Dakota Diary - 18

John's house was very small and plain, about half a mile to the east from us. We knocked on the door, and a young woman answered.

“Hello, you must be Mattie and Cora Sue. Come on in. I’m Rosie. John isn’t back from work yet, but he should be here any moment. Come into the front room and sit down. Can I introduce you to my sister, Annie? She’s staying with us now. We come from Wisconsin. John is from Scotland. Sorry to be wittering on. I’m not much good at small talk.”

“Hello, Annie. Nice to meet you. We come from Wisconsin too - from La Crosse.
Have you lived here long?”

“I came just after the baby was born in 80 and have stayed ever since. I know a few people in La Crosse. Do you know the Tony Mitchells?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Are they the same sort of age as we are?”

“Oh, no, they're older - our parents' age. And they moved there from Ashland, where we come from.”

“I’ve never been to Ashland, but I’ve heard it's a very pretty town.”

“Oh, yes, but the wind off Lake Superior makes it very cold in the winter.”

“Not colder than Dakota Territory, I would think.”

“Well, it seems colder there because of the dampness of the air off the lake. But in terms of real temperatures, I think it probably is colder here. What a thing to be talking about! The weather! Surely we can think of something else.”

“How long have you lived here, Rosie?”

“Imet John in  78 when I came her to see if I could get a job waitressing or in a hotel, because of all the new people coming with the railway. John and I got married in  79. Our baby, William is almost three. I’ll put him to bed before we eat, but I just wanted him to see his daddy before he goes to sleep. Oh, I think I hear him coming now,” and she seemed very relieved to be able to hand over
the socializing to somebody else.

John came in, and was very apologetic to us about being late. He shook our hands as we introduced ourselves, and said he was pleased we were able to come and have a meal with them.

“I hear that you are going to Colonel Lounsberry’s for a big party on Saturday, but we aren’t invited - it will be mostly the upper crust of the town - doctors and lawyers and folks like that.”

John went over and picked up his son. “Hey, Willy, have you been a good boy today?” and the boy giggled as his dad tossed him in the air.

“Now don’t you go getting him all het up when I want him to go right to sleep,” said Rosie.

“You go with your Ma now, and be a good boy. I’ll come and tuck you up in a few minutes.”

And Willy looked as if he would cry, but thought better of it, and took his mother’s hand and walked down into the back of the house.

“Can I offer you girls a drink before we eat? It will be at least five minutes before she gets him off. We have got some wine and sherry and lemonade.”

“Oh, I haven’t ever had a sherry,” I said. “Can I try a small one please?”

“I would like a glass of lemonade, thank you,” said Cora Sue, frowning at me.

“Well, Annie, what about you? Will you have a sherry too, to keep Mattie company or will you have a beer with me?”

“To be honest, in this weather, I think lemonade is the preferred drink. Alcohol just makes me feel hotter.”

So John poured me a sherry, himself a beer, and Annie went into the kitchen to get lemonades for herself and Cora Sue.

It wasn’t long before Rosie came back, and had a sip of the lemonade that Annie had poured for her, while John took a quick trip into the back bedroom to say goodnight to his son.

After that we went into the kitchen and sat down at a round table, laden with interesting foods.

“I didn’t know what sort of food you’d like,” apologized Rosie, “so I went to the shops and got a little bit of all sorts of things. There’s bound to be something here that will suit. And I made my famous potato salad. If I’d known you were from Wisconsin instead of some fancy state back East, I wouldn’t have been so worried. So help yourselves.”

We continued chatting with John and his family about what we had been seeing and doing both in the last week here, and in the rest of our trip.

“I was told to ask you about your home country, Scotland, John,” said Cora Sue. “What part of Scotland do you come from? And when did you come to the States?”

“Well, I was born in a little place called Fifish, which is only about 1500 people, on the sea near the Firth of Forth.”

“Whatever is that?”

“Ah, I forgot you wouldn’t know even the basic geography of Scotland. The Firth of Forth is a sea loch - an estuary - a long finger of water coming in from the sea, not all that far from Edinburgh. The
Forth is the river, and the Firth is the estuary. Anyway, the place I come from has a good tidal harbor, a pier, a good place for sunbathing and very little else. But nearby we have a castle.”

“A real castle?”

“Of course, a real castle, although it is now a ruin. It is called Aberdour. Let me see if I can tell you what it's like. It was built in 1458 for the Earls of Morton and Barons Aberdour. The oldest
portion is a massive keep tower, and is chiefly of rough rubble work, with dressed quoins and windows.

“But (thanks to Sir Walter Scott) Aberdour's best title to fame rests on the grand old ballad of Sir
Patrick Spens. The skipper conveyed in 1281 the Princess Margaret from Dunfermline to
Norway, there to be wedded to King Erie and this is how the ballad tells of it.

Half owre. half owre to Aberdour

It's fifty fathoms deep,

And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens,

wi' the Scots lords at his feet.

“I hate to say this, but I didn’t understand about half of those words. You’ll have to translate for us. What are quoins anyway?”

“Oh, I can answer that,” said Rosie, “It’s just a fancy name for a cornerstone.”

