The Cassell family carried everything they owned as they walked about six miles on the Territorial Road before stopping at the log farmhouse of Isaac Holmes. It was mid-summer of 1862, about a decade after the first white settlers began to arrive in southeast Minnesota.
It was two years after a survey of 40 acres that was being purchased by Theodore Cassell (Kassell, Castle). But that purchase was evidently not finalized as Theodore was homeless as he walked with his recently-arrived German wife Caroline and their 6-year-old daughter, always called “Hat.” In dire need of shelter, Theodore offered cash rent of a dollar a month to occupy Isaac Holmes’ hen house.
That small log hen house had once been the home of the Holmes family when they had first arrived. For a year or two while putting his farm into production, Holmes had also been building a larger and more comfortable log residence. It was not uncommon that pioneers relegated a first primitive dwelling into a hen house.
After weighing the value of a hen house compared to a cash rent house, Holmes accepted the offer. The feathered residents were shooed out, and the Cassells moved in. But Theodore Cassell had no money and little chance of earning any. All the neighbors, who had large families living on small farms, had no need for hired hands.
Financial struggles were accompanied by personal tragedy. The Cassells’ baby boy, only a few months old, died of convulsions. The neighbors attributed the convulsions to being continuously tickled by his sister Hat. Area historian Sumner Sheldon believed that baby was the first burial in the Sheldon farm cemetery. Mrs. Cassell could not speak English. Grandma Sheldon was a German-speaking Swiss and the only neighbor with whom Caroline Cassell could communicate. With the Cassells owning no property, Grandma Sheldon offered them a burial plot.
Most neighbors blamed Holmes for having a renter who took ears of corn and heads of wheat from their fields and also helped himself to eggs and chickens. With no friends or relatives nearby and not even another German-speaking family in the neighborhood, what else could Theodore do to feed his family?
Neither was he able to pay his rent. His landlord Isaac Holmes, a poor farmer on a poor farm, was considered a good citizen. Initially, he did not seem upset that Theodore failed to pay rent. But eventually, he succumbed with his Irish neighbors needling him about having a non-paying renter instead of a “hooseful of hens.” Holmes evicted the Cassells by ripping the roof off his one-time hen house.
As emotionally charged as this eviction was for those involved, it serendipitously resulted in economic progress for the previously most destitute. With no longer a home at Holmes’, Theodore Cassell built a shack in a ravine south of the Hokah-Houston Territorial Road. It is not known whether he knew before or after this move that the 500 acres of slews and marshland in that valley of the Root River was prime muskrat habitat. His finances improved considerably. He also did what little farming he could by hand – grub hoe farming. He kept a couple of pigs and maybe a cow or two. Certainly not prosperous, the Cassell family lived in no more poverty than anyone else in Houston County in the 1860s.
Mrs. Cassell, after three days of stomach illness, died with no visit by a doctor – very suspiciously, according to neighbors. The coroner was called in before she was buried next to her baby boy in another donated plot on the Sheldon farm on June 8, 1872.
At times without land or cash, Theodore Cassell stole from farm fields to feed his family. But there was an occasion when he also paid, two years after the fact, presumably when he was able to. An entry in Dr. G. J. Sheldon’s diary read, “March 12, 1873. Theodore Cassell – By cash. $5.00 paid to my son, Henry, for three acres hay got, 1871. Remarkable case of honor in an old thief!”
With no rural welfare system for the needy, sometimes thievery, although not encouraged or approved, was a fact of life and might be charitably overlooked. When the Enockson family or old Jim Steele would steal some corn from a certain farmer in Winnebago Valley and sell or trade it to stores in Eitzen, the cornfield owner would tell the storeowners, “It was alright because they had to eat, too.”
Another cause of thievery, although rare, occurred in pioneer times, too, due to mental illness when a person is unable to overcome a strong urge to steal. This condition was later named “kleptomania.”
In the early days at Hokah, a blacksmith named Henry Stein suffered with this condition. Wherever he went, he was compelled to take anything handy, such as a block of firewood, hitching strap or an ice chain from a bobsled.
Stein was never arrested. His misdemeanors never caused any real trouble, only minor inconvenience. If anything was discovered missing, the owner would just go to the blacksmith shop and often be able to retrieve his item.
On one occasion, some practical jokers bored a hole into a piece of firewood, filled it with gunpowder, plugged it up and placed it where Stein might pick it up. Several nights later, the ruse worked to perfection when the top of Stein’s stove exploded.
One day in Burkhardt’s Saloon, Frank Kitzinger, Julius Burkhardt and William Langen, Sr. were trying to remember the exact date when something had occurred. When he noticed Stein across the room, Kitzinger asked the blacksmith if he could remember the date when he had taken a harness. Stein did remember, and the mystery was solved.
Area historian W. J. Langen (born 1869) wrote about a woman, who whenever visiting a dry goods store, would take a pair of stockings, a handkerchief or some such item. Her husband made arrangements with local storeowners to let her take things and send him the bill.
Sources: “Now and Then” columns by Sumner Sheldon in the Houston Gazette and Country Journal, July 2 and July 16, 1987; Just for Old Times Sake; History of Early Days of Hokah, Minn. by W. J. Langen, 1948; A Creek Runs Through Me; A History of the Winnebago Creek Valley in Southeastern Minnesota by Barbara Scottston and Terry Atherton, 2013.
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