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Editorial Note: Part one of a two-part series
The month of October 1895 was a busy one on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes were engaged in lining up enough wagons to haul their annual rations back to Fort Berthold from Minot, where railroads were delivering their rations in bulk at that time. The rations would then be divided up every week for the various families, who would be given weekly ration cards for this purpose.
Forty-eight wagons were eventually mustered together to haul these government supplies back to Fort Berthold. They pulled into Minot in the first half of October, and the people who had come up from Fort Berthold would sometimes set up temporary accommodations on the hillsides just outside town. Many photos were taken of these temporary tent encampments at various times in the 1890s.
Ernest Tompkins was the son of Allan Tompkins and Evangeline Case Tompkins. He was born and raised in Minot. Years later, Tompkins described another location chosen for these Native American bivouacs. In a memoir he finished typing out in 1953, Tompkins wrote, "When the Indians came to Minot just a while before the food and other merchandise that the Government gave them would arrive, they camped in what was known as Kullass (or Kulaas, for Tosten Kulaas) Coulee, which extended south of the Post Office. The people used to go up there and in looking over their horses would try to swap them out of their horses, or buy them. They always sold their horses cheap. They would be in town two or three weeks before the day that the merchandise would arrive."
In 1953, the Minot Post Office was on First Street SW, where the federal building is now. Tompkins' quote is from page ten of his typed memoir titled "These are notes of the early days at Minot as I remember them." His memoir runs to thirty pages, and he signed his name - Ernest Minot Tompkins - at the end of his memoir and dated it March 5, 1953.
One Minot resident who had had many business dealings with members of the Three Affiliated Tribes was John Charlebois. He had arrived in town in 1886.
By 1895, he was installed in his blacksmith shop on the west side of what was then named Ramstad Street (and later renamed First Street) one block east of Main Street. In 1895, it was situated at the southwest corner of Ramstad Street and Second Street (and now First Street and First Avenue SE).
Charlebois recalled that "During the summer months, there were a great many Indians who came to Minot to purchase supplies. Some of those Indians were the best friends I ever had."
Both John Charlebois and his wife Emilda Levitt, or Emilda Le Vitre, were born in Quebec, although they were not married in Quebec, but rather in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Another early Minot resident who hailed from Quebec was John Maloney. He was the oldest of eleven siblings. Like John Charlebois, Maloney had purchased property and had started a business in Minot in the 1880s. Maloney purchased lots on both sides of Main Street between Central Avenue (then named First Street) and the railroad tracks of the Manitoba Road, as the Great Northern Railroad was then called.
On the west side of Main Street, Maloney and Edward Kelley opened one of the first dozen licensed saloons in town. All twelve saloons were found on the west side of Main Street. Maloney and Kelley were one of five saloons on the same block.
To their immediate south, the second block had three saloons; the remaining four saloons were on the third block on that side of the street. Their liquor licenses were issued by the Minot City Council from October 3 to October 27, 1887. Maloney and Kelley acquired their license on October 27. They apparently did not run a saloon in the following year, since no license was issued to them.
When Kelley was given a liquor license in 1889, his partner was William Manning, not John Maloney.
Maloney and Kelley had signed a contract to purchase their lot in March1887 for $300. They made four payments totaling $150 in 1887. But then their payments stopped, and that lot must have reverted to the Northwest Land Company, which was the company selling lots in Minot's original townsite.
Kelley resumed payments on the lot in 1889 and made his final payment on October 17,1891.
The ending cost of the lot was $300 plus $76.18 in interest, according to two entries in the ledger kept by the townsite company. The two ledger entries are found on pages 145 and 219 in the "Journal, Northwest Land Company, July 1886-1893."
It is Volume 35 in Box 72 in the Solomon G. Comstock Papers, 1872-1998, S248/255. The Solomon Comstock Papers are housed at the Northwest Minnesota Historical Center in the Livingston Lord Library on the campus of Minnesota State University Moorhead.
Maloney purchased a lot directly across from Kelley's saloon on the east side of Main Street in May, 1888 for $500 from Edward Reynolds Keplinger. Keplinger, or Kaplinger, had taken out a contract to buy the lot for $275. He made a total of four payments from August 1887 through May 1888, amounting to $297, and selling it to Maloney three weeks after having made his final payment on the lot. Keplinger had been doing business there as Keplinger & Son. His son's name was Edward William Keplinger.
Keplinger's payments are listed on page 173 in the aforementioned "Journal."
John Maloney was joined in North Dakota by three of his sisters. His sisters were: (1) Mary Jane Maloney Nash, who was born in Quebec in 1862; she was married to Phil Nash when she moved to Minot, probably in 1891; (2) Esther Matilda Maloney, who was born in Quebec in 1876 and who was teaching in Ward County by early 1894; and (3) Clara Louise Maloney, who was also born in Quebec in 1876. Esther would later marry Mark Murphy, a well-known White Earth rancher. Clara would later marry Thomas Hagan from Bottineau County. (For Esther's teaching career in Ward County, see page four of the Minot Journal for Friday, February 16, 1894, and page four of the Ward County Reporter for Friday, September 21, 1894.)
To be continued …