Mellette County, South Dakota
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Family Histories & Biographies - Adrian Surname
Earl and Bess Adrian 1933 - 1984
By Bess Adrian
(Transcribed, with permission from the Mellette County Historical Society, from "Mellette County 1911-1986", published by the Mellette County Historical Society in 1986)
"Creak, Creak, Creak" groaned the old hayrack as Earl Adrian headed west for their new home in Mellette County in April of 1933. He had bought a quarter of land from the Government in 1920 when the Eagle Side property was offered for sale. He had been paying for it monthly from his wages of $18.50 per week besides paying his board at Clearfield, where he bought cream, poultry and hides. He had worked in Clearfield from 1926 to 1933 when he decided to move to Mellette County.
His wife Bess and little daughter Helen Marie remained at Clearfield where Bess was teaching at the Kepa Paha school. The dry years began in 1932 and 1933. Prices had gone to pieces from the collapse of the stock market in 1929. Her wages had been $110 per month at that school in 1930 and 1931 but had lowered to $75 per month in 1932-33. The schools were paying in warrants (interest-bearing orders on the School District) until they could get taxes for their District. Luckily, Ben Butz, who ran the Outlaw Store in Winner, would take warrants at a discount for groceries and supplies.
Earlier in the spring Earl had traded for 5 bushels of seed potatoes, 100 lbs. of sugar, some 50-lb. sacks of flour, beans and other staple food. These and a little furniture that the Adrians had bought during their married life since June 11, 1928, were loaded onto a hayrack on Sunday evening so Earl would be ready to start at daylight Monday morning. The running gears of the wagon had wide rimmed wheels. It had been used in earlier times as a freight wagon between Ft. Randall and the Black Hills. He drove a four-horse team with new harness. The harness had been bought from Sears Roebuck with the school warrants.
When he pulled up on the flat west of the M. I. Strain place on the Little White River, 5 miles from his new home, he had to go on a "trackless plain." The Kasat Brothers had plowed up all of the prairie that spring and never left any section line. They planted it to wheat but it never came up. We all had the same disappointments. Our 5 bushels of potatoes came up and looked nice but there was no rain and a scourge of grasshoppers and beetles moved in. We were all powerless to fight them. We didn't have any rain that summer. No crops were raised. Lucky for us the Government had built three-room houses with a porch and a barn on the Indian allotments in 1913. The owners, however, refused to live in them but camped down south on Cut Meat Creek where there had been a day school for the Indian children. They were friendly and used to tease Earl for working so hard when there was no hope of saving the crops.
Earl dealt for wire and cut fence posts to fence our land. Then in 1934 he summered the Palmaieer cattle when they ran out of water up north of Clarence Krogman's Ranch. Earl had a well dug a few years before, and had a windmill on it. It watered the 400 head of cattle that summer, and he and Clyde Otterman dug out the old watering spring that had been near the headquarters of the HE Cattle Company (our place) some years before. Today there is a nice lake over that spring north of the ranch buildings at the Adrian Ranch.
Money was a very scarce item. If Earl broke a singletree or doubletree, he went to the creek and cut an oak tree, shaped it with the ax and brought an endgate rod into the kitchen. He heated the rod in the kitchen stove until it was red hot and drilled the necessary holes in
the oak wood. We didn't have a brace and bit. Finally Clyde Otterman traded him one. Another tool that was very useful was the monkey wrench. Now with the modern tools those have disappeared.
Another important article was a "slip" or "fresno." A slip could be handled by one man. He would hook it on his doubletree and move dirt across the ditch or creek to make a crossing. Two men generally used a fresno with a four-horse team and could do the work faster.
Our son Robert was born at the Ranch on October 29th, 1933. Earl went to Clearfield and got Mrs. Leonard Storms to care for our new son until I got stronger. The car needed some repairs so Earl traded it off for a team of horses. We got along without a car until 1935 when times were a little better.
Dwight Sharp worked for us in 1933 putting up hay. One day he and Milton Meuller from White River killed 65 rattlesnakes in a prairie dog town on the flat near Clarence Krogman's.
In May of 1934 my brother-in-law, Leo Fuhrer, drowned below the power dam at Spencer, Nebraska. His wife, my sister Rose Fuhrer, had taught school for a number of years. That fall, she and her two children came to Mellette County where she taught at the school by Dave Deutsch's place. They needed to stay at the schoolhouse, so Earl dealt for a shack with John Big Crow, who wanted $25 for it. Earl traded our turkey gobbler, two wagon wheels, a sack of flour and $5 for it. Then he and Clyde Otterman used four horses and loaded it on two running gears of wagons. They moved it about 15 miles to her school yard. She hired a Deutsch girl to take care of her baby in the daytime and they slept in the schoolhouse at night. Our daughter, Helen Marie, stayed with them.
In the spring of 1934, the Ringthunder Club started. I joined in June. We met every two weeks. It was welcomed entertainment. I still belong to it 50 years later and have been president two or three times and was secretary for several years.
In 1935, we had a nice rain in January. The ground hadn't frozen the previous fall so Earl planted some wheat on the last day of 1934. We got 100 bushels of wheat from it that fall.
The rains of 1935 brought up western wheat grass all over the pastures; they looked like wheat fields. My Mother came to visit us that fall. We drove the car up on the buttes north of our house and came down on the steep side. When we got to the gate north of the house Earl said to me, "You will have to open the gate because we don't have any brakes." Mother almost had a heart attack after coming over that steep butte.
Our son Dean was born at Wilson's Hospital in Winner on July 29th, 1935. While I was at the hospital, Earl brought two steers to the Winner Sale Ring and got $45 for them. That was considerably higher than cattle had been previously. We used the money to pay my hospital bill.
That winter when I went to Kary's store to get gas after taking Helen Marie to school, Mrs. Cordelia Kary told me that Martin and Ferd Littau were threshing haystacks to get the Western Wheat Seed to sell in other areas where they needed the seed. Earl decided to have our few stacks threshed. Every bit of cash helped a great deal.
While cattle prices were so low, Earl decided that we should raise turkeys. They could eat grasshoppers and we had an abundant supply of them. He was able to borrow money on the turkeys from Mr. Clark at Farmer's State Bank in Winner. We sent for a big incubator to hatch the eggs from our 100 turkey hens that we had saved from the year before. We put the incubator in our storm cave. It was in good condition and we hatched turkeys and chickens for several years.
He built a long brooder house and installed an old furnace for steam heat. The poults were raised on wire netting so they stayed healthier. Later that summer, he built a pen in our east pasture and put up roosts. Earl slept in our car so coyotes wouldn't attack the turkeys early in the morning. At daylight he turned them out and herded them across the prairie until they were filled up with grasshoppers. Then he brought them back and gave them water and grain. By late afternoon, they were turned out again to get more hoppers. It was a tedious job but we kept at it.
That fall, we sold truckloads of live turkeys to the Omaha Cold Storage in Winner. They sent the trucks out after them. The next season, we went at it stronger than ever. When it came time to sell, prices were down and the Cold Storage had quit picking poultry, so we hired one of the Sharp girls to care of Bob and Dean while Earl and I picked turkeys in our barn. Then we packed them in barrels and sent them by railroad refrigerator cars to Chicago. We decided to go out of the turkey business. Sime Fridy hired us to hatch turkeys for him and raise them in the brooder house for six weeks.
Nineteen thirty-six was another dry year, but we were better prepared for it. All of the poultry around the yard kept the hoppers down. Earl had fixed a garden so we could irrigate it. We raised a good garden. That fall, Earl had a big woodpile cut up but it got covered up with snow. We didn't use it again until spring. He took care of the cattle alone so didn't have time to bring in much wood. Each evening he cut enough for the next day.
We moved into one room and used two cots. Helen Marie was going to school in Winner, and roads had been blocked for weeks. We ran out of table salt so I boiled stock salt and sifted it through cloth to get the rocks out. I'd have to bake bread in the kitchen oven, but all of our cooking was done on the old wood stove that we got from Sam Yellow Robe when we first moved out there. Donna Adrian still uses it.
We were trying to get rid of all of our turkeys so dressed them and put them in barrels to ship to Chicago. On one trip to White River with the barrels, Earl was scooping snow by Grover Six Toe's place to where two men were scooping towards him. They were from Ludlow, South Dakota, and had brought down a herd of horses in the fall to winter north of Mission. When John Gionetta and Peter Hafnor came to look at them, many were dead and all were in poor condition. Earl agreed to pasture them but had to strengthen them by feeding oats before they could stand the trip across country. He had to use the money I had saved to buy a radio and a gasoline washing machine. So those comforts had to wait until they took the horses that summer.
Lester Hafnor stayed at our place that spring to break the horses to drive, then sold them to the Government on purchase orders. Earl and Reinholdt Deutsch would help out by hooking them on the wagon to haul wood. One day they hooked up two half-broken horses. They put a hobble on one, and Earl had that rope. Reinholdt had the reins and was crouched down in the wagon. Somehow the hobble rope hooked around so it was useless. They circled the yard a time or two, just missing the tanks of water. Finally, they went through the gate and headed for open country. They kept them going in circles until they were tired out. That night Reinholdt had a nightmare and was screaming. When Earl woke him up, Reinholdt thought the horses went over the windmill. I hired Libbie Petr to help cook for the nine men who came to take the horses home.
By that time, Carl Klinkenbeard's road crew was grading the County Road past our place. They boarded with us, then put in our first big stock dam in the east pasture.
On September 25th, 1937, our son Bill Eugene was born at Winner. Libbie took care of the family while I was gone. Eighteen months later, our son Richard Lee was born at Winner. He was an eight-month baby, but grew to be over six feet tall. Dick required a lot of care as he had colic for two months, so sleeping was "almost a thing of the past" for me. One-and-a-half-year old Billy felt terribly neglected. Earl petted him and called him "Dad's good boy!" so he felt like he was extra special.
That summer, Helen Valburg started a 4-H Club for the girls of the community. Helen Marie joined. It was wonderful training in sewing, cooking and home beautification. Each year they signed for a different project and Helen Valburg insisted that they do good work. They won lots of prizes and it helped them later in life with the sewing and cooking experience.
Our roads were a big problem in winter. In 1938, Ann Sammons was teaching Surprise Valley School and driving back and forth from her home. She was willing to stay at the Otterman log house which was a half mile from school. Helen Marie and Bob Adrian, Clara and Harold Deiss, and also some of the Schaeffer children stayed with her. We all sent food for them to eat. The next winter we hired Mrs. McCabe from Winner and Erna Deutsch to stay with them.
During the summer of 1939, the agent for Rural Credit stopped at our place and offered to sell us the half section of land at the Reichardt place. It had a good house on it and a barn. He offered us very good terms, so after considerable negotiating we dealt for it. We couldn't afford to move the house up to our place until the fall of 1941, when we hired a house mover from Mission to get it moved. It just had tar paper on the outside and building paper on the inside.
That fall the men dug the basement. On December 8th, they were pouring the cement for the basement. I was getting dinner ready when I heard Franklin Roosevelt on the radio declare war on the Japanese. They had attacked Pearl Harbor and sank several U.S. ships December 7th. He said all factories would start making Army clothing. Civilians were asked to conserve as much as they could and to raise big gardens. I went up and told the men.
Earl had been trying to sell our two-year-old steers all fall; he was trying to get 14¢ per lb. for them. On Saturday, December 6th, he had finally sold them for 10¢ per lb. He knew prices would skyrocket, so the following Friday he went to Winner and bought some replacement cattle.
