M.L. Berg

(First in a two-part series)

In the summer of 1867, Fort Stevenson was built along the banks of the Missouri River, and Fort Totten was built along the shores of Devils Lake. Once built, they were manned by companies of the 22nd Infantry.

There were two companies at Fort Stevenson and three companies at Fort Totten. The officer in charge of all five companies – as well as five more companies stationed at Fort Buford – was Colonel Regis de Trobriand, whose headquarters were at Fort Stevenson. He was in charge at Fort Stevenson from August 1867 until April or May 1869, when he was assigned to Fort Sully, Montana Territory.

The route between Fort Stevenson and Fort Totten was often used to deliver mail. The various mail carriers could be Native American scouts, U.S. Army personnel, or men hired for the work by private contractors who were paid by the federal government for this service. One of these early military mail contractors was Charles Ruffee, who resided in Minnesota. Another military mail contractor was Edwin Winston, who lived at Fort Stevenson in 1880 with his wife Mattie and three other people.

The route between the two forts covered 120 miles. It was broken up into five stages, with crude shelters or cabins built at the end of each stage for the benefit of the carriers.

In general, carriers from each fort would start out, hoping to meet the others at a half-way point, exchange their loads of mail and return to their starting points.

The first stage east of Fort Stevenson ended at Strawberry Lake. Not far northeast of Strawberry Lake lay the Dog Den region. Colonel de Trobriand described it as “a bad place to travel across any time. There the terrain is broken by sharp hills and narrow ravines, very favorable to ambuscades” (on page 138 in “Military Life in Dakota” (Lincoln and London, 1951).

Joseph Henry Taylor, who resided in McLean County most of the time from 1872 until his death in April 1908, described the wider geography there in an article he wrote in the 1890s titled “Fort Totten Trail.” He called Dog Den “a spur of the Coteau du Prairie, the great divide or grass covered mountains that cross the two Dakotas beginning at Bijou Hills in South Dakota, extending northwestward until lost in the surface depressions of the lower Saskatchewan valley.”

Joseph Taylor also cited a Native American legend as to the origin of the Dog Den name.

“Over among the deep ravines and canons of the north side, the mysterious ghost dogs snarled and growled at the cavern’s mouth that led deep down through earthy crust to that underground land with ever-green pastures.” The dogs were, then, spirits, guardians of a passageway linking humans with a subterranean land of plenty.

Taylor added, “The Dog Den had long been a sacred ground and place of mystery to the Indian tribes who lived within the northern buffalo range.” (These quotes are all found on page 261 of the second edition of Taylor’s “Sketches of Frontier and Indian Life on the Upper Missouri & Great Plains,” published in Washburn in 1895. The first edition of this book had been published in Pennsylvania, Taylor’s home state, in 1889. A third edition was published in Bismarck in 1897. The first edition had 26 sketches, the second edition had 28 sketches, and the third edition, 30 sketches.)

But as Colonel de Trobriand had pointed out, the Dog Den was hardly a safe place to pass through. As a result, an alternative stage was added in September or October, 1867, that circumvented the Dog Den area. This alternative was a stage ending at at some point in the lower Mouse River Valley 60 miles from Fort Stevenson.

The Mouse River Valley route was used at least until 1868. (See De Trobriand, “Military Life in Dakota,” pages 139 and 200.) This would also have been the earliest mail route to enter the Mouse River region, even though it was but a segment in a military mail route, rather than a route designed to serve pioneer settlers on the frontier.

The beginnings of mail service in the Mouse River region took place in the early 1880s. When carriers entered the Mouse River region in the 1860s the counties of Stevens and McHenry had not yet been established. Stevens County and McHenry County were created in January 1873.

McHenry County was named for James Edward McHenry. He was a co-founder of the town of Vermillion, and he had served during the fifth territorial legislature from Dec. 5, 1865, to Jan. 12, 1866.

Stevens County was probably named for Owen F. Stevens, a doctor who resided in Union County in southern Dakota Territory. Stevens had served in four different sessions of the territorial legislature – the fifth, the sixth, the tenth and the eleventh – spanning nearly a decade from December 1865 to January 1875.

As originally created in 1873, Stevens County contained the Fort Berthold Reservation, along with Fort Berthold and Fort Stevenson. In today’s terms, it extended in a line of townships that included Berthold as part of its northern border, while its southern border included the line of townships just to the south of Underwood. Its eastern border was formed by a column of townships that included Sawyer and Benedict, and its western border included Makoti. So, at first, Stevens County was impressively large.

But the territorial and the state legislatures gradually picked Stevens County apart, reassigning its townships to other counties. In April, 1885, its northern 28 townships made up the lion’s share of Ward County’s original 30 townships. Ward County acquired even more townships from Stevens County in 1890, as did McLean County, which had acquired several Stevens County townships earlier, in 1883. (Ward County had also been named for a man who served in the territorial legislature. This was Mark Ward, who sat in the sixteenth session from January to March 1885, and who represented Kimball in southern Dakota.)

Over time, Stevens County ceased to exist due to these many reallocations of its townships by the Dakota Territory legislature and then by the North Dakota state legislature.

The official federal censuses of population illustrate the demise of Stevens County in a nutshell. In 1880, 247 were counted; in 1885, just 55; and in its last census, that of 1890, only 16 people remained.

Berg, of Minot, enjoys researching Minot’s history.