Part one of a series
Editor’s notes: The following, entitled Springs and Wells, written in the 1940s by Edith Thompson, Coulee Region’s poet laureate, was published posthumously in the January 6 and January 13, 1977, editions of the Houston Gazette and Country Journal. A few alterations reflect currently preferred spelling and punctuation.
Father always said of this land of Looney Valley, “We have never had a complete failure in any year. There is always something at harvest time.” A Chautauqua speaker at Houston said, “The Mississippi Valley is the garden spot of the world.”
Our land of hills and valleys drank the rains and stored the water in springs all along the foothills. These springs were precious to the pioneers who came looking for land where they could build homes. They often chose their location because of a spring. The daughter of one of these pioneers, Mrs. (Anna Sather) Stenberg of Winona told me their land had three good springs. You can see today after nearly a hundred years, the little waterfall and pond with the dairy house nigh it.
In these later years of soil erosion, many of the springs that used to bubble up out of the earth have disappeared, gone deeper or dried up. I have drunk out of Silver Spring-clear, cold, alive. This is the source of our Silver Creek which keeps singing as did Tennyson’s brook, “Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.”
At the house my aunt and uncle (Adam) Coon built … there was a very determined spring under the cellar that persisted in oozing up, up through the floor. I remember how cool and damp it was down there among the milk pans on a hot summer day.
At the head of the Traff Valley, which branches off to the west of Looney Valley, there is a fine young spring at the foot of the west bluffs. For many years, it was piped down into the kitchen of the house … But a few very dry years (made it) undependable, so Ole Hoganson drilled them a well to take its place. This spring is the source of the little stream that runs past the log cabin my brother and I built …
I named this rill Betsey Creek after Aunt Betsey Addleman, a vigorous pioneer who with Uncle Caleb owned a farm halfway up to this spring. The bit o’ water still furnishes water for cattle and hogs on six farms before it flows into Silver Creek. Many springs used to bubble up along its course and furnish water for the families established beside them, but now they have gone out of sight, and windmills with their airy wheels or electricity with its unseen power, lifts the water out of the earth.
The lower valley is wider along the road running east and west – the hills two mills apart – and the farmers, even in pioneer days, had no springs so had to dig wells before they could start,
My father had so many irons in the fire with town board meetings, church councils and surveying in Houston and Winona Counties that he had to hire much help. He tried to hand over the job of well digging to a neighbor, Joe Mills. But Joe refused the job as being more dangerous than he wanted to tackle.
In those times, every householder discussed theological matters and the hardest nut to crack was the question of foreordination and free will. My grandmother, a Methodist, and my mother, a Presbyterian, often discussed it, and I sat in on these arguments as to whether God foreordained our destinies or whether we had the freedom of our wills to run our lives as we wished.
So, this question even entered into the practical work of digging wells. When Joe refused the well job, Father rather gruesomely suggested that perhaps Joe was foreordained to die in a well. But Joe had a comeback for this: “No sir, not if I never go down in one.” So, someone else had to be found to take the risk.
But before it could be dug, it had to be located, and a neighbor who had great faith in well-witching offered his occult services for this safe process. Father told him he didn’t have any faith in it, but to go ahead and witch it anyway.
This is how it is done, even yet. First, the witcher, or dowser as they call them in England, cut a branched willow wand shaped like a wishbone. Then grasping each of the branches in a hand with the pointer where they joined, pointed up, he begins following where the awareness in his hands seems to lead.
Father used to tell how this particular dowser was so powerfully affected that he had to run to keep up with its impulse. When the pointer finally turned straight down, he tightened his grip but in spite of him, the pointer finally turned straight down. “There,” he said, “you dig right here! Here’s your water.”
They dug there and got good flow of water but Father always said, “That’s where I was going to dig anyway.” Who can untangle the intangible?
Sir Walter Scott says in one of his great novels, “The tool should be out from a witch hazel bush with a branch to the north side and another to the south, so that as it grew, the moon had shown between its branches as it moved from east to west.”
In the proceedings of the Society of Psychological Research, pages are devoted to a report on well-witching – some rhythm or sympathy between the waters under the earth and the water that makes up so large a part of a man’s physical being, seems to be their conclusion.
So, now that Joe and his “freedom of the will” was out of the picture, and now that the gifted neighbor had located the water, Father got a man to dig the well …
Author/poet Edith Thompson (1873-1950) was the subject of this column, published February 24, 2025.

Photo courtesy of the Houston County Historical Society
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