Those first years of Euro-American settlement in Aurora County quickly changed the broad, rolling prairie into bustling towns, small hamlets, and hundreds of working farms. By 1882, stagecoach mail routes, originating in Plankinton, delivered mail to scattered communities as far as fifty-five miles away. On March 31, 1883, the Dakota Free Press newspaper, reporting on the flurry of newcomer activity, noted, “emigrants are coming into Aurora County at a booming rate. About 30 carloads of emigrants movables and stock arrive daily.”
Between 1880 and 1885, the population jumped from 69 people to 5,950, and the farms numbered 1,278. The county boasted two growing towns, five banks, six newspapers, seventy-two schools, many churches, and numerous business establishments. Providing legal services during the Dakota Boom, twenty-eight attorneys practiced law in the county. By 1887, the federal government had authorized post offices in the two towns of Plankinton and White Lake and the seven hopeful communities of Belford, Canty, Gilbert, Parsons, Flynn, Robey and Wyatt. The future looked bright and prosperous.
Then came the bust that ended the euphoria of growth and prosperity.
Once the land was claimed and the houses and barns built, the growth ceased. Many people had come only to acquire land and then sell it as quickly as possible. Even those who came with intentions to stay found themselves driven out by harsh conditions caused by extreme weather events and a protracted drought, especially severe in the James River Valley. Starting in 1885 and lasting until the rains returned in 1896, the distress was most severe in 1889 and 1894. For too many people, hope could not survive the lack of rain, a terrifying and deadly blizzard in 1888, a massive prairie fire in 1889 that swept west to east across the county, and the frequent winds and hailstorms that destroyed homes and crops and, sometimes, even lives.
Farm prices fell, debts went unpaid, and banks failed. Speculators swooped in when mortgage foreclosures became common and purchased a significant amount of property. Land deeds sold at public auction transferred title on 278 pieces of property in the six years starting in 1889, with 65 sales in 1891 and 64 in 1892. By 1895, the number of sheriff sales had dropped to only five during the entire year. As the long drought persisted, the population evaporated, falling 35 percent in ten years, from 5,950 to 3,854. By 1900, the exodus had removed 47 percent of all those counted a decade earlier in three of the northern townships, Bristol, Cooper, and Pleasant Valley. Aurora County was not alone in its troubles. Many of the counties lying in the James River basin lost significant population and, with so many abandoned farms, the amount of land under cultivation fell substantially.
The hard times hit Isabella Todd Diehl, mother of three young children, in the summer of 1887. Lightning killed her husband Martin during a terrible hailstorm that also destroyed the entire crop on their homestead in Hopper Township. Soon after those tragedies, Martin’s relatives demanded immediate payment of a $300 loan. Diehl’s plea for help, sent to her widowed sister in Scotland, brought Jean Todd, a trained nurse, and her eight-year-old daughter, Ella, to Dakota Territory on a bitterly cold day in December of that same year.
In their memoirs, Jean Todd Saville and Ella Todd Wilson depicted the aftermath of the exodus on the area: “Little claim shacks dotted the landscape, many of them empty, as the owners had ‘proved up’ and left and their patches of broken land was growing up to fireseed, a weed.” Saville described the poverty and despair of that time in Aurora County, “It was a sifting time for people, only those who had faith and backbone (and those who couldn’t leave) stayed. Prairie schooners, with a few thin horses and cows following, were a common sight. Food was a must but clothing was worn to the last patchable shred, and undergarments were often made of flour sacks and the useable parts of worn garments were often pieced together for their children.”
One of those who tried to outlast the drought, but finally gave up, was Rachel Gibbs’ husband, George. The couple and their three children had been among the first to arrive by covered wagon in the spring of 1880, when Gibbs was three months pregnant. The harvest was good for about six years, even though hail destroyed their crops a few times. In his memoirs, George Gibbs wrote, “then the drought set in and for ten years it was nip and tuck to live.” Gibbs packed up her household after a six-day hot wind ruined much of the crop in July of 1895, and her husband “got discouraged and concluded to pull out and leave the Dakota country.”
Those who remained could only pray the rains would return before they too abandoned their dreams and left in despair.
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It Happened Right Here: Boom and Bust, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, May 26, 2016. Updated.
Note 1: The location of the country post offices were as follows: Belford and Parsons: Belford Township; Canty: Center; Gilbert and Robey: Washington; Flynn: Crystal Lake; Wyatt: Patten. Other Post Offices, defunct by 1887, had been established in Dudley, Firesteel and Pleasant Lake Townships.
Note 2: The stories of the Todd women, written by Ella Todd Wilson, are available at the South Dakota Historical Society in Pierre, SD, in the Aurora County folder of the Pioneer Daughters Collection, collected by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the 1940s.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 