In 1886, Christian Maiers, his wife, the first of their 11 children, along with his parents and a brother, moved from Russia to Dakota Territory. Christian had only $20 left when the whole family moved into a 12x18 foot sod house. To earn extra money, he and other settlers gathered old buffalo bones to sell to fertilizer companies.
Christian used a wagon and a team of oxen to gather the bones. One of the oxen was slow and lazy, but they also had a cow that was very energetic. So, when it was time to haul the bones to Ellendale, he decided to replace the problem ox with his cow.
In his memoirs, he wrote, “This team … would run nearly all the time, and I had a hard time guiding them. Ellendale was 35 miles cross-country.”
Christian was travelling with other bone gatherers, and they planned to camp overnight along the way. However, his animals had other plans. “I could not hold my odd team in check,” he wrote, “and I steadily drew away from the rest of the party. When I got into the hilly country about 15 miles from my farm, my odd team … ran the wagon, filled with bones, into a trap of big rocks (and) part of the load spilled… Then the team became stubborn and wouldn’t move… Getting down on the front end of the wagon tongue, I scared the beasts enough so they bounded out over the rocks.”
Once more, the team was on the run, with Christian stuck out on the wagon’s tongue. Before he knew it, they ran into a swollen creek, where they all took a much needed breather. But when Christian was ready to move on, he found they were stuck.
An Englishman working in a nearby field came to help, using three horses to pull the wagon free. “With the animals running once again,” Christian wrote, “I reached Ellendale that same evening. I sold the bones for $4 a ton – and a ton was about all I had left.” The next morning, he bought supplies and headed home at a good clip. When he’d gone about 10 miles, he met up with the friends he started out with the previous day. Christian wrote, “They couldn’t believe that I had already been to town until I showed them the supplies I purchased.”
Dakota Datebook written by Merry Helm
Source:
The Way it Was: The North Dakota Frontier Experience; Book Four: Germans from Russia Settlers: Everett C. Albers and D. Jerome Tweton, Editors
