heavy Swedish accent. "Uffda she'd shoot right through a moose or a bear with no trouble" Hans was the grandfather of a girl my friend married, he lived his whole life up in Grygla MN as a farmer/trapper/hunter. You have a good look on Google earth, thats one nasty place to try to make a living! In the early 80's my buddy moved up there to live on Hans and Huldas farm, Hans and Hulda had moved into town, they were really old, hard to tell exactly how old, but pretty darn old I'd say. Hans had some good stories of the old days....once he told of a big indian battle in the late 1800's that took place up there, said how all the farmers got scared and took off for the cities leaving everything behind. By dang I looked it up this morning and theres a powerful account of it "The last indian uprising in the United States" from the MN historical magazine complete with the whole lowdown of what happened and where. Those guys in the 3rd regiment were shooting Krags! Anyway, Hans would rattle on about how the only things to trap back in the 30's were skunks and weasels, there were no fox or raccoons or any such a thing...even all the beaver had been pretty much wiped out. Me and the Wife spent a lot of time up there helping our friends move and getting the farm put back together. Once I went to explore some beaver dams and stumbled across an old overgrown homestead ...there was stuff laying about that looked like it was just left yesterday...thats why Hans told me the story. Hans said he had a hired man back in the 50's that everyone just called "pinhead" said he had a tiny little head no bigger than an orange, said one day Pinhead was out with the tractor pulling the wheat planter, and got a notion to go into town to the bar for a drink, so Pinhead just drove the tractor into town, planting wheat all the way down the road! By gosh that was some hard Country! Maybe some day I'll have the chance to drive up there...I did a lot of trapping down by Fosston and over by Northome...just rambling.
Mud
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