Pioneer Life - Minnesota to North Dakota

-After William McGee returned home from duty in the Civil War, he moved his family to High Forest Township, Minnesota, around 1866. High Forest is the township immediately south of Rochester City.

Olmstead County, Minnesota (current map)  High Forest Township south of Rochester (light green)

In 1883, John Carney McGee and two of his brothers left High Forest and went to Rochester.  It seems most likely that the two brothers who traveled with John were James Patrick McGee and Michael Emmett McGee.  From Rochester, they traveled by wagon to Minneapolis, which is about 77 miles if they could go in a straight line.  The US Department of Transportation states that wagons could cover between 8 and 20 miles per day.  So somewhere between 5 and 10 days travel. And although TV shows and movies would lead us to believe that the wagons carried people, that was not the case.  People walked unless they were injured or ill.  Only their possessions were in the wagon.

 In Minneapolis, John and his brothers took the train to Fargo, North Dakota.  (Today that would be about a 4.5 hour trip on the Amtrak "Empire Builder" route.)  From Fargo, they went by wagon again to Cando, North Dakota.  If they could have traveled in a straight line, that would be about 160 miles.  At 8 miles per day, that would have taken about 20 days.  When John was interviewed for a North Dakota pioneer historical project, he said that he spent 36 days traveling by wagon.  John said that he and his brothers arrived in Cando in August of 1883.  They brought with them a team of 3 (horses? oxen?), some farm implements, some kitchen utensils, an iron, and some tins.

Current Mapquest map with Fargo in bottom right and Cando in the top left

By June 11, 1884, John had built a sod house with the help of one of his brothers.  This grand house had two windows and one door.  The full dimension of the house was 10 feet by 12 feet.  So, why a sod house instead of a "normal" house made of wood?  And what was a sod house?

Well, the Library of Congress has some useful information.  In 1880, when pioneers were arriving in the Dakotas, they saw a sea of tall prairie grass -- and no trees!  Actually, there were a few trees along river banks, but none elsewhere. The only thing available to build a shelter with was sod.   They cut squares out of the ground, which included the prairie grass down to the roots.  They used them for the walls and the roof.  The only timber was used for the doors and windows.  The best part of sod was it was very energy-efficient -- houses kept cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  The bad part is that they were porous, so the rain came through the roofs and got everything inside wet.  It sounds like tent-camping.

The sod house below was built in the 1890s, somewhere in the Dakotas.  It looks a lot bigger than 10'x12'.  The grass growing on the roof seems typical of sod houses in that time frame.

 Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo., Library of Congress

This second picture is somewhere in the Devils Lake area, and its size may look much like John Carney McGee's sod house did.  Can you imagine living there?

 Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU, Fargo. Library of Congress

John lived there four years before building a more permanent home.  His table was made of some boards, and the chairs were boxes.  He stored his food in a "hole in the ground."  When John was asked what type of stove he had in the house, he replied, "stone."  Well, that had me puzzled for a while as I was inhibited my idea of what a stove was.  A stone stove (or more frequently called a three-stone stove) consists of three stones arranged around a fire in a way that a pot could sit above the fire, supported by the three rocks.

Traditional Three Stone Stove

Now remember that there weren't enough trees to build a house, so you can imagine that there wasn't enough to use for fire either.  No, John used buffalo chips that he collected out on the prairies.

Water was carried from a stream.  The stream appears to have been at least a mile from John's homestead.  Here are the coordinates 48.4283952, -99.0142001 for the property.  You can plug them into Google Earth to see the land today.  John's homestead was the NW quarter of section 14.  The coordinates appear to put you at the NW corner of his property.  There is water on the farm now, but North Dakota is in its third year of flooding.

He bought food and clothing in Devils Lake, which is about 30 minutes by car but a lot longer by horse.  The prices are surprising.  He paid $4.00 for a hundred pounds of sugar and $5.00 for a hundred pounds of flour.  John said suits cost $4.00 to $15.00.

John's hobbies -- as he listed them -- were Dancing, Hunting, and Fishing.  For work, he recorded farming and stock raising.

Just for fun, here is an old song about sod houses.


