Humboldt County
Historical Association
PO Box 162
Humboldt, Iowa
50548
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WILD WEST IN 1862_DAKOTA CITY_FORT DODGE_THE GREAT METROPOLIS OF EIGHT HUNDRED SOULS
A. D. Bicknell included this account as part of a series titled “Pioneer Days in Northwestern Iowa” which appeared in the Humboldt Republican from April 15 to June 24, 1897.
Although the railroad, in 1862, extended as far west as Cedar Falls, the country east of Waterloo for more than seventy-five miles was still very wild. Except close to the few streams we often rode a dozen miles over a prairie bare of any human signal. Several times our train stopped at a mile post, out of sight of any house, and unloaded lumber. Once the conductor told me it was left there on the order of someone “living over yonder about fifteen miles.”
Camp fires and canvas covered lumber wagons were numerous at Cedar Falls, all of which belonged to farmers who had come long distances to this nearest market to sell their wheat, wool and oats. The first one I talked with told me he had brought in wheat from Webster county, over a hundred miles, and sold it for twenty-five cents a bushel. He run his own hotel on the road, and hoped to get part of a load of merchandise to haul back, taking his pay in trade from his merchant, in salt, groceries, whiskey, tobacco and other necessities.
Salt was a precious piece of property, growing more and more valuable the farther it was carted. But whiskey had not yet been “taxed out of the reach of the poor man,” as a thirsty fellow growled that it had been two years later. Billy Holehan was then running a still near Fort Dodge, and handing out what he called first-class goods at a dollar a gallon.
Primitive conditions grew apace as we went west from Cedar Falls. From Alden to Webster City, twenty-five miles, with the exception of a stage station where horses were changed, there was nothing but the virgin prairie. Not a bush nor a running brook broke the monotony. From Webster City to Fort Dodge, twenty miles, there was no house but that of the enterprising muskrat.
West of Fort Dodge to the Missouri river the tri-weekly stage carried the mail to the county seats on the route and on to Sioux City, where river navigation pulled for the traffic of the pioneer for eighty miles or more back toward the end of the railroad. But even on this line the prairie was bare of improvement except at the little hamlet at the county seat, and now and then a few log cabins at the far-apart streams.
Here was a route from Cedar Falls to Sioux City, two hundred miles long in a straight line that typified the highest stage of development west of the railroads. Yet it was wilder than I know how to tell, and north of this line these wild conditions were wilder still, and wilder grew the farther we went.
Dakota City and Algona were the only towns in Iowa north of Fort Dodge on the East Des Moines, and Dakota City, though it was an old, old town of eight years growth—I quote from the book—consisted of four dwelling houses, two of which were empty, one was occupied by a lone bachelor and one held a regular family. Also there were two offices, three barns, a 10 x 14 school house and a hotel with three rooms below and two upstairs. There was not a chimney in the city. Yet Dakota City held high rank among the county seats of the northwest third of Iowa.
Fort Dodge was the metropolis of the northwest. Nothing outranked her to the Rocky Mountains. Though she only claimed a population of eight hundred, she was at the jumping off place, so to speak, for all points west and northwest , and her people were enterprising and daring out of all proportion to their numbers. Their houses seemed ridiculously small, and to one just fresh from central New York it was hard to harmonize the cramped home quarters with the cultured and genial people who lived there. The first night I stopped there I called on a friend of years before. He had married in Fort dodge, and I had never seen his wife. They pressed me to get my satchel from the St. Charles—there were no “grips” then—and stay with them while I remained in the city. But as I could see all over the one story house, and it had but three rooms, and the family consisted of husband, wife, two children and an old maid, and only one bed and a lounge showed up for the night’s repose, I concluded that my pressing invitation was due to an over-politeness that could not be genuine. Ah, how I was fooled. Afterwards that blessed woman who presided in that home did not know how to deceive, and that in that same little house there was always room for another friend.
In this same little house I noticed what seemed a luxury quite out of harmony with the surroundings; that is to say, a first-class piano. But next day in passing a two-room house I saw and heard, through the open door a girl who was coaxing such melody from her piano that I was forced to stop and listen. I then and there determined never more to be surprised at seeming incongruities; and so when a few days later I met Charlie Bergk, the treasurer and recorder of Humboldt county, in his tiny little office in Dakota City, and noticed his piano in the little bedroom in the rear—the room now used by Dock Simpson for medicine bottles—I was not surprised but boldly called for his best. Charlie was clad in an ancient and broken straw hat, a blue denims “smock” with blue denims overalls tucked into boot tops that reached above the knees, and over all but the hat there shown the friendly smile that lit his way into the hearts of his friends.
He played and sang a favorite of his—‘Call me pet names, dearest; call me thine own.” There was a little mis-cue on some of his th sounds, and the piano had been slightly jarred out of tune in its jolting over the hundred and twenty miles in a lumber wagon, but Charlie threw such soul into the execution that when he had gotten well into the song I had forgotten his boots, his clothes, his old hat, his German accent, his cracked piano, the disorder of the little room, and everything else that was out of harmony with the spirit of the song.
Charlie, old boy, I would go a hundred miles to hear you sing that song again as you sang it that day.
But where have I drifted? I just meant to say that at that time the culture and style of Fort Dodge was partly indexed by the nineteen pianos owned there. Also, other Fort Dodge items are “held over for next week.”