# Bismarck, Burleigh County, North Dakota For a few years in the mid-1880s, the Spence family made their home in Bismarck, on the eastern bank of the Missouri River in what was then Dakota Territory. John W. Spence, born in Pontefract, England, in 1835, was by this time a man who had already traveled widely across the American West — through Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, and beyond. His trade was teaming, and his life reflected the restless mobility of the frontier. He resided in Bismarck in 1886 and again in 1888, and it was here that two of his children were born: Alice Beatrice Spence on 19 May 1885, and Fredrick Reif Verner Spence on 3 June 1888. Bismarck in these years was a young town, freshly named the territorial capital and shaped by the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which crossed the Missouri here. It was a jumping-off point for people heading further west, and this suited a man like John, who worked as a teamster and would travel back East to bring settlers westward, sometimes gone from home for months at a stretch. Those long absences left their mark on family memory. On one occasion, while John was away, his family in the West went hungry. It was the local Indians who came to their aid, bringing food and saying they could not let the family of John Spence go without. The story, preserved through his descendants, speaks to the kind of man John was and the good standing he held with the Native people he encountered in his travels. For the Spence family, Bismarck was not a permanent settlement but a station along a wider journey. Their years here — bracketed by the births of Alice in 1885 and Fredrick in 1888 — capture a family living at the edge of the frontier, sustained by a father's labor on the roads west and, at least once, by the kindness of neighbors on the plains.