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Hello, If you haven’t noticed, there is a severe drought taking place across much of the Dakotas. It extends into Montana as far west as Miles City. Maybe further now. I haven’t been to Wyoming. But I just figure it is always dry there. You see people haying some pretty poor stuff. Road ditches that make a bale or two to the mile. Side hills that normally are left alone. Crops that are too poor to combine but may make a bale an acre. Hay is scarce. In North Dakota we have only two seasons. “Putting up hay season” and “feedin...
Hello, This is the time of the year for outdoor cooking. I don’t care if you are going to the lake, a rodeo, or just an evening at home. A lot of people will pack a grill and groceries when they go on vacation. They will go on vacation and cook! I guess the women in our family are a bit different. Carm said if they go on vacation she is ordering out. She is not going on vacation to cook. The last time they went on a 4-H trip all the other families brought grills and salads. She brought pop tarts and licorice. Shirley was like...
I will have at least one more article on Bob and Grace Renshaw. I last wrote about how Bob had left the homestead, been elected Clerk and Recorder, rented the Lane property, and eventually moved to their permanent home in Ekalaka in 1931. Like most of us, he reports that they paid “monthly installments.” I remember, especially as a grade schooler, what a beautiful yard and home they had. There was always lots of work for the new clerk and recorder and he named the following people who helped him in his office: Eddie Syk...
I have written my story about fish and seafood being my favorite protein. That is a bold statement to make in beef country, but people used to feel sorry for me, so I could get away with it. I’ll see if that still works. My mother loved to fish and bring the catch to the house. We had catfish and bass, never trout, and they were delicious. I remember one particular time when Mom’s relatives were visiting: her parents, Aunt Betty, Uncle Merle, and infant daughter, Melanie. I didn’t know anything about babies, but they left...
Hello, Haying season gets kind of hectic. First, you have to be smarter than the hay. You have to know when it is too wet. You have to know when it is too dry. You have to know when the leafy spurge is hiding in the alfalfa and grass so you can cut around it. You have to know where the hen pheasant has her nest or chicks hidden. It is important to keep them alive so someone else can kill them in the fall. I never have really figured that out. In order to do all of these things right, you sometimes are forced to bale at...
I don’t know how I ate as an infant or small child. My weight was over eight pounds at birth. My father’s weight had been over nine pounds; it was genetic. Katie’s weight was also over eight pounds. From birth through the year I turned eight, my family would drive to the Dairy Queen on summer Saturday nights and order. When I was a baby, they bought me an ice cream cone and my dad had a malt. Mom didn’t have anything; she claimed not to have a “sweet tooth.” My folks didn’t know a baby can’t digest or use ice cream. Anyway, m...
Yay!!! Summer is finally here!!! Alright, I know it’s felt like summer for the past month, but now that it’s officially here, I’m going to talk about skin cancer and SUNSCREEN! The primary use of sunscreen is to prevent skin cancer. However, using sunscreen is NOT just a summer time thing. You can even get skin damage on a cloudy day; that’s because the Ultraviolet (UV) rays of the sun are what cause skin damage, and clouds don’t block UV rays. Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer. Every year in the United States, n...
If you spend a lot of time at the museum, it's easy to forget just how incredibly old some of our specimens are. Many of us get distracted by the impressive size and anatomy of our prehistoric beasts or get sidetracked by ever-important "who would win in a fight?" questions. But when I walk through our collections and ponder the items in front of me, I'm struck by the vast stretch of time these fossils represent. "Deep Time," as it's frequently referred to in earth science,...
Hello, Remember the scene in the great “Indiana Jones” movie, when Harrison Ford says, “Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes. I hate snakes.” Shirley is a lot that way. I’ve mentioned it to you before. About the time she wanted me to fix the screen door, and I put it off. Until one morning there was a horse in the living room and a rattlesnake in the office. I tell you what, there was no procrastinating after that. I fixed that door! This time of the year is great for snakes. Or bad for snakes. I guess you could define it a...
In this article I will share some Renshaw family history along with weather, crops, individuals, schools, and business information. Renshaw reports that their son, Morris, somehow had a broken hip. Guess who was there to take care of it? That’s right, Dr. B. B. Sandy who lived only about four miles northeast. It was a bad break and Dr. Sandy said there was a one in one hundred chance that Morris wouldn’t be a cripple. The first bone setting did not work and Dr. Sandy was called back to reset the hip. He made a splint, a san...
I don’t usually write articles about recent deaths, but I hope you don’t object to my words. The first recent death was Gary Brower. He was welcomed to the Beaver Lodge Cemetery Board about the time I resigned. He quickly became president and made important changes to the cemetery, and at the same time or soon after began cleaning, removing and remodeling one old home in our neighborhood. With help from his wife, Birgit, the couple changed their old home and worked together on the finishing touches in our neighborhood. Oth... Full story
Hello, I mean Good Morning. Or whatever. Oh, well, whatever will be, will be. Or something like that. Sorry I missed some of the papers last week. Not sorry for you, but for me. Cause if I don’t write, they don’t pay me. And if they don’t pay me, I can’t buy pretty things for my wife and necessities for myself. Like…. You know what I like. Some things really disgust me. Eating moldy bread. Two headed dogs. Cows that won’t take their calf. People who pick boogers out of their nose and eat them. Don’t you just hate that? I...
BETHESDA, MD - Savory wine and sapid beer all vary in the taste from bottle to bottle. The variety of flavor is attributed to the sensor cells found in taste buds spread throughout your tongue, which recognize 5 basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory. The flavors that our brains recognize are a combination of taste, smell, temperature, and texture. This combination generates our perception of how a hamburger tastes and evolved with our survival instinct to avoid potentially poisonous foods. To understand how...
