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| Pembina Pioneer Express masthead [Courtesy: Pembina County Historical Society] |
Northern Express – Drayton (R.H. Young, Editor; Weekly, published on Fridays - $2 per year)
December 9, 1881 Vol. 1 No. 1 is the first issue
(Becomes the Pioneer Express April 20, 1883 at Vol. 3 No. 38)
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December 23, 1881 Vol. 1 No. 3
The train loaded with some $2,000 worth of goods which Ricard Bros. sent out from here the 7th to Turtle Mountains was captured by Indians and half-breeds at or near Pembina mountains. The Indians claim the land as their own, and say that no one has the right to cross it, and therefore appropriated the goods to their own use. Sheriff Brown of Pembina was out there yesterday and found most of the goods, but could not get them as they refused to give them up. They were too many for him, so he returned for help. We understand he has gone out today with a squad of soldiers from Fort Pembina. We will give full particulars tomorrow. – Independent (Emerson, Manitoba)
February 10, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 10
Announcement – We announce this week our intention to remove the Northern Express to Pembina, at which place the next issue will be published. (page 1)
February 24, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 12
Amongst many drawbacks and inconveniences incidental to the removal of our business and the enlargement of our paper we lay before our readers this week as good a paper as we can under the circumstances.
March 24, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 16
Townsite Auction Bill
[Indian Title to Dakota Lands – page 1]
The St. Vincent townsite company have sold their interest in that town to a Winnipeg syndicate. St. Vincent has invested $200 in a hook and ladder truck with other fire apparatus. This is a wise move which should be a reminder to this town of its duty in the promises. Of course when Pembina takes hold it will be on a larger scale.
March 31, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 17
Quite a number of our citizens went over to St. Vincent on Tuesday evening to attend the auction sale of town lots.
April 21, 1882 Vol 1. No. 20
The unmistakable double-toned whistle of the steamer Selkirk was heard on Tuesday evening for the first time this season. Passengers from various points on the river improved the opportunity of making a business trip to Town and taking in interesting features of the flood along the way.
The Selkirk has had a lively business the last two days carrying freight across from St. Vincent.
The ice made a new door into the engine room of the St.Vincent elevator last Sunday. At St. Vincent the situation is becoming somewhat unpleasant. Several of the streets are covered with water. Around the Northern Hotel it is nearly a foot deep, but the higher portion of town is dry yet.
April 28, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 21
Moorhead has had several bets at stake including a town lot and a suit of clothes, that the water would not rise to the level of his saloon floor. He has won the bets with just a quarter of an inch to spare.
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| Having had its own County Seat stolen - and for other more practical reasons - St. Vincent came to the support of its neighbor across the river |
That excellent daily journal, the Grand Forks Herald, has printed lately some very interesting articles about the county seat fight now on between Cavalier and Pembina which are read and pondered over here.In another place in the same issue of the New Era, the editor of that paper jumps into the county seat fight in Pembina’s interest as follows:
The county seat battle among our neighbors across the river, is not only interesting, but also something fierce. The Cavalier crowd have let it be known that they are long in finances, having, it is reported, 1,500 dollars subscribed, to be spent where it will do the most good, and have also let it be known that they are ridiculously short in common sense, by committing a blunder which in a county seat scrap as well as in politics, is worse than a crime, by bragging that three towns, settled almost exclusively by Icelanders, they are sure of 96 percent of the votes, and in another township, similarly settled every voter signed their petition except one, an absentee.Now what do you think of that for an exhibition of pure, unadulterated newspaper gall?
In gazing enraptured and abstractly at those four townships, the Cavalier blunderbuss schemers have overlooked a fact, that a majority of the citizens of Pembina county are either of French, German, Canadian, Scotch, Irish, English or U.S. birth, and when the Cavalier bunglers have rubbed it into the people of Pembina county, that they propose to rule that county by the vote of four Icelandic towns they may afterward mortgage their city for what it will being, add the proceeds to their “reptile fund, blow it all in, and then would not be within a rifle shot distance of beating Pembina, at the show down”.
