By Lee Epps
“They were warm and comfortable as fine a house as anyone needed. Just a dandy place to live,” replied a Houston County man (born in 1855) when asked, “What was it like to live in a log house?” Then his wife chimed in, “They were just wonderful, weren’t they? Small, dark, cramped and crowded with rough walls and floors. And let me tell you, they were especially wonderful if you enjoyed an everyday battle with bedbugs.”
Bedbugs were wingless, bloodsuckers that tormented southeast Minnesota pioneers and their homes for generations. If by extended efforts a residence was freed from bedbugs, another infestation “was almost as certain as the next winter,” wrote Houston County historian Sumner Sheldon, noting bedbugs traveled from house to house in the clothing of travelers.
According to a popular song lyric from the 1920s:
“Oh, it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more;
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’
But how in the world can the old folks tell
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’
The butterfly flits on wings of gold and the June bug wings of flame,
The bedbug has no wings at all, but it gets there just the same.”
Since bedbugs spent daylight hours in dark cracks or crevices in bedroom floors and walls, it was insect paradise in log cabins with all the “cracks, crannies, bits of loosened bark and mortar, scars and scabs by scarfing ax, skips and chips by broad ax, and especially the checks, chinks and fissures of drying, shrinking timbers.” Log home days predated contact insecticides.
Plastered walls were decorated with Picasso-like blotches of splattered pioneer plasma when unfortunate bedbugs met their demise when swatted during early daylight by the hand of one on whom they had dined during the darkness.
It was often stated that bedbugs had an odor. But the stink might have emanated from the digested blood which adorned the walls after swatting.
Sheldon, as a boy living in a frame house, had not seen a bedbug before he became a bedtime snack. In about 1918, he noticed little red spots or blisters on his stomach and chest. When he asked his mother about them, she, with “the fastest hands west of the Mississippi,” unbuttoned his overalls and jerked his homemade shirt over his head. After an instant inspection, his mother ordered, “Come on girls. There is work to be done. We have bedbugs!”
One girl was instructed to remove all the bedding. Another was to build up the kitchen fire, put on the copper boiler, fill it with water and begin boiling all the bedding. A third girl was to fetch a squirt oil can and fill it with kerosene and then take her straw tick (a large sack of striped cloth) way out past the old log stable, empty out and burn the straw. Then bring back the tick to be boiled. A fourth was told to help wherever she could do the most good.
While the boiling continued, all bedsteads were taken apart and scrubbed with hot water and Fels-Naptha soap. The cracks and crevices of all bedroom floors and walls were squirted with kerosene as were the joints as the bedsteads were reassembled. Formaldehyde was used liberally, too. The ticks would be filled with fresh straw and placed back on the bed springs.
Sheldon concluded all of that emergency effort must have worked. The lad never again had little red blisters around his midsection.
A hired man on the Sheldon farm during the 1930s, Ellsworth (Elsie) John McLaughlin, had grown up in Winona where he heard some men in his father’s blacksmith shop speculating about the fate of a man who years before had headed west to homestead, promising to return for his family. He had never returned. One man conjectured in jest, “Mebbe bedbugs et him!” That was one of the most hilarious things young Elsie had ever heard – until he went west and encountered unwelcome bedmates.
Elsie, as a young man in the year 1900, went west to Rapid City, where he was employed painting storefronts. During his first night in a boarding house, he was beset with an unprecedented accumulation of bedbugs. The next day, he purchased a dozen pie tins and a quart of kerosene and borrowed a brush from work. That night, he moved his bed at least a foot away from the wall. He placed a pie tin under each leg of the bed, dresser and chair and put a tablespoon of kerosene in each tin.
He stripped off the bedding, shook it out and piled it on top of the dresser. He then painted kerosene into the cracks of the bedstead, dresser and chair. He remade the bed and slept all night without sharing any more blood with tiny creepy-crawlies.
It was not until 1862 that kerosene became readily available as a cleaner, brighter and cheaper alternative to whale oil for nighttime illumination by lantern and oil lamps. Before kerosene, there were scant, if any, bedbug-combatting options for the earliest Minnesota pioneers of the 1850s?
Among many books brought to Houston County by pioneer physician Giles James Sheldon was a 1939 leather bound book entitled, “Farmer and Gardener.” Chemical control of insects was scarcely mentioned, but it briefly addressed bedbugs, “Oxalic acid is often used for bedbug poison” and “Corrosive Sublimate, this is the most common bedbug poison, but it has probably destroyed as many persons as bedbugs.”
During his 46 years of medical practice, including 26 years in Houston County, Dr. Sheldon, according to his grandson, “certainly encountered bedbugs in numbers that we today cannot comprehend … to be gone … even weeks at a time, moving from house to house, living and sleeping under every conceivable condition, except good, … with nothing in the way of insecticides, and before 1862, not even kerosene!”
So common were bedbugs that Dr. Sheldon only wrote of them once, when surprised by their absence, during an 1874 hotel stay,. “Last night was passed without annoyance. Not a bug!”
Sources: four “Now and Then” newspaper columns by Sumner Sheldon, published during May, June and July 1986 by the Houston Gazette and Country Journal
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