Early American colonists, like the ancient Hebrews and Romans, knew all about hand-dug wells and their dangers. When settlement reached the Great Plains, the need for and peril from hand-dug wells was all the more acute.
Surface water sources were scarce. Fortunate was the settler who could hammer a sand point into the soft earth and hit shallow, potable water. Most had to descend into the earth to excavate hand-dug wells. If they hit rock, they had to bore holes into it and pack them with black powder or dynamite. Really, what could possibly go wrong? (Experienced well-drillers set off their charges by setting the fuses, ascending to the surface, and then dropping hot coals down to achieve detonation.)
In 1879 a settler named Ben Madison along Big Prairie Road, near Jamestown, commenced digging himself a well. He dug down 56 feet, curbing with stone as he went, and then bored 5 feet deeper. (I’ll tell you later how the boring was done.) There he struck gas under pressure, which blew sand out the top of the hole for a day and a half.
Madison next brought in a professional well driller with more guts than brains who went to the bottom of the shaft and resolved to bore further. Again the gas blew sand into his face and he pulled to the surface as fast as he could.
His next move was to lower a lantern to the bottom of the well to see what was going on — with predictable results, an explosion burning off his whiskers, eyebrows, and clothing. Water poured down the hole extinguished the flames, but at last report, the settler still had no well.
Clearly, well digging was a hazardous proposition. Boring was possible, but not common. By “boring” I mean using a rotary drilling bit driven by a horsepower. A horsepower was an apparatus with a vertical shaft around which teams of horses walked, turning the shaft, the power from which was transmitted to the drilling rig by a tumbling rod.
Already in 1884 a contractor in Richland County named M. L. Dohm was doing this, producing what he called “tubular” wells, meaning water drawn up a pipe or casing. One was a reported 166 feet deep. Soon another settler claimed intellectual ownership of the boring process and threatened action against anyone else using it. At any rate, into the early 1900s, hand digging of wells remained the usual practice.
Use of dynamite to blast through rock strata was common, too. In 1896, for instance, H. F. Eaton of Oakes called in a well digger who used dynamite to bring in a well that flowed a barrel a minute, water that Eaton planned to use for irrigation.
Over in Emmons County, on the other hand, farmers said they had a “dandy” well-digger named Ira Young who eschewed explosives and pounded his way through rock, as much as a foot and a half of it, with a sledgehammer.
News stories frequently reported amazing finds of curiosities through the excavations of well-diggers. Diggers near Dickinson in 1896 produced a human skull from underneath a vein of coal more than thirty feet underground. The Dickinson editor heard enough such tales from excavators that he filed a spoof story about diggers at Gladstone who struck a three-foot vein of cheese, “underlaid with a strata of gravel resembling Irish potatoes,” but had to vacate the well on account of a dangerous flow of buttermilk.
The dangers, however, were real. Falls, cave-ins, and toxic gasses all took their toll. That well-digger at Jamestown who lost his whiskers but escaped with his life was a lucky one.