He had the lumber bought for the house so they worked on it all winter. We moved into it on March 14th, 1942. It was a lovely house compared to our old one. Billy, age 5, and Dick, age 3, were scared of so many rooms and shadows. Earl dealt for a 32 volt light plant that charged 16 batteries for our electricity. It worked fine and it was used until we got the REA in 1952.
In 1942, Helen Marie started high school at O'Neill Academy, O'Neill, Nebraska, and graduated in 1946. She then attended General Beadle Teachers College, Madison, South Dakota, and Black Hills Teachers College at Spearfish, South Dakota, where she graduated in 1948. On August 3rd, 1948, she married Harold Hanson of Lead, South Dakota. They had nine children; Carol, Harold Jr., Bruce, Bonnie, Clifford, Mike, Laura, Betsy and Kent.
Bob went to O'Neill Academy in 1946. Then he and our other boys all went to Winner High School and played football. From the time they were 10 years old, they joined Norris Stockman 4-H Club at Norris. Lloyd Letellier and Reece Bligh were the leaders. The boys all received very good training in raising Hereford cattle and being able to judge their qualities. The training in public speaking enabled them to carry on meetings when they were in Junior Stockgrowers in later years.
Bob went to Brookings for two years, then joined the Army and served 16 months in Korea. He bought the Marion Georgeff place and married Patricia Grimshaw on October 12th, 1957. They have four sons: Jim, Tom, Kevin and David, and one granddaughter, Keely Lynn Adrian (Kevin's daughter).
Donald Dean graduated from high school in 1953. He then went five years to Notre Dame University where he got his Bachelor of Arts and Science, and then to University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Masters in Engineering. He finished at Stanford University where he got his PhD. He married Joan Hogan, June 17, 1961, and they have four children: Nancy, Sandra, Bryan and Edward.
Earl and I, with our four sons, took part in the South Dakota Stockgrowers meetings while the boys were in high school. We went to our first American National Stockgrowers meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, in January of 1947. We hired Pattie and Harold Sioddard to stay at our place and care for Dean, Bill and Dick. (Bob was at O'Neill at school.) Earl had always wanted to go back to Arizona. We went a week ahead of the convention and visited the Grand Canyon, Montezuma's Shrine and Carlsbad Caverns, plus lots of other points of interest. We also visited some of Earl's friends at Prescott, Arizona, where he had spent three years (from 1924 to 1927) recovering from TB and worked
in a Federal Government hospital where they cared for drug addicts among former servicemen.
In January of 1950, we went to Florida and attended the American National Convention at Miami. It was a wonderful trip and I was a Charter Member of the National CowBelles. The next year we organized the South Dakota CowBelles at the State Convention. Again, I was a Charter Member. By 1954, I took the secretary-treasurer job, then in 1955 was Vice President, and thru 1956-1957 was President of the South Dakota State CowBelles.
Bob, Dean and Bill were each President of the Junior Stockgrowers of South Dakota. The story of those officers is written in the "Last Grass Frostier" book by Bob Lee and Dick Marten.
Our church at Norris was terribly small for the congregation, so Earl and Father DeMeyer made arrangements with St. Francis Mission to buy a church that was five miles south of Norris. Earl and Leo VanderMay each paid $500 to St. Francis for it. In 1959, we hired the Williams Moving Co. of Winner to move it. The men of the parish volunteered their labor. Our Altar Society, of which I was president, sold
vanilla and extracts and got a big set of dishes so we could have a bazaar in the old church hall and raise money for new supplies in the church. It was all freshly painted when we had the bishop and several priests for the Church Blessing by Bishop McCarty and our First Communion Class.
As our family was in high school and college, we had more time to travel and take greater part in community and public activities. I helped collect money for the Red Cross, Crippled Children and Polio. Our club held dances in White River each year for polio. We would raffle a quilt or bedspread and also get articles donated by stores in Valentine, Winner and White River. We furnished the lunch and had Louie Krogman auction the articles during intermission. For several years, we made from $1,600 to $2,000. We also had Silver Dollar Amateur Contests. What a blessing when they discovered a vaccine for polio.
Bill Adrian took a course in Diesel Engineering after graduating from high school. He went to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to take the course, then helped at the ranch. April 23, 1962, he married Donna Shouldis. Earl had bought a ranch by Hayes, South Dakota so Donna and Bill moved up there. They lived there for four years.
I had three major surgeries in Yankton in 1957, and later in the 70's when my knees were also deteriorating. Earl had several bouts with pneumonia, so in 1966 we decided to move to Mission. The government was buying range land around Pierre so we sold that ranch and gave possession on April 1, 1966. We asked Bill and Donna to come back and live on the home ranch.
In December of 1965, I had decided to take a vacation during Christmas holidays. I went to Seattle, Washington, by train, had my own compartment and really enjoyed it. I visited my sister Rose and her son's family and also my brother Albert at Vancouver, Washington, for a few days. Then I went to Rcdondo Beach, California, to visit our daughter, Helen Marie, and family. The day after arriving there, our son Dean called from Nashville, Tennessee. Their son Edward was born on December 18th, 1965, and Joan was having a nervous breakdown. He needed me to care for their four children. I started home the next day. Earl met me in North Platte. I packed my clothes that night and we went back to North Platte to get the plane for Nashville. On Sunday night. I arrived and started babysitting their four children until March of 1966. Then I took Edward home with me. Joan was able to be home to care for the other children.
Earl and I had to get packed to move into the apartment house that we owned in Mission. Donna and Bill moved down April 1st. I begged Donna to just be patient until we moved out of the ranch house. They couldn't move all of the cattle so dealt for feed along the Missouri River south of Pierre in the fall of 1966. Earl and I went up there to see how the cattle were getting along. Those people had the biggest crop of forage and fodder so the cows were doing real well. The men sold 600 head at the sale ring in spring 1967.
We moved into Mission to our apartment on the third Thursday of May. Donna and I served CowBelles that afternoon at the ranch. Earl got the basement of our new house started immediately. They had the cement poured in the basement by Memorial Day. Then I had to go to Nashville again while Dean and Joan made a trip to California. On the return trip, I couldn't get a plane ticket from Chicago to Pierre or Sioux City, so made that portion of the journey by train. Earl met me on July 4th at Sioux City. The house was finished by September 6th, 1966.
I helped teach religion at St. Thomas Church in release time. I had helped by bringing Jim Adrian, age 5, in for class when we lived at the ranch, then Tom and Kevin. All together, I taught for nine years. By that time, we had another project. The ministers of Mission needed funds to have two buses bring children from school for one hour during release time on Monday. We got Bishop McCarty to buy the old high school building. It was renamed McCarty Hall Rummage Rooms. Earl and I ran it for 17 years. I still donate food for the bake sales and mark clothes to sell there. We get clothes from all over. One man from Cleveland, Ohio, has paid over $500 each year for the postage on boxes.
My knees had become crippled so we went to Ames, Iowa, in 1974 to see Dr. Baird. He agreed to replace my right knee on October 9th, 1974. It was very painful but I was dismissed by October 31st. I got along real well so decided to get the other one done. I had it done on August 13, 1975, but hurt it in the hospital because they didn't have bars to pull to get up in the bathrooms. I went back. They tried it in a cast but the knee bone slipped so on September 24th, they put in a hinge joint. I was there eight weeks until October 15th, 1975. It has given me a great deal of trouble. Now in 1984, I use a walker. While Earl was living I used a cane and held on to him.
Our families have grown. Bill and Donna had four children—Jeff, Ken, Mary Colette and Charles Earl or "Chuck." Dick married Marge Mesner while going to Marquette University. When they graduated in June of 1964, Earl and I took our pickup back and moved their furniture to the extra house at Bob Adrian's place. That summer, the black footed ferrets were discovered in the south pasture at the ranch. The government hired Dick to study them for a year. Then they wanted him to have a Master's degree. Dick was studying ferrets and Marge was expecting Michael, their first child, when the school board of Surprise Valley School asked Marge to teach District 13 (2 miles west of our place). She accepted and was a very good teacher.
Michael was born on January 12th, 1965. Marge taught the day before and went to the hospital at Pierre that night. They called me and asked me to teach the next day. It was my last day of school teaching. I sure enjoyed it. Dick taught for the next two weeks and I babysat for Michael the rest of that school year. Michael was a good baby. Each morning, Marge dropped him off then picked him up in the evening. That fall they moved to Brookings. Dick studied for his Master's. Marge and another married lady took a few subjects and babysat for one another. Megan was born at Brookings on August 10th, 1966. Donna, Bill, Earl and I went to the baptism and were caught in the worst hailstorm on the way home. Bill's car was so banged up from the hail that they had to get a new one. Dick accepted a job in the Bank of Detroit so they rented a house in Detroit and later bought one. Four more children were born there; Kirsten, Danny, Richard Jr. and Jonathon. Marge had her Master's by that time so taught in a nursery school.
As mentioned earlier, we were very active in the National and South Dakota Stockgrowers Associations. We attended conventions in most of the states. Earl was also National Vice President of the Pinto Horse Association. In 1970, we went to Mallorca, Spain. It is a beautiful island off the southern coast of Spain. It is the most beautiful, peaceful place. They had tours on the island and each day we had a chance to go to Africa or Paris, etc. We chose Rome and both considered it the most wonderful trip that we ever made. We toured the ancient parts of Rome and also the Vatican. The tour lasted 10 days and meant much to us the rest of our lives.
In 1973, we went to Mexico with the Stockgrowers. We landed in Mexico City. The first day, there were bullfights and boat rides. We stayed at a lovely hotel. About three days later, we were taken by bus to Acapulco. On the way, we toured Our Lady of Guadaloupe Shrine. It was beautiful. We got to go to Holy Communion at the Shrine. We had a lovely boat ride in Acapulco Bay. Earl bought a five-gallon punch
bowl with 24 cups at Silver City, Mexico. It is sterling silver.
I had the first knee surgery in 1974, and Earl's health was giving him problems, so we limited our trips to visiting our families from then on.
In 1977, Earl had his first heart-related problem. He was in Rapid City Hospital for two months. They installed a pacemaker. Helen Marie brought him home on October 1st. I had to have a pacemaker installed on August 25th, 1982.
In February of 1978, son Dick called saying Marge was in the hospital with leukemia. That was a terrible blow for all of us. They gave her all kinds of medicine and Marge always hoped that there would be some kind of a cure.
On June 25th, 1978, we had a big family reunion for our 50th wedding anniversary. We had over 70 family members here. Marge got the doctor to give his permission for her to attend. That made it extra special to have her with us. She had to go back to the hospital and passed away September 1st, 1978. Helen Marie was back there with them. All of their friends in Detroit had helped with the children throughout the summer. We all went back to her funeral. Dick kept the six children and his job at the bank. Jonathon was 2 years old that October 2nd. Their family learned to be self reliant.
Two years later, Ruth Knox began helping them and on February 13th, 1982, she and Dick were married. At their wedding Jonathon was the ring bearer, Richy and Danny were ushers, Kirsten and Megan were bridesmaids, and Mike was bestman. They have gotten along beautifully and last year moved to Columbus, Indiana.
Throughout 1983, Earl's health had been deteriorating. His pacemaker bothered him a lot. He had faithfully managed the bingo at St. Thomas Church each Friday evening. Finally, one Friday evening when things were real hectic, he said he was through and turned his job over to Dick Whiting, Earl had managed it for 10 years.
