Submitted by: agcomm,  Thu Jul 31 10:49:57 1997


Plains Folk:  Cable Cars
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University 
copyright 1997 Plains Folk
 
  It was one of those wild hairs.  Coming home from Montana, I decided to go looking for
cable cars.  In North Dakota.  Obviously not cable cars of the San Francisco sort.
I'm talking about platform cars that hang attached to pulleys on cables strung across the
Little Missouri River, a little stream that lies at the bottom of a big valley running through the
hills and badlands of far western North Dakota.  These precarious, homemade conveyances
are used in places far from any bridge to carry people and goods across the river when the
water is too high to ford.
The most famous of these is the Kruger cable car, not far north of the South Unit of
Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  With a good map of the Little Missouri National
Grassland, I made my way to the site, pulling up on the east side of the river.
The frame of the rectangular car is of angle iron, the floor steel mesh.  There is a plank
seat on each end.  A pair of auto wheel rims on each side ride the two half-inch steel cables
that stretch across the river.  A gas engine belted to a shaft turns one pair of wheels for motive
power in crossing.  To come back you have to loosen the belt and reverse the drive.
The car is pretty stable on the twin cables, but that was not much comfort to my
Labrador retriever, forced to sit on the swaying car and pose for the camera.  After taking
photos we descended the steep bank and waded, thigh-deep in cool cappuccino, unforgiving
rocks on bare feet, toward the ranch on the west side.  This is the place that used to be known
as the Bellows Ranch.
Kermit and Cassie Kruger, owners since 1970, weren't home that day, but I got them
on the telephone to ask about the story of the cable car.  It seems Kermit and some neighbors
built it in 1971, using a cut down Javelin auto body for the original car.  Three years or so ago
they replaced the Javelin with the angle-iron-and-mesh car.  They use the cable car about half
the year, fording the rest of the time.
"The biggest need was school," Kermit answers in response to my question, Why. 
When the Kruger kids started school, at what was known as the Meyer school, it was on the
east side of the river.  The teacher and the Krugers lived on the west side.  The teacher would
ride horseback to the Kruger yard each morning and take the cable car across the river with
the kids.  After a couple of years they moved the school into a mobile unit on the Krugers'
side.
The Krugers still have foster kids on the place, and today they still use the cable car to
catch a school bus on the east side to grade school in Medora or high school in Belfield.  How
do they like it, I asked.  "It's a big thrill for them," Kermit says.
Occasionally too big a thrill.  One day in about 1975 the river was running bank full. 
Kermit was away, attending his brother's wedding.  Cassie and a Kruger son were aboard the
cable car in mid-river when it flipped and dipped, putting them into the river.  Fortunately, the
force of the water held them into their seats.  It was hard to get out, but they did, and they
walked the twisted cables to shore.  "We almost met our maker," Cassie recalls.
This year Kermit made a few improvements, including a transmission on the engine, so
you no longer have to reverse the drive manually.
Crossing the river sitting high on a cable car would be fun, I think,  the first couple of
times.  This is one of those inconveniences, however picturesque, that goes with living in a
beautiful, barely accessible place on the plains.
 
                              ###
NDSU Agriculture Communication
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866