The farm where I grew up, and where the restoration is, was homesteaded in 1892 by my grandfather, an energetic young man of 21 or 22 at the time. His parents had emigrated from Norway in 1868, two years before he was born, so he grew up speaking Norwegian, but he was definitely American in spirit and ambition. Most of northeastern South Dakota had been homesteaded about 1880, but a triangular area stretching to North Dakota had been an Indian reservation until it was taken away from the Dakota tribe and opened for homesteading. My grandfather, often referred to as JR (no “Dallas” jokes, please) built a 900 acre spread by 1905-1910, which was one of the largest and most prosperous farms in the area, always on the forefront of new innovations. My father, Lester, was the ninth of fourteen surviving children, and the youngest boy, born in 1912. As the “baby boy”, and being bracketed between three additional siblings who died as infants, he was the favored child, at least according to some of his older brothers. When he was about 12 his parents moved to Watertown, the largest town in the area, to retire early while leaving management of the farm to three of the older brothers.

In Watertown Lester learned to smoke, drink, play a wicked game of snooker, and generally run wild. He must have scandalized his strict Methodist parents and driven them crazy. The snooker came in handy when he quit (or was kicked out of) school and made pocket money and cigarettes by playing “for the house” at the American Billiards Parlor. He took great pleasure in regaling me with stories on how he set up and won bets playing traveling salesmen while leaving them believing he had just been lucky. The salesman would curse his luck and make Lester promise to play him the next time he was in town so he could win his money back.

So how did Lester end up with the farm rather than his older brothers? The depression hit, and my grandfather had to take the farm back from his sons at the age of 60. Lester spent the next ten years working for his father, many other farmers in the area and traveled the western half of the country to find work like many other young men during the depression. This included two trips to California and a spell tending bar in Havre, Montana, the grist for many other stories he told while we milked the cows. Meanwhile, the older brothers found other farms to buy or moved away, until only Lester was left. The carnage of the dust bowl in the end gave him the farm, just as the carnage of unprepared homesteaders had built the farm for his father. How the wild-ass ne’er do well of a kid brother ended up with the home place obviously stuck in the craw of a couple of the older brothers, according to my mother, though being good Norwegians it only came out in passive aggressive behavior many years later.

Lester charmed a pretty, young Polish-American girl, my mother Marian, who worked in the county USDA office and they married in 1942, They raised four kids on the farm and generally lived the life of a mid-20th century yeoman farmer. The aggressive/progressive characteristics of my grandfather skipped Lester, however, so we did everything the hard way. If a job could be done by manual labor he felt it was silly to spend money on a labor saving device. Every rock was picked, every hay bale was thrown, every bushel of grain was shoveled and every bit of snow moved by hand. Every bit of manure was moved out of the barn, shoveled into a wheelbarrow and stacked outside the barn to freeze until we could spread it on the fields in the spring. And twice a day the ice had to be chopped and thrown from the stock tank so the milk cows could go outside to drink.

This wasn’t unusual in my area, though I would sometimes listen wistfully to stories my classmates would tell of trucks with hydraulic hoists or bale accumulators which allowed a tractor to pick up and stack bales or especially the farms which had chain conveyor gutter cleaners which would scoot the manure out the door into a manure spreader pulled by a tractor which could start in the winter. Yet somehow all this labor was supervised by my father with a light touch. Work was mostly fun, and while many of my classmates had labor saving technologies that we didn’t, it was always in the service of doing even more work; in farming more acres or milking more cows. By the time I was ten years old I knew how good I had it, how gentle a taskmaster my father was, how easy he was on us emotionally. He was a softie. He cried when Old Yeller died in the movie; he cried in my company once when he felt my older brother was very unhappy; hell, he cried when he had to kill a cat that was eating our chickens; he was a kind man.

Much of the reason for this post is simply to reflect, but there is relevance to the theme of this blog. One result of the way my father saw the world is that he didn’t break every acre of prairie he could, he let some that his father had broken go back to grass. He didn’t stuff extra cattle on the pastures, which is why I have the good prairies to enjoy and collect seed on. Rather than take on more stress he didn’t try to buy the last 300 acres of grass from my grandparents estate (grass that I would love to manage now). He told me the story of the neighbor to the southwest, an alcoholic old Irishman trying to scrape a living off 240 acres of rock and gravel. Lester was continually asked for favors, giving him some wheat for seed, some hay or oats for his skinny cows or help with fieldwork. Finally, the neighbor, in despair, told Lester that since he could never repay him for all the favors Lester should put a lien on 80 acres that adjoined ours. and it would then eventually be ours. Lester waved it off, said the debt really wasn’t that much, and refused the land.

When I graduated from college I came back to help on the farm as Lester’s health failed. The hard work (and perhaps the hard living when he was younger) had worn him down and at 65 he was no longer able to take care of everything. A farm sale was imminent. He talked me out of farming, as a smart young man like me could find a much easier way to make a living, but said he was just selling the livestock and equipment; the land would still be in the family. He rented the ground to a couple my age, aggressive, smart people who needed a break because the gentleman’s father was very difficult to work with. And eventually, in our forties and fifties, my wife and I were able to buy the farm while the same neighbor still farms it over 40 years after Lester retired. In the end Lester just asked me, “So are you going to buy the place or not?” after 20 years of dissuading me from buying it. That deserved an hour’s answer or a few second’s answer, and I knew that if I hesitated he would probably offer it to the long term renter. “Yes,” I said, “how should we work this out?”

So all the stories on hunting, trapping, playing snooker, threshing crews and runaway teams are wrapped into the need to do right by the farm. I may or may not have been a good farmer. but I damned well plan to be a good steward.