In your editorial Radicals always in our midst (March 16), I was surprised to read in your editorial that in 1871 "the Irish rebel John J. O'Neill met Métis leaders in Manitoba to enlist support for an invasion of Canada in an effort to weaken British oppression in Ireland." I would respond: what Métis leaders?
I have researched this issue extensively. William O'Donoghue had recruited four Fenian leaders to come to Manitoba. The Fenian Brotherhood did not officially sanction this trip, but provided funds for 300 muskets. They had about 30 men with them when they crossed the Manitoba border and ransacked the HBC post at Emerson, which was called "Fort Pembina."
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| A "Bobby" moment in 1962 |
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| Remembering Bobby: A brilliant career, a tragic end |
He was the master of swagger, the Fargo Phantom, the reaper of records. He was, in short, a riding dynamo at the Downs in the 1960s and 1970s who's never been equalled. Bobby Stewart. Never in a hurry to get to the paddock to mount up ("C'mon, let's go!") but always in a hurry to cross the finish line first ("Way to go!"), he earned the leading jockey title six times (no other jockey has more than four) and set five track records. He even rode in the Kentucky Derby. Lanky frame, cherubic grin. "He had no peer," said ASD patriarch owner/trainer Bert Blake who had Bobby ride his horses every opportunity he got.
In April 1946, Arnold Amundson of Climax, Minn., led a procession of 140 farmers to the local elevator as a national kickoff for Mercy Wheat, a program by the United Nations to deliver grain to war-starved Poland. Farmers were hanging onto on to their grain, so the government offered them a 30-cent-per-bushel bonus to deliver it. NYC Mayor and UNRRA Director Fiorello La Guardia encouraged farmers to grow even more wheat to feed the countries ravaged by the war. |
| Grape Vine Ivy on Chicken Coop - my family home in St. Vincent, MN (Kittson County, July 2010) |
...you're trying to be witty but making people angry - that will not gain you readers nor convince anyone of your point of view. For good writing with wit, irony, and insight, I suggest you read (or re-read, as the case may be) Mark Twain. Twain knew how to build as well as cut down people using wit. He could have you laughing at the same time as wincing, realizing how right he really was while 'insulting' you at the same time. Your attempt at 'existentialism' as your tags imply, was the opposite of that terms intent. Søren Kierkegaard, who by the way I have deeply admired since my college days when I originally discovered him, "...maintained that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and BOREDOM." If you were truly trying to say that DESPITE being bored up in Roseau County / Kittson County, that you found true beauty and meaning there, you have failed miserably.Some would say I'm helping to perpetuate exposure to an article I dislike. That's true, but my point in writing this is partly to do just that, to bring attention to it, and thus the bigger issues it brought up. I think it's not only healthy, but productive, to get people talking about such things. It can help residents as well as outsiders to appreciate or at least understand all the dynamics involved with living in such a place, what place in general means, and how different paces of life affect how we view life overall. I am coping with this in a very person way at this stage in my life. I'm trying to learn how to slow down, re-prioritize my life, and balance my old life with my new life (which, ironically, is really my old life...)
I grew up in Kittson County. Yes, it can be boring. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing - some people like that. It was bucolic, peaceful, contemplative. Wide open skies and you could see for miles. It made you think the world was HUGE and the possibilities with it. It is a place STEEPED in amazing history and people that made it. I'm incredibly proud to have been born and raised there, and the people in that county, a good share of them? They're related to my family through blood or marriage. It's like the Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon except it's the Six Degrees in Kittson County. It's like that with a lot of families. Family and friends - and community - are corner stones of our county.
By the way, Skull Lake is NOT the only natural lake in Kittson County. There is also Lake Stella, near my hometown St. Vincent MN
Boundary Post Rupert Land / Pembina by Major George Seton1The British-American Frontier.When I first viewed this sketch, I thought it was unrealistic [based on my experience viewing actual photographs of the time] on what the natives looked like. Then I found several specific references concerning the specific event this print depicts. These references, including the above text, explain this was representing the indigenous population in ceremonial dress, which then makes more sense...
