This isn’t what I expected to find when I started investigating the early history of Halloween pranks. But then, Medora was not your typical frontier community. There, as a correspondent of the Bismarck Tribune (I suspect it was young James Foley, judging by the comic touch) observed,
. . . the cowboys of the Bad Lands favored the stars and gaudy buttes of that land of earthen goblins with a celebration. True, there were no maidens to add the feminine charm to the occasion, but the pistol decorated gentlemen of the ranges were equal to the emergency. . . . a number of the bovine guardians agreed to don the female garb.”
They wanted to have a dance! So the designated cross-dressers gathered and garbed themselves at a ranch house, after which their fellows rode up, came in, and the dance commenced. As did the whisky, so before the night got late, cussing and shooting commenced, the lamps were shot out, the cross-dressers tossed off their dresses, and a melee broke out.
Compared to this, the enthusiastic Halloween pranks that year in the town of Hope I described last week were downright wholesome! Two years later in Hope the editor noted the “mad pranks” of Halloween that he said “were annoying to many, [but] no damage to property was committed, as is too often the case.”
This was the typical prairie frontier town attitude, but where was this alarming “property damage” happening? As I have recounted, in eastern cities they were talking about the “Halloween problem” of property damage done by overgrown boys. Was that happening here, too? The answer is, not so much. In Casselton 1893 we read of routine pranks, with a few boys tossed in the lockup briefly, whether for discipline or for a joke.In 1899 the editor in Cooperstown spoke mildly of “the usual pranks.” Small towns took it all in stride.
In our would-be cities, like Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, and Bismarck, there was some trouble, particularly as we entered the progressive twentieth century. The Jamestown editor insisted in 1900 the pranks were perpetrated not “by children alone, but young men were engaged in the night’s laborious efforts who probably would groan if their parents should ask them to split an armload of wood.” The next year the Bismarck Tribune denounced the “tendency to overstep the bounds of decency and propriety in the celebration of the night, and all manner of malicious and destructive pranks have been engaged in.”
In 1902 a zealous police officer in Grand Forks mixed it up with a crowd of boys pranking in the Jewish neighborhood, pulled his gun, and shot himself in the leg. The officer did arrest one of the boys, limped back to the station with him, and got his wound dressed.
In our little cities authorities put on extra officers; issued proclamations warning no damage to property would be tolerated; locked kids up now and then for a little while; and generally kept a lid on things. North Dakota had no such incident as happened in Moorhead in 1905, when a man caught a bunch of boys vandalizing his garden and shot one of them in the head with a pistol (fortunately a glancing blow treated without permanent injury). Property and property damage always seemed to be the issues. Indeed, the most severe condemnation of the “numerous acts of vandalism perpetrated on Halloween by mischievous boys” came from a Grand Forks letter-writer who signed himself, in all capital letters, PROPERTY OWNER.
An alternative scene, as reported from Jamestown in 1905: “Never was there a jollier Halloween party than the one under the auspices of the Presbyterian Sunday school last night.” Let’s don’t tell the Jamestown Presbyterians about what happened in Medora in 1885.
