She read a novel about King Arthur's court and probably had some romantic images in her mind about it because she named Elaine and Enid after two of the ladies in the court. Mom always liked having a lot of people around and found the ranch too lonesome so she didn't regret leaving it when she got married at about age 19. Aunt Fern, her sister, liked a lot of people around, but also liked the ranch. Aunt Fern loved riding horseback around the ranch. When they first moved up there, there were no other white people around and they said Grandma Spencer sometimes went six months without seeing another white woman.

      The ranch was named Fairbank because they thought there would be a town nearby with that name but the plans for a bridge there fell through and the town never materialized. Grandpa ran a trading post for the Indians for a while and Mom learned to talk one of the Sioux dialects. Later, when we used to have the Hughes County Fair in Blunt, the Indians would come to town and Mom would go to their tepees to see if anyone she knew was there. Sometimes she would know someone from one of the families she had known at Fairbanks and could inquire about some of the old Indians. She would show off and talk a little Indian to them. They were at the fair so that they could sell some Indian-made beaded stuff, leather, and some Indian jewelry.

      Going back to the fact that Mom didn't like the solitude of the ranch, I forgot to mention that Uncle Roy hated it so much that he ran away from home at the age of 14. Grandpa rode after him and caught up with him a couple of hundred miles away. He tried to talk him into coming home, but Roy didn't want to and Grandpa let him go. There might have been a strong personality conflict between Grandma and Uncle Roy. I'll have to verify that with my cousin Margaret Trevor. He became a merchant seaman and was later a ship's engineer. He sailed to almost every country in the world that had a seaport. He was very good about writing letters and he sent some things from time to time. The ship in the bottle is one of his gifts to the family. His hand writing was very precise and completely legible. This must have meant something about his personality. I don't think anyone in the family ever saw him again.

      In the early days the ranch was quite remote before people had automobiles and Fairbank was the end of the stage line. They actually had a stage coach that went there once or twice a week. We used to go up there in Pa's old Studebaker when the road following the Section lines had only two wheel tracks. After the automobile was in general use, the stage was a two-seated model T Ford.

      Emil Hansen drove the stage. (Aunt Fern always referred to it as "the stage”.) It took the mail and any light shipments of things and occasionally there was a passenger or two. Enid, Irma and I took the stage up there to visit. When we got to the big, steep bluff that we had to drive over just before going down into the river bottom land, Emil's old Model T couldn't make the hill in any regular low gear. But Emil had a Ruxel gear shift built in. I remember the little man with the low guttural voice saying, "Can't make it in low gear but the Ruxel will get us over the hill." It shifted down to such a low gear ratio that we crawled at about one mile an hour . . . but we got over the hill.

      The federal government has regulatory power over all navigable streams and the Feds defined the Missouri River as a navigable stream. Then Congress decided that some steps should be taken "to keep the channel open and free of snags."They set up a little boondoggle project to have a pilot boat come up the river to remove snags, etc. It would come by and the few ranchers there thought it was a big treat to see the pilot boat go by. One time the pilot boat got stuck on a sand bar and it took several days for them to get it free. The skipper sent one of the hands up to the house to see if they could buy some fresh vegetables because they were really tired of the food they had on the boat. Like all farm families Grandma had a big garden. What they couldn't eat they tried to preserve by canning and in the case of sweet corn, they could dry it then soak and cook it when they wanted to eat it. The garden first had to be plowed, then smoothed out with a harrow, then planted, then watered, the weeds hoed and then things picked, etc. Grandma collected a lot of things out of the garden and the boat hand asked what he owed her. She said "Oh, that's nothing. We have a surplus of vegetables. You're welcome to them. But you can do something for me. Just blow the boat whistle when you go by Fairbanks. It's lonesome up here and I would like to watch the boat go by."

      Years later they finally wised up and realized that the only navigation on the Missouri that far north was a duck hunter in a row boat and the project was canceled. One of the South Dakota congressmen or senators got the old log book to save. A log was required to prove that they were doing their job. They noticed that an entry going upstream and then downstream that they "Blew whistle at Fairbank."

      In those days Grandpa raised white-faced Herefords. He thought the most beautiful sight in the world was a well fed Hereford steer standing in tall grass. Later on when Aunt Fern took over the ranch she switched to Black Angus as they are very hardy in cold climates.

      Grandpa and Uncle Roy were both riding horseback. Uncle Roy was considerate enough that he didn't take the best horse and Grandpa having a better horse always caught up with him.

      It's too bad that you and Craig didn't get to see the ranch before the Oahe Reservoir covered up all the bottom land. The land in Little Bend was completely forested, and the rest of the bottom land made the river next to it a beautiful sight. There was an island in the middle of the river in front of the ranch too. When we saw it in 1960, I was in shock for a while. I said that it looked as bleak as Siberia in winter. Aunt Fern and Doe McGruder managed to raise cattle anyway. Aunt Fern living in her Mobile home in Fort Pierre had low living costs. She surprised everyone by having a much bigger estate when she died than anyone thought she would have.

      Harlow used to go up to Fairbank and stay all summer. He said that when he had to come home to go to school, he would be homesick for Fairbank He did chores and helped out. Grandma Spencer didn't think he was always attentive to his chores. She told me "I wanted Harlow to hoe the garden but if it was a nice hot day he would go swimming in the river with the Day kids.”

      I have to get to the bank now.

      Love, Dad

      Editor's note: One of the anecdotes in this letter corresponds to an item in Gene Howard's Introductory Notes.

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