In July of 1885 a settler named John Blaskey was 22 feet down in a well he was excavating on his farm near Conway, Walsh County. He was filling buckets with dirt, and his wife was at the surface drawing them up with a windlass.
Early in the evening Mr. Blaskey shouted up he wasn’t feeling well, and his wife drew him up. Before long he said he felt better, and against his wife’s advice, went back down the well. “Foul air,” as the papers said — toxic gas — overcame him before he reached bottom, and he fell from the bucket.
Mrs. Blaskey brought neighbors to help. One of them bravely started a descent on the bucket, began to faint, and was saved by the hand of his son reaching down for him. Another neighbor arrived, announced, “I can stand it,” commenced a descent of rescue — but himself passed out and fell dead at the bottom of the well. Still another neighbor tried to go down, this one with a safety rope attached, and was hauled up when he passed out.
Eventually an experienced well digger arrived and extracted the corpses with ropes and hooks. Thus the death toll stopped at two.
The newspapers of the settlement era are full of stories like this. Over near Mitchell the same year, 1885, Fred Stiendorf and his sixteen-year-old son, said to be professional well diggers, died, the father overcome with gas, the son by falling from the bucket trying to rescue the father.
The next year, near Larimore, a Canadian well digger named Philip H Green was killed by falling from the bucket, overcome by gas.
Over at Oakes in 1891, a young man named Martin Pearson sensed gas when half-way down a 46-foot-deep shaft, signaled to be brought up — but passed out and fell to the bottom, unconscious. His partner dashed water onto him, and he revived enough to clutch the bucket and ride to the surface, a survivor.
In Griggs County in 1895, well digger Albert Frick was in a forty-five-feet deep well when it caved in, breaking his arm in three places. He survived to have the fractures set by the local doctor.
In 1897 Lars Lebo of Ramsey County had his skull crushed when the windlass atop the well he was working in collapsed. The same year William Albert, working on a well near Kulm, drowned when the water level rose abruptly.
In 1904 the well digger William S. Smith died on a claim northwest of Williston, overcome, the papers said, by “foul air.” Another digger died from the same cause that year at Norwich, and still another, Tom Brace, in Morton County.
On a farm near Sawyer in 1906, the well digger Jacob Tomlinson started down a 90-foot-deep well and was overcome by gas, falling to his death. His body became wedged at the bottom of the well, such that it could not be retrieved until the next day.
Despite all such grisly tales, press reports and popular regard assigned well diggers an oddly heroic place in prairie society. They spoke of “far-famed well-diggers,” noted their comings and goings, eagerly sought their services, occasionally made jokes about their drinking habits, but overall, expressed something like awe for their hard work and fearlessness. It seems that a certain loss of life in deep holes was counted the necessary cost to secure pure water for the emergent prairie society.
