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Opium Smuggling in 1895

5/24/2010:

On this day in 1895, the Grand Forks Herald published a fascinating article about the illegal opium trade from Canada into North Dakota. Trade in opium from poppies grown in Asia was, and still is, an international drug problem. The addictive properties of opium have always lain quietly intermixed with its powers of relieving grievous physical pain.

There were opium dens in the shadowy backstreets of Fargo and Grand Forks in the 1890s. There addicts would seek the temporary nirvana found in an opium pipe and somehow struggle to pay for a habit that held them within its relentless grip.

The Grand Forks newspaper reported that two brothers, otherwise unidentified, had concocted a "novel opium smuggling scheme" along the "northern borders" of North Dakota. The smugglers bought old oxen, past their prime for doing farm work, for the low price of five or ten dollars apiece from farmers in Manitoba. Each ox was then fed a curious kind of feed. The two brothers rolled opium into a round ball and then covered the opium with lead or with tin foil to form a larger ball. The smugglers then forced an ox to swallow the balls whole, where they resided in the first of the ox's four stomachs.

Yoking the oxen to pull a wagon, the men drove the "loaded oxen across the line" of the border. Because they "valued the oxen at next to nothing" in worth, continued the article, the drivers urged them down North Dakota roads as far as they could go. When the oxen gave out and collapsed, wrote the Grand Forks Herald, the criminals then "cut their throats" and extracted "the opium balls." The oxen's stomachs had not digested the tin foil or lead coating, and the opium "came out perfectly sound" and ready for sale to willing buyers in the cities of the Red River Valley.

In that era, opium and morphine were legal medicines, but the U.S. government collected import taxes on these valuable commodities, something the smugglers were able to evade.

According to the newspaper story, in one case alone, the brothers avoided $2,800 in import duties by purchasing "two old oxen" for just ten dollars. In a short time, the two smugglers reportedly made $40,000 in their oxen-driving business - a handsome sum, especially in 1895.

Opium dens existed in the underworld of Grand Forks and Fargo, despite police efforts. The Fargo locations were said to be in the shanties in the "hollow" near Front Street along the Red River.

Whether or not the two smugglers were brought to justice is unknown, but the case of the opium-ingesting oxen gives a brief glance into the unsavory side of history before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 regulated the sale of opium and other addictive substances.

Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, MSUM History Department.

Sources:

"Nubs of News; A Novel Opium Smuggling Scheme," Grand Forks Herald, May 24, 1895, p. 2.

"Opium Joint Is Found By Police," Fargo Forum, September 2, 1908, p. 10.

"Negroes Will Not Be Popular In Fargo," Fargo Forum, April 19, 1905, p. 16.

William C. Sherman, Playford V. Thorson, et al, Plains Folk: North Dakota's Ethnic History (Fargo: N.D. Institute for Regional Studies, 1988), p. 385.

Marcus Aurin, "Chasing the Dragon: The Cultural Metamorphosis of Opium in the United States, 1825-1935," Medical Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 3, (Sept. 2000), p. 425.