Oral history as related by Estella Jacobsen to Nina B. Ellsworth on September 30, 1996. Estella Jacobsen is a slender, regal lady of the Castle Rock prairie. This is her story.
When my father-in-law Henry Jacobsen was only eleven years old, he was a stowaway on a ship and came to New York harbor. He and another little boy had run away from home in Hamburg, Germany. In New York he spent some time begging on the streets and was taken to a boys` home and kept there for a time. When he was sixteen years old, a ranch lady from Nebraska that needed help took him in. He spent two or three years on this ranch, then he got a job as a salesman for a confectionery store. He sold candy and tobacco. When he was about twenty-five he worked in Chicago, Illinois and he sang in a fifty piece church choir. He had a beautiful singing voice! My mother-in-law Mabel Jacobsen was reared in St. Josephs, Missouri. She went to be a bridesmaid at the cousin`s wedding, and they got acquainted. A couple years in 1905 they were married. In 1919 they homesteaded at Castle Rock, seventeen miles north of Newell, S.D. In 1938 I married Francis Jacobsen, their son. Francis` parents stayed there until they passed away.
My father and mother, Edwin and Ella Parks, had a ranch they homesteaded in 1910. I was born on the ranch with no attendant, just my mother and father. There were eleven of us kids. My oldest sister was the only one who was born in a hospital. The rest of us were all born at home. My mother died of heart problems and flu when I was nine years old. My mother was just a housewife, of course, with eleven children she was a busy lady. My mother died on my older sister`s eleventh birthday. We just grew up having to be more or less independent. I lived there until I married in 1938. I was 19 years old. That was considered young to be married, but not extremely so. I probably was not mature enough.
My mother`s family name is Eliot. Not any of their people moved back here. My parents were the only ones who came and stayed.
Homesteading had to have been hard for a lot of people. When they came to this land, there wasn`t anything on it. My dad`s three brothers and one sister did come and homesteaded. They didn`t last but maybe three years. They couldn`t hack it. In Castle Rock, there wasn`t even as much as a tree, so you can imagine that it was tough sledding. I don`t know how they did it. My father-in-law came in 1909 to locate, to file on this claim of a hundred and sixty acres. I think he came in October of 1909. The following spring, he came to start his homesteading days. He landed at Belle Fourche and he bought a team and a wagon to start hauling his stuff out to build a homestead shack. He brought this load of lumber out, unloaded it, and went back to Belle Fourche. It took him a long time because it was in the spring of the year-- it was muddy . . . no roads . . . it was all just across prairie. I remember it took him two or three days to make the trip one way, and then unload and come back again for the second load. When he came back with the second load, somebody had come and loaded his first load up and took it. That was gone. It was tough . . . experiences like that.
In 1936 we had a terrible drought. The Jacobsens had a band of sheep and they had to have pasture. Their pasture land, grasshoppers were terrible that year, besides some kind of beetles, they were worse than Junebugs. The beetles were big, anyway they just cleaned up the grass. It was also so dry, of course. That country is dependent upon reservoirs for water for their livestock. The reservoirs went dry, so they had to find pasture for their livestock. There was Indian reservation land, it had adequate feed on it. The Cheyenne River flowed past the ranch that they rented. They were there with the sheep for about a year and a half. During that time, that`s where I met my husband, Francis Jacobsen. We married three years later. As soon as we were married in 1938, we went out to Castle Rock. I stayed there until October of 1974.
The things children do for activities have changed immensely. We used to play Annie Over in school. We played baseball, and of course, fox and goose. I don`t remember all of them. In Annie Over, we threw the ball over the school, somebody would have to be on the other side to catch it. That`s what all country kids played. Of course, we had swings and teeter totters. We had what they called Young Citizens League, they don`t have that anymore. We learned about our flag. We had a flag salute every day. We put the flag up and we took the flag down, that was a ritual thing. You did that every day.
We didn`t have a car or any motorized vehicle until I was 16 years old. That was when we got our first vehicle. That was something else. It was eight or ten years old before we bought it. Of course, we were poor and we couldn`t afford any better. We kids were kind of fortunate in a way. At that time the kids didn`t drive vehicles, it was their parents who did. We would be invited to accompany our neighbor kids to things, and we would probably have to walk to their house. It might have been two or three miles from our home to walk to where we could catch a ride with them. Then if it was an evening thing then we would probably come back to their home and stay the night with them and then come home the following day. Either that or they`d take us all the way home.
Grandpa Jacobsen was the Secretary-Treasurer to the Coyote Association. They exterminated as many coyotes as they could because of the way coyotes were killing off farm animals. Clyde Ice had his plane out there. This was during the war, World War II. You could hardly buy gasoline. You couldn`t buy tires. They needed these things for the war effort, you had to have a very good reason to be using this stuff. People were just desperate for decent tires. You couldn`t buy good rubber tires. It was not even possible. Anyway, Clyde Ice landed his plane. He had killed some coyotes . . . they would pay him so much per head.
My first airplane ride was with Clyde Ice. Clyde Ice was an old well-known pilot in this area. He had been a bomber pilot. It was 1944, we were snowed in . . . we had about two and a half feet of level snow. The snow was so deep that it would play a horse out to get through it. There was no way to get around except with a caterpillar tractor.
My little girl was two and a half years old. RosaLee, her cousin, came bounding over to our house, it wasn`t very far. When she came through the door, she didn`t realize it but my daughter had put her little hand on the door frame. When she shut the door, she caught my daughter`s finger, cut the end of the finger off. All that was left was hanging . . . little threads of flesh. Here we were snowed in. We couldn`t get out. This happened, around nine thirty in the morning, just as Clyde Ice landed. My father-in-law said, ``Clyde, could you fly my little granddaughter to the doctor?`` ``Why sure,`` Clyde said, ``Get her over here.`` That was my first time getting on an airplane. It was one of the little Piper Cub planes, very small. Of course you didn`t fly very fast, nor did you fly very high. It was an interesting thing because it was white everywhere. You could barely see the tops of the posts and fence lines. Everything just looked so white. He flew us to the airport he managed at Spearfish. He had a crew of men there and he asked one of them if they would take us to the doctor. Doctor Lyle Hare was the doctor. Dr. Hare said it was a clean wound. It didn`t look clean because it was all bloody. It quit bleeding. He poured dry sulfa, that is an antiseptic, I guess. Anyway, it prevented her from getting infection. It healed up beautifully. There was just very little scar.
We were snowed in for many days. No mail service. That was the one thing, we still had back then. Six days a week we got mail. We have been lucky to have had that. The Castle Rock post office closed in 1972.
Both of my husbands died. I was married a second time in 1978. Micky Fox was my second husband. He also was a rancher out there, only his ranch was cattle. Both them died of heart very suddenly (She held both of her hands to her heart). My first husband, Francis Jacobsen died while working with the sheep. He was under a lot of stress because we had terrible weather. They were trying to move ewes and lambs and so on. It was stormy. It was a really stressful time.