Mae’s Journey

MAE ELISE DAHLBY

was the seventh child born to Elsie and Amund Dahlby and their first child born in Iowa. Her parents chose to leave the comfortable settled area in Dane County, Wisconsin, because it was getting too crowded for this family with four growing boys.

Mae was born on May 7, 1896 in Kensett, Iowa, in a big new house planned by Amund, probably built with home sawed lumber as was his style. Many of the new settlers in the Kensett and-Joice area were also from Dane County, Wisconsin, like the Brunsvolds, the Kittlesons, the Paulsons, the Gilbertsons and Knut Johnson Fia.

It’s unclear where the land was located that Amund farmed at this time but Mae has said it was into Minnesota. He must have had a livestock operation also. This seemed like a temporary arrangement of wheeling and dealing as Amund was quite able to do. So, by 1898 they had swapped their new Kensett house for Bergsagel’s 320-acre Joice farm. It was a wide prairie area in Bristol township and the village of Bristol was a thriving community four miles away, north of the big farm.

Perhaps Amund knew the railroad would pass by his new land in 1899 when the Chicago and Northwestern line was built from Mason City to Lake Mills and on to Guckeen, Minnesota.

It was an exciting time to be a little girl in this family. Mae and her little sister Ruth had responsibilities as all farm children did on farms. There were chickens, gardens, potato patches, extra farm hands at meals, lots of company and excitement. But for Mae it was her dolls and the horses. When she was 13, she still played with her cherished 16 dolls.

The rural school was south of their farm so there was often a buggy for going to school or the Concordia Church school or else a horse to ride. She appreciated

nice horses all her years, often remembering helping her dad and his helpers breaking the “ponies”, whether they were driving horses or work horses. The Joice History as recorded in the Graphic has a photo of Amund’s livery enterprise in early Joice.

This was important to the new community that had the railroad and a hotel. This would be like a car rental today.

Mae was a chum of Florence Haugebak Otto, Emma Midbo, Blanche Gilbertson, etc. but when it was time to play ball she liked to play with the boys. This was the story of her life, as she enjoyed her brothers, too, and enjoyed her sons all her years. There was even a “boy-friend” in her last years at the nursing home.

Her early photographs tell us someone was busy styling her hair with bows, braids and curls made by tying and twisting rags in wet hair.

This was her sister Alpha, who also did a lot of professional sewing for her sisters.

Each of the older brothers and sisters attended further schooling. Peter and Alpha went to Humboldt College, Humboldt, Iowa, which must have been started by the Norwegian Synod connection. Tom Dahle’s mother, a Kittleson relative, went there from Wisconsin because the Dahle’s thought she needed more culture. The college, which was built like a Terrace Hill on the Bluffs of the Des Moines River (the Iowa governor’s mansion), was planned to be the Yale of the Middle West. Unfortunately, it closed before 1910.

Ellen, James and Ruth attended Waldorf Academy. The chronology is unclear, but Mae was a sophomore in Lake Mills high school and doing very well in Latin when her mother became very ill and she had to drop out. This might have meant that Amund and Elsie lived in Lake Mills a while, but it is also possible the train schedule AM and PM meant the students from Joice could use the train and return.

This was the least schooling any of the nine Dahlby children received but Mae was always a very good speller and reader and quick to figure in her head.

The pleasant, happy life in the big house was coming to an end. Most of the Dahlby’s had left to homestead in western Canada, but the summer Mae was 16, she stayed in Iowa to cook for James and his help at the big house. There would be a lot of work to entertain company coming through Joice. Mae reported that James had 20 different girl friends that summer.

In those days the Young People’s Society was a big family social event in the summer. Mae hosted this event at the big house and served two kinds of cake, sandwiches from her own homemade bread and boiled coffee with egg. This was for about 70 people and all food was made from scratch in those days.

The horses or sheep took care of the grass in the outer yard along with the chickens, and a reel type mower groomed the fenced in yard where the flowers were.

James eventually would settle for just one girl friend- Viola Swenson from the Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin area. She was the granddaughter of Astri Hoverud and she had captured James’ heart. Paul had set his cap for Clara Brunsvold and the two couples would take over the big house and the big farm and the rest of the family would be homesteaders in the available lands near the big bend in the Saskatchewan River in Canada.

