Richard P. Jahn, an attorney by trade, is also something of an amateur historical detective. He enjoys digging into the past, solving the puzzle each relic presents, and shining light on the shadows cast by the passage of time.
Ten years ago, Jahn found a few items in a shoebox sitting on a shelf in his Signal Mountain home that set him on one such voyage of discovery. Today, the results of his journey are contained within the pages of a book titled “Called to the Prairie: Life in McKenzie County, North Dakota 1915-1916.” If the title doesn’t grab the attention of history buffs, the contents will.
“It contains details about a little place in a niche in time no one ever thinks about,” Jahn says as he gazes at the front cover of the book.
The cover offers a clue to why the project captivated Jahn. Printed across the top half, above the title, is a black and white photograph of a young man on a horse. The man is smiling, and he’s placed his hat on the horse’s head.
The man is the future Rev. Richard C. Jahn, Jahn’s grandfather.
“Called to the Prairie” is the published version of the daily journal entries Jahn’s grandfather made while serving as a volunteer minister in Schafer, N.D., during his second year of seminary. As a whole, it paints a portrait of life in a prairie community that lacked power and water, whose people battled fierce winters, and where stories worth reading about 100 years later took place.
“Grandpa had a horse called Pistol. You could ride him as long as you didn’t hurt him,” Jahn says. “One day, a man wanted to borrow the horse, and grandpa warned him not to spur him. The man said, ‘Okay,’ and rode off. An hour later, the horse came back without a rider. It’s hoofs were bloody. It had killed the man. There was evidence on its flanks that the man has spurred him.
“Grandpa preached his funeral. He rode there on the horse.”
In another incident recorded in one of the diaries, Jahn’s grandfather went out in a blizzard against the advice of his cabin mate. He nearly froze to death.
When Jahn’s grandfather died in 1977, Jahn came into the possession of a lifetime of documentation, including the journals his grandfather had kept. Jahn had thumbed through his grandfather’s high school entries, but they were short and lacked detail, so into a shoebox the diaries went.
In 2002, Jahn began reading the journals again, and discovered two his grandfather had written while in North Dakota along with a book of recollections about his time there. He was stunned. “I knew he’d gone there, but I didn’t know he’d kept diaries,” he says.
Jahn opens a plastic sandwich bag containing three thin books, each about the size of an opened wallet, and carefully removes the contents. These are the fabled journals. He gingerly opens one and places it at the table at which he’s sitting. The pages, most of which are either loose or barely clinging to the binding, are filled with what appears to be tiny scribbling. Upon closer inspection, the words are still legible, though one might need glasses to read the century-old ribbons of ink.
“The entries in the book are right out of the diaries,” he says. “I didn’t do any editing. They spelled differently back them - “stayed” was spelled “s-t-a-i-d” - but I left everything like it was.”
Certain entries brought out the historical sleuth in Jahn. In one, his grandfather wrote about being stuck at someone’s cabin during a blizzard. While there, he picked up a book “about A.D. 2000.” Intrigued, Jahn did some detective work and figured out the title.
“The book was titled ‘Looking Back.’ It was published in 1888 by Edward Belamy,” Jahn says. “It was about a guy who fell asleep in a chamber under his house. His house burned down, but the chamber was preserved, and they dug him up in the year 2000.”
Jahn added footnotes about this and other details related to his grandfather’s life at that time. An attorney in North Dakota added local historical footnotes.
The entries alone have more than enough detail to captivate readers, though. Even the brief weather reports Jahn’s grandfather wrote at the beginning of each entry are telling. “In the winter, the temperature readings were minus 20, minus 30. The weather was unbelievable,” he says.
Jahn had a little difficulty finding specifically where his grandfather had stayed. The first town his grandfather mentioned in his diary was Schafer, but in 2002, Jahn was unable to find the town on a map, as it was no longer there. With a little footwork, he determined the town had been located in the western half of the state, and in time, he honed it down to its precise location.
In 2003, Jahn traveled to North Dakota and visited the site of the cabin in which his grandfather had stayed. He also met the son of his grandfather’s cabin mate, and traveled to the locations where his grandfather had ministered. “He preached to five different groups that were anywhere from 25 to 40 miles from where he was staying. He went to one each Sunday,” he says.
Jahn was far from done, though. To him, the most intriguing parts of the puzzle were the pictures, which his grandfather had mentioned in the journals. Armed with his curiosity and a knack for uncovering hidden jewels, he found a few in his home and a treasure trove in his parents’ house. From there, he set about the task of matching the photos with the entries in the journals. In some cases, he was able to pinpoint the exact day a picture was taken.
Some of the photos wound up in the book. He’s especially proud of a select few, including one of a party his grandfather’s friends threw for him before he left. The photo features several young men, twice as many bottles of booze, and a cigar in each mouth. “His roommates said, ‘Since you’re going to North Dakota, we’re going to throw you a blow out. So I have a photograph of these Lutheran-ministers-to-be boozing it up. Everyone puked except my grandfather. I guess he was tougher than the rest of them,” Jahn says, laughing.
Jahn self-published “Called to the Prairie” this year in time for the centennial celebration of McKenzie County, where Schafer was located. He says the local officials to whom he showed the book “went nuts,” and he sold more than a few copies at the celebration.
For McKenzie County residents, “Called to the Prairie” is a piece of local history - a first person account of the crises Jahn’s grandfather endured and his interactions with the homesteaders of that time. But for Jahn, it’s a piece of family history. Through its pages, he learned of his grandfather’s courage and tenacity in a difficult place at a challenging time.
The book also gave Jahn a chance to do something gratifying beyond his considerable work as an attorney: to dig into the past, to solve the puzzle each relic presents, and to shine light on the shadows cast by the passage of time.
For more photos, pick up a copy of The Hamilton County Herald.