Yodeling Slim Clark - Little Old Sod Shanty (1946).Pir

What about those Callaghan/Callahan Siblings?

Sometimes it helps to keep asking questions about family puzzles.  Sometimes it helps to just be lucky.  And other times, it takes having knowledgeable strangers just knowing where to look for answers.  This time it took all of the above.

Catherine Callaghan Pasonault, Bernard Callahan, Margaret M Callahan McGee at the McGee farm in Omaha, Nebraska

Here is the picture that triggered the questions.  Margaret Callahan McGee is my great-grandmother.  Margaret's much younger brother Bernard was a regular family-visitor when my mother was growing up.  The third woman in the picture was the puzzle.  This sure looked like a sibling shot, especially since there were other, bigger group shots that they were in also.  I had an unverified note on one old picture that her name was Kate Pasonault, and her husband's name was Ernie.  Previous research by Mary McGee Clarys on the Callaghans/Callahans had unearthed a family of 8 children (4 boys, 4 girls), and two of them (Margaret and Bernard) had immigrated from Ireland to North Dakota. So who was this other woman?  Neither Mary nor I were ever successful at figuring out the Pasonault connection -- or even if there was one.

So this summer on our trip through family history in North Dakota, Gerald Maurseth from the Cando Pioneer Foundation, helped us find Ernie Pasonault.  Ernie's full name is Joseph Ernest Pasonault and professionally he usually went by his first two initials.  At the Pioneer Foundation in Cando, North Dakota, there are many photographs, and most have "J E Pasonault" and the title of the photo handwritten in white at the bottom of the picture.  He must have scratched his name and title into the photo as he was processing them. Ernie was the town's first official photographer.

While I was still traveling, Mary Clarys went to work on finding more about Ernie Pasonault since the town photographer had to be at least a little bit famous, and now we had his full name.  She was successful almost immediately.  Ernie is pretty renowned in North Dakota from his photography work.  Many of Ernie's photographs were preserved by Bill Shemorry. When he died, the collection passed to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, and they are now in a digital collection available at digitalhorizonsonline.org.

So with this little bit of data, Mary and I kept poking around trying to find someone with more information about Catherine's family. At one point, I just gave up and decided to ask for permission to use the family photos in the Shemorry collection. Since the pictures are owned by the State Historical Society of North Dakota, I followed the directions on the photo collection to contact Emily Schultz to request permission to use the photos.  When I wrote Emily, in addition to seeking permission to use the images, I also told her about the family puzzle and asked if she had any information on Catherine.  Emily went straight to work on our mystery.  After searching through the Shemmory Collection, Emily was only able to find a record of Catherine's birth date but not any family information.  But she didn't stop there.  She passed the puzzle on to Jim Davis, Head of Reference for the State Historical Society of North Dakota.  

Joseph Ernest Pasonault, Kate Callaghan Pasonault, Margaret Marie Callahan McGee, John Carney McGee

Jim Davis found several impressive records about the John Carney McGee family and the Joseph Ernest Pasonault family.  And in an archived research package on North Dakota Pioneers, we see the connection between Catherine Callaghan Pasonault and Margaret M Callahan McGee.  The research was done sometime between 1936 and 1942, when John and Margaret were still alive.  Margaret makes a statement that she has 4 brothers and 4 sisters.  Her only siblings in this country -- Kate Pasonault and Bernard Callahan.  And the address to the McGee farm (with the bench that is in many family photos) is 4428 Emile Street, Omaha, Nebraska, which today is part of the Nebraska Medical Center.

This puts a whole new spin on trying to figure out why Margaret would come from Ireland and its temperate climate to the intense cold of North Dakota.  Her sister Kate had built herself a beautiful life with an up and coming young photographer.  I can imagine Kate encouraging her sister to come to join her.  But now, why did Kate come?  Who would have paid Kate's travel expenses?  Ernie was only a student when they married and an immigrant himself from Canada.

Just a side note on the spelling of the family name.  It looks like Kate kept the original Irish spelling of the name, and Margaret and Bernard chose an "Americanized" spelling.

Much thanks to Emily Schultz and Jim Davis from the State Historical Society of North Dakota!  I still have much to digest from the data Jim collected, and Emily sent.