One kind of help available on farms was “newcomers”. These were penniless immigrants who needed to learn the English language and the ways of life in America. Amund had a lot

of livestock and that made a lot of work all year long. Eigil Heimdal was one she remembered and also Osmund.

Joice had become the most developed community it would ever be. It was a half mile away with stockyard pens for shipping cattle and horses in and out. There were 2 elevators, a lumberyard, creamery, bank, milliners’ shop, 2 department stores, Kaasa’s and Bang and Gordon, also Abrahams, Evan’s hotel, a shoe shop but there was no church until 1915.

Concordia and Bristol were already active Lutheran churches and the Catholic Church was in the nearby community of Bristol.

This was a happy life for Mae and by now she had a boyfriend of her own, Ingebret  Kaasa. He was the younger brother of Henry who had married Mae’s sister Clara. This was not to last as Mae’s parents frowned on this friendship and insisted that she join the rest of the Dahlby homesteaders in Canada. This meant goodbye to more schooling, to all her friends at church and, of course, to her boyfriend.

Her new journey would take her to the true

prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada which was the homesteading land in 1910. Many Joice names appear on the pre-emption claims near Beechy. Treslans were early and Marie and Peter Dahlby joined them. There were Husos, Berges, Bothners, and Isaac and Amund Dahlby.

Just getting to this area was a challenge. The train went as far as Regina or Swift Current, but the quarter mile wide Saskatchewan River with its shifting currents and flood stages made the ferry crossings difficult or impossible. There was no bridge for many years, but this area looked the most like Iowa and they chose this place.

Mae liked her job helping in the Dahlby store and post office. These frontier farmers needed

• Mae and her homesteader husband Oscar Johnson in Outlook, SK, Dec. 26, 1915.

everything but they were apt to be short of cash, so credit was used and abused.

Most of the homesteaders were young couples or single fellows, so the Dahlby store and post office was a social place to get acquainted. The daylight in summer lasted from 5 am to 10 pm so the workday was long and wearying. The winter nights were long and isolation was a problem so there were many occasions for parties and social events.

Soon Mae became engaged and married young homesteader Oscar J. Johnson who had come from Northwood, North Dakota. Her sister Alpha and her mother helped make her wedding dress and who knows where she might have found some kind of flowers on December 26, 1915. For the photo done several days later in Outlook she actually went to a store, borrowed some artificial flowers, arranged them herself for the picture, and then returned them to the store.

Their simple home on the prairie was a prairie vista with a high view. Only in the coolies were there clumps of trees. Otherwise, all one could see was just prairie grassland.

There was a freedom from strict church pressures about behavior, so Mae had many happy times dancing at school house parties and in homes. Her young husband Oscar played a fiddle so he was important at the dances. The dancing and singing were in sharp contrast to the usual hard life and isolation of the frontier.

On January 6, 1917, on the Johnson Homestead, baby Komer Alton was born, with Grandmother Elsie Dahlby as midwife. There was no doctor for 40 miles, at Outlook, across the river. The baby’s baptism was recorded in a beautifully bound church record book for the Lutheran Church-to-be. They were surrounded by cousins and friends, Elsie and Alvin Bothner, Aaron and Evelyn Dahlby, and the

Treslan babies, too. This church was never built, especially since Amund and Elsie soon left for Iowa. However, a Mennonite church and Baptist church are still strong there.

When Komer was a year and a half old, his dad was digging an open well when a stone he had thrown out, rolled back into the well and struck him on the lower back, badly injuring his kidney.

Somehow, they transported this injured man to Outlook where the doctor’s diagnosis was negative. Mae cared for him in a boarding house under the doctor’s supervision until he died. He lies buried in the Outlook Cemetery just north of Outlook Academy. His grave on the high bluffs overlooks the deep valley of the Saskatchewan River.

Grandpa Andrew Johnson placed a fine

• The widow Mae and her son Komer. They moved back to Joice not long after the death of Oscar in a well digging accident.

marble marker which reads, “Oscar Julius Johnson, beloved husband of Mae Dahlby Johnson, December 26, 1895-June 25, 1918. Gone but not Forgotten”.

