The Minnesota Farm Woman

The real Minnesota Farm Woman was my great-grandmother, Christine, who was born in 1873. She and her husband Andrew were among the first settlers in Forbes, Minnesota, first in 1893 and again in 1894 with their three small children. In 1893, she was twenty and he was twenty-four. It is hard to imagine carving a life and a town out of the Minnesota forest, but they did that and more. They hunted and farmed for most of their food, but still needed to purchase things like coffee, sugar, nails, and ammunition. For these things, Andrew had to travel to the city of Duluth, 60 miles away, and to get there in the early days, he had to walk. Perhaps he had a pack-horse, or perhaps he didn’t. As she told the stories to her grandson, who grew up to be my dad, she never mentioned one. Travel would have been nearly impossible in the winter, so most had to be done in the summer. Crops and animals had to be cared for so Christine, like many pioneer women, stayed at home with her babies. I can only wonder how long the journey was…perhaps two weeks, give or take a day or two. He walked. She waited. He walked. She rocked her babies in the creaky rocking chair. There were no telephones, and no electricity, the only light at night coming from an oil lamp. Waiting must have seemed like an eternity. One night, Christine heard a noise in the bedroom. She did what any pioneer Farm Woman would have done and grabbed the rifle. I’m almost certain it was right there, fully loaded at all times. There, halfway through a window, was a man. He had taken off his boots and had put them inside the window, on the floor, and had one leg over the windowsill, ready to climb in. Whatever he was up to, it was no good. Christine pointed the rifle at his head and hollered, “You get on out of here!” I don’t know if it was the tone of her voice or the rifle pointed between his eyes, but he listened. I doubt that Christine slept much that night. I think about her sitting in that creaky rocking chair, holding the gun across her lap while her babies slept, the lamplight flickering in the dark. As she told the story in the days to come, people didn’t believe her, but Christine had proof. The would-be intruder left so quickly that he forgot his boots on the floor, right under the bedroom window. Not much later, Andrew and Christine opened a mercantile store. The railroad came, and the trains brought supplies every week. My dad spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s farm, and she told him the stories. She gave him a few things before she died. Perhaps it is because he kept her woodpile stacked high with split wood, but I like to think he got them because he named his firstborn after her. The creaky rocker no longer creaks, but it has a place of honor in my living room. The oil lamp sits on my mantle, and every once in a while I turn the lights off, light the wick, and imagine what things were like back then. I prefer electricity, but there is nothing like the warm feeling I get inside whenever that old lamp is lit.