PIcture For Today

I'm trying to post some spring time pictures.

Go for it. We finally got about 3" of snow, but ready for spring rains here and more snow in the mountains. The first picture reminds me of old times. We scooped rolled feed from the truck into a small window. Then hauled it from that room to feed bunks with 5 gal buckets.

There was a "Bonanza" farm a couple miles from our farm. It was owned by a couple of brothers. After the Sioux uprising, the MN Guard escorted the Sioux to a reservation in ND. The state didn't have any money to pay the guardsmen, so they gave them script that they could use to buy government land in ND.

The guardsmen were already established farms in southern MN and didn't want to move to ND, so the brothers bought up the land script for 5 cents on the dollar and formed a "Bonanza" farm. They had lots of hired men, horses and equipment to farm with.

As pictured in the last picture, the men would start out plowing from the headquarters and plow 5 miles south then plow 5 miles back north. They would make 2 rounds a day with a 2-bottom plow, as 20 miles per day was all the work horses could do in one day.

An old family friend worked for them; his job was to care for the horses and take a team and buggy and drive the kids 6 miles to catch a train into Fargo to go to school. He also had to be there to pick up the kids when they returned on the late afternoon train.

The brothers would drive their own buggy to the same RR station later and take the train to Fargo to gamble on the grain exchange. They eventual lost everything but 3 quarter sections of land. If they had stayed out of the grain exchange, they would have stayed wealthy.

Note the wooden silo built into the barn you don't see often. I no where one is that somebody restored and built a room ontop not very stable though.