On our 55th wedding anniversary, Bill's and Bob's entertained us at the Country Club. Then on July 3rd, 1983, we had a big family picnic at Donna and Bill Adrian's. All of the families got there except for two grandchildren. Carol Hanson Besenty was expecting her baby, but she got here in November and we had the last four-generation pictures taken with Dad in them. Our picnic was a huge success and we got a lot of pictures from it. Everyone had such a good time.
On October 2nd, Earl collapsed as we came out of the church in Mission. He had to be taken to the Winner Hospital by ambulance. He recovered but on the night of December 3rd, became ill. He was in the Winner Hospital until December 13th. where he died. He was buried at Winner Cemetery on December 16th. He was 85 years old July 23, 1983.
We started out in Mellette County after five years of marriage with very little possessions. After a lot of hard work and planning, we ended up with a lot more and five wonderful families who mean a lot to us. There are 26 living grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren. I am 79 years old and will be 80 on December 20, 1984.
We had such a wonderful life together. I know he is waiting for me.
By Bess Adrian
(Transcribed, with permission from the Mellette County Historical Society, from "Mellette County 1911-1986", published by the Mellette County Historical Society in 1986)
"Creak, Creak, Creak" groaned the old hayrack as Earl Adrian headed west for their new home in Mellette County in April of 1933. He had bought a quarter of land from the Government in 1920 when the Eagle Side property was offered for sale. He had been paying for it monthly from his wages of $18.50 per week besides paying his board at Clearfield, where he bought cream, poultry and hides. He had worked in Clearfield from 1926 to 1933 when he decided to move to Mellette County.
His wife Bess and little daughter Helen Marie remained at Clearfield where Bess was teaching at the Kepa Paha school. The dry years began in 1932 and 1933. Prices had gone to pieces from the collapse of the stock market in 1929. Her wages had been $110 per month at that school in 1930 and 1931 but had lowered to $75 per month in 1932-33. The schools were paying in warrants (interest-bearing orders on the School District) until they could get taxes for their District. Luckily, Ben Butz, who ran the Outlaw Store in Winner, would take warrants at a discount for groceries and supplies.
Earlier in the spring Earl had traded for 5 bushels of seed potatoes, 100 lbs. of sugar, some 50-lb. sacks of flour, beans and other staple food. These and a little furniture that the Adrians had bought during their married life since June 11, 1928, were loaded onto a hayrack on Sunday evening so Earl would be ready to start at daylight Monday morning. The running gears of the wagon had wide rimmed wheels. It had been used in earlier times as a freight wagon between Ft. Randall and the Black Hills. He drove a four-horse team with new harness. The harness had been bought from Sears Roebuck with the school warrants.
When he pulled up on the flat west of the M. I. Strain place on the Little White River, 5 miles from his new home, he had to go on a "trackless plain." The Kasat Brothers had plowed up all of the prairie that spring and never left any section line. They planted it to wheat but it never came up. We all had the same disappointments. Our 5 bushels of potatoes came up and looked nice but there was no rain and a scourge of grasshoppers and beetles moved in. We were all powerless to fight them. We didn't have any rain that summer. No crops were raised. Lucky for us the Government had built three-room houses with a porch and a barn on the Indian allotments in 1913. The owners, however, refused to live in them but camped down south on Cut Meat Creek where there had been a day school for the Indian children. They were friendly and used to tease Earl for working so hard when there was no hope of saving the crops.
Earl dealt for wire and cut fence posts to fence our land. Then in 1934 he summered the Palmaieer cattle when they ran out of water up north of Clarence Krogman's Ranch. Earl had a well dug a few years before, and had a windmill on it. It watered the 400 head of cattle that summer, and he and Clyde Otterman dug out the old watering spring that had been near the headquarters of the HE Cattle Company (our place) some years before. Today there is a nice lake over that spring north of the ranch buildings at the Adrian Ranch.
Money was a very scarce item. If Earl broke a singletree or doubletree, he went to the creek and cut an oak tree, shaped it with the ax and brought an endgate rod into the kitchen. He heated the rod in the kitchen stove until it was red hot and drilled the necessary holes in
the oak wood. We didn't have a brace and bit. Finally Clyde Otterman traded him one. Another tool that was very useful was the monkey wrench. Now with the modern tools those have disappeared.
Another important article was a "slip" or "fresno." A slip could be handled by one man. He would hook it on his doubletree and move dirt across the ditch or creek to make a crossing. Two men generally used a fresno with a four-horse team and could do the work faster.
Our son Robert was born at the Ranch on October 29th, 1933. Earl went to Clearfield and got Mrs. Leonard Storms to care for our new son until I got stronger. The car needed some repairs so Earl traded it off for a team of horses. We got along without a car until 1935 when times were a little better.
Dwight Sharp worked for us in 1933 putting up hay. One day he and Milton Meuller from White River killed 65 rattlesnakes in a prairie dog town on the flat near Clarence Krogman's.
In May of 1934 my brother-in-law, Leo Fuhrer, drowned below the power dam at Spencer, Nebraska. His wife, my sister Rose Fuhrer, had taught school for a number of years. That fall, she and her two children came to Mellette County where she taught at the school by Dave Deutsch's place. They needed to stay at the schoolhouse, so Earl dealt for a shack with John Big Crow, who wanted $25 for it. Earl traded our turkey gobbler, two wagon wheels, a sack of flour and $5 for it. Then he and Clyde Otterman used four horses and loaded it on two running gears of wagons. They moved it about 15 miles to her school yard. She hired a Deutsch girl to take care of her baby in the daytime and they slept in the schoolhouse at night. Our daughter, Helen Marie, stayed with them.
In the spring of 1934, the Ringthunder Club started. I joined in June. We met every two weeks. It was welcomed entertainment. I still belong to it 50 years later and have been president two or three times and was secretary for several years.
In 1935, we had a nice rain in January. The ground hadn't frozen the previous fall so Earl planted some wheat on the last day of 1934. We got 100 bushels of wheat from it that fall.
The rains of 1935 brought up western wheat grass all over the pastures; they looked like wheat fields. My Mother came to visit us that fall. We drove the car up on the buttes north of our house and came down on the steep side. When we got to the gate north of the house Earl said to me, "You will have to open the gate because we don't have any brakes." Mother almost had a heart attack after coming over that steep butte.
Our son Dean was born at Wilson's Hospital in Winner on July 29th, 1935. While I was at the hospital, Earl brought two steers to the Winner Sale Ring and got $45 for them. That was considerably higher than cattle had been previously. We used the money to pay my hospital bill.
That winter when I went to Kary's store to get gas after taking Helen Marie to school, Mrs. Cordelia Kary told me that Martin and Ferd Littau were threshing haystacks to get the Western Wheat Seed to sell in other areas where they needed the seed. Earl decided to have our few stacks threshed. Every bit of cash helped a great deal.
While cattle prices were so low, Earl decided that we should raise turkeys. They could eat grasshoppers and we had an abundant supply of them. He was able to borrow money on the turkeys from Mr. Clark at Farmer's State Bank in Winner. We sent for a big incubator to hatch the eggs from our 100 turkey hens that we had saved from the year before. We put the incubator in our storm cave. It was in good condition and we hatched turkeys and chickens for several years.
He built a long brooder house and installed an old furnace for steam heat. The poults were raised on wire netting so they stayed healthier. Later that summer, he built a pen in our east pasture and put up roosts. Earl slept in our car so coyotes wouldn't attack the turkeys early in the morning. At daylight he turned them out and herded them across the prairie until they were filled up with grasshoppers. Then he brought them back and gave them water and grain. By late afternoon, they were turned out again to get more hoppers. It was a tedious job but we kept at it.
That fall, we sold truckloads of live turkeys to the Omaha Cold Storage in Winner. They sent the trucks out after them. The next season, we went at it stronger than ever. When it came time to sell, prices were down and the Cold Storage had quit picking poultry, so we hired one of the Sharp girls to care of Bob and Dean while Earl and I picked turkeys in our barn. Then we packed them in barrels and sent them by railroad refrigerator cars to Chicago. We decided to go out of the turkey business. Sime Fridy hired us to hatch turkeys for him and raise them in the brooder house for six weeks.
Nineteen thirty-six was another dry year, but we were better prepared for it. All of the poultry around the yard kept the hoppers down. Earl had fixed a garden so we could irrigate it. We raised a good garden. That fall, Earl had a big woodpile cut up but it got covered up with snow. We didn't use it again until spring. He took care of the cattle alone so didn't have time to bring in much wood. Each evening he cut enough for the next day.
We moved into one room and used two cots. Helen Marie was going to school in Winner, and roads had been blocked for weeks. We ran out of table salt so I boiled stock salt and sifted it through cloth to get the rocks out. I'd have to bake bread in the kitchen oven, but all of our cooking was done on the old wood stove that we got from Sam Yellow Robe when we first moved out there. Donna Adrian still uses it.
We were trying to get rid of all of our turkeys so dressed them and put them in barrels to ship to Chicago. On one trip to White River with the barrels, Earl was scooping snow by Grover Six Toe's place to where two men were scooping towards him. They were from Ludlow, South Dakota, and had brought down a herd of horses in the fall to winter north of Mission. When John Gionetta and Peter Hafnor came to look at them, many were dead and all were in poor condition. Earl agreed to pasture them but had to strengthen them by feeding oats before they could stand the trip across country. He had to use the money I had saved to buy a radio and a gasoline washing machine. So those comforts had to wait until they took the horses that summer.
Lester Hafnor stayed at our place that spring to break the horses to drive, then sold them to the Government on purchase orders. Earl and Reinholdt Deutsch would help out by hooking them on the wagon to haul wood. One day they hooked up two half-broken horses. They put a hobble on one, and Earl had that rope. Reinholdt had the reins and was crouched down in the wagon. Somehow the hobble rope hooked around so it was useless. They circled the yard a time or two, just missing the tanks of water. Finally, they went through the gate and headed for open country. They kept them going in circles until they were tired out. That night Reinholdt had a nightmare and was screaming. When Earl woke him up, Reinholdt thought the horses went over the windmill. I hired Libbie Petr to help cook for the nine men who came to take the horses home.
By that time, Carl Klinkenbeard's road crew was grading the County Road past our place. They boarded with us, then put in our first big stock dam in the east pasture.
On September 25th, 1937, our son Bill Eugene was born at Winner. Libbie took care of the family while I was gone. Eighteen months later, our son Richard Lee was born at Winner. He was an eight-month baby, but grew to be over six feet tall. Dick required a lot of care as he had colic for two months, so sleeping was "almost a thing of the past" for me. One-and-a-half-year old Billy felt terribly neglected. Earl petted him and called him "Dad's good boy!" so he felt like he was extra special.
That summer, Helen Valburg started a 4-H Club for the girls of the community. Helen Marie joined. It was wonderful training in sewing, cooking and home beautification. Each year they signed for a different project and Helen Valburg insisted that they do good work. They won lots of prizes and it helped them later in life with the sewing and cooking experience.
Our roads were a big problem in winter. In 1938, Ann Sammons was teaching Surprise Valley School and driving back and forth from her home. She was willing to stay at the Otterman log house which was a half mile from school. Helen Marie and Bob Adrian, Clara and Harold Deiss, and also some of the Schaeffer children stayed with her. We all sent food for them to eat. The next winter we hired Mrs. McCabe from Winner and Erna Deutsch to stay with them.
