by Helen Herrett
This is the story of something that happened sixty-three years ago. I was six years old, so the things that I`m telling you about didn`t necessarily take place just this way, but it`s how I remember them. Then, too, we talked about the flood for so many years that my memories have blended in with the stories told and retold in the evenings when neighbors dropped in or relatives came to visit.
Our Big Flood happened in the spring of 1924. This was about a year after my parents, Lou and Nellie Lawson had sold the homestead and moved, with their three daughters, Helen, Betty, and Dorothy, to a ranch they had bought on the Belle Fourche River seven miles west of town so that their children could go to school.
The ranch building on the new place was very close to the river. I remember that my parents worried about this, afraid that the children might fall into the water and drown. My mother watched us closely and, as the oldest, I had orders to keep the little ones away from the river.
We had a lot of snow that first winter, especially upstream from Belle Fourche. Instead of having a chance to go off slowly, a warm rain fell in Bear Lodge, causing the snow there to melt all at once and the river to rise very quickly.
At first the water rose high within its banks. Instead of flowing sleepily along it began rolling very fast. Instead of rippling peacefully, it roared. Dead trees fell and were carried along. The ice broke up and huge chunks joined the torrent. The water was dirty, full of trash and soil from upstream, foaming, dangerous. Soon it rose so high that it left the banks and spread out on the lowlands. At first it stood there. Then as more and more pushed from behind it began to flow across the flats. No matter which way we looked, all we could see was water, around the house, the barns, covering the road, and the paths to the farm buildings.
But my parents had been busy, doing all they could to be prepared.
Knowing my mother, I imagined she baked a huge batch of bread, churned butter, made cookies and cakes, carried potatoes and jars of vegetables, fruit and meat from the root cellar. She always believed that the people under her roof should be well fed. Then I`m sure she took some of the family treasures upstairs to keep them from the water and saw everybody had clean clothes in case we had to leave in a hurry.
The hen house was close to the river-bank so they caught all the chickens, tied each one`s feet together, put them in a wagon and moved them to a nearby hilltop. That wagon became home to the old hens until it was safe to bring them down again.
One thing I especially remember was moving the pigs. My father had hired a man, Steve Wagner, and a good neighbor who came down to help. They decided to put the old sows and their babies into the hay-mow of the big old barn that in those days held many of the animals. I`m sure it was a job. They boosted the mothers or coaxed them to climb the stairs after their piglets until they had all but one sow high and dry. This one evidently had a mind of her own. She refused to go with the others and as the barnyard was filling up fast with water she climbed to the top of a manure pile near the barn and waited out the flood.
In those days, most farmers milked several cows. Milk, cream and butter were needed for the family. The whole milk was separated into cream and skim milk, the extra cream was sold to help pay for the groceries, the skim milk was mostly left to sour, then made into cottage cheese of fed to the pigs and chickens.
The cows had to be milked and the calves fed morning and night even if there was water everywhere. So my dad and Steve would get on saddle horses, go out and feed everything and bring back enough milk for the family. It must have been hard, to carry a pail, watch out for floating debris, and not spill too much on the way.
I remember that once Steve`s horse stepped into a hole and the water was so deep that the horse had to swim.
The cows mostly stayed in the barn but had to go outside for water. Instead of sticking their noses out and drinking from the water that flowing past, they would wade out to the tank where they were used to drinking, fill up and run back to shelter, not knowing they couldn`t even see the tank because the flood waters were flowing over the top of it.
The teacher boarded at out house and after the water got so high that it was hard to get out, my dad took her and me to stay with some neighbors, the Barbers, who lived a little farther from the river, so that we could go to school as usual. I can`t remember being afraid, excited about it, yes, but I didn`t have sense enough to be scared. It was fun to go visiting, to play with other kids that I saw every day at school, to sleep upstairs in the wild log house. In fact, I think I cried when I had to go home. Betty has memories of being there to.
Everyone else was frantic. My grandmother heard that a big white house had floated down the river, caught on a bridge in Belle Fourche and had to be dynamited. Of course the phone lines were out and she had no way of knowing that it wasn`t ours.
The water rose until it was nearly even with the floorboards on the front porch which were just a little lower than those in the house, then, inch by inch, it began to fall.
It must have been an unbelievably hard job to clean up the mess left by the flood, but finally, the chickens and pigs were brought back to their homes, the family could sleep at night without keeping a watch on the river, the ruined fences were mended, a new cellar built to take the place of the old one that had been washed out.
I`m sure that neighbors helped all they could because in those days that was what being a neighbor meant.
Two good things came out of this. The water that flowed across the river bottoms brought topsoil from the hills and the lowland farmers got the best crop of hay they had in years.
Another was that the river was too impatient to follow the gently curving bend where the farm building stood so it cut a new channel that was straighter and far enough from the house that my mother didn`t think about the children playing too close to the water. She found lots of other ways to worry them but that was one problem that was solved for good, though it took a flood to do it.