Some of Kathrina’s family also came to Lustre to homestead. Her brother Henry came in 1921 and bought a farm from the Lafon (John F. Dick farm) family. He bought a large Alman Taylor steam engine and had it shipped by train to Wolf Point at an expense of $1700. He used the steam engine to break sod and seed, but soon gave it up for the more conventional tractor. Agatha, Peter and Anna also came for short periods of time.
D. M. likes to tell stories about wild horses. There was a bunch of wild horses in the grain fields. I had a good, fast saddle horse, so I took a disk off of the farm implement and put a bolt through the middle of it. I jumped on my horse and pounded on the disk with a hammer, running after the horses. It made the most terrible racket, and the horses never showed up again. Another time a bunch of wild horses were in the field, so I jumped on my horse and roped the leader and tied him in the corral. I found a pail and put rocks in it and tied it to the horse’s tail. Then I took the blindfold off and turned him loose. The horse took off whinnying and running like a scared jackrabbit, as did the other horses, and they never stopped running as long as I could see them. They, too, never showed up again.
During the dry years we always had a big garden, because we irrigated from the windmill. At one time we had the windmill run for six weeks without stopping. On the yard there was only one poplar tree near the well. We had the best garden and so always had that food and chickens plus the milk, cream and butter in the cooler. The cooler was the tank that all the cold well water flowed through before it went to the garden. I think we at least never had nothing to eat, but for a week or two we had only bread and syrup, as that is all we had in the house.
In winter we had to go to town and get groceries. We got together in a group to help one another. Two or three neighbors in a sled and then two or four horses pulling it, and we went to town with the sled to get groceries for the whole neighborhood. Not only for us, but each neighbor gave us his order.
One winter was so bad that we didn’t get mail for three months. We had a telephone then already from our place to Wall street on the north and Lustre road to the east, and south to Frazer. There were three lines connected up to our house, so we could call back and forth. We were the central or switchboard. The first telephone line was the top line on the fence. It always shorted out and was a lot of trouble. Next the homesteaders put up 8-foot cottonwood posts to put the wire on, and this worked much better.
We added a second lean-to to our original homestead shack. The original building was used for a barn and storage until the large barn was built. Next (in the fall of 1916) we bought Wall’s house at the sheriff’s sale. It was 14 x 18 and became our bedroom and living room with a kitchen lean-to in the back. Later we added and remodeled several times. The Walls had a sheriff’s sale as they had borrowed all the money they could, but had then given up and left in the middle of the night. So the bank sold what was left on the homestead. We bought the small house and moved it onto our homestead. We paid $500 for it, and it cost $125 to move it. Inside the house was a Sears mail order pump organ in a low ‘piano’ type case. (It was called a piano-organ, since it had a keyboard as big as a piano but still had to be pumped for the air to the reeds.) I contacted Sears and asked if there was money owed on the organ. They answered, “Yes. $65 was still owed.” I wrote back that I would crate it and return it to them for $20 or would buy it from them for $20. Sears wrote back to not return it, but that we could buy it for the $20, which I did. The organ is still in the shed on the farm.
Another story is about the work horses. We were digging a basement for the Wall house and were almost finished. Jacob Friesen was helping and drove the horses too close to the basement, and the horses and Fresno scraper fell into the hole. Kathrina was also in the basement, but at the other end so was not hurt. We had to untangle the harness piece by piece, and as soon as the horses were free they jumped the bank and went to the barn. When we moved the house to our farm, it was not finished on the inside—only bare 2x4s. We papered the inside with newspaper to keep the winter wind out, then boarded over the studs.
