Life Matters - April 10, 2024
Going on two weeks ago we moved into our new house near Mitchell, SD. Since then, a water treatment system has been installed, as our well is high in calcium and iron, giving it a hardness typical (so we learned) for this area. With the filtering system—water softener—in place, the water is excellent, we couldn’t ask for better water. I asked the water treatment technician guy (in his upper 70s now) what the settlers here in this area did for water before deep wells and softener systems? He said they had cisterns and that when he himself started in the water business over 50 years ago he hauled a lot of water to cisterns when rainwater didn’t keep up. I didn’t think to ask him where he hauled the water from, but I did ask about the rural water system (available in some areas here) and he said that water is piped out of the Missouri river. The Missouri has its beginnings in northwest Montana, having such sources as Glacier National Park, Bob Marshall Wilderness, and Giant Springs northeast of the Great Falls, Montana, city limits.
When my brother John’s (John passed on in September of 2021, God bless his memory) address was still Great Falls, he took me to “The Springs,” as they came to be called in my mind, and I learned that The Springs bubble up from the Roe river bottom (the recorded shortest river on earth at 200 feet long before flowing into the Missouri) with an approximate several thousand square feet area of river surface bubbling like a live thing as underwater fountains gush to the surface, adding 242 cubic feet of crystal clear water every second (150 million gallons per day) to the Missouri river’s already strong flow. There may well be one, but I can’t think of a more beautiful river in this country we are still pleased to call home, than the Missouri.
Perhaps the Missouri was part of this area’s attraction to the former Europeans settling in South Dakota. Besides the fertile soil with no tree removal needed before plowing or grazing, that is. Whatever the attraction, they had to have been a hardy lot. The Missouri was only a distant (by horse and wagon) dream for most of them as they endured summer’s heat—dusty winds, winter’s cold—blizzards, and the north and south winds battling for temperature preeminence in spring and fall.
Soon after moving to South Dakota from “out east,” I started in the carpenter business through which a lot of friendships have been forged over the years. One such friend is Eldon Peterson, a muscular, robust, relatively young, (my age—see I said relatively) farmer with a boomingly good voice whom I became acquainted with in those first years. We both love to chat, both of us have now been in health challenging accidents (he before I met him) and both of us appreciate our heritage. He, his Dane-Norwegian Lutheran, and I, my Pennsylvania Dutch Amish.
In the course of conversation we got on the subject of ‘’settling’’ these prairies by the hardy lot of pioneers of whom his forbearers were a part. “Oh yes,” said Eldon, “they definitely were a hardy lot!” He then went on to tell me about his great-grandparents who came to South Dakota in 1881 to homestead 30 miles south of Milbank and raised eight children there. Great-grandfather George spent many a long day in the fields from sun-up to sun-down working the fields, planting, cultivating, then harvesting the crops with neighbors helping each other or alone. There not being cellphone service in the 1880s he, at times, had no contact with his young wife, Magretta, or their small children, all day long. There not being any fences either, someone had to herd the family cow, or cows, taking them to grassy areas and then bring them back home for milking. There were days when Magretta (we don’t know who she had staying with the children) took the cattle to grass 1 ½ miles from the homestead. On one such day she was petting a friendly cow when the cow swung her head, probably annoyed by flies, hooking Magretta’s belly skin with a swinging horn, (this was before dehorners) ripping her open so far that her guts came oozing through the gash. The young lady went to a stream nearby, washed her protruding innards, then held them in while walking the mile and a half home. Once home, she took a needle and thread and sewed herself up, closing the gash in her belly! Without anesthesia! (unavailable) And lived to be a week shy of 100 years old!
A local extension agent once told me “South Dakota is for the rough, the tough, and the hardy.” Perhaps that remark was a throwback to the local pioneer days on the prairie?
Desperate situations call for desperate measures. None of us want to be in that desperate a situation. But it is good for us to consider where we Americans came from. And with that to consider: where are we going? When the quality of temporal life improves, it takes purposeful living to keep from getting physically and/or spiritually soft, to keep following the instruction in II Timothy 2:3, enduring hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.
Life Matters!