The Early Days Up North

By Art Lundgren
Transcribed by Virginia Clawson Freberg
1977

This is Art Lundgren and I'm supposed to talk a little bit, Emma says, about the early days up North (Longville) -- it was really kind of rough. About the turn of the century after the Indians and loggers got moved a little bit, the timber was taken off and the land up there was thrown open to homesteaders and also the railroad land and school land was sold. The Indians were given their choice: they either could keep 80 acres of land or else move further back to the reservation, so that area really became an open reservation with settlers and homesteaders in there.

The people that moved in had it pretty rough. Some of them mostly lived in log cabins and a couple in dug-outs. I know one family lived in a house four years and they did not even have a floor - bare dirt for floor which they kept real clean, while others had their dug-outs.

Later on, after they first built out of logs, some of them were able to find some logs left over from the logging companies who took the most and the best. The floors they put in out of rough pine would wear down so that the knots stuck out.

The cattle they moved up there from the dryer areas mostly became sick; I don't know why they were always sick from the beginning - what we thought was fawn fever. Some of them later got abortion and different things which wasn't too good, and a lot of them died.