In the News: Winchester House (Geroux Hotel)

THE PRIDE OF OLD PEMBINA. 

The Most Elegant Hostelry in Dakota, North of the Columbia at Fargo.
Special to the Globe. 

PEMBINA, N. D., April 21. – One of the most superb and popular hotels in North Dakota is the Winchester House, of Pembina. It is prominently located in the heart of the city, at the corner of Cavalier and Roulette streets, and has a frontage of fifty feet on Cavalier street and sixty feet on Roulette street. It is built with white Crookston brick, and is three stories high. It is at present one of the most elegant and substantial hotel structures north of Fargo, North Dakota. Supplied and equipped with all the modern hotel improvements of metropolitan cities, it is highly prized by all our citizens and the traveling public. Built in the year 1882, at a cost of about twenty thousand dollars, it is a most fortunate investment for its present owner and proprietor. 

J. W. Winchester, after whom the house is named, is the owner and present proprietor of this most popular public resort. The management of this hotel has been given the personal care and attention of J. W. Winchester and his bright and popular wife. Mrs. Winchester has ever been distinguished as one of the most popular and entertaining of hotel matrons, and her popular parlor entertainments have always been most highly appreciated by all the patrons of this hotel and many invited friends, and to her own careful labor in the culinary department in preparation of meals this hotel owes much for its well-earned popularity for its table luxuries. So acceptable are the meals served in this house that the southbound Northern Pacific vestibule train often stops at Pembina sufficiently long enough to enable passengers to obtain their meals here in preference to those furnished by the dining car attached to these trains. This whole structure is occupied as a hotel, and the house can, with adjoining hotel accommodations, accommodate several hundred guests at a time in a most comfortable and acceptable manner.  

This hotel has been for years the “head center” of the political, social and festive activity of the northeast corner of Dakota. In and about this charming resort are clustered some of the most interesting memories of the past political history of this section. Here it was, in this hotel, that the late Jerry Tuohy, one of the most gifted Democratic leaders of his party, planned some of his most successful political conquests in this district, and here it is where, today, the present Republican leader, Jud LaMoure, sways his numerous political cohorts, and plans his most important political battles. Here, too, Jud often “flushes” with great success and raises the “downs” with less than a pair of “breakers.” This hotel is patronized by the very best class of boarders and travelers and for neatness and comfort this house enjoys a most envious reputation. Many of the county officers are remembered among its guests, and as a hotel bonanza for its owner is the Merchants’ hotel of Pembina and this entire section of the Red River Valley. 

Source:
The Saint Paul Daily Globe
Monday Morning, April 22, 1889
Volume XI, Number 112, Page 6

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From: Pembina and Turtle Mountain Ojibway (Chippewa) history: from the personal collections and writings of Charlie White Weasel

So as you can see, Charlie White Weasel's testimony concerning who built the Winchester House (originally the Geroux Hotel) and first ran it, confirms what Chuck Walker wrote in SHERIFF CHARLEY BROWN.

Also from the same source:

Lucien Geroux ... was then keeping a hotel in South Pembina, the same building, (improved) now being the one in which the county poor are being boarded and cared for, usually called our poor house. 

The large, 2-storey building just east of the Pembina Bridge, sitting in the area where the future Selkirk Park will be, is what I think is the building mentioned above (i.e., Lucien Geroux's first hotel, later repurposed and used as the Pembina Poor House...)

Tales from Pembina: Starvation

The 1826 flood, the worst flood of the Red River of the North ever known in modern times...

But before that, deprivation...

In the month of January, it was rumored at the Selkirk settlement, that the hunters who were on the plains of Minnesota in quest of buffalo were starving. The sufferers were from one hundred and fifty to two hundred miles from Pembina, and the only way to carry provisions to them was by dog sleds. The sympathy for their welfare was very great; and even the widow contributed a mite to their relief.

It appears from a statement made by one who was in the colony at the time, that in the (prior) month of December, 1825, a snow storm raged with violence for several days, and drove the buffalo out of the hunter's reach. As this was an unexpected contingency, they had no meat as a substitute, and famine stared them in the face.

Says an eye-witness¹:

"Families here, and families there, despairing of life, huddled themselves together for warmth, and in too many cases, their shelter proved their grave. At first the heat of their bodies melted the snow; they became wet, and being without food or fuel, the cold soon penetrated, and in several instances froze the whole body into solid ice. Some again were in a state of actual delirium, while others were picked up frozen to death; one woman was found with an infant on her back within a quarter mile of Pembina. This poor creature must have traveled at the least, one hundred and twenty-five miles in three days and nights. Those that were found alive, had devoured their horses, their dogs, raw-hides, leather, and their very shoes. So great were their sufferings, that some died on the road to the colony after being relieved at Pembina. One man with his wife and three children were dug out of the snow where they had been buried for five days and nights without food, fire, or light of the sun, and the wife and two of the children recovered."

When the spring came, the melting of the winter's snow produced a still greater calamity. On the second day of May, in twenty-four hours, the Red River rose nine feet; and by the fifth, the plains were submerged. A panic now seized every living thing; dogs howled, cattle lowed, children cried, mothers wept and wrung their hands, and fathers called out to their families to escape to the hills. The water continued to rise until the twenty-first, and houses and barns floated in the rushing waters. On one night a house in flames moved over the waters amid logs and uprooted trees, household furniture, and drowning cattle, reminding one of the day when "the heavens being on fire, shall be dissolved."

- From: The History of Minnesota: From the Earliest French Explorations to the Present Time, by Edward Duffield Neill, Secretary of the Minnesota Historical Society (1858))

¹ - Alexander Ross