Peering at the Past If you had horses and a wagon and were willing to work…

Part 3 of a series

Everyone owned them; many bought and sold them. Some bred them, but few caught and “broke” them. But Knute Lee did it all and even sang to horses. He was an extraordinary horseman of Houston County during the first two decades of the 1900s. Previous generations of the Lee family had immigrated from Norway to Black Hammer Township, where the family name became Lee when the original Ytrelie proved difficult for non-Norwegians to pronounce and spell.

In 1902, Rural Free Delivery became a permanent service of the U.S. Post Office. During that decade, Knute was in his early-to-mid-20s when he organized the first mail route out of his hometown Spring Grove and had his first job as a rural mail carrier. He started out being paid $50 a month (purchasing power of $1,600 in 2022). Those mailmen had expenses, required to supply their own transportation, which at that time, meant a horse-pulled vehicle. Lee realized he would need two teams of horses, since he could not use the same team every day for his 25-mile mail route. It went north out of Spring Grove to Black Hammer and then towards West Beaver Creek. He built a barn for his horses.

Knute had been born in 1879, the same year the first train had pulled into Spring Grove. Before the prominence of motorized vehicles, the economy depended on trains and horses. Knute, like many, would take advantage of the opportunity provided by the railroad. However, he was not a train man; he was a horseman.

As a few communities in Wisconsin had been the first homes for Norwegian immigrants who eventually moved on to northeast Iowa and southeast Minnesota, so was Spring Grove a launching site for many pioneer farmers who moved on to the Dakotas. Those Dakota connections provided a business opportunity for an enterprising young horseman.

In 1910, Knute acquired about a dozen horses – from where or by what financial arrangement is not known. He and the horses filled one of the railroad’s “immigrant cars” that permitted passage for both livestock and their owners. They headed about 400 miles northwest to Lemmon, S. Dak., near the state line with North Dakota where a cousin was homesteading along with other families that had formerly resided around Spring Grove.

One Spring Grove transplant, Tollef Ellestad, wanted to move back and offered to trade his 80-acre South Dakota farm and a sod house for Knute’s house in Spring Grove and 20 acres of land. Knute, his wife Mathilda (Glasrud) Lee and two young daughters went west by train. A couple of days behind them, Mathilda’s brother Arthur Glasrud and a hired man named Gallagher traveled in an immigrant car to tend to the family’s horses and cows.

It was a true pioneer experience, living in a sod house with two children. Arthur and the hired man slept on the floor. Knute with two teams of horses and Arthur with one got to work with spring planting. But Knute was not a farmer, and the intense summer heat, lack of rain and merciless wind was too much to continue. Mathilda and children would board a train back to Spring Grove about three weeks after Knute, Arthur, two teams of horses and wagons departed to work their way back to Houston County.

If you had horses and wagons and were willing to work, you could make money while making your way across hundreds of miles where better weather had made it possible to grow and harvest crops. By night, they camped out; by day, they joined threshing crews on large farms and were paid well. Even if Knute and Arthur were not needed, they could rent out their teams. Along the way, they were joined by two other Spring Grove men, one a Myhro and Helmer Gulbrandson.

About a month before the men made it back, Mathilda had arrived in Spring Grove by train. She said, “I thought the town looked so pretty. It was so green… Everything had been so brown out there on the prairie.” The young family was back home, but had to begin anew. The horseman was not yet the horseman he would become – to be continued.

The source for this column was the 1993 book, Mathilda’s Journey, by Robert E. A. Lee, the son of Knute and Mathilda Lee.