NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota
State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
April 16, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
Growing up in western Kansas I had a few unhappy brushes with skunks, but I never went looking for them on purpose. From what I'm told by Ernie Zahn, of Velva, North Dakota, though, skunk hunting was a pretty lucrative, if aromatic, occupation for his generation on the plains. "Skunks were the number one fur-bearer in the country," he explains. "They were worth from $2.50 to $5 apiece. They were graded short-stripe, long-stripe and broad-stripe, and the shorter and darker the skunk, the more it was worth." Ernie was born in 1915 to a German-Russian farm family in Dickey County, N.D.,the 12th of 13 children, and his father died when he was just 3. So he and his brothers did all sorts of things to make a little money and carry the family through.
"The first thing we would do in the fall," he says, "after the season opened Nov. 1, was hit the culverts to take the skunks out. We would start at 12:00 midnight, and then we would go all night and all day.
"We got very efficient about this. We would go to a culvert, and in fifteen or twenty minutes we could have the skunks out and be on our way and find another one. We had equipment fixed up to get the skunks out; we had barbed wire we would wind into the skunk's hide or tail and pull it out. We got as high as 16 skunks from a culvert, so this was big business."
How big?
Ernie says, "One night we went out and we had 43 skunks by morning, at 3 or 4 dollars apiece." Darned good wages for the 1930s.
The job was not without risk, though. Once he and a brother checked out a particular spot and, he recalls, "We looked in this culvert and it was full of skunks. But the township crew had mucked one end of the culvert shut." The skunks were way at the plugged end, wedged in tight, and the boys couldn't get them out. So they dug out the end of the culvert. Then, "My brother, who was older than I was, he had a lot of guts, he would get down and throw the skunks out. Then he got to one and he couldn't get it. He braced his feet and he gave another pull, and when he let up, the skunk let go and scented him right in the face. He went over backwards, couldn't get his breath, he couldn't see, and he hollered, `He got me!'
"I went down and grabbed him by the hand and led him up onto the road, opened up the petcock on our Model T, drained some water out of the radiator, he washed his face and we sat around until he recovered. But we made forty or forty-five dollars for that bit of work."
Believe it or not, Ernie found a woman who overlooked his skunk-hunting proclivities and saw enough virtues to marry him. One fall he drove his wife over to the industrial school in Ellendale to get her teaching certificate renewed. On the way home he cruised some fields and coulees for skunks, digging into three dens and taking 18 skunks.
When he got home, a fur buyer drove into the yard just ahead of him, ready to buy skunks. "He didn't have to ask me if I had any, because he could smell that I did." The man bought Ernie's skunks on the spot for 52 dollars. Subsequently his wife got a school to teach in McIntosh Countyand got forty dollars a month.
"So you see," concludes Ernie, "furs were a very important thing to us back in those days. We always had a lot of skunk. There wasn't too many people who went out and trapped skunk because of the scent and all, but once you got used to it, it just didn't seem to happen."
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866