“Well, what were you doing there before you decided to come here?”

“I was a cook on board a ship, and we sailed to America many times. I fell in love with it and decided that I would like to emigrate. I came over in May 72, on the SS Republic of the White Star Line, which was one of the first of a group of ships that was powered by steam rather than just by sails. So instead of taking a month, I crossed in just over a week And I worked my crossing, so it didn’t cost me anything. The usual fare was 15 guineas for a cabin, and the cheapest accommodation was seven guineas.”

“What’sa guinea?”

“That’s British currency - and means one pound and one shilling.”

“That's just stupid. Why do they use that?”

“I think it's stupid too, and mainly for the benefit of the rich people who want to show off their wealth by saying they bought things in guineas.”

“And where did you land?”

“In New York City. I had to be vetted in a place called Castle Garden.”

“Did you sail from Scotland?”

“No, most the ships going to New York, and there were dozens of them each week, left from Liverpool, at the West Waterloo dock.”

“Tell us about the time you worked with our Pa. You say he was a jailer. How come he had that job?”

“Well money was hard to come by - and the Burleigh County Commission advertised a vacancy, and he applied and got it. He didn’t work continually there, but was there for the winters of 74 and 75. He
still did the odd story for one of the papers, but that wasn’t enough to live on. He got about $20 a month from this job, and it kept him able to pay for his rent at the boarding house and in food
and enough to have the odd drink and night out. I think we still owed him some money when he died.”

“Did he ever tell you anything about buying into a gold mine, or a coal mine around here?”

“No, I can’t say he ever did. We didn’t talk much about things like that. He was very interested in politics, and wanted to be a lawyer. He kept asking me questions about how things were run, and laws and stuff like that.”

“Somebody mentioned that he had been involved in a court case.”

“He was involved in everything - and there were two or three times when he was on a jury. One was when about November,  73, I think it was, a soldier named Frank King was killed by a gambling den owner called Spotty Whalen over a woman called Maud Seymour. Your Pa wrote a lot of stories about it in the paper, but he seemed to side with the dead man. Then a bunch of soldiers from the fort came into town, seeking revenge for Frank King - and they came and demanded entrance at the
door, but another shot was fired from within and killed another soldier, and a second one was wounded. So then there was a barrage of bullets from the soldiers into the building, and Dave Mullen, the owner, was killed with a bullet to his brain. Mark didn’t think that was the real story. He thought the soldiers had forced their way in and shot Mullen in cold blood. After the shooting, the soldiers disappeared so there was nobody to confirm what happened and what didn’t.

“Then the whole place was in an uproar. The soldiers were going to riot, and about 70 armed soldiers came into town and the town people were confused, because they now had to be protected against the soldiers, who supposedly were there to protect them.

“Mark was on the coroner’s jury and they had the job of investigating the crime. Oh, actually, I think I kept the clipping of what he wrote about the murder. It will be here somewhere. Do you know where it is Rosie?”

Rosie got up and went to a bookshelf and took out a folder, and found the article.

“Here, you can read it for yourselves.”

We took the clipping and sat together and read it aloud.

The scene within the house where THE MURDER was committed beggars description; but as I saw it I will try to open the picture to you readers. As I enter the door of the saloon, I saw on my right near the counter, where Mullen fell after being shot, a pool of blood covering three feet square of the floor with considered amounts of brains mingled in. The counter was spotted with blood. From the front door, clear the whole length of the main room, through the hall, out the back door of the house was one continuous trail of human gore which had fallen from the wounds of Denny Minnehan who went in search of water after being shot. On the platform at the rear of the main or dancing hall lay the remains of Dave Mullen. Upon examining the corpse, I found a ball had entered the forehead above the left eye and passed through the head and out at the back, crushing and carrying away the
skull and portions of the brain. In the walls of the building, through doors and windows were the marks of the bullets fired by the soldiers.

THIS TRAGEDY is totally the fault of men wearing the garb of US soldiers. If they had been kept in their quarters, where they belonged, this bloody and murderous scene would not have been enacted. There have been telegrams sent eastward which I know are not true, and having heard the testimony in the coroners inquest, held on both the deceased, I do not hesitate to pronounce this act of the soldiery one that was decidedly and cold-bloodedly murder, and such is the verdict of most of the citizens. I hope this will be the end of this cruel kind of work but blood has been spilled. The bad passions of bold bad men are aroused and it is difficult to predict the end.

“So what happened at the court case?”

“That Dave Mullen did on the morning of November 11, 1873, come to his death from a gunshot wound fired from a person dressed in the garb of a soldier. Said gun shot ball entering his forehead and passing directly through his brain.”

“And were any of the soldiers charged?”

“No, but the roughest characters in town were run out of town, and the soldiers were still allowed to roam the streets, which annoyed Mark.”

“Were there other bad things happening around here then?”

“Oh there was the odd murder here and there, and sometimes the people got caught and imprisoned, and sometimes they didn’t. It’s pretty much a typical small western town in that regard.”

John said we could keep the article written by our dad that he had cut from the paper, and we were very grateful to him for that, as we said good night and thank you to Rosie and Annie and John for a very pleasant evening.