During the summer of 1939, the agent for Rural Credit stopped at our place and offered to sell us the half section of land at the Reichardt place. It had a good house on it and a barn. He offered us very good terms, so after considerable negotiating we dealt for it. We couldn't afford to move the house up to our place until the fall of 1941, when we hired a house mover from Mission to get it moved. It just had tar paper on the outside and building paper on the inside.
That fall the men dug the basement. On December 8th, they were pouring the cement for the basement. I was getting dinner ready when I heard Franklin Roosevelt on the radio declare war on the Japanese. They had attacked Pearl Harbor and sank several U.S. ships December 7th. He said all factories would start making Army clothing. Civilians were asked to conserve as much as they could and to raise big gardens. I went up and told the men.
Earl had been trying to sell our two-year-old steers all fall; he was trying to get 14¢ per lb. for them. On Saturday, December 6th, he had finally sold them for 10¢ per lb. He knew prices would skyrocket, so the following Friday he went to Winner and bought some replacement cattle.
He had the lumber bought for the house so they worked on it all winter. We moved into it on March 14th, 1942. It was a lovely house compared to our old one. Billy, age 5, and Dick, age 3, were scared of so many rooms and shadows. Earl dealt for a 32 volt light plant that charged 16 batteries for our electricity. It worked fine and it was used until we got the REA in 1952.
In 1942, Helen Marie started high school at O'Neill Academy, O'Neill, Nebraska, and graduated in 1946. She then attended General Beadle Teachers College, Madison, South Dakota, and Black Hills Teachers College at Spearfish, South Dakota, where she graduated in 1948. On August 3rd, 1948, she married Harold Hanson of Lead, South Dakota. They had nine children; Carol, Harold Jr., Bruce, Bonnie, Clifford, Mike, Laura, Betsy and Kent.
Bob went to O'Neill Academy in 1946. Then he and our other boys all went to Winner High School and played football. From the time they were 10 years old, they joined Norris Stockman 4-H Club at Norris. Lloyd Letellier and Reece Bligh were the leaders. The boys all received very good training in raising Hereford cattle and being able to judge their qualities. The training in public speaking enabled them to carry on meetings when they were in Junior Stockgrowers in later years.
Bob went to Brookings for two years, then joined the Army and served 16 months in Korea. He bought the Marion Georgeff place and married Patricia Grimshaw on October 12th, 1957. They have four sons: Jim, Tom, Kevin and David, and one granddaughter, Keely Lynn Adrian (Kevin's daughter).
Donald Dean graduated from high school in 1953. He then went five years to Notre Dame University where he got his Bachelor of Arts and Science, and then to University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Masters in Engineering. He finished at Stanford University where he got his PhD. He married Joan Hogan, June 17, 1961, and they have four children: Nancy, Sandra, Bryan and Edward.
Earl and I, with our four sons, took part in the South Dakota Stockgrowers meetings while the boys were in high school. We went to our first American National Stockgrowers meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, in January of 1947. We hired Pattie and Harold Sioddard to stay at our place and care for Dean, Bill and Dick. (Bob was at O'Neill at school.) Earl had always wanted to go back to Arizona. We went a week ahead of the convention and visited the Grand Canyon, Montezuma's Shrine and Carlsbad Caverns, plus lots of other points of interest. We also visited some of Earl's friends at Prescott, Arizona, where he had spent three years (from 1924 to 1927) recovering from TB and worked
in a Federal Government hospital where they cared for drug addicts among former servicemen.
In January of 1950, we went to Florida and attended the American National Convention at Miami. It was a wonderful trip and I was a Charter Member of the National CowBelles. The next year we organized the South Dakota CowBelles at the State Convention. Again, I was a Charter Member. By 1954, I took the secretary-treasurer job, then in 1955 was Vice President, and thru 1956-1957 was President of the South Dakota State CowBelles.
Bob, Dean and Bill were each President of the Junior Stockgrowers of South Dakota. The story of those officers is written in the "Last Grass Frostier" book by Bob Lee and Dick Marten.
Our church at Norris was terribly small for the congregation, so Earl and Father DeMeyer made arrangements with St. Francis Mission to buy a church that was five miles south of Norris. Earl and Leo VanderMay each paid $500 to St. Francis for it. In 1959, we hired the Williams Moving Co. of Winner to move it. The men of the parish volunteered their labor. Our Altar Society, of which I was president, sold
vanilla and extracts and got a big set of dishes so we could have a bazaar in the old church hall and raise money for new supplies in the church. It was all freshly painted when we had the bishop and several priests for the Church Blessing by Bishop McCarty and our First Communion Class.
As our family was in high school and college, we had more time to travel and take greater part in community and public activities. I helped collect money for the Red Cross, Crippled Children and Polio. Our club held dances in White River each year for polio. We would raffle a quilt or bedspread and also get articles donated by stores in Valentine, Winner and White River. We furnished the lunch and had Louie Krogman auction the articles during intermission. For several years, we made from $1,600 to $2,000. We also had Silver Dollar Amateur Contests. What a blessing when they discovered a vaccine for polio.
Bill Adrian took a course in Diesel Engineering after graduating from high school. He went to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to take the course, then helped at the ranch. April 23, 1962, he married Donna Shouldis. Earl had bought a ranch by Hayes, South Dakota so Donna and Bill moved up there. They lived there for four years.
I had three major surgeries in Yankton in 1957, and later in the 70's when my knees were also deteriorating. Earl had several bouts with pneumonia, so in 1966 we decided to move to Mission. The government was buying range land around Pierre so we sold that ranch and gave possession on April 1, 1966. We asked Bill and Donna to come back and live on the home ranch.
In December of 1965, I had decided to take a vacation during Christmas holidays. I went to Seattle, Washington, by train, had my own compartment and really enjoyed it. I visited my sister Rose and her son's family and also my brother Albert at Vancouver, Washington, for a few days. Then I went to Rcdondo Beach, California, to visit our daughter, Helen Marie, and family. The day after arriving there, our son Dean called from Nashville, Tennessee. Their son Edward was born on December 18th, 1965, and Joan was having a nervous breakdown. He needed me to care for their four children. I started home the next day. Earl met me in North Platte. I packed my clothes that night and we went back to North Platte to get the plane for Nashville. On Sunday night. I arrived and started babysitting their four children until March of 1966. Then I took Edward home with me. Joan was able to be home to care for the other children.
Earl and I had to get packed to move into the apartment house that we owned in Mission. Donna and Bill moved down April 1st. I begged Donna to just be patient until we moved out of the ranch house. They couldn't move all of the cattle so dealt for feed along the Missouri River south of Pierre in the fall of 1966. Earl and I went up there to see how the cattle were getting along. Those people had the biggest crop of forage and fodder so the cows were doing real well. The men sold 600 head at the sale ring in spring 1967.
We moved into Mission to our apartment on the third Thursday of May. Donna and I served CowBelles that afternoon at the ranch. Earl got the basement of our new house started immediately. They had the cement poured in the basement by Memorial Day. Then I had to go to Nashville again while Dean and Joan made a trip to California. On the return trip, I couldn't get a plane ticket from Chicago to Pierre or Sioux City, so made that portion of the journey by train. Earl met me on July 4th at Sioux City. The house was finished by September 6th, 1966.
I helped teach religion at St. Thomas Church in release time. I had helped by bringing Jim Adrian, age 5, in for class when we lived at the ranch, then Tom and Kevin. All together, I taught for nine years. By that time, we had another project. The ministers of Mission needed funds to have two buses bring children from school for one hour during release time on Monday. We got Bishop McCarty to buy the old high school building. It was renamed McCarty Hall Rummage Rooms. Earl and I ran it for 17 years. I still donate food for the bake sales and mark clothes to sell there. We get clothes from all over. One man from Cleveland, Ohio, has paid over $500 each year for the postage on boxes.
My knees had become crippled so we went to Ames, Iowa, in 1974 to see Dr. Baird. He agreed to replace my right knee on October 9th, 1974. It was very painful but I was dismissed by October 31st. I got along real well so decided to get the other one done. I had it done on August 13, 1975, but hurt it in the hospital because they didn't have bars to pull to get up in the bathrooms. I went back. They tried it in a cast but the knee bone slipped so on September 24th, they put in a hinge joint. I was there eight weeks until October 15th, 1975. It has given me a great deal of trouble. Now in 1984, I use a walker. While Earl was living I used a cane and held on to him.
Our families have grown. Bill and Donna had four children—Jeff, Ken, Mary Colette and Charles Earl or "Chuck." Dick married Marge Mesner while going to Marquette University. When they graduated in June of 1964, Earl and I took our pickup back and moved their furniture to the extra house at Bob Adrian's place. That summer, the black footed ferrets were discovered in the south pasture at the ranch. The government hired Dick to study them for a year. Then they wanted him to have a Master's degree. Dick was studying ferrets and Marge was expecting Michael, their first child, when the school board of Surprise Valley School asked Marge to teach District 13 (2 miles west of our place). She accepted and was a very good teacher.
Michael was born on January 12th, 1965. Marge taught the day before and went to the hospital at Pierre that night. They called me and asked me to teach the next day. It was my last day of school teaching. I sure enjoyed it. Dick taught for the next two weeks and I babysat for Michael the rest of that school year. Michael was a good baby. Each morning, Marge dropped him off then picked him up in the evening. That fall they moved to Brookings. Dick studied for his Master's. Marge and another married lady took a few subjects and babysat for one another. Megan was born at Brookings on August 10th, 1966. Donna, Bill, Earl and I went to the baptism and were caught in the worst hailstorm on the way home. Bill's car was so banged up from the hail that they had to get a new one. Dick accepted a job in the Bank of Detroit so they rented a house in Detroit and later bought one. Four more children were born there; Kirsten, Danny, Richard Jr. and Jonathon. Marge had her Master's by that time so taught in a nursery school.
As mentioned earlier, we were very active in the National and South Dakota Stockgrowers Associations. We attended conventions in most of the states. Earl was also National Vice President of the Pinto Horse Association. In 1970, we went to Mallorca, Spain. It is a beautiful island off the southern coast of Spain. It is the most beautiful, peaceful place. They had tours on the island and each day we had a chance to go to Africa or Paris, etc. We chose Rome and both considered it the most wonderful trip that we ever made. We toured the ancient parts of Rome and also the Vatican. The tour lasted 10 days and meant much to us the rest of our lives.
In 1973, we went to Mexico with the Stockgrowers. We landed in Mexico City. The first day, there were bullfights and boat rides. We stayed at a lovely hotel. About three days later, we were taken by bus to Acapulco. On the way, we toured Our Lady of Guadaloupe Shrine. It was beautiful. We got to go to Holy Communion at the Shrine. We had a lovely boat ride in Acapulco Bay. Earl bought a five-gallon punch
bowl with 24 cups at Silver City, Mexico. It is sterling silver.
I had the first knee surgery in 1974, and Earl's health was giving him problems, so we limited our trips to visiting our families from then on.
In 1977, Earl had his first heart-related problem. He was in Rapid City Hospital for two months. They installed a pacemaker. Helen Marie brought him home on October 1st. I had to have a pacemaker installed on August 25th, 1982.
In February of 1978, son Dick called saying Marge was in the hospital with leukemia. That was a terrible blow for all of us. They gave her all kinds of medicine and Marge always hoped that there would be some kind of a cure.