Mae had a caring community in the Beechy area, but her parents were back in Lake Mills, Iowa, so she chose to return to Iowa with her small boy. She worked at the telephone company with Anna Odden, Carl Ruby, Frank Streeter and other friends. She also clerked at Kaasa’s general store in Joice. This turned out to be a matrimonial bureau because one of the customers was widower Gilbert Tweeten.

On March 4, 1923, she married Gilbert at the new Dahlby house on East Main in Lake Mills. Ruth Ruby and Delpha Anderson were her attendants. It was a snowy, stormy time and the horses and sled were waiting to take the new bride home to her new family. Alvin was 8, Olive was 6 and Komer was 6. This home was built before 1900 and was much more comfortable than the prairie homesteader’s house, but another woman had furnished and planned it. Temperaments and personalities complicated this blended family, but life was busy and soon they had three more babies of their own.

In 1927, they extensively remodeled this older home. The Tweed Brothers built a full block basement with five rooms, a new pipe furnace, a Delco electrical system and a large cistern.

They enclosed the open porches to be useful rooms and they redid the entrances. The living room and dining room got new plaster and woodwork, so there was much work for everyone.

There is no medical history indicating where Mae might have contracted tuberculosis, but in the midst of the weariness she experienced with the remodeling and a new baby, she became ill. Dr. Russ of Rake diagnosed that she had tuberculosis and needed sanitarium care. He recommended the high altitude of Las Vegas,

New Mexico, where he had other patients at the sanatorium. Mae said she couldn’t be separated from her family like that, so Gilbert decided to rent out his farm and take Mae, the three children and a hired girl, Gena Almelien, to live in Las Vegas where Mae could have total rest and the equivalent of sanatorium care.

That January, 1930 journey was another one of Mae’s reluctant journeys, but it suggests to us Gilbert’s practical way of solving problems. Komer stayed in Lake Mills at Dahlbys to go to high school, and Alvin and Olive stayed with their Myre grandparents and went to Waldorf Academy.

Gilbert had a new 1930 Chevrolet 4-door

sedan for this long trip to a new world. Ruth was 5, Jim was 4, and Stanley was 9 months. Ruth remembers using Sterno fuel to warm the baby’s bottle also going down US 65 in southern Iowa and Missouri with one side paved and everyone driving on the paved side until they had to yield.

They rented a comfortable house with a big yard in Las Vegas within walking distance of a small, friendly Missouri Synod Church with a pastor named Wolfram from a family in Ventura, Iowa. At Christmas they used all the carols they didn’t get to use in Sunday School back home. This church was the touch of home and friendships that brought comfort and family to this lonely family.

Ruth had been in first grade at country school but couldn’t qualify by age, so the Tweetens paid tuition at the State Normal School kindergarten for her and for Jim later.

When school was out, they planned the summer of 1930 as a rest trip to North Dakota and to Beechy, Canada, to visit brothers and sisters. They travelled past Pike’s Peak and north to Beechy. The TB recovery plan in those days was absolute rest, fresh air, sun and quiet. So, the trip included a homemade

push-up camper trailer made by Gilbert from a Model T rear end. He used canvas over some buggy fold-up irons and more canvas for a transport cover. This was the sleeping quarters for Mae and Gilbert for two summers.

At Pike’s Peak Gilbert got permission to park his trailer in a goat pasture at Colorado Springs at the base of the Peak. In 1988 Ruth walked from the bus depot 2 or 3 miles west and was quite sure she was in this camp area again. She wanted to remember once again how it felt.

The family bought goat’s milk from the farmer.

The drive up Pikes’s Peak was a courageous trip in 1930 with only gravel roads and dust. The officer asked Gilbert if he had his chains and because he said he did he could go up even if it were snowing. However, when it was time to put the chains on, he realized the chains were in the camper back in the goat pasture and he could ascend no further. They turned around on the roadway. Wow! Ruth remembers that they bought a card in Colorado Springs which had blue columbine

flowers on the vast mountainside. “Places and places where none can find, God has planted the columbine”. Blue flowers are still her favorites.

When these travelers reached Rapid City, Gena Almelien, the hired girl, boarded the train for the return trip to Iowa. This older maiden later married in Iowa.

