Early twentieth-century North Dakota boasted a renaissance man named George F. Will — the son of the seedsman Oscar H. Will who got his degree from Harvard, came back to Bismarck to run his father’s business, but had a lot of other interests. He was an anthropologist, an archeologist, a horticulturalist, a historian, a hiker, a traveler, a dendrochronologist, and also — although not much remembered for it — a songcatcher. He collected cowboy songs and other frontier ballads.
Educated as he was, George Will had to be aware that songcatchers were fanning out to America’s hinterlands to collect ballads. So, he wrote up some of his collections and published them in two articles for the Journal of American Folklore, in 1909 and 1913. The guys who sang him the songs were employees of his father’s at the nursery.
Which brings us to George Tye, who, it turns out, was an outstanding character in his own right. Born in 1850 in Wisconsin, raised in Minnesota, he turned up in Casselton in 1877 at age seventeen. The next year he journeyed on to Bismarck, there going to work bullwhacking, driving the wagon road to and from Deadwood in the Black Hills.
In 1880 he struck out as a hunter and trapper. A photo from that time depicts him as a rough and ready character with a lever-action revolver, a heavy cartridge belt, and an enormous slouch hat. He survived blizzards in open country, drove teams across plains of gumbo, and survived a boat wreck on the Missouri River. He cowboyed for several open-range cattle operations in Montana. Near the mouth of the Musselshell he fell in with rustlers, but fortunately left them before the Montana vigilantes caught up with them.
Back to Bismarck then, where he married a woman named Lizzie Galloway. Most of the details I am telling you come from a five-part memoir published in the Mandan Pioneer in 1935. Oddly, Tye recounted to the reporter then his 1891 marriage, but omitted his previous marriage to a woman named Ada Hill, who died in a Montana blizzard in 1888.
Anyway, wife no. 2, Lizzie, shared Otis’s adventurous spirit. They lived in town a little while, but as Otis recalls, “I did not enjoy living in Bismarck.” Otis got a series of jobs outfitting for land surveyors, and then in about 1894 he and Lizzie took off horseback for several years of touring and working odd jobs across the Rockies to Oregon, down to California, and back again to North Dakota. At that point, Otis says, he had “seen the elephant and [come] back to our starting place again.”
He went to work “pulling trees,” as he said — digging up and transplanting trees from the river button to Bismarck residences. This led him to doing the same work in the employ of Oscar Will. He also filed on a homestead at Yucca, in Oliver County just a little north and east of town.
Says Tye, “It seemed like there was no other place to go unless one would go to Alaska and that is too cold for me. It looked like I would have to live and die on the homestead.” Which he did, or nearly so. He farmed, got appointed postmaster of Yucca, opened a store, and following his purchase of an automobile in 1922, added a gas station.
Otis Tye was a frontier character, and he was a storyteller, no doubt. The Wills valued his experience and handiness. Oscar’s boy George listened to his stories. At age 76 Tye he wrote that memoir for publication in the Mandan paper. When he passed away in 1946, one of pallbearers was: George F. Will.
For because besides working side-by-side at the seed company, Otis Tye and George Will shared some adventures in the field — as well as some cowboy ballads from the Montana range. More about that in the next episode of Plains Folk.
