People sometimes ask me where I get all these stories about life on the prairies. My typical reply is, Why, there’s one up every section road. That’s actually understating things a bit. There are several good stories up any section road, and they intersect and entwine one another.
Many a curious traveler, like I, has visited the Ashley Jewish Homesteader Cemetery in the country north of Ashley. This historic site is the resting place of countless human narratives. Rebecca Bender, a daughter of the storied community, has told the best of them in her book, Still, published by North Dakota State University Press.
I’ve never gotten a square answer from Rebecca or anyone else about the little outlying graveyard at the southwest corner of the property, set aside for infant burials. I know about the Kinderfriedhof in a German Gottesacker, because that’s my own culture, but the story of these infant burials at the Jewish site remains a mystery to me.
Here’s another mystery stretching west from that little cemetery--a devil’s lane. When I point it out people don’t seem to know what I am talking about. It has to do with the law and logistics of partition fences. Where two country properties adjoin one another, it makes sense to have only a single fenceline separating one neighbor’s pasture from another. But who is to build and maintain the fence? Prairie states adopted statutes stipulating each landowner is responsible for the half of the fenceline to his right as he faces it. If each does his part, well, good fences make good neighbors and the livestock are well regulated. What if one of the parties fails to keep up the fence?
In such case the aggrieved party can resort to legal compulsion. He can call out the fence viewers--which in some cases were just the township trustees--officials authorized to view the fence and order negligent parties to shape up. This did not seem to happen as often in North Dakota as in other states; I’m not sure why not.
The alternative was for the aggrieved party to build a second fence just inside his own property line. This resulted in a devil’s lane--a narrow strip of ground along the property line with two fences running its length, closely parallel.
This sort of neighborly spite and tension is irresistible to storytellers. Newspapers up and down the plains in the late 1880s published the syndicated story by Edgard L. Vincent entitled, “The Devil’s Lane.” It’s a sappy story, tinged with a bit of tragedy, but worse than that, the author just doesn’t understand fence law. I suspect prairie readers snorted when they read it.
During the first decade of the twentieth century a musical comedy titled A Devil’s Lane toured the country and was enormously popular on the plains, playing one community opera house after another. For instance, on 19 November 1904 A Devil’s Lane, billed as a “pastoral comedy” in which “you cannot fail to fall in love with the characters while you laugh at them,” played the opera house in Bottineau.
Pastors composed sermons around the homely symbol of the devil’s lane. In July 1914 Reverend J. H. Hull of the Congregational Church in Deadwood preached on “The Neighborly Way and the Devil’s Lane.”
The most notable literary reference to a devil’s lane is the short story by Nebraska’s Mari Sandoz, entitled, of course, “The Devil’s Lane,” published in 1938. Even Sandoz succumbs to the temptation of making the strip of contention the object of soap opera, albeit a dark one.
Somewhere in your own country neighborhood there is a devil’s lane, and now that you know the context, you will notice it. Try to tell a better story about it than the ones I’ve been reading.
