O Pioneers!
Or: Becker County Be Bangin'
Let’s be honest - few things sound less riveting than reading about the history of settling a county and its townships. The only time I’ve ever really given a flip about anything Pioneer-related was during The Little House on the Prairie era of American television and when we played The Oregon Trail computer game in elementary school. Do I care about the historic adventure of journeying west, the can-do spirit of homesteading, the struggle to settle an untamed land? I do not!
So you can imagine my surprise when, in searching for some supplemental research about Great-Great Grandparents John & Theresa, I stumbled upon the book PIONEER HISTORY OF BECKER COUNTY by Mrs. Jessie W. West & Alvin H. Wilcox (1907), which has been helpfully transcribed on the internet here, and found it to be such a valuable resource + keepsake that I imminently ordered a copy of it on eBay:
Granted, you probably won’t feel the same way if you don’t also have masses of ancestors who settled in Becker County. One of the coolest things, to me personally, was looking for the names of certain ancestors and also running across the names of other ones who are also listed in the histories. But beyond that, with all the tales of shoot-em-ups between gamblers, land-scammers, kids getting lost in the woods, unfortunate drownings (so. many. drownings), and run-ins with bears, it’s still a pretty riveting read all on its own. It also adds a lot of detail to what it was like for white pioneers to arrive in “new” territory (because let’s be real - it wasn’t new to the Indigenous people who were essentially kicked off that land so that these dorks could move in!) around that time.
Speaking of which - here’s a couple images from the 1870-1900 edition of Time-Life’s This Fabulous Century book series. The below image of the encampment of Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, is so upsetting to me, seeing how beautiful and gorgeous that expanse and community was and how we (white settlers, our government and our armies) violently destroyed all of it, inside and out.
This is another excerpt from that same edition. We’ll be talking about the great grasshopper swarm of 1874 in later chapters, but I absolutely read that paragraph and was like, “huh…sounds like we were never meant to be here in the first place and all of those plagues and natural disasters was probably God telling us to get TF out.”
Listen, I’m nothing if not completely unsupportive of the Manifest Destiny!!!!
Anyway, back to the stuff that directly relates to moi:
Erie Township was already settled in both name and deed by the time Great-Great Grandpa John Eidenschink arrived there in 1882, but also just barely:
BTW, I love the bit in the “We arrived at Frazee on the 25th of May” section about walking “to Detroit to see the great city”, because it really paints a picture of what the town was like back then. Knowing that Great-Great Grandpa John rented a farm five miles outside of town and rode to Detroit Township every day and seeing the note above on the bad condition of the roads also further illustrates what his everyday life was like.
I also found some photos of what Detroit and Erie townships looked like back when John and Theresa arrived + set up their lives there:
And that’s a wrap on the Eidenschinks for now! See you in the next chapter, when we return to Clara Nellie French and start exploring her ancestry….a journey that is going to take us through some of the most hallowed halls in history!
Don’t let the grasshoppers git’cha -
-Amber