They parked their trailer for several weeks in Aunt Alpha’s yard near Beechy, Canada. There they had older cousins to help with the children and a caring sister to attend to Mother’s care. Most of the two months stay in Canada was spent in the house on the Johnson homestead, vacant now and for sale, but cropped by a neighboring farmer Smith.

It was a simple, peaceful life for three kids. Jim and Ruth learned to snare gophers with twine looped around the hole. They also experienced the gumbo roads that became impassible when it rained.

Last time Ruth and Stanford were in Canada they were served fresh Saskatoon berry pie. It brought back a berry memory from the summer of 1930. They planned an adventure to head for the big river and pick berries, and soon were 30 miles from the homestead gathering Saskatoon berries. But when it was time to go home no key. Be sure, Gilbert

searched thoroughly and even took the door panel off. No luck!

So, he made a big decision. He had to walk about 5 miles on the trail to where a hay crew was making hay. He remembered there was a vehicle there and he would try to hire the man to take him to the homestead where there was another key. Mother Mae and the three kids spent overnight in the car. That was life on the sparse prairie, to solve your own problems or ask for help.

It was the middle of the morning when they finally returned and home looked very good to

them. Gilbert was apt to be clever, so who knows why he didn’t bypass the switch.

The journey continued on to North Dakota for threshing season at John Tweeten’s farms. The Hittle family lived in the vacant house where Richard Tweeten lives now while Gilbert ran the separator, as the threshing machine was called. Mae cared for the children while Gilbert was gone.

When late August came, they still would thresh for another month, so Ruth went to school with cousin Kenneth. They were often in trouble for sliding down the fresh straw piles as they walked home from school.

By the time this family arrived back in New Mexico, to another rental house north of the school, Jim and Ruth had missed a month of school. Gilbert needed to find work as the income from the farm in Iowa was going down. First, he demonstrated Iowa built Maytag washing machines to women in their homes.

By March of 1931 he was working for a Mr. Sander’s road construction crew on Highway 66   going toward Santa Fe. Once he cut his wrist badly in a freak saw accident. He had to stay 5 nights at their camp so Mae was without a car until Saturday and Sunday. The family had to rely on friends like the Goetsch and LeRoy Wicks family who were friends at church who had come from Minnesota and Illinois.

When school ended, they moved the sleeper camper to the construction camp site along with a 12 x 12 tent with board sides and a floor for living and sleeping. They remembered that summer for its burros to ride and for the rattlesnakes. Gilbert was partner on a dynamite crew so he ran a pneumatic hammer a lot. In 1976, LeRoy Wicks, Sr. directed visitors to “Tweeten’s Hill”, outside of Las Vegas on Old Hiway 66, where Gilbert had used a lot of dynamite the summer of 1931.

By December 4, 1931 Mae and Gilbert had a

new baby, Luther Gilbert. This was probably not prescribed by Mae’s doctor. She had hired help and her letters to her sister in Canada describe his slow growth as a bottle baby. She wrote that their plan was to return to Iowa and see if her health deteriorated. If so, they would sell out in Iowa and move permanently to the climate of New Mexico high country.

By March, 1932, baby Luther and the rest of the family were back to Iowa, and the bank holiday, and the Depression. There was no hay, silage or grain for the cattle and hogs the renter had cared for. The journey to recovery was difficult for Gilbert, too.

Komer had made playhouse furniture, a cupboard, table and stools, for Ruth in the Dahlby shop for the homecoming. Now there were seven children under one roof with plenty of work for each and a mother who rested a lot. By November 26, 1932, another Tweeten baby, Maynard, arrived to complete this family of eight.

Elsie and Amund were faithful caregivers but they were seventy years old by now. Olive was expected to help a lot when not in school. By May, Olive and Alvin graduated from Lake Mills High School with Olive as Valedictorian.

The economy became Gilbert’s great concern as prices continued on the bottom and he had a large family to provide for.

In April, 1932, as the children walked by T. Haugens on the way to school they were invited into the porch to see the casket of unmarried Tilda Haugen who had died of tuberculosis. The heavy scent of roses is still a strong memory. She was a first cousin of Elmer Holtan. The children didn’t understand then, that without special recovery care, tuberculosis patients seldom recovered.  That was the trauma before antibiotics came along to control this dread disease.

