Harry Johnson's brothers and sisters: Theo, Anna and Beatrice. Seated: Harry, Christ, Larry and Boyd. November, 1960
When they lived in Richwood and Harry was just a small boy, his father worked at a sawmill on Otter Tail River and was gone all week. The weather was cold and snow very deep. They ran out of wood. The woods on the other side of the fence by their house belonged to another man, but wood they had to have, so his mother and Harry waddled in the deep snow and pulled down small dead poplar trees and dragged them to the house and sawed them up with a buck saw. This went on all day for days so they would not freeze to death. When his father came home on the weekend, he would try to bring in enough wood to last for the week.
In their childhood they lived in and out of Buffalo Lake. They swam across it many times, fished in it, played in it with boats, and skated on it when it froze over. They earned their spending money by catching frogs and minnows to sell to the fishermen that came there to fish. When they lived in the woods, they walked to school across Moon Lake, which is drained now. In the winter it was frozen over. They would come home after dark and the wolves would be in the brush around the lake howling like mad and eyes flashing. Believe me, they ran as fast as their little legs would go to get home.
When Harry was older, he bought his first team of horses and he needed a harness, so he went to an auction sale to buy harnesses. He asked my dad if he would sign a note for the harnesses for him. Dad said yes, if he would have the money saved for the note and interest when it was due. Harry had the money saved long before it came due and he was there with the money. He was then ready to haul with his team. They hauled wood, lumber, and logs to and from the sawmill at Strawberry Lake down across all the frozen lakes, which made it many miles closer and not so much snow, as it blew off off the ice.
One night on his way home with a load of wood, he stopped at the head of the lake to water his horses before he went home. He walked around the sleigh and he stepped into an open air hole in the ice. He had on a heavy sheepskin coat. It just happened he was close enough to the sleigh to grab a hold of the brace on the sleigh, but he couldn't pull himself out of the ice water. He said he was trying to figure out how he would get out of there, so he told the horses to go slow and they pulled him upon the ice. He watered them and went home, and his clothes were all frozen stiff. This was a close call. If he had not had a good team of horses, they could have made a fast start and he could have lost his grip on the sleigh.
When he was a little boy, they used to play on the river bank by the mill pond. One day he fell in and they had a bulldog by the name of King. The dog jumped into the river and pulled him out of the river onto the bank. If King had not been there with him he would have drowned.
Then he tells about the time when they hauled fresh meat to the Spraska sawmill for the cooks. They came from Richwood with a load of fresh meat, and sometimes it would be late in the evening before they got to camp with it. The Timber Wolves could smell the meat and sometimes there would be a dozen wolves trailing along beside the sleigh, howling and snarling. Nobody ever got hurt by them, but if they would have had to stop for any reason, it could have been serious, but they said they would have thrown them a chunk of meat.
For years Harry took ice out of the lake and sold to the Callaway creamery and stores around the country, for iceboxes. They stored the ice in icehouses and covered it with sawdust and it would keep all summer. Some days he would take out 150 to 175 tons of ice in one day. At that time Richwood Village did not have even a deep well, just surface wells which would go dry in winter or in the summer if it did not rain very much. So they had to depend on the ice water for washing clothes, dishes and cooking in the wintertime. One cold morning a man he knew stopped at the ice field to visit a minute, before going to camp after lumber. An open field was just behind him with snow on the thin ice, and he kept on stepping backwards and fell into the lake. The men all laughed, they thought it was funny, and he begged them to pull him out. They pulled him out and they told him he better go to a farmhouse close by, but he went to the woods, wet clothes and all, to get his load of lumber. His clothes were frozen stiff, but guess there is still warmth in them.
Harry, do you remember when we hauled hay from the
Hamden Slough
with the Model B truck? You had bought a big stack of loose hay. It was in October so we were trying to get all the feed in before snow came. We had hauled many loads that day and it was about four PM when we decided to go back and get the last load. We loaded one sling full, then the other one, but there was still more hay left, so we kept piling it on because it was getting dark. We got all we figured that was good, so we bound the load down as good as we could and started out for home. We had not gone very far over the frozen ploughed field before our load tipped off.
We had to pull the binding ropes off and fix up the rest of the load the best we could. We took home what we had left on the truck and the next morning we had to go back and pick up the rest of the load. It did not pay to try to cut our number of loads.
When we came home we were hungry, Annabelle and Lorraine, who were in grade school at that time, had fed the chickens, picked the eggs and made the supper.
Another time we had been snowed in since New Year's Day. In March you had a call to go to work with the truck. The road was blocked out to the main highway so how were you going to get to work? You stood and scratched your head thinking and said, "We will plank it out". I said, "That will take days". "Oh well" you said, "if I am going to go to work, this is how we have to do it". So we set to work and shoveled the truck out and put the chains on it. We loaded up the planks on the truck, took some gunnysacks and started out to the road. The first day we got up the road a quarter of a mile, but from there on we had to use the planks all the time over the deep snow, putting one plank ahead of the other. The second day we had gone a mile and one half. The third day in the afternoon we got to the highway. We left the truck there, locked it up and walked home. We were wet and very tired.
Every day Harry drove the Model A to the highway to go to work. Some days it stormed so he had to walk both ways.
We still have the Model 1932 truck and it runs like a new truck.
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