The revolt of the French and Indian half-breed population in the Red River and Lake Winnipeg district of North America, several hundred miles west of Lake Superior, is rather a troublesome affair. This district is part of the Hudson's Bay Company's vast territory, which has lately been transferred to the Dominion of Canada. The insurrection hitherto has been confined to the neighbourhood of Lake Winnipeg, from which the British Canadians have been expelled; the Governor, Mr. Macdougall, has been obliged to return to Canada, and Fort Garry remains in the possession of the rebels. It is thought these were instigated by some of the French priests to resist the establishment of the Canadian Government, but the Vicar-General of Quebec, accompanied by Colonel de Salaberri, himself a half-breed, has gone to the Red River country to use his influence on the side of loyalty and to persuade the Winnipeg people to lay down their arms.
Another influence to be noted in stirring up the insurrection and keeping it alive is that of American annexationists at Pembina, cooperating with others engaged in business at Red River. Pembina is a settlement of three or four log-houses on the Dacotah side of the frontier, where every white resident but one is said to hold an office of some sort or other. Besides the few residents, there has been an Illinois lawyer, who is described as 'running the machine' in the interests of annexation. All the American versions of the affair have come from him. Hence the exaggerated stories about the Indians being called to arms, for which there has been no foundation except in the circumstance that Colonel Dennis garrisoned the Sonte Fort in the Lower Settlement with fifty Swamp Indians, an inoffensive set of semi-civilized half-breeds who live by farming in that neighbourhood. It has, of course, been the policy of the annexationists to lead the American people and Government to believe the Canadian officials have been inciting the Indians to take up arms. The most recent canard of this sort has been that Macdougall bribed the Sioux to make a descent on Pembina, in revenge for the conduct of the people there2. If the trouble should continue, and should tend towards annexation, there certainly would be reason to look for a movement of the Indians in that direction. This, however could not be owing to Canadian influence, but to the fears of the Indians themselves, who naturally dread the prospect of their being brought under American sway. We have to thank Major G. Seton, who was lately in that part of the world, for a View of the plains near Pembina, with the boundary-post there erected to mark the frontier between the United States and British territory of Rupert's Land. the boundless level of rich grass is here traversed by the road, or track, which appears in the foreground. Major Seton's sketch is also an illustration of the habits and costumes of the Cree Indians. These are represented as walking in procession, headed by the Medicine Man, with the sacred rattle in hand, within which is celebrated a 'Dog Feast', so called from their eating dogs on the occasion, and being a mixture of religious ceremony and social mirth. In the half-distance are their tents, made of dressed bison (called buffalo) leather, with their badges or armorial bearings painted upon them, beside which stand their carts, made without a particle of iron, and which are very strong and so light as to be serviceable as rafts when deep water has to be crossed. In the foreground is a group of two young Indians in their gala costume, with their dogs, which in winter are used to drag sledges.
Major Edwin Hatch, a subordinate of Sibley operating out of the village of Pembina, just south of the Canadian obrder, retains John McKenzie, an American living in Canada, to bribe a pair of Canadian officials into drugging Shakopee and Medicine Bottle during a "friendly meeting." The two unconscious Indians were then handed over to Hatch in Pembina. After the hangings, the Minnesota legislature appropriated the sum of $1,000 to reward McKenzie for his part in the crime [William W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1924) pp. 443-50. Also see Robin W. Winks, "The British North American West and the Civil War," North Dakota History, Vol 24, 1957.]By the way, the context was the aftermath of the Dakota War...
The train from Red River had just brought news of the murder of a young teacher sent last year from St. Paul to the Selkirk settlement, by a party of Yankton Sioux, who are hostile to the inhabitants of Pembina, it is supposed on account of their relations to the Chippewas. It is well known that there has been a feud from time immemorial between the Sioux and Chippewas, two of the most powerful Indian nations in the territories of the United States.
