M.L. Berg

Edmund Hackett was still living in McHenry County in 1884. He had been a founder of Villard, which he named for a railroad president. He had come to the Mouse River Valley for the first time in the winter of 1881 and 1882 to survey a possible railroad route from Bismarck to the Turtle Mountains. The name proposed for this company was the Bismarck, Mouse River, Turtle Mountain & Manitoba Railroad. Tracks never were laid for it.

Before his move to McHenry County, Hackett was a carpenter living in Bismarck, where he settled in 1872. He was appointed Mayor of Bismarck for two months in 1875. He was still listed as a carpenter in the 1880 census of Bismarck.

At that time, his wife was Bridget, and they were both 46 years old. They were living with their children: sons Edmund, Jr. and John, and daughter Katherine.

The man who conducted the 1880 census of Bismarck was a lawyer named Darius Preston. Preston would later move to Ward County to become the first editor of the Burlington Reporter in April, 1886 and the first Minot city attorney in August, 1887. Darius practiced law in Minot in a law office on the west side of what is now First Street Southwest, but was then known as Reishus Street. Darius Preston passed away in Minot on Wednesday, April 17, 1889.

By the fall of 1884, Edmund Hackett had married for a second time, to Leah Youngs, who was half his age. (In October, 1884, Hackett had become a McHenry County commissioner, whose duty it was to arrange for a vote on the formal organization of the county in February, 1885.) Leah gave birth to their child that fall, while they were living in the Newport area, which was downstream from Villard and close to the future site of Towner.

Matters came to a head in the Hackett household early in December, 1884. The Devils Lake Inter-Ocean newspaper ran this startling account on its front page on December 13, 1884:

(Leah) claims that she overheard the sheriff (Michael McClear) and her stepson (Edmund Hackett, Jr.) planning to assassinate her, and when she heard them coming to her room, she fled to the house of a neighbor, leaving her five-months old babe behind. Arriving at her neighbor’s house, she related her strange experience, and explained, as a reason for the conduct of the two men, the fact that they had recently stolen and killed a calf.

Another strange feature of the proceedings is that she also charged her husband with participation in the calf killing and in proof of her story, she told where the hide of the calf was buried. The next day, her neighbor went to the spot indicated by her, and there, sure enough, found the hide.

While the excitement was at its height, the commissioner returned home, and ascertaining the extent of the social explosion, it is said he at once resigned his position as commissioner, and, together with his son and the sheriff, quit the country. The woman claims that the sheriff and her stepson had prepared a grave in the stable in which they proposed to bury her. For this and other reasons, Leah fled to Benson County for safety. Benson County newspapers reported that Leah had considered herself “little better than a slave on the Mouse River last summer, being compelled to do housework and chores for half a dozen men.” She was obviously distraught, when she arrived in Minnewaukan.

Soon after arriving there, she cut her throat with a butcher knife in the dining room of the Trafton hotel. She received medical treatment. It seems that her mind never did recover from this suicide attempt, and she continued to have “bad spells.”

By January 10, 1885, she was declared insane and taken to the asylum in Jamestown. (The information from the Benson County newspapers is found on page 48 of the Benson County centennial book ‘Pioneers and Progress: Minnewaukan, N.D., and Countryside’ (Altona, Manitoba, 1983).)

Unfortunately, matters turned out badly for Leah. She returned to Minnewaukan, possibly to nurse her child, who was six or seven months old. After suffering for fifty-five days, Leah passed away on Thursday, February 5. The Benson County census of 1885 had a special schedule for deaths that had occurred during the previous year. Leah’s cause of death was simply summed up in two words “slit throat.” The physician who had attended her was United States Army Dr. W. B. Davis. Benson County papers wrote that after her death that “J. K. Salisbury has taken Mr. Hackett’s child, the father went to Devils Lake.”

After arriving in Devils Lake, Edmund told people there that Leah’s death was the result of inflammation of the lungs caused by inhaling cold air through the self-inflicted wound in the throat, the wound refusing to heal. (See the item “Death of Mrs. Hackett” on the front page of the Devils Lake Inter-Ocean paper for February 14, 1885.) Edmund Hackett, Sr. died twenty years later at Kalispell, Montana, on October 7,1905.

Edmund, Jr., had preceded his father in death, dying at Kalispell eleven months earlier, on November 11, 1904. (It seems likely that Edmund, Jr. and Michael McClear never did go back to McHenry County, after Leah had reported their cattle rustling in 1884.)

Minnewaukan was more than a place of refuge for Leah Youngs Hackett. It was the seat of a district court embracing eight counties. This judicial district was named the Sixth Subdistrict of the Eighth Judicial District. It included, going from east to west, Benson, DeSmet. McHenry and Ward Counties, as well as Eddy and Wells Counties to the south and Rolette and Bottineau Counties to the north. District court cases filed in Ward and McHenry Counties were tried in Minnewaukan until March of 1887.

To be continued …

M.L. Berg of Minot enjoys researching local history.