# Prairie Crossroads **Dakotas and the Merging Lines** Cooper • Lanphere • Bartosh • Riha North Dakota and South Dakota formed the ground on which several of this family's separate lines first came together. Across roughly six decades — from the territorial years of the 1880s through the middle of the twentieth century — the Cooper, Bartosh, Lanphere, Spence, and Strong families touched the Dakotas plains, drawn by the same forces that pulled hundreds of thousands of others: cheap land, open country, and the promise of a fresh start. Farmers, teamsters, laborers, and townspeople, they took their places among one of the most ethnically diverse rural populations in America, and on that prairie their marriages began knitting the separate threads into one. ## The Northern Plains The land itself set the terms of every life lived upon it. North Dakota was a country defined by its flatness and its enormous sky. Its eastern edge lay in the valley of the Red River of the North — a lakebed left behind by the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, so level and so fertile that it drew wheat growers from across the world. Moving west, the land rose into the rolling drift prairie, cut by the broad, shallow valley of the James River, and further still into the rugged country toward the Missouri and the badlands beyond. The southeastern counties where most of these families settled — Ransom, Sargent, Dickey, Richland, and Cass — sat in this eastern and central belt, prime farming country where the soil was deep and the growing season, though short, was generous enough for small grains. South Dakota offered a parallel landscape. The northeastern corner, where most of these lives unfolded, was a country of low, rolling glacial plain — broad horizons, shallow lakes and sloughs left behind by the ice, and soil that rewarded the plow. Towns like Hecla, Britton, and Pierpont were laid out along the reach of the railroads, each a cluster of grain elevators, a main street, a church or two, and a scatter of farmsteads spreading outward into section-line country. The far western edge of the state was another world entirely: Spearfish, tucked against the Black Hills in Lawrence County, belonged to the mining and timber country of the western uplands, shaped by the gold rush that had brought Americans flooding into the Hills in the late 1870s. It was demanding country in either Dakota. Winters were long, brutally cold, and often deadly, with blizzards that could bury a homestead and isolate a family for days. Summers were hot and dry, punctuated by violent thunderstorms and, in bad years, hail that could flatten a crop in minutes. Trees were scarce away from the rivers, and those who stayed learned to respect the land. ## Settling the Territory When the earliest of these families were in Bismarck and McLean County in the mid-1880s, North Dakota was not yet a state. Dakota Territory was still being organized, its towns young and its institutions improvised. Bismarck, on the Missouri River, was a rough frontier capital — a railroad and river town that served as a supply point and jumping-off place for the country to the west. The Northern Pacific Railway had pushed through in the 1870s and 1880s, and the rails were the lifeline that made settlement possible, carrying homesteaders in and hauling grain and cattle out. The Spences, among the earliest of these families, lived around Bismarck and McLean County in these years, at the small center of a very large and empty land, where statehood — which came in 1889 — was a matter of active anticipation rather than settled fact. The Northern Plains had been the homeland of the Dakota, Lakota, and other nations, and the homestead boom pushed hard against that older world. Ordinary settlers and Native families still crossed paths in ways that could be neighborly as often as they were fraught, sharing the same difficult country in the same difficult seasons. The decades on either side of 1900 were the great settlement boom. The Homestead Act offered 160 acres to anyone willing to file a claim, live on it, and improve it, and the railroads aggressively advertised the region across the United States and Europe. Germans — including Germans from Russia — and Norwegians formed the largest groups, but Swedes, Bohemians and other Czechs, and native-born Americans moving up from older settled regions all took their place on the prairie. The families in this book reflect that mix precisely: Bohemian immigrants who came out of the Czech villages of central Europe by way of earlier settlement in Iowa, arriving in Ransom County around 1910; Swedish immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic in the great migrations of the 1870s and later; and old-stock American families with roots reaching back into New York and Pennsylvania, who worked their way west through the Dakotas. Catholic and Lutheran churches anchored these communities, and small towns along the rail lines — Lisbon, Enderlin, Ellendale, Oakes, Fairmount — became the centers