Merry Helm

On this date in 1916, J. E. Shannon was being held in the Cass County jail. He had been arrested in March after a robbery and gunfight in a Drugstore in Davenport, south of Fargo. Five months later, on August 24th, Sheriff John Ross discovered something unusual.

On this date in 1916, there was a one-paragraph story in the Bismarck Tribune that read: “S. F. Crabbe, state architect, visited the state penitentiary yesterday …” While that might not sound like much, it was, in fact, quite significant.

Martha and Harry Thompson of Selz, North Dakota had six children. Son Gust was born in 1923 – tomorrow would be his birthday. He joined the army when he was barely 18 and parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. Sometime later, he would become a German prisoner.

William “Bill” Hamann was a mover and shaker in the western North Dakota cattle industry. He was born near Richardton in 1904 and began working with livestock in the late 1920s. Along with his associates, he established the Western Livestock Company in Dickinson in 1948. It grew to become the largest cattle auction in North Dakota.

Five prohibition agents raided the ‘largest still west of Chicago’ on this date in 1932. It was on a farm five miles north of Jamestown. Special agents had suspected a still in the Jamestown vicinity since the first of July, when a truckload of corn sugar, the main ingredient of homemade moonshine, was tracked from Valley City to near Jamestown, where they lost the trail. Soon after, agents followed a truckload of piping from Fargo. Again, they lost the trail near Jamestown.

During the Spanish-American War, the first battle involving Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders took place on June 24, 1898. Author Stephen Crane said…

This is part 3 of the story of Cavalier County State’s Attorney Gudmundur Grimson, who in 1922 prosecuted a case involving a Munich, North Dakota boy who…

Yesterday, we began a 3-part story on Gudmundur Grimson, the attorney for a farm family whose son died in a forced-labor camp in Florida.In 1921, young…

North Dakota Supreme Court Justice Gudmundur Grimson was born in Iceland in 1878. When he was four, his family of 15 emmigrated to Dakota Territory and…

Yesterday, we began the story of Phil Jackson, who grew up in Williston, went to UND, and became a coach in the NBA. He began by leading the Chicago Bulls…