NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
June 18, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
You drive through one of these little plains country towns today, with its businesses boarded up, its residential streets gap-toothed from people moving the houses away into the county seat, and you get no clue of the vitality that once surged through the place. That's the way it is with Gascoyne, North Dakota, today. But if you talk to someone like Phyllis Teigen, who grew up there, the place comes alive with stories.
Gascoyne is on the Milwaukee Railroad, and when the rails arrived in 1908, Phyllis's father, Atwood LeRoy Cady, was already there, holding down a claim and running a store. He married Laura May Hankel in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1917, and moved her to a home in Gascoyne, where Phyllis was born.
Town life ran on railroad time. For instance, as a girl Phyllis was supposed to hang the mailbag for the Flyer, the 9:30 train coming out of the west. She had to stand on a box to reach the mail carrier alongside the tracks. A mechanical arm extended from the passing train to sweep the mailbag from the carrier where it had been tied. "It's a dangerous thing," Phyllis says, because of the suction of the passing train. After it passed, she would pick up the incoming Gascoyne mailbag that the conductor had tossed out onto the ground.
One morning Phyllis went up to hang the mail and the depot agent told her it wasn't time yet. Suddenly, though, the agent hollered, "Tie that mail! The train's coming!"
"I got it tied, and just jumped down, and there was the train," Phyllis recalls. When her father found out about that dangerous close call, though, she got a heck of a scolding.
The railroad connected the town to the outside world, which had both its good and its unfortunate aspectssuch as the swarm of tramps that descended from boxcars when trains stopped in the 1930s. The Cady house was one of the first that the bums would come to as they entered town, and Mrs. Cady always gave them something.
Sometimes, though, they unnerved her. Once the whistle was signaling the train's imminent departure, and this one bum wouldn't leave the porch—he kept demanding a coat. Finally Mrs. Cady grabbed a coat from a hook by the door and threw it to him so he would leave. It was Phyllis's coat.
By this time the automobile was bringing to town another stream of humanitygypsies. As elsewhere on the plains, local people viewed the gypsies as mysterious, shady, and a threat to property. "They were a different breed," Phyllis said. "You couldn't understand what they wanted."
In the 1930s Mr. Cady ran a garage, and after school was out he left teenage Phyllis in charge while he drove a mail route. This was good for the after-school trade. She sold a lot of candy and ice cream. Once she even managed to patch a tire. She had strict instructions, though, that if gypsies came, she was to lock the garage and the gas pump while somebody called the sheriff.
By the next decade Phyllis was married and her husband, Mervin Teigen, introduced a third means of transportthe airplanefor carrying the mail. One winter in the late 1940s it was so snowy Phyllis, who subbed a mail route for her father, could not get through. So Mervin took the mail up in his Cessna 140 fitted with skis.
Flying over the farms and ranches he dropped mail, groceries and, in at least one case, cigarettes. One farmer was a heavy smoker and was getting desperate for a smoke by the time Mervin dropped him a carton. A neighbor watched the guy run for the drop and later told Mervin, "I think he had that cigarette lit before it hit the ground!"
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866