Letters from Amund, Elsie, and Mae describe

well the plight of old and young in the 30’s. On September 23, 1935, the Tweeten barn burned to the ground. Escaping sparks from the neighbor’s silo-filling tractor pulled up too close to the haymow probably caused the fire.

They had invested the money from Mae’s Canada homestead in the Hovland 80 acres adjacent to the Tweeten farm. It had a full set of buildings and so the cows were moved to this barn where they were milked while the Levorson crew was building the new, modern round roof barn. They had saved the horses in the barn at the time of the fire, too, so no livestock was lost.

For about 10 years a hired man and his family lived in this Hovland house. Better days were coming for Gilbert as his operation expanded and Mae’s health improved. She always rested and used hired help to do her painting and decorating.

Komer, Olive and Alvin went their separate ways into new experiences and homes of their own. Ruth, Jim and Stanley finished country

school at Dahlen, Mt. Valley #1 and graduated from Joice High School, where they had Dahlby cousins living on three sides of town.

Luther and Maynard began grade school in Lake Mills in their 6th and 5th grades and graduated from Lake Mills High School. Jim, Stanley, Luther and Maynard spent time in military service and so did their brother in-law, Stanford Holtan.

A new and pleasant era began when Jim and Stanley began farming on the home farm and on the Anonson place. Gilbert and Mae could travel extensively during the winter months and whenever they wished. Mrs. Bergland stayed with the four boys in the winter of 1949 and Jim married his own cook by April 3.

In 1955 they built a new home, Mae’s first new house, on South Grant Street in Lake Mills.

They soon bought everything new in it, except one bedroom set. She had no affection for “old” things and always loved new cars and new clothes.

Stanley and Bess lived on the Tweeten farm for one year and in 1956 Maynard and Marilyn became the residents and Stanley and Bess moved to the Kensett farm.

Life in Lake Mills revolved around the Dahlby couples getting together for birthdays, holidays and relatives who came visiting from a distance. There were baptisms and confirmations for the grandchildren and later, many weddings, which pleased her very much.

Her family was her concern and her pleasure. She was not an easy communicator in person and will be remembered for the alternative­ her letters.

Gilbert was a good vacation partner.  They took trips to California and Florida in their later years. He was nine years older than she so social security was new and very good to them.

When Parkinson disease was diagnosed for Gilbert, it progressed slowly, but it complicated their lives. He had never ridden with her doing the driving, but he finally had to. She cared for him at home until the last week he lived, and he died on June 14, 1970, almost 83 years old.

Mae continued to drive to Church Women’s (WMF) conventions of the St. Ansgar Circuit and later to the ALCW Conventions of the Mason City Conference. She loved to wear nice hats to those day-long events in the fall and spring. She preferred to be a participant and seldom had an office. She was very faithful to her circle and prepared her lessons well.

She taught Sunday School for 25 years, along with Gilbert who at times was the Sunday School Superintendent at Winnebago Lutheran Church. She was faithful in everything she did but was careful not to stretch herself too far.

Apple pie, cookies in the jar, buns, Lawrence Welk, and Flinch parties would describe her 28 years in her house on Grant Street.

It is ironic that she followed all of her brothers and sisters to their graves when they had said of her, “She will never come back from New Mexico alive”. She lived to be 92 years and 10 months old, longer than any other Dahlbys or in-laws lived. She practiced good health habits which she learned in her recovery times in  the thirties. Maybe it was being the little girl in a big family that taught her to get what she wanted, or try to. She often tried to be a

match-maker and had great fun over that.

During more than six years at the Lake Mills Retirement Home she received very good care and company. She outlived nearly all her neighbors and friends, and she had faithful and frequent visitors from her three generations family. The residents remember how often her family came to visit her and that children sometimes came with carts or boxes full of kittens, puppies or bunnies to visit her and entertain all of them.

Mae’s journey is the most recent of the generations written in this book. She will be remembered for her pretty, well-kept hair and clothing, her love of nice, new things, for boat rides and Liberace. Television came in her generation and she had a special list of favorites. In her last days she often asked for a ride back home to Joice. There she would find her mother, her father and the brothers she loved so much. God has blessed us through the pain and the joys of this matriarch of the 1900’s. Our journey is better because she went before us.