THE MISSOURI FLOOD OF 1881 BY HALVOR B. HUSTVEDT TRANSLATED BY KATHERINE HUSTVEDT INTRODUCTION To the country at large and to the Dakotas in particular the following account of the tremendous Missouri flood of 1881 should indicate that the continued drouth of the past few years, which has been a calamity of far greater magnitude , is not necessarily one past redress. The moisture-laden snows may bring floods again to these regions. My father's story of the hardships he experienced that winter and spring was, regrettably, written in Norwegian, though he wrote beautiful English and, as he was a native American of pioneer stock, used English in his everyday speech. This translation has been undertaken because his account is a page of Dakota history, because he told it entertainingly, and because the courageous pioneering of brave men and women should be made known to their children and their children's children. My father, Halvor Bj0rnson Hustvedt, first set foot on Dakota soil in the year of the Custer massacre.1 The fires of Custer's last bivouac on the edge of civilization at Yankton had just turned to ashes, and traces of his camp were still plain when my father reached the scene where for five years he was to be a young pioneer pastor among the first white settlers of the Dakotas. The measure of his courage and 1 Hustvedt was bom, reared, and educated in America. He went as a young pastor of twenty-three to serve these first Dakota settlers on the James and Missouri rivers, decades before the latest influx of immigrant settlers on the upper reaches of the James, of whom R0lvaag writes in his Giants in the Earth. The Bergen congregation, the first congregation organized in the Dakotas, belonged to the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Synod of America, whose college was situated in Decorah, Iowa, and of which Hustvedt was a graduate, as well as of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He was a native of Wisconsin, where in 1843 his parents had settled in Dane County, fifteen miles from the site of the capital, Madison, which at that time was a mere village. 77 78 STUDIES AND RECORDS endurance is given in his account of walking thirty miles through snow up to his knees, the last fourteen of them with one foot largely incapacitated through an accident. I It was the memorable winter of 1880-81. I call it memorable because, during that winter, there had been a snowfall such as has never been seen before or since, in the memory of man, to this day. We had then lived in Yankton County, Dakota Territory , for four years and I had traveled about quite regularly, in four counties, through summer and winter, in good and bad weather, but always on horseback or in a buggy - never in a sleigh, and that for the very good reason that there never had been any sleighing. This, then, was the fifth winter and to begin with promised to be like all the others. But after the New Year it began to look different. The earth was at last hidden by a white coverlet and this remained. More and more snow fell and the going became heavy. But a sleigh was rarely to be found in this locality at that time and we were obliged to get along as well as we could; there would always be a way out. If it was impossible to use a vehicle we could always saddle the horse or resort to the locomotion of the apostles. On the seventeenth of January I left for a conference in Decorah , Iowa, and reached my destination without undue trouble the following day. But on the homeward journey, a couple of weeks later, from the first moment on it began to look a little dubious. The customary schedule was followed fairly well until evening. This was Monday, January 31, 1881. We reached Algona about on time but there the conductor, Jim Hogan, then a resident of Decorah, received orders from the superintendent of the division at Mason City for the passengers to detrain and to return, himself, with the train to Mason City as quickly...