We never actually lived on a farm or ranch during my stay in Ekalaka and Carter County but I spent a lot of time on my grandparents farm. In a sense, we lived on a farm also because even on the 4 acres at our first house in Ekalaka or the 152 acres on the second, we always had a milk cow and horses plus sheep, goats, pigs and of course, chickens. In recent years, I have heard kids complain bitterly about being bored. To the best of my recollection, I was never bored on our small farms or on my grandparents larger one. All of...
In the 19th century, the Pony Express carried the mail 1860-1861. It was very expensive with a one-page letter costing the equivalent of $19.00. That was too expensive for the general population. The telegraph went into service then, and the Pony Express became a romantic memory. For all it’s flaws, the U.S. Postal Service does its best to serve the general public. When the Postal Service wanted to establish a Post Office here, they thought it was a good idea to name it after a Sioux girl, Ijkalaka, the wife of David H...
Hello, Today, I’m going to talk about health care. It’s talked about on the news every day. It is in every paper you pick up. It’s cause riots and sit ins. It causes elections to be won or lost. But, honestly, many of us take health care pretty much for granted. Unless, of course, you are a pig. Pigs have problems with health care. Oh, if you are a pig in a hog house, I guess pig care is pretty important. But if you are a pig in the human health care system, it’s kind of rough. I just learned this a week or so ago. One of...
Well, in my last article I wrote about Bob and Grace Renshaw getting married, moving over to the homestead, digging a well, and planting and harvesting a crop. Bob and Grace both taught, and earned money to by material for a barn and a chicken house, other essentials they needed. They had a boy and a girl, filling out their family. Renshaw continued to teach at the Peabody School during the 1914-15 term. With some cash he finished fencing his land and bought a walking plow, a rod-breaking plow, and a harrow to break more sod.... Full story
When we turned over the last page on the calendar, we asked ourselves that very question. Wasn’t it just April? Time goes so quickly. School dismissed for summer and the grade school children are running free; older students have jobs in the country or in town. Gardeners ran the risk of frost damage so long. It briefly fell to 29 degrees Memorial Day morning. Tomatoes were delayed, while fruit trees and bushes were left susceptible to early morning lows. Did your plants, trees and bushes survive? Brice did weather readings a...
Supplements range from Sammy Sosa’s Flintstones vitamins to a pill of Ginkgo biloba. Humans have long recognized the importance of supplementing their diet with important nutrients. As explorers conquered the world in the age of discovery, they were constantly under the threat of developing scurvy. The cure to scurvy was identified by Dr. James Lind in 1747 and was relatively simple; supplement the diet of sailors with citrus fruit. It took nearly 200 years for humans to discover citrus fruit contained high amounts vitamin C...
Hello, I’m a good eater. Meaning I eat a lot. I know, I know, looking at me you wouldn’t guess that. Or, maybe you would. I’ve eaten a lot of things in a lot of places. I ate tacos on the streets in Mexico City. Even after our hosts warned us that eating on the streets of The City would cause you to become diseased and die. I’ve eaten goat in a little village in the Mexican mountains and shared a little tequila with a peasant while sitting around a campfire. Ate shark steaks in San Diego and clam chowder on the harbor...
Monday, May 29, 2017 was Memorial Day; and as every year, visitors come to Ekalaka. Some have family members who were in the military during past wars, others come to put flowers on the graves of parents, grandparents, or even earlier ancestors. All were buried in Beaver Lodge Cemetery after it was founded in 1901. Visitors can find graves where family is buried with the help of a map and list located in the center of the cemetery. The people might know where early homesteads were located, and visit them, also. In summer...
Hello, The third weekend in May brings the Preakness. The second leg of horse racings Triple Crown And it also brings the bucking horse sale. If you live on the northern plains, you’ve probably been through, or in, Miles City. To ranchers and cowboys and rodeo guys, in the spring, Miles City is the Mecca of the North. The “World Famous Miles City Bucking Horse Sale” is held every year in May. Has been for over fifty years. And it brings out people from all over. Our family has been involved in the bucking horse business since...
Today is May 20, 2017, Graduation Day at Carter County High School in Ekalaka. We didn’t even know all the graduates. One is a relative, others we recognize, but don’t always remember their names. We’ve been out of the “loop” that long. We started following graduations in 1986; that was 31 years ago, long before these graduates were born. Brice always covered graduations for the newspaper; I had the pleasure of photographing graduates once, when Gary Tuggle loaned me his wheeled office chair to move around during the proce...
Its spring time and more of us are outside now then we have been for months. It was a long winter… This beautiful time of year it is more likely for us humans to encounter one of those cute little Disney animals, like raccoons, skunks, foxes and bats. However, those cute little critters could carry a very dangerous virus. RABIES!! Rabies is most often transferred through the saliva of a rabid animal by a bite; whether that’s a human or another animal being bitten. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Pre...
In this article I need to describe how Bob and Grace got together in Carter County as she had been teaching in Oklahoma and he was on his homestead in Montana. Grace arrived in Ekalaka on April 30, 1912. She came from Baker in an “open car” on a cloudy, windy day. Johnny Johnson, the driver, gave her his fur coat to wear. Late April of 2017 may be similar to April of 1912, but we don’t ride in an “open car.” Times have changed and we should be thankful for outfits with electric windows and heated seats. Read as Bob tells of...