On June 25th, 1978, we had a big family reunion for our 50th wedding anniversary. We had over 70 family members here. Marge got the doctor to give his permission for her to attend. That made it extra special to have her with us. She had to go back to the hospital and passed away September 1st, 1978. Helen Marie was back there with them. All of their friends in Detroit had helped with the children throughout the summer. We all went back to her funeral. Dick kept the six children and his job at the bank. Jonathon was 2 years old that October 2nd. Their family learned to be self reliant.
Two years later, Ruth Knox began helping them and on February 13th, 1982, she and Dick were married. At their wedding Jonathon was the ring bearer, Richy and Danny were ushers, Kirsten and Megan were bridesmaids, and Mike was bestman. They have gotten along beautifully and last year moved to Columbus, Indiana.
Throughout 1983, Earl's health had been deteriorating. His pacemaker bothered him a lot. He had faithfully managed the bingo at St. Thomas Church each Friday evening. Finally, one Friday evening when things were real hectic, he said he was through and turned his job over to Dick Whiting, Earl had managed it for 10 years.
On our 55th wedding anniversary, Bill's and Bob's entertained us at the Country Club. Then on July 3rd, 1983, we had a big family picnic at Donna and Bill Adrian's. All of the families got there except for two grandchildren. Carol Hanson Besenty was expecting her baby, but she got here in November and we had the last four-generation pictures taken with Dad in them. Our picnic was a huge success and we got a lot of pictures from it. Everyone had such a good time.
On October 2nd, Earl collapsed as we came out of the church in Mission. He had to be taken to the Winner Hospital by ambulance. He recovered but on the night of December 3rd, became ill. He was in the Winner Hospital until December 13th. where he died. He was buried at Winner Cemetery on December 16th. He was 85 years old July 23, 1983.
We started out in Mellette County after five years of marriage with very little possessions. After a lot of hard work and planning, we ended up with a lot more and five wonderful families who mean a lot to us. There are 26 living grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren. I am 79 years old and will be 80 on December 20, 1984.
We had such a wonderful life together. I know he is waiting for me.
Earl and Bess Adrian Family
The Adrian Story
by Bess Adrian
(transcribed by RB, Mellette County Memories Golden Anniversary Edition 1911-1961, by Winifred Reutter )
Earl Adrian, only son of Mary and Deidrich Adrian, was born at Parker. S. D., July 3, 1898. He had one sister, Helen, a year older. When he was but a few years old, his folks moved to Corsica, S. D. where they operated a hotel until 1910. Then a number of families from around Corsica decided to settle in Tripp County close to the Dorian Buttes, west of Clearfield. Dallas, S. D., the end of the railroad at that time, was a booming land office town. D. L. Adrian, William Seiser, Tony Raben and T. J. Harrington had gone ahead to Dallas, purchased lumber for their houses and freighted it across country to their new homes. Earl still has a birthday card that D. L. Adrian wrote to his wife, March 1, 1910, telling her that the river had broken up, therefore she would have to go around by Sioux City.
In due time, the new homes were built and the families established. Their main fuel at first was twisted hay and cow chips. By the fall of 1910, a sod school house was built. Miss Kavanaugh was one of the first teachers. Most terms were three months, receiving thirty-five dollars per month. After the school bought an organ they had fun dancing during the noon and recess periods and on Saturday nights. Teachers were hard to get because very few were qualified. When they didn't have school close to his home, Earl walked three miles southeast to the Ed Johnson school.
Later he went to Ward's Academy near Platte. S. D. He worked for ten cents per hour before and after school, cleaning barns and hauling hay, to help pay for his education. Rev. Camfield, who managed the school, was very good. He tried to help less fortunate boys get an education. Toward spring, Earl got so homesick that he and the two Rowe boys, Charles and Frank, left school, crossing the Missouri River in a row boat while the river was still full of floating ice. This was at Snake Creek crossing. In later years, when Frank Rowe (now living close to Winner. S. D.) had a son going to high school and Earl Adrian had sons playing in the same football team, they would reminisce about their days at Ward's Academy and their row boat trip across the Missouri River. Charles Rowe lost his life in World War I.
Earl's cowboy days started when he hired out to John Neiss as a ranch hand. Neiss owned some very good horses. Some were thoroughbred Percherons; these had to be broken to work, and some were wild horses. These were broken to be sold on purchase orders at the Rosebud Indian Agency. The ranch was located in eastern Todd County so Earl was able to ride home often, to visit his mother who was in poor health. He also worked for Dave Archer and Tom Arnold. Dave had a ranch in western Tripp County. Sometimes in the winter, when the snow was deep, they would hitch two unbroken horses to a bobsled. Tipping over in the snow wasn't as painful as on the hard ground, and they had many exciting experiences together.
On September 12. 1919, Earl's mother passed away. His sister Helen had married Clark Culver the year before. His father was working for the International Harvester Company out of Winner, so from then on until he married in 1928, Earl's home was wherever he hung his hat.
For four years he worked for Oscar Haish, north of Winner, S. D. He came up into Mellette County to get stock. Haish owned a ranch on the Little and Big White Rivers. It was during that time he met Sam Yellow Robe from Westover, S. D. He told Sam of his desire to buy some land and to start a ranch of his own. The two things he had especially wanted it to have were plenty of water and wood. Sam promised to keep on the look out for a quarter of that kind.
Some of Earl's early memories of Mellette County are amusing. He recalls the "Hay Palace" at Wood. It was made of baled hay and was arranged with bales of straw intermingled to make a design. Each year they would have a fair and a big celebration. One time when Earl had been searching for stray cattle for Haish, he found some close to Wood. It was during the fair time and the year they had the hay palace so he decided to wait over and attend the dance for a while. Later be felt be should, drive the cattle on, so started out. Two of the steers had given him a lot of trouble so he had tied them together by their horns. As he was going down a section line southeast of Wood, a terrific lightning storm broke loose. The lightning was terribly close. Sparks kept shooting across from the horns of those two steers and balls of fire followed down on the barbed wire fence. Luckily, neither Earl nor the steers were hit but things were pretty exciting around there for a while.
One time he was driving a herd of horses from Mellette County. His saddle horse was about played out by the time he got to Bill Lynass's place. Bill was out putting up hay but when Earl asked if he could use his corral to catch a fresh horse, Bill willingly quit to help. Earl chose a grey horse because he thought it looked like it had been ridden. Lynass tried to discourage him from picking that one but the grey was caught. The corral was eight foot high and it was a good thing, as that horse tried everything after Earl got on him. Finally, when the gate was opened, Earl continued to ride him and use him for the next twelve miles. Later that horse held the number two place as the second best bucking horse in South Dakota. He was used for many years at the Frontier Days in White River and his name was Red Wing.
Boyd O'Brien tells another story of Earl driving cattle to the Haish ranch on the Big White. It was in the later part of February, very wet and cold. They were moving four hundred head of good cows. Earl had developed a bad cold from sleeping out in the open under a tarp. He had continued driving until he was practically unconscious when he arrived at the O'Brien home. Mr. And Mrs. Henderson of Westover took him to Murdo to the hospital where it was learned that he had a severe case of pneumonia.
Shortly after that he went to Lead to work in the Homestake Mine. It was while he was there that Sara Yellow Robe wrote to him, saying that the quarter of land that had been the headquarters for the HE ranch was being offered in the Indian land sale at Rosebud. Earl sent in a bid of $1,610.00 and was successful in getting it. It is the SW 24 40-31. It had a house and barn that had been built earlier by the Government. It is still the headquarters for the Adrian ranch.
Working in a mine was not very satisfactory for a man that was used to the open range. Earl only worked there a little over a year, then went to Keya Paha and was foreman for Charlie Benedict, a cattle feeder from Chicago, In January, 1924, he went to Prescott, Ariz., where he worked in a Government Hospital as an orderly and on the guard force.
Next he went to Borger, Texas. That was just when the oil boom was on in that country. There were no roads and the streets of Borger were filled with deep ruts. Earl still has a picture of a truck stuck in the mud on the main street. In 1947 when he and his wife traveled through Borger it was hard to realize that the paved streets of the town were the same streets of mud he had seen in 1926.
Earl returned to Winner in the summer of 1926 and helped his father buy cattle for a while, later he worked for the Harding Cream Company, Clearfield, S. D. He also bought poultry and hides. During that winter, the farmers around Clearfield decided to have rabbit hunts on Sunday afternoons. They would kill hundreds of rabbits in one drive. The two bidders for the dead rabbits were Earl Adrian and W. H. Sturges of Winner, S.D. Earl was generally successful and got them for thirteen cents apiece. He hired them skinned for 5 or 6 cents and sold the hides to a firm in Denver, Colo.
It was while he was working at Clearfield that he met his future wife, Bess Angel. She was teaching the Churchside school, about one and one-half miles northwest of Clearfield. They were married June 11, 1928, at Bess's home at Spencer, Nebr. Their attendants were her best friend, Louise Whiting, and her cousin, Patrick Langan. The only honeymoon they took was trying to get back to Clearfield through muddy roads from Spencer. Much of highway 18 wasn't even graveled at that time and the gumbo hills north of Spencer will always be remembered.
During the next five years Earl and Bess both stayed on the payrolls, trying to pay for three more quarters of land and get a herd of cattle started.
Their daughter, Helen Marie, was born in 1929. For the next three years Bess taught the Keya Paha school and Earl continued to work for the Harding Cream Company.
The Adrians moved to Mellette County in March, 1933. Earl and his hired man batched until school was out. Adrians had high hopes in their new home. They planted five bushels of potatoes besides a field of corn and rye. That was the first year of the beetles. They came in all colors and sizes, and all were hungry. All pests do better in dry weather and even that was in their favor as it didn't rain all summer. A milk cow couldn't even be kept because the pastures were so bare.
Dale McCumber was our mail man, delivering the mail three times a week; shortly afterwards it came every day.
In October our son, Robert, was born. Mrs. Clyde Otterman assisted a doctor from Rosebud. Then Mrs. Leonard Storms took care of mother and baby; she came from Clearfield.
That fall we traded our car for a team of horses as we didn't have money to buy gas and oil. Earl bought a load of wheat from Ferdinand Littau and look it to the mill at Mission, S. D., to be ground into flour. We got twenty-nine sacks of flour and several small sacks of breakfast food.
Throughout that year we went to the little Catholic church, with team and wagon, down south about four miles on Cutmeat Creek. There had been an Indian Day School there but all traces of it were gone.
Many people roasted wheat and ground it for coffee. We had no feed for our chickens. The only grain that was available was given for W.P.A. work. In January, Earl asked if they would allow him to work enough to get grain for the chickens. He was granted permission and from then on, he had to get up at four A.M., harness his horses and drive twelve miles to a Government dam that was being built in what is now Harold Krogman's pasture. Fred McKennett was foreman of the project. Many men were working there and they used four horse teams on fresnos.
Zona Rajewich was teaching our school that year. Often she walked five miles to and from school. Her son, Joe Jr., was five weeks old when school started. Surprise Valley Township had four schools at that time. The main community entertainment was card parties and dances in the school houses.
The spring of 1934 was hot and dry and we had lots of grasshoppers and beetles.
Our brother-in-law, Leo Fuhrer, drowned in the power dam at Spencer, Nebr., during the month of May. He left Bess's sister. Rose, with two small children to support. That fall she came up and taught the Deutsch School. Earl traded for a small shack which he and Clyde Otterman moved into the school yard. He paid for the shack with our turkey gobbler, a sack of flour, a couple wagon wheels and five dollars.