where scattered farm families gathered to trade, worship, and marry. The economy of this country ran, above all, on grain. Spring wheat was king, with oats, barley, corn, and flax alongside, and the rhythm of life followed the crop: planting, the anxious watch through the growing months, and the hard labor of harvest and threshing in late summer and fall. The elevators along the tracks set the pulse of every town, and a family's fortune rose and fell with yields and grain prices set in distant markets. Fargo, on the Red River across from Moorhead, Minnesota, was the exception — the largest city in North Dakota and its commercial gateway, where the branch lines and main lines converged. ## The Cooper Family on the Plains Into this world came **Oscar F. Thaddeus Cooper** and his wife, **Rosalthea "Rose" Angelia Lanphere**, who had come west out of Pennsylvania and New York. They arrived in Brown County, South Dakota, before 1884, part of the great tide of settlers pouring onto Dakota land during the feverish decade when railroad promotion, cheap homestead land, and a run of unusually wet years drew tens of thousands northward. Brown County had barely been organized when the family put down roots near the small town of Hecla, its streets still raw and its future entirely unproven. Around Hecla they raised children who were born, married, and buried on that same ground across the decades that followed. The optimism of the 1880s gave way to harder truths in the 1890s, when drought and the financial panic of 1893 broke many who had come out in the wet years, but the Coopers held on, and their line reached across Brown, Marshall, and Day counties in the northeast and as far as Spearfish in the far west. It was the Coopers' son, **Charles Calvin Cooper**, whose life traced the family's steady movement westward and northward across the upper plains. Charles was born on 19 August 1879 at Bell Run, in McKean County, Pennsylvania — a corner of the state near Shingle House, in the wooded highlands where the Allegheny country met the New York border. By 1880 the family was recorded at Ceres, in the same county, and his earliest years were spent among the hemlock and hardwood hills of northern Pennsylvania, then dominated by lumbering and the small farming that filled the cleared land between the mills. Like many families of that era, the Coopers did not stay put; somewhere in Charles's youth the household turned toward the newly opened lands of the Dakotas. By 1896 his connection to South Dakota is already noted, and by 1900 he was living at Hecla, in Brown County, in the far northeast of the state near the North Dakota line. At Hecla, on 17 October 1900, Charles married Bertha Clausen. The couple had a son, Edwin Theodore Cooper. The marriage did not endure, and in time Charles and Bertha divorced — a difficult and comparatively uncommon step in that period, though the plains offered a certain anonymity to those who chose to begin again. ## The Bartosh Line and the Merging of Traditions Charles did begin again, and his second marriage joined the Cooper line to a family whose name carried the imprint of Bohemia. **Anna Elizabeth Bartosh** was born on a farm in Center Township, Pocahontas County, Iowa, in the summer of 1888. Her father, **Frank Louis Bartosh**, and her mother, **Mary Eva Riha**, belonged to the wave of Czech settlers who put down roots in the black-soil prairie of northwestern Iowa in the closing decades of the nineteenth century — a landscape of open fields and small townships, of tight-knit ethnic communities where the old language still moved through kitchens and church halls. The Bartosh and Riha families would carry that heritage onward into Ransom County, North Dakota, settling in and around Casey, Lisbon, and Enderlin. Anna spent the whole of her childhood in Pocahontas County, and successive census years trace her family's small movements within it — living in Center in 1895, in Grant City by 1900, and in Sherman Township by 1905. These were the ordinary shifts of a farming family, following land and opportunity within a familiar radius. As a girl she knew the rhythm of the agricultural year, the chores of a rural household, and the closeness of a community bound by shared Bohemian heritage. By 1910 the family had moved eastward across the state to Jackson Township in Winneshiek County, another region long favored by Czech immigrants. Anna married for the first time in December 1909, in Winneshiek County, when she was twenty-one. Her husband was Jesse Perry, and from that union came a son, William. