August 2, 2001

Plains Folk: A Soldier's Grave

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

I arrived at the northeast corner of section 35, Bald Hill Township, Griggs County, North Dakota. Here's how we got there.

A bunch of us were sweating away at the Ladbury church, near Sibley, trying to remedy its foundation problems (see a future column on that), and I got to talking with Jeannette Arbuckle, long-time postmaster of Hannaford. She showed me a letter she received in 1986 from a Mrs. Dennis Carlson, of Akron, Iowa. The correspondent sought information about the grave of an ancestor, one Kristian Peterson.

Peterson was one of four brothers who immigrated from Norway in 1856 and first settled at Beloit, Wisc. In 1859 they moved on to Norway Lake, Minn. Come the Civil War they all four enlisted in Company D, First Minnesota Cavalry. That was how they found themselves marching across Dakota Territory with General Henry Hastings Sibley's punitive expedition against the Sioux in 1863.

The family narrative enclosed by Mrs. Carlson reveals how the expedition was recalled in family annals. The prairies of Dakota "were like being on the ocean," the Norwegian veterans recalled. "There was never a house or habitation in sight.

"The worst of all was the water which did not agree with them. Soldiers [who] died were wrapped into their blankets, buried in shallow graves, and left behind. One night Kristian was taken ill very suddenly and was dead before morning. Kristian died on the plains."

Was ever a sentence more pregnant with desolation? "Kristian died on the plains."

Mrs. Carlson added that the water "had been poisoned by the Indians." Sibley referred to this in his report, too, but like everything else in his report, you have to read it with salty skepticism. You go drinking North Dakota slough water, and bad things happen. Heck, about every other slough on the northern plains is called "Alkali Lake," isn't it?

Anyway, the three surviving brothers wrangled some lumber and put the deceased into a rough box, which they buried about two miles north and two east of present-day Hannaford–in the northeast quarter of the section cited above.

Arriving there by gravel road and track, I was disheartened. Mrs. Arbuckle, who located the site in 1986, had told me the grave was in crop land. Now the quarter was CRP, heavily overgrown with grass and clover and alfalfa, making the grave more difficult to spot. Mulling this, not knowing which way to strike out, I turned over the envelope from Iowa in my hand–and there on the back was a sketch map made in 1986. Go about a quarter mile south, it said, and then west a hundred yards or so, and the grave was beside a big pile of rocks.

It was. I walked the section line south, a bromegrass wildlife area on my left, the CRP on my right, spotted the pile of rocks, and turned west.

The grave was encircled by steel fence bars. A pale marble soldier slab was mounted on concrete. An American Legion insignia attached to the fence indicated that the grave likely has seen some flowers on Memorial Days past. As I rested my hand on the enclosure, a pair of sharptails clattered out of the alfalfa and swung southeast, my eyes following.

The Peterson brothers chose for a grave site the southeast face of a distinct knoll. It looks down on an attractive slough, which on the day of my visit was alive with cormorants and pelicans. Because of high water, the cottonwoods skirting the near shore are all dead, but I suspect there were trees there in 1863, and those trees figured in the choice of burial site.

I prefer the southeastern vista as it is now, because I can look a mile directly across the water to see the white-frame 1885 Union Church, with its graveyard full of Norwegian pioneers.

"Christ Peterson, Co. D. 1 Minn. Cav." He died on the plains.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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