Water for cattle had been scarce throughout the summer. Clyde Otterman and Earl used a four-horse fresno to dig out the old spring that had always had water in former years. Also we dug a well by the house that never went dry. Mrs. Palmateer and son, Lloyd, were trying to keep their herd of cattle but the wells in their pastures were drying up. Finally, they hired Earl to summer four hundred head of cattle for them. He went up and helped drive them down. By the time they got within a quarter of a mile of the spring, they broke into a dead run and came running and bellowing the rest of the way. That only slackened their thirst at the spring so they were driven up by the well where we had four tanks full of water. The windmill went day and night. That was the two things we had plenty of, wind and dust!
The Government bought cattle that summer and fall. A cow and a calf brought only twenty dollars but that was more than they brought on the market. Many ranchers and farmers had them mortgaged anyhow, for more than they were worth. They issued most of the cattle that were sold at Parmelee, back to the Indians for food. They were branded E.R.A.. which meant Emergency Relief Administration. There was a standing joke that some of the Indians must have thought it meant "Eat Right Away."
In the fall, the W.P.A. would put up thistles for anyone who wanted them to. Many of us bought them and some of the farmers just turned their stock out to them. All the fields that had been farmed had some thistles on them. That winter we sent our cows down to Laurel, Nebr., with Ray Eveleth, who had dealt for winter feed down there. We gave one dollar per head per month for them. We had to bring them home about April first of 1935. They were real thin because of the severe winter in Nebraska. That spring it was hard to get a cow to claim her calf. We had a heavy wet snow April 10, 1935. It was about a foot deep on the level and was real wet. The coyotes were so bad; they would take calves right out of the stockyard while the cows were all around there.
Earl had a job as feed loan inspector in the fall of 1934 and was over around Huron and up in the Black Hills most of the winter. Hershal Nelson worked at our ranch, gathering wood and eating for our calves.
After the snow melted in 1935, our range grew the most beautiful crop of western wheat grass. The hillsides and valleys were covered just like a great wheat field. We raised a good crop of milo and a small field produced 100 bushels of wheat. Turkeys were still a good price. We sold over $400.00 worth that fall and kept 100 hens for the next year. Our hope was to raise enough turkeys the next year to buy a power washing machine and a radio. In July of 1935 our son, Donald Dean, was born.
Rudolph and Joe Petr cut our wheat and rye. Earl hired boys to help hay and they kept two mowers going throughout the late summer and fall, cutting hay and bunching it. They hauled it in with hay racks and used slings to pull it onto the stack. Dwight Sharp and Milton Mueller were hauling from the flat south of Clarence Krogman's. The flat was a prairie dog town. They found rattlesnakes had crawled under almost every shock of hay. On that flat they killed sixty-five snakes and piled them up. That had been known as a rattlesnake den when Holders lived there. Their son came home one day in the fall and reported that he had seen a snake about six inches around. When the men went up there to see it, they found that it was a bunch of little snakes wrapped around one another. They killed over 300 snakes there that afternoon. For years Earl and I would go out on that flat late in the fall, if it was a warm, balmy day, and look around the tops of the prairie dog holes. The snakes would crawl up to sun themselves. We killed dozens of them and Clarence Krogman killed a good many. Finally, a few years later, when we were able to get the Interior Department interested in poisoning prairie dogs. Earl and his sons took a road blade over there and filled up most of the holes by leveling the ground.
There was more of a demand for cattle In 1935 because very few of the poor ones sold in 1934 went to market. We sold three steers (Earl had bought them the winter before for five dollars apiece) for $49.50 per head in July. That summer we were forced to buy two more quarters of land from the county if we wanted to keep our ranch together. They were just northwest of our house.
The winter of 1935 was open, with very little snow, and there wasn't any rain in the spring, so the hundred bushels of wheat we had planted didn't even come up. There were lots of grasshoppers. Earl went to White River one day and over by the Twin Buttes near Fred McKennett's it looked like the ground was moving. It was a whole army of Mormon crickets. They were huge, brownish crickets that crawled along but almost always kept moving southwest, only stopping long enough to eat and then crawled on but never changed their general direction. The men in White River said that when they came to the Little White River they just jumped right in. The current would sweep them down stream quite a ways, but most of them seemed to survive and then crawled out down stream to continue on their journey. When they got here our turkeys were afraid of them and wouldn't eat them, even though they were used to eating thousands of grasshoppers. These Mormon crickets lasted only a few weeks, then they were all gone and we haven't been troubled with them since.
That is the spring we had bought a very large incubator to hatch turkey eggs. We hatched about 1,500 poults. Earl had built a brooder house which was heated with a furnace that had steam heat. The turkeys were kept on wire until they were six weeks old when they were turned out on the range. Earl fixed our Chevrolet car so he could sleep in it and could stay out with the turkeys at night, as the coyotes were had. Also there were many prairie fires that summer.
The rest of South Dakota was very dry in 1936. But this part had the good grass which had grown up in 1935, so many people here took in stock to pasture. Some of them didn't have their pastures fenced so the rest of us had to put up with roaming cattle. I remember that we bought corn to fatten our turkeys and the only place we could feed them was in the pole corral, as the hungry, stray cattle would crawl or jump any wire fence.
The turkey market went to pieces that fall. We sold two truck loads of prime turkeys and hardly made anything on them. Then we started picking the rest, packing them in barrels and shipping them to Chicago. They brought a pretty good price that way. Throughout the winter that was our main job. It was a mighty hard one. Each evening we would pin-feather and pack them. Often Earl would have to scoop a lot of snow so he could get them to town so they could be shipped. One day we came into the house and smelled rubber. We found our sons, Rob and Dean, up on the kitchen range reaching for the clock. Their shoe soles were almost on fire. From then on we hired Eva Sharp to watch the children while we worked. We had taken our daughter, Helen Marie, to Winner to go to St. Marys school because our roads were drifted full of snow so frequently that winter.
It was on one of the trips to White River with barrels of turkeys that Earl was scooping through a drift when he saw two men were shoveling from the other side. When they got together he found they were Pete Hafner and John Gionetta from Ludlow, S. D. They had brought a large herd of horses down to a pasture north of Mission, S. D., early in the fall. When they came to look at them, they found many dead and the rest in very poor shape. They wanted to bring them to our place so we agreed and the money that had been saved for the radio and washing machine went to buy oats for the horses.
Lester Hafner stayed with us throughout the spring and broke horses to sell on purchase orders. It was getting hard to sell horses at that time as people were buying tractors. We hired Reinhold Deutsch to do most of our farming with his tractor.
We used our incubator to hatch turkey eggs for Sime Frldy of White River that spring, and raised his turkeys until the Fourth of July in our brooder house. Hafners and Gionettas moved their horses on July 9th, driving them back to Ludlow, S. D.
We raised a good garden by irrigating it. Had lots of vegetables; enough to feed nine to eleven men during the latter part of July and August of 1937. Carl Klinkenbeard built our first big stock dam and they also boarded here while doing some road work with their dump trucks.
On September 25, 1937, our son, William, was born. We also bought the gasoline powered washing machine and a battery operated radio. We have had many appliances since but none were ever so appreciated as that first washing machine and radio. They sent a reading lamp with the radio. It wasn't long until we decided that we should have a six volt windcharger to keep the radio battery charged. Then we had electric lights in two of the four rooms in the house. I also had a gas iron to iron the clothes with.
During Christmas vacation in 1937 I look Helen Marie, Robert, Dean and Billie to Spencer, Nebr., to visit my folks. Helen Marie went to St. Marys Academy in O'Neill.
On March 13, 1939, our son. Richard Lee, was born. He was very small, weighing four and a half pounds. His first few months were spent crying with colic, but by the time he was two months old, he got along fine. Helen Marie was busy with 4-H club, as Helen Valburg had organized it the summer before. The ladies of the community had the Ring Thunder Extension club which was organized in 1934.
Election day of 1940 will always be remembered by the Adrians. Earl was chairman of the election board at the Deutsch School. We had a big snow storm just before election. However, it was clear that morning, so Earl tied the ballot box on the saddle of one horse, and he rode the other across the prairie to the school house ten miles northwest. The only ones who could get there that morning were Dave Deutsch and his sons. In the afternoon Fred and Martin Littau got there with a team and wagon.
In 1939 Ann Sammons taught our school and kept Bob and Helen Marie at the Otterman log house a quarter of a mile south of the school. In the fall of 1940, the district agreed to have the Shaeffer children, Deiss children and our two oldest ones stay at the log house. The district would pay part of the expense. We hired various ones to take care of them: Erna Hill, a couple of Littau girls, and later Mrs. McCabe from Winner.
We bought the Reichardt place from the Federal Land Bank and in the fall of 1941 had their house moved up to the home place. Earl hired Shorty Scull to remodel it.
Cattle prices were down that fall and Earl didn't sell our three-year-old steers until December 6th, as he was trying to get ten cents per pound for them. The next day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I heard President Roosevelt give his famous speech over the radio when he declared our country in a state of war. That Friday, Earl went to Winner and brought back a bunch of yearling steers.
Shortly after that, prices began to soar and the Government established a set of war regulations for the public. Many materials became hard to get and some you could not buy at all. One of the items was overalls, because the factories were producing war materials. I was able to get two bolts of denim, so from then on, our boys' overalls were home-made. Flour sacks, of cloth those days, were used in making underwear and bedding. Everyone was asked to plant a victory garden. We had huge ones, canned over 450 quarts of food. We still have our ration books. Gas, kerosene and sugar were some of the items rationed.
On March 14, 1942, we moved into our ten-room house. Some amusing memories of the change to a larger house arc that the two youngest sons, Billy, aged five, and Dick, aged three, were afraid to sleep alone in their bedroom. To add to their fears, their father killed some prairie dogs and told them that they were baby coyotes. He laid them on the back porch to be used as fish bait. So the children developed a deathly fear of the back porch and for a long time wouldn't go near it alone or into the basement.
Earl dealt for a 32-volt light plant. We had a well dug east of the house and water piped into the house. One evening, when the electricians were wiring the house the children were playing hide and seek. Later it was discovered that Billie was missing. Every place was checked; Earl even went to the creek with the flashlight. Again the house was searched and he was finally found, standing up asleep at the side of some sacks of flour. He was leaning against the flour with his head resting on one of the sacks, which were in the front clothes closet, and it was hard to see the chubby little boy sleeping there.
The years have rolled along. Helen Marie graduated from St. Marys Academy at O'Neill, Nebr., in 1946, attended teachers college for two years and married Harold C. Hanson in August, 1948. They live at Casper, Wyo., and have a happy family of seven children.
Robert Earl attended St. Marys Academy for one year, then went to Winner high school, graduating in 1951. He attended Brookings State College for two years, joined the army and served in Korea. He married Patricia Grimshaw, Mission, S. D., in October, 1957. They own the former Georgeff ranch and have two fine boys.
Donald Dean graduated from high school in Winner with high honors. He attended Notre Dame University, Ind., for five years, earning his degree in Liberal Arts and Civil Engineering. He then attended the University at Berkeley, Calif., and earned his Sanitary Engineering Degree and also his Masters Degree. At present he attends Stanford University and is working for his Ph.D. in engineering.
William Eugene graduated from Winner high in 1955, then attended Oklahoma State Tech, Okmulgee, Okla., for
three years, taking diesel engineering and graduating there. At present William is in partnership at the home ranch with his father.
Richard Lee graduated from Winner high school in 1958, went to an electrical school in Denver for one year, and has taken two years at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisc.