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, and William — though born a Perry — would grow up under another name entirely. That other name came from **Charles Calvin Cooper**, whom Anna married on 25 November 1913 in Fargo, in Cass County, North Dakota. In that union the Cooper and Bartosh lines were joined — an old-stock American family with Pennsylvania and New York roots married to a Bohemian immigrant family out of the Iowa prairie, exactly the kind of crossing of immigrant traditions that the Dakotas made possible. Charles adopted young William, who was thereafter known as Bill Cooper — a quiet act that folded the boy fully into the new family. Together Charles and Anna had several more children: **Gladys May**, Eva Rose, George Thomas, and Sadie Harriet, a full and blended household raised across the moves that carried the family from Dakota to Minnesota. The threads of Charles's two marriages were not entirely severed by the years; his daughter Gladys, from the second family, is remembered to have crossed paths with her half-brother Edwin later in life, a small reunion that quietly bridged the two chapters of her father's story. ## Following the Land The middle decades of the couple's life were marked by steady movement across the upper plains. Charles and Anna were at Lisbon, in Ransom County, in 1914 and 1915. By 1920 the census found them at Eagle, in Richland County, in the southeastern corner of North Dakota — flat, open wheat country where the rhythm of life turned on planting, harvest, and the fortunes of the grain markets, and where their residence anchored them for years to a landscape of section-line roads and prairie townships. This restless movement reflected the circumstances of a working family on the northern frontier of American agriculture, following land, labor, and prospects from one small town to the next. The families gathered here lived through the region's sharpest swings. The years around the First World War brought high wheat prices and prosperity, but also strain — the 1918 influenza pandemic reached even isolated prairie towns, and the war pressed hard on German-speaking communities whose loyalty was sometimes questioned. The early 1920s opened with an agricultural depression that struck the wheat country years before the rest of the nation felt the Crash, as grain prices collapsed and farm debt mounted. The 1930s were the cruelest chapter, when drought settled over the Northern Plains, turning the dry years into the Dust Bowl and stripping the topsoil off exhausted fields. Grasshopper plagues, dust storms, and failed crops combined with Depression prices to drive countless families off the land, and North Dakota lost population as people gave up and moved on — many toward the milder country of the Pacific Northwest. The Coopers made exactly that journey. In the early 1920s Charles moved his family away from the Dakota plains and into the pine and lake country of northern Minnesota. By 1930 the household was recorded at Maple Ridge, in Beltrami County, and by 1940 it had settled in Bemidji itself, the county seat and the region's principal town. Bemidji, set on the shore of its namesake lake near the headwaters of the Mississippi, had grown up around the timber trade and offered a different country than the open Dakota wheatlands — a place of forest, water, and the small-city life of a north-woods county town. The family can be traced there through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the longest stretch they spent anchored in any one region after years of frequent relocation. ## Later Years Charles lived out his remaining years in Bemidji, the last of the many places he had called home across a life that spanned Pennsylvania, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota. He died on 21 April 1948, at the age of sixty-eight, and was buried at Bemidji, in Beltrami County, in the northern town that had become, after so much movement, the settled ground of his final decades. Anna outlived him by sixteen years and made one final, considerable move, this time far to the west. By 1950 she was living in Spokane, Washington, at 2214 College Avenue, a full step removed from the prairie and lake country where she had spent nearly all her life, in the company of family that had grown to include grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A single remembered exchange survives from those years, small but telling. As an infant in the family — the author of this book — lay asleep, a neighbor remarked that the baby was "so young his eyes haven't opened yet," and Anna — by then Great Grandma Cooper — answered simply, "He's sleeping, silly." It is a fragment of ordinary domestic life, but it preserves something of her plainspoken, matter-of-fact presence in the household. Anna Bartosh died in Spokane on 24 November 1964, at the age of seventy-six, and was buried there, on the far side of a journey that had carried her from a Bohemian farming community in Iowa across three states and the better part of a continent. With the marriage of Charles Cooper and Anna Bartosh at Fargo in 1913, the Pennsylvania-and-New-York Cooper line and the Bohemian Bartosh and Riha line were bound together on the Dakota prairie, and the household they raised carried both traditions off the drought-stricken plains — Charles to a grave at Bemidji in the Minnesota pinewoods, Anna to one in Spokane, far to the west of the wheat country where their family had first come together.