Cannons and busses

 Two or three interesting but unrelated news items here:  the first, a Little Falls Herald clipping from 1898 that would have been a result of the Spanish-American war heating up. It's stunning to imagine three flat cars with a huge cannon on each rolling thru Little Falls.  At the time, America was fighting with the Spanish off both coasts (or thought we were).  With over 4,000 miles of coasts and a number of large cities there, big guns were made and expedited. The closest photo I could find online was this one from a collectors website.  It looks like it could be 28 feet long, I suppose.  It's definitely still impressive over 100 years later.

From a Facebook page called "St Cloud Remembered" comes this 1928 photo of the bus you could take to and from the cities.  It's parked in front of the Breen Hotel, later the Germain Hotel.  The businesses we'd remember from that corner were a Fanny Farmer candy shop, and an optician around the corner.  Q: What cafe was right across the street in the building hidden by the back of the bus?

Less than 1500 feet from the school

 With my skeptical, publicity-aware brain, this little controversy seems almost staged, but chances are it was just snarkiness on the part of the unknown Buckman news reporter.  (Btw, the reporter was NOT yet Uncle Math Hesch, who was 8 years old when this happened ☺).
I thought, too, that the whole "so many feet from a school" was a later invention, but evidently not.  If you know Buckman, it seems like the saloon was actually there first and it was the school that was built too close!

"Our saloonkeeper, Jos. Hortsch, went to Little Falls and got his liquor license again.  A certain person went to Little Falls to prevent getting the license, but he got it anyway.  He invites all the boys to call on him."




"That Buckman Saloon
Buckman, March 2?, 1898

Editor Herald:
It was stated in last week's Herald that a certain person went to Little Falls from Buckman to prevent Jos. Hortsch from getting a license.  The law is to have no saloon within 1500 feet of a schoolhouse, but there have been saloons ever since 1893 from 400 to 800 feet from the school house, and the certain person was not at Little Falls to be against license, but is going to start a saloon in the fall within 1500 feet of the school house, and just went to Little Falls to see if the county commissioners had a right to violate the school laws.
Yours truly, 
The Certain Person"

Travel, Blow snakes and Karo syrup

The Andersons probably went by way of St Cloud, making the trip 132 miles instead of 103 miles and an hour and 49 minutes now.   

 The western hognose snake (puff adder or blow snake) is primarily diurnal. If threatened (or perceiving a threat), it may flatten its neck (much like a cobra), hiss, and make mock strikes...Although it is more common that they will flatten their heads out, some individuals may puff up, filling their throats with air. This is more common with adolescent males.

Oh yeah, I was sure this was a pull-yer-leg story, but just for fun I googled "blow snake"--and, wow, there really is/WAS such a thing.  (With snakes, you react first, talk later).  There may have been a small benefit in seeing one if it meant your friends plying you with liquor as a cure, too. "...the snake blew it's poison into his face and poisoned him" was enough, even if there was no poison.

 Wonder if the side track in Elk River ever materialized?  Who knew there were mineral springs there? Stranger things have happened; it was an age of possibilities and mineral water was mineral water, right?

 Wow, just think--Paul's wife Mary (Otremba) Hesch came here when she was 12, and now, at 57, she went to see the big ships.  Course, this may have had something to do with Math & Ted talking about going to Europe (they did the following spring), and maybe Mary wanted to see for herself whether or not the were safer now.

What an odd ad, huh?  Corn syrup was better than honey?  But maybe honey was considered poor man's sugar, where Karo was manufactured.  

This next article blew us away.  We thought "Live long and prosper" was Star Trek...but no--actually, it was used to wish a happy life to newlyweds too.

(Everything old, etc)

The Kasmer Ginter family

This photo from the Morrison Co Atlas (1970)  has had me stumped since I found it, partly because I suspected the name might have been transposed to Gunther (it wasn't ☺) and partly because "Kasmer" or "Cazemir" was such an unusual first name that it almost HAD to show up in a search.  Evidently, I didn't search far enough or early enough before....

But here they are, about 1898 (when the youngest kid, Franziska, looks to be around 5).  I'm assuming that the census was taken when the oldest kid was away working for another family and would be counted in their household. Of course, that kid was home for the portrait, tho. The atlas says Ginters lived in Rural Little Falls (Rt. 3) by 1970.

Does anyone know more about this family?

1898--Game Warden Hubris

Larry found this incendiary article last week in a San Francisco newspaper of December 4, 1898.  I'm sure it went out on the wire and was picked up because it supported the impression that Minnesota was one of some unsettled, dangerous places 'up north'.  And, why not make the headline as scary as possible?
Was the deputy thoughtless, or stupid?  Obviously, things escalated quickly, but damn.  It was December and the Ojibwe had to eat, too.  Besides, fourteen against one seems like a foolhardy ratio...
                                            .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
THREATENED UPRISING OF CHIPPEWA INDIANS

Resist Arrest by a Deputy Game Warden for Having Shot Deer Out of Season.

St Paul, Dec. 3--Another uprising of the Chippewa Indians is threatened.  The Game Warden at Sauk Rapids has had a fight with fourteen red men, whom he attempted to arrest, in which he was badly whipped, and State Game Warden Fullerton has ordered that the Indians be taken into custody, be the result as it may.  The Indians declare they will resist all attempts to capture them and will organize a rebellion.
The Sauk Rapids deputy met the Indians in the woods, and as each one was carrying the carcass of a deer he attempted to arrest them on a charge of having violated the game laws. In the fight that followed the deputy was severely punished and his rifle taken from him.  The Indians warned him against  following them _____ they would never be taken alive, and threatening to begin shooting the moment a posse appeared in sight.  
Game Warden Fullerton has notified the authorities that he will pursue the Indians with a posse, and serious trouble is feared.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Ok--here's a quote from the Wikipedia article about the Ojibwe (Chippewa) people:

"Often, earlier treaties were known as "Peace and Friendship Treaties" to establish community bonds between the Ojibwe and the European settlers. These earlier treaties established the groundwork for cooperative resource-sharing between the Ojibwe and the settlers. The United States and Canada viewed later treaties offering land cessions as offering territorial advantages. The Ojibwe did not understand the land cession terms in the same way because of the cultural differences in understanding the uses of land. The governments of the US and Canada considered land a commodity of value that could be freely bought, owned and sold.

The Ojibwe believed it was a fully shared resource, along with air, water and sunlight. At the time of the treaty councils, they could not conceive of separate land sales or exclusive ownership of land"..... 

...or the right to limit hunting for food, either.

I wonder what happened next, don't you?

News from 1896

From the Waterloo, Iowa Daily Courier, October 9, 1896:

        Killed by a Boiler Explosion

Little Falls, Minn, Oct 9--The boiler at Joseph Oestreicher's feed mill in the town of Buckman exploded, instantly killing one man and injuring two others--one probably fatally.  Engineer William Besch was killed.  Oestreicher had both legs broken and received other injuries, and Theodore Carl was seriously hurt.  The accident was due to the inexperience of the engineer.