Search results for

6/6/2007: Thomas M. Hammel was a ranching boy who had grown up in the North Dakota Badlands. As a boy, he had worked on his father’s ranch, in the CCC and later on other ranches in North Dakota and Montana. Work was no doubt part of his life, but this work would pale in comparison to what he faced several years later.

6/7/2007: Yesterday we discussed the Bataan Death March. Thomas Hammel, whose experiences we shared yesterday, may have made it through the march, but he now faced life in a Japanese prisoner camp. This day in 1942, Hammel was officially done marching, but his three years as a prisoner of war were just beginning.

6/11/2007: It was reported on this date in 1895 that the town of Forman had “been thrown into a fever of excitement over the finding of a number of human bones and teeth in the cellar of a vacant house...”

6/12/2007: As tension began to grow between Native Americans and US Government officials in Dakota Territory during the mid-1870s, a letter arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota addressed to Major James McLaughlin; a letter that would begin McLaughlin’s career as an Indian Agent. On this day in 1876, that fateful letter from Moses K. Armstrong completed its journey from Washington, DC and found itself in the hands of Major James McLaughlin.

6/14/2007: In 1870, John Gustav Bergquist, an immigrant of Sweden filed his declaration for US citizenship. He would walk 100 miles to Alexandria ten days from today to become an American.

6/15/2007: The city of Grand Forks was given its name on this day in 1870. Sanford C. Cady, the city’s first postmaster, named the city by performing a simple literal translation of its previous french name, “Les Grandes Fourches.”

6/19/2007: Often in the warm summer months, Mother Nature can deliver a violent reminder to those of us in the Upper Great Plains of just how forceful she can be. Summer storms can be as destructive and life threatening as any of our dreaded winter-time blizzards. Of these summer storms, tornados are clearly the most violent and the most dangerous.

6/22/2007: Right now in Fessenden, the annual Wells County Fair is underway. This fair, however, is not just any fair. Today and the rest of this weekend, Wells County is celebrating the event’s 100th birthday, a landmark only four other county fairs in North Dakota have been able to celebrate.

6/21/2007: On June 20, 1957, a category F5 tornado ripped through the city of Fargo, leveling hundreds of homes in the residential Golden Ridge area on the northwestern edge of the city.

6/24/2007: On this date in 1897, the Jamestown Weekly Alert announced that Frank James had been captured.