All four sons won many medals in competition in athletic events.
Earl and his four sons are members of the Mission Council of the Knights of Columbus. Earl is a fourth degree Knight.
Bess has been a grand Regent of the Catholic Daughters Court of Mission; Our Lady of the Sioux, number 1767 for three and one half years. She is also active in the Altar Society at Norris Sacred Heart Church. She has been an extension club member since 1934. Is a charter member of the South Dakota CowBelles and the National CowBelles. In all of these organizations she has held the position of secretary, treasurer, vice-president, and president, except National CowBelles.
Adrians' have a large ranch, raising a lot of cattle. Some of these they feed out and part of them they sell to Eastern cattle feeders. They have built up a demand for their cattle.
Both Earl and Bess have taken an active interest in community affairs. They have seen their home grow, from a ten by twelve shack that they started to keep house in 33 years ago, into a modern home with telephone, electricity, and a graveled road past their place, but both realize that the comforts of this world are not their goal.
by Bess Adrian
(transcribed by RB, Mellette County Memories Golden Anniversary Edition 1911-1961, by Winifred Reutter )
Earl Adrian, only son of Mary and Deidrich Adrian, was born at Parker. S. D., July 3, 1898. He had one sister, Helen, a year older. When he was but a few years old, his folks moved to Corsica, S. D. where they operated a hotel until 1910. Then a number of families from around Corsica decided to settle in Tripp County close to the Dorian Buttes, west of Clearfield. Dallas, S. D., the end of the railroad at that time, was a booming land office town. D. L. Adrian, William Seiser, Tony Raben and T. J. Harrington had gone ahead to Dallas, purchased lumber for their houses and freighted it across country to their new homes. Earl still has a birthday card that D. L. Adrian wrote to his wife, March 1, 1910, telling her that the river had broken up, therefore she would have to go around by Sioux City.
In due time, the new homes were built and the families established. Their main fuel at first was twisted hay and cow chips. By the fall of 1910, a sod school house was built. Miss Kavanaugh was one of the first teachers. Most terms were three months, receiving thirty-five dollars per month. After the school bought an organ they had fun dancing during the noon and recess periods and on Saturday nights. Teachers were hard to get because very few were qualified. When they didn't have school close to his home, Earl walked three miles southeast to the Ed Johnson school.
Later he went to Ward's Academy near Platte. S. D. He worked for ten cents per hour before and after school, cleaning barns and hauling hay, to help pay for his education. Rev. Camfield, who managed the school, was very good. He tried to help less fortunate boys get an education. Toward spring, Earl got so homesick that he and the two Rowe boys, Charles and Frank, left school, crossing the Missouri River in a row boat while the river was still full of floating ice. This was at Snake Creek crossing. In later years, when Frank Rowe (now living close to Winner. S. D.) had a son going to high school and Earl Adrian had sons playing in the same football team, they would reminisce about their days at Ward's Academy and their row boat trip across the Missouri River. Charles Rowe lost his life in World War I.
Earl's cowboy days started when he hired out to John Neiss as a ranch hand. Neiss owned some very good horses. Some were thoroughbred Percherons; these had to be broken to work, and some were wild horses. These were broken to be sold on purchase orders at the Rosebud Indian Agency. The ranch was located in eastern Todd County so Earl was able to ride home often, to visit his mother who was in poor health. He also worked for Dave Archer and Tom Arnold. Dave had a ranch in western Tripp County. Sometimes in the winter, when the snow was deep, they would hitch two unbroken horses to a bobsled. Tipping over in the snow wasn't as painful as on the hard ground, and they had many exciting experiences together.
On September 12. 1919, Earl's mother passed away. His sister Helen had married Clark Culver the year before. His father was working for the International Harvester Company out of Winner, so from then on until he married in 1928, Earl's home was wherever he hung his hat.
For four years he worked for Oscar Haish, north of Winner, S. D. He came up into Mellette County to get stock. Haish owned a ranch on the Little and Big White Rivers. It was during that time he met Sam Yellow Robe from Westover, S. D. He told Sam of his desire to buy some land and to start a ranch of his own. The two things he had especially wanted it to have were plenty of water and wood. Sam promised to keep on the look out for a quarter of that kind.
Some of Earl's early memories of Mellette County are amusing. He recalls the "Hay Palace" at Wood. It was made of baled hay and was arranged with bales of straw intermingled to make a design. Each year they would have a fair and a big celebration. One time when Earl had been searching for stray cattle for Haish, he found some close to Wood. It was during the fair time and the year they had the hay palace so he decided to wait over and attend the dance for a while. Later be felt be should, drive the cattle on, so started out. Two of the steers had given him a lot of trouble so he had tied them together by their horns. As he was going down a section line southeast of Wood, a terrific lightning storm broke loose. The lightning was terribly close. Sparks kept shooting across from the horns of those two steers and balls of fire followed down on the barbed wire fence. Luckily, neither Earl nor the steers were hit but things were pretty exciting around there for a while.
One time he was driving a herd of horses from Mellette County. His saddle horse was about played out by the time he got to Bill Lynass's place. Bill was out putting up hay but when Earl asked if he could use his corral to catch a fresh horse, Bill willingly quit to help. Earl chose a grey horse because he thought it looked like it had been ridden. Lynass tried to discourage him from picking that one but the grey was caught. The corral was eight foot high and it was a good thing, as that horse tried everything after Earl got on him. Finally, when the gate was opened, Earl continued to ride him and use him for the next twelve miles. Later that horse held the number two place as the second best bucking horse in South Dakota. He was used for many years at the Frontier Days in White River and his name was Red Wing.
Boyd O'Brien tells another story of Earl driving cattle to the Haish ranch on the Big White. It was in the later part of February, very wet and cold. They were moving four hundred head of good cows. Earl had developed a bad cold from sleeping out in the open under a tarp. He had continued driving until he was practically unconscious when he arrived at the O'Brien home. Mr. And Mrs. Henderson of Westover took him to Murdo to the hospital where it was learned that he had a severe case of pneumonia.
Shortly after that he went to Lead to work in the Homestake Mine. It was while he was there that Sara Yellow Robe wrote to him, saying that the quarter of land that had been the headquarters for the HE ranch was being offered in the Indian land sale at Rosebud. Earl sent in a bid of $1,610.00 and was successful in getting it. It is the SW 24 40-31. It had a house and barn that had been built earlier by the Government. It is still the headquarters for the Adrian ranch.
Working in a mine was not very satisfactory for a man that was used to the open range. Earl only worked there a little over a year, then went to Keya Paha and was foreman for Charlie Benedict, a cattle feeder from Chicago, In January, 1924, he went to Prescott, Ariz., where he worked in a Government Hospital as an orderly and on the guard force.
Next he went to Borger, Texas. That was just when the oil boom was on in that country. There were no roads and the streets of Borger were filled with deep ruts. Earl still has a picture of a truck stuck in the mud on the main street. In 1947 when he and his wife traveled through Borger it was hard to realize that the paved streets of the town were the same streets of mud he had seen in 1926.
Earl returned to Winner in the summer of 1926 and helped his father buy cattle for a while, later he worked for the Harding Cream Company, Clearfield, S. D. He also bought poultry and hides. During that winter, the farmers around Clearfield decided to have rabbit hunts on Sunday afternoons. They would kill hundreds of rabbits in one drive. The two bidders for the dead rabbits were Earl Adrian and W. H. Sturges of Winner, S.D. Earl was generally successful and got them for thirteen cents apiece. He hired them skinned for 5 or 6 cents and sold the hides to a firm in Denver, Colo.
It was while he was working at Clearfield that he met his future wife, Bess Angel. She was teaching the Churchside school, about one and one-half miles northwest of Clearfield. They were married June 11, 1928, at Bess's home at Spencer, Nebr. Their attendants were her best friend, Louise Whiting, and her cousin, Patrick Langan. The only honeymoon they took was trying to get back to Clearfield through muddy roads from Spencer. Much of highway 18 wasn't even graveled at that time and the gumbo hills north of Spencer will always be remembered.
During the next five years Earl and Bess both stayed on the payrolls, trying to pay for three more quarters of land and get a herd of cattle started.
Their daughter, Helen Marie, was born in 1929. For the next three years Bess taught the Keya Paha school and Earl continued to work for the Harding Cream Company.
The Adrians moved to Mellette County in March, 1933. Earl and his hired man batched until school was out. Adrians had high hopes in their new home. They planted five bushels of potatoes besides a field of corn and rye. That was the first year of the beetles. They came in all colors and sizes, and all were hungry. All pests do better in dry weather and even that was in their favor as it didn't rain all summer. A milk cow couldn't even be kept because the pastures were so bare.
Dale McCumber was our mail man, delivering the mail three times a week; shortly afterwards it came every day.
In October our son, Robert, was born. Mrs. Clyde Otterman assisted a doctor from Rosebud. Then Mrs. Leonard Storms took care of mother and baby; she came from Clearfield.
That fall we traded our car for a team of horses as we didn't have money to buy gas and oil. Earl bought a load of wheat from Ferdinand Littau and look it to the mill at Mission, S. D., to be ground into flour. We got twenty-nine sacks of flour and several small sacks of breakfast food.
Throughout that year we went to the little Catholic church, with team and wagon, down south about four miles on Cutmeat Creek. There had been an Indian Day School there but all traces of it were gone.
Many people roasted wheat and ground it for coffee. We had no feed for our chickens. The only grain that was available was given for W.P.A. work. In January, Earl asked if they would allow him to work enough to get grain for the chickens. He was granted permission and from then on, he had to get up at four A.M., harness his horses and drive twelve miles to a Government dam that was being built in what is now Harold Krogman's pasture. Fred McKennett was foreman of the project. Many men were working there and they used four horse teams on fresnos.
Zona Rajewich was teaching our school that year. Often she walked five miles to and from school. Her son, Joe Jr., was five weeks old when school started. Surprise Valley Township had four schools at that time. The main community entertainment was card parties and dances in the school houses.
The spring of 1934 was hot and dry and we had lots of grasshoppers and beetles.
Our brother-in-law, Leo Fuhrer, drowned in the power dam at Spencer, Nebr., during the month of May. He left Bess's sister. Rose, with two small children to support. That fall she came up and taught the Deutsch School. Earl traded for a small shack which he and Clyde Otterman moved into the school yard. He paid for the shack with our turkey gobbler, a sack of flour, a couple wagon wheels and five dollars.
Water for cattle had been scarce throughout the summer. Clyde Otterman and Earl used a four-horse fresno to dig out the old spring that had always had water in former years. Also we dug a well by the house that never went dry. Mrs. Palmateer and son, Lloyd, were trying to keep their herd of cattle but the wells in their pastures were drying up. Finally, they hired Earl to summer four hundred head of cattle for them. He went up and helped drive them down. By the time they got within a quarter of a mile of the spring, they broke into a dead run and came running and bellowing the rest of the way. That only slackened their thirst at the spring so they were driven up by the well where we had four tanks full of water. The windmill went day and night. That was the two things we had plenty of, wind and dust!
The Government bought cattle that summer and fall. A cow and a calf brought only twenty dollars but that was more than they brought on the market. Many ranchers and farmers had them mortgaged anyhow, for more than they were worth. They issued most of the cattle that were sold at Parmelee, back to the Indians for food. They were branded E.R.A.. which meant Emergency Relief Administration. There was a standing joke that some of the Indians must have thought it meant "Eat Right Away."
