Stories

I believe that small towns are built and revolve around a couple core places. My childhood and adolescence occurred on location at the church, the school, the ice arena. As I got older, the bar figured heavily in that rotation, as well.

The scene of the incident?

This was the case for a couple of my relatives, too.  Actually, most people recall them hanging around the liquor store more than the bar, but I'm quite sure both locations were personal favorites. From all accounts, they were big guys: muscular, broad, solid. Women say that they were good looking men. Everyone agrees that they were drinkers and carousers, partiers and card players. All the individuals I spoke with about them also said that they expressed themselves physically, as well, and not through modern dance. Fists. They'd all beat the crap out of each other and then go back in the bar and buy each other whiskey.

It's no wonder that teetotaling Grandma didn't want a thing to do with these characters, nor did she want any of us kids to know about them, either. They were at the far eastern side of the county. We were far west, nearly North Dakota. My brother heard about these guys when he was in seventh grade from an old hired man in the eastern part of the county who had known them. He had a story to tell about the rowdies that started with a poker game and ended with a guy missing. The two brothers showed up wearing new clothes and being flush for awhile. An inquiry and investigation turned up nothing, least of all a body. Since the man was a sort of itinerant worker without family, and all the guys at the card game stuck to their story, the matter was dropped. It helped that the sheriff at the time was also a drinker, and could have been at the card game that night.

The witnesses?

I took a drive up to the eastern-most townships of the county that butt up against Manitoba. Space between farms is long and wide, and cows are plentiful. The land where the party took place is still owned by the same family, but it's difficult to know where exactly all of this occurred. There were cattle involved, as well - cattle that were never in the holding corral, but were in there the next morning. Or was it that the manure pile had been moved? At any rate, I'm not sure I found anything close to where they were.

With the help of the nice folks at the County Historical Museum, I spoke with a few of the people who knew the brothers. One gentleman said that the man who disappeared had walked into a lake and that the men thought hunters would find him. Another woman actually partied with them. When I asked her about card games, she said quickly, "Oh, I don't know anything about any card games. They just came over here to visit. We didn't play any cards. They were too busy boozing." Hmm. The hired man who originally told the story to my brother didn't know nearly as much as he did back then, either. Funny enough, when the story was thrown out to a museum visitor that day, he said, "Ya. That's just about it, there. Them guys were something."

There you have it. More on home to come.