7 september 2023 Another RAVEN Story

 SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

    Twenty-some years ago, my daughter Bonny and I were at Lee’s Store in Wannaska one evening, when a man in his late 30’s drove up in a bright yellow ‘70’s model Chevy pickup. He asked Bonnie Lee if she knew how to get to the Klondike Church. She said she had never heard of it but, referring him to me, said I might. The man said he was looking for his grandmother’s grave and that he hadn’t been there since her funeral a long time ago. 

    He had asked an uncle in Strathcona how to get to the cemetery from there but seemed vague about all the details of the directions, knowing only to take State Highway 32 north from there to Roseau County No. 6 in Huss Township, then north on County Highway No. 3, then north what he thought was eight miles. “Well, he said something about ‘eight’, I’m not sure what he meant,” the guy said. “I drove almost to Badger but nothing looked familiar.”

    I had heard of the Klondike Church, I said, more so because the name Klondike was familiar to me from old turn-of-the-20th Century wagon trail maps I had seen that indicated the old trail systems that followed the sand ridges and high ground above the swamps and rivers from Thief River Falls to Warroad, from the railhead at Stephen to Hallock and further to Roseau; one of these trails was the Klondike Ridge Road.

    I told him I thought I had been there as I had been to a number of churches and old cemeteries in my tenure here as a transplanted Palmvillian; my interests lying not only in area history but any opportunity to see a different part of Minnesota is reason enough for a well-deserved road trip in the pursuit of stories for THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History & Humor Journal, back in the day.

    I recalled a church and cemetery just off a little used township road that I stopped and took pictures of one evening about sunset several years earlier. I wondered if that was it, and I said, “Bonnie, you got a plat book?” referring to the county atlas that is distributed free by Farm and Home Publishers.

    “Yeah, here it is,” she said and handed it to me from behind the counter. She was closing the store to go home, it was after 6:00 p.m., but insisted the store was open for business as long as she was there. I tried to hurry the atlas-search along anyway. I thought the church I remembered could be the Klondike Church and had to really scour the mental atlas in my head to get an idea where it was exactly. I could only create snapshots of memory—no distinct place. It was very vague. I could ‘see’ it in my mind’s eye as the photograph I took of it, but I’ll be darned if I could think where exactly it was and so said to the man that maybe it was in Deer Township or maybe Poplar Grove.

    Finding nothing to indicate a church and cemetery where I thought it was, west of Wiskow’s/Northland Threshing Bee on Roseau County 8 in Huss Township, I told the man to see if John’s Repair was open and if so, ask someone there and if nothing else, ask any person he saw in town. I thought later, I should’ve gone with him to ask Ellert Nelson or Dale Wensloff or Charlie Bergstrom. The man so resembled a friend of mine from work, that I felt a kinship with him from the start and was strangely compelled to help him find the Klondike Church if at all possible. Despite my best intentions, I could do him little good. It looked like he was on his own.

    But the Klondike Church and cemetery plagued me, as I drove home. I was determined to locate it for myself if not for him, and when we got home I went immediately to the RAVEN ‘office’ and my chief resource, that being “The Roseau County Heritage Book” and look it up; I found it on Page 74, in the bottom right hand corner.

    It wasn’t the church I recognized or remembered, in fact, I had never seen it before I realized. “Hmmmm,” I thought. “Facts about the church are that it was organized in 1907 by a ‘Rev. Palm’, of all people as Palm is my mother’s family name.  The members of the congregation included Barney Bjerkhoel, the discoverer of outlaw Dutch Henry’s murdered body on his land in 1906. Construction on the church building was begun in 1925 ... Yet, it didn’t say exactly where the church was located.

     Checking the time elapsed since I had left Wannaska I took down the 1976 Roseau County Atlas and looked up Poplar Grove Township for starters. I followed the road past the Tin Man’s (Johnny Hovorka), past the old Donny Thompson place on the north side, past the old Galseth place on the south side, where Barney Bjerkhoel dashed after accidentally stumbling onto John Stewart’s (alias Outlaw Dutch Henry) decaying body in 1906 on his Palmville homestead in Section 7, past the old Rosie Kasprovich’s now tumble down building site on the curve of the road still gloved by thickly growing cedar trees. In my mind’s eye, I turned west past the Robert Hedlund’s (formerly Lyle Thompson’s) place with his old hip-roofed barn and low-slung turkey sheds on the south side of the road. 

    I went past Birdene Thompson’s, where the greatly blurred enlarged picture of all the deer feeding in front of the distinctively-painted cross-buck doors of his old barn, near his house, and had on his kitchen wall, could be seen hanging in local cafes and service stations; and then slowed when I noticed a cross symbol (placed in text) in Section 8 a mile east of County Highway 3 and half mile south on the east side of the road along what then was designated as Birdene’s Land. 

    The symbol must of meant church and cemetery because it was a combination of the two and not listed by itself nor defined. It must be it. I had to find out. I checked the time again it was 6:30, maybe with any luck I’d see that guy in his yellow truck again, and so with that in mind, and Bonny in tow, we jumped in our old beater and headed west toward the Klondike Church.

    Despite the onset of evening, temperatures hadn’t dropped appreciably by 6:30 p.m., it was still very hot according to northern Minnesota standards and sweat poured from our every pore even with the driver’s window down and the rear window open there wasn’t enough cool air flowing so the old pickup felt like an oven travellin’ 65 mph down a gravel road.

    Bugs, every once in a while, would sacrifice themselves with a smack against Ol’ Blue Betty’s pitted windshield with its two horizontal cracks along the bottom. Ducks flew up from water-filled ditches along the road that we rocketed by. Redwing black birds and Bob-O-Links scolded us as gravel dust and strewn rocks washed their reed canary grass borne nests from our wake. We travelled the speed of sound—or the best you can do in an ‘85 Ford pickup with rusted out wheelwells and a large wooden crate in the back. We were movin’ man, “We was goin’ to the Klondike Church…”

    You can tell Bonny is a country girl, ignoring this fishtailin’ speed across washboard roads in an old Ford F150 pick up truck with cattails thumpin’ the window-glass. This doesn’t phase her a bit, whereas the press of bumper-to-bumper city traffic does at home in Brrmidji now. She watches for deer and critters for us, saying in monotone-like, “Deer, Dad... Turtle… Skunk here…,” kind of way as though she’s running a tally instead of warning me of their presence. She looks up over the top of her library book on occasion just to check our progress and whereabouts more than wondering if we are still on the road or not.

     I slow for our turn north off Roseau County 8, onto 290th Avenue in Poplar Grove Township toward our destination of 15.4 miles west southwest of Wannaska, Minnesota found here, in 2023: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wannaska,+MN/48.6072006,-95.9705963/@48.62265,-95.9353842,12z /data=!3m1!4b1!4m8!4m7!1m5!1m1!1s0x52bf5678c7e6777d:0xb32a826cf797b845!2m2!1d-95.7347135!2d48.6583084!1m0?entry=ttu

     I see a pickup parked in a hayfield off the high raised roadbed. A tractor in the distance is pulling a round baler spewing a plume of hay dust behind. The distinct fragrance of freshly baled hay envelopes the truck, a smell that is both pleasant and negatively memorable to the asthmatic part of me yet as much defines the area in which I’ve chosen to live as does the fragrance of new green tree leaves, flowers—and cow manure spread on the neighboring fields when the wind is just right. Nestled off the road in a ring of trees and shaded from the hot sun is the Klondike Church in my memory, if not in the accompanying picture.
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/82632/klondike-cemetery