In the fall, the W.P.A. would put up thistles for anyone who wanted them to. Many of us bought them and some of the farmers just turned their stock out to them. All the fields that had been farmed had some thistles on them. That winter we sent our cows down to Laurel, Nebr., with Ray Eveleth, who had dealt for winter feed down there. We gave one dollar per head per month for them. We had to bring them home about April first of 1935. They were real thin because of the severe winter in Nebraska. That spring it was hard to get a cow to claim her calf. We had a heavy wet snow April 10, 1935. It was about a foot deep on the level and was real wet. The coyotes were so bad; they would take calves right out of the stockyard while the cows were all around there.
Earl had a job as feed loan inspector in the fall of 1934 and was over around Huron and up in the Black Hills most of the winter. Hershal Nelson worked at our ranch, gathering wood and eating for our calves.
After the snow melted in 1935, our range grew the most beautiful crop of western wheat grass. The hillsides and valleys were covered just like a great wheat field. We raised a good crop of milo and a small field produced 100 bushels of wheat. Turkeys were still a good price. We sold over $400.00 worth that fall and kept 100 hens for the next year. Our hope was to raise enough turkeys the next year to buy a power washing machine and a radio. In July of 1935 our son, Donald Dean, was born.
Rudolph and Joe Petr cut our wheat and rye. Earl hired boys to help hay and they kept two mowers going throughout the late summer and fall, cutting hay and bunching it. They hauled it in with hay racks and used slings to pull it onto the stack. Dwight Sharp and Milton Mueller were hauling from the flat south of Clarence Krogman's. The flat was a prairie dog town. They found rattlesnakes had crawled under almost every shock of hay. On that flat they killed sixty-five snakes and piled them up. That had been known as a rattlesnake den when Holders lived there. Their son came home one day in the fall and reported that he had seen a snake about six inches around. When the men went up there to see it, they found that it was a bunch of little snakes wrapped around one another. They killed over 300 snakes there that afternoon. For years Earl and I would go out on that flat late in the fall, if it was a warm, balmy day, and look around the tops of the prairie dog holes. The snakes would crawl up to sun themselves. We killed dozens of them and Clarence Krogman killed a good many. Finally, a few years later, when we were able to get the Interior Department interested in poisoning prairie dogs. Earl and his sons took a road blade over there and filled up most of the holes by leveling the ground.
There was more of a demand for cattle In 1935 because very few of the poor ones sold in 1934 went to market. We sold three steers (Earl had bought them the winter before for five dollars apiece) for $49.50 per head in July. That summer we were forced to buy two more quarters of land from the county if we wanted to keep our ranch together. They were just northwest of our house.
The winter of 1935 was open, with very little snow, and there wasn't any rain in the spring, so the hundred bushels of wheat we had planted didn't even come up. There were lots of grasshoppers. Earl went to White River one day and over by the Twin Buttes near Fred McKennett's it looked like the ground was moving. It was a whole army of Mormon crickets. They were huge, brownish crickets that crawled along but almost always kept moving southwest, only stopping long enough to eat and then crawled on but never changed their general direction. The men in White River said that when they came to the Little White River they just jumped right in. The current would sweep them down stream quite a ways, but most of them seemed to survive and then crawled out down stream to continue on their journey. When they got here our turkeys were afraid of them and wouldn't eat them, even though they were used to eating thousands of grasshoppers. These Mormon crickets lasted only a few weeks, then they were all gone and we haven't been troubled with them since.
That is the spring we had bought a very large incubator to hatch turkey eggs. We hatched about 1,500 poults. Earl had built a brooder house which was heated with a furnace that had steam heat. The turkeys were kept on wire until they were six weeks old when they were turned out on the range. Earl fixed our Chevrolet car so he could sleep in it and could stay out with the turkeys at night, as the coyotes were had. Also there were many prairie fires that summer.
The rest of South Dakota was very dry in 1936. But this part had the good grass which had grown up in 1935, so many people here took in stock to pasture. Some of them didn't have their pastures fenced so the rest of us had to put up with roaming cattle. I remember that we bought corn to fatten our turkeys and the only place we could feed them was in the pole corral, as the hungry, stray cattle would crawl or jump any wire fence.
The turkey market went to pieces that fall. We sold two truck loads of prime turkeys and hardly made anything on them. Then we started picking the rest, packing them in barrels and shipping them to Chicago. They brought a pretty good price that way. Throughout the winter that was our main job. It was a mighty hard one. Each evening we would pin-feather and pack them. Often Earl would have to scoop a lot of snow so he could get them to town so they could be shipped. One day we came into the house and smelled rubber. We found our sons, Rob and Dean, up on the kitchen range reaching for the clock. Their shoe soles were almost on fire. From then on we hired Eva Sharp to watch the children while we worked. We had taken our daughter, Helen Marie, to Winner to go to St. Marys school because our roads were drifted full of snow so frequently that winter.
It was on one of the trips to White River with barrels of turkeys that Earl was scooping through a drift when he saw two men were shoveling from the other side. When they got together he found they were Pete Hafner and John Gionetta from Ludlow, S. D. They had brought a large herd of horses down to a pasture north of Mission, S. D., early in the fall. When they came to look at them, they found many dead and the rest in very poor shape. They wanted to bring them to our place so we agreed and the money that had been saved for the radio and washing machine went to buy oats for the horses.
Lester Hafner stayed with us throughout the spring and broke horses to sell on purchase orders. It was getting hard to sell horses at that time as people were buying tractors. We hired Reinhold Deutsch to do most of our farming with his tractor.
We used our incubator to hatch turkey eggs for Sime Frldy of White River that spring, and raised his turkeys until the Fourth of July in our brooder house. Hafners and Gionettas moved their horses on July 9th, driving them back to Ludlow, S. D.
We raised a good garden by irrigating it. Had lots of vegetables; enough to feed nine to eleven men during the latter part of July and August of 1937. Carl Klinkenbeard built our first big stock dam and they also boarded here while doing some road work with their dump trucks.
On September 25, 1937, our son, William, was born. We also bought the gasoline powered washing machine and a battery operated radio. We have had many appliances since but none were ever so appreciated as that first washing machine and radio. They sent a reading lamp with the radio. It wasn't long until we decided that we should have a six volt windcharger to keep the radio battery charged. Then we had electric lights in two of the four rooms in the house. I also had a gas iron to iron the clothes with.
During Christmas vacation in 1937 I look Helen Marie, Robert, Dean and Billie to Spencer, Nebr., to visit my folks. Helen Marie went to St. Marys Academy in O'Neill.
On March 13, 1939, our son. Richard Lee, was born. He was very small, weighing four and a half pounds. His first few months were spent crying with colic, but by the time he was two months old, he got along fine. Helen Marie was busy with 4-H club, as Helen Valburg had organized it the summer before. The ladies of the community had the Ring Thunder Extension club which was organized in 1934.
Election day of 1940 will always be remembered by the Adrians. Earl was chairman of the election board at the Deutsch School. We had a big snow storm just before election. However, it was clear that morning, so Earl tied the ballot box on the saddle of one horse, and he rode the other across the prairie to the school house ten miles northwest. The only ones who could get there that morning were Dave Deutsch and his sons. In the afternoon Fred and Martin Littau got there with a team and wagon.
In 1939 Ann Sammons taught our school and kept Bob and Helen Marie at the Otterman log house a quarter of a mile south of the school. In the fall of 1940, the district agreed to have the Shaeffer children, Deiss children and our two oldest ones stay at the log house. The district would pay part of the expense. We hired various ones to take care of them: Erna Hill, a couple of Littau girls, and later Mrs. McCabe from Winner.
We bought the Reichardt place from the Federal Land Bank and in the fall of 1941 had their house moved up to the home place. Earl hired Shorty Scull to remodel it.
Cattle prices were down that fall and Earl didn't sell our three-year-old steers until December 6th, as he was trying to get ten cents per pound for them. The next day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I heard President Roosevelt give his famous speech over the radio when he declared our country in a state of war. That Friday, Earl went to Winner and brought back a bunch of yearling steers.
Shortly after that, prices began to soar and the Government established a set of war regulations for the public. Many materials became hard to get and some you could not buy at all. One of the items was overalls, because the factories were producing war materials. I was able to get two bolts of denim, so from then on, our boys' overalls were home-made. Flour sacks, of cloth those days, were used in making underwear and bedding. Everyone was asked to plant a victory garden. We had huge ones, canned over 450 quarts of food. We still have our ration books. Gas, kerosene and sugar were some of the items rationed.
On March 14, 1942, we moved into our ten-room house. Some amusing memories of the change to a larger house arc that the two youngest sons, Billy, aged five, and Dick, aged three, were afraid to sleep alone in their bedroom. To add to their fears, their father killed some prairie dogs and told them that they were baby coyotes. He laid them on the back porch to be used as fish bait. So the children developed a deathly fear of the back porch and for a long time wouldn't go near it alone or into the basement.
Earl dealt for a 32-volt light plant. We had a well dug east of the house and water piped into the house. One evening, when the electricians were wiring the house the children were playing hide and seek. Later it was discovered that Billie was missing. Every place was checked; Earl even went to the creek with the flashlight. Again the house was searched and he was finally found, standing up asleep at the side of some sacks of flour. He was leaning against the flour with his head resting on one of the sacks, which were in the front clothes closet, and it was hard to see the chubby little boy sleeping there.
The years have rolled along. Helen Marie graduated from St. Marys Academy at O'Neill, Nebr., in 1946, attended teachers college for two years and married Harold C. Hanson in August, 1948. They live at Casper, Wyo., and have a happy family of seven children.
Robert Earl attended St. Marys Academy for one year, then went to Winner high school, graduating in 1951. He attended Brookings State College for two years, joined the army and served in Korea. He married Patricia Grimshaw, Mission, S. D., in October, 1957. They own the former Georgeff ranch and have two fine boys.
Donald Dean graduated from high school in Winner with high honors. He attended Notre Dame University, Ind., for five years, earning his degree in Liberal Arts and Civil Engineering. He then attended the University at Berkeley, Calif., and earned his Sanitary Engineering Degree and also his Masters Degree. At present he attends Stanford University and is working for his Ph.D. in engineering.
William Eugene graduated from Winner high in 1955, then attended Oklahoma State Tech, Okmulgee, Okla., for
three years, taking diesel engineering and graduating there. At present William is in partnership at the home ranch with his father.
Richard Lee graduated from Winner high school in 1958, went to an electrical school in Denver for one year, and has taken two years at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisc.
All four sons won many medals in competition in athletic events.
Earl and his four sons are members of the Mission Council of the Knights of Columbus. Earl is a fourth degree Knight.
Bess has been a grand Regent of the Catholic Daughters Court of Mission; Our Lady of the Sioux, number 1767 for three and one half years. She is also active in the Altar Society at Norris Sacred Heart Church. She has been an extension club member since 1934. Is a charter member of the South Dakota CowBelles and the National CowBelles. In all of these organizations she has held the position of secretary, treasurer, vice-president, and president, except National CowBelles.
Adrians' have a large ranch, raising a lot of cattle. Some of these they feed out and part of them they sell to Eastern cattle feeders. They have built up a demand for their cattle.
Both Earl and Bess have taken an active interest in community affairs. They have seen their home grow, from a ten by twelve shack that they started to keep house in 33 years ago, into a modern home with telephone, electricity, and a graveled road past their place, but both realize that the comforts of this world are not their goal.
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