Life in Fountain Prairie

A Collection of Short Stories About Growing Up in Southwestern Minnesota During the Great Depression
by Daniel H. Smith, MSW

The Stories

Daniel H. Smith wrote twenty stories about growing up in Fountain Prairie Township during the Great Depression. Fountain Prairie Township is near Pipestone, Minnesota.

Daniel was born on March, 5, 1922, and was seven years old when the Great Depression started in 1929. His father lost all of his savings when the banks collapsed. Daniel was eight year old when the Dust Bowl years started in the Midwest. While many families lost their farms in the area, the Smith family was able to scrape together money to pay the interest on their mortgage each year.

We will add the stories as we complete the editing.

Brother Al

Albert Eme (Al) – born April 19, 1915 The fifth child was Albert and they called him “Aap” pronounced, “Op.” Jacob and Albert two boys were always close. We called them “Bop and Aap.” When they were called for supper or to do a chore, it sounded like one word: “Bop’n’Aap.” Throughout the drought and depression, Al stayed in school and graduated from the eighth grade. One time Al and Jake rode Daniel’s wagon off the hog house. When it landed, the wheels splayed out. When Al was 18 years old Pa dropped him off at the train station in Willmar, with no train ticket. There was nothing to harvest and no work in Minnesota, and money for a train ticket. Al rode in box cars and sometimes on top of the train in the box above the train engineer. One time, Al was caught in a long rain storm…

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Wally Gets the Hook

Ted, his best friend Wally, and I decided to go fishing in the crick near Uncle Jake’s shanty. Catching fish was not only a fun activity, but during the Great Depression the fish we caught were a key part of our family diet. Even though Jake’s crick was dry during the Dust Bowl years, we knew that behind the bridge there was a large water hole where we could catch bullheads. We threw our lines in the hole and waited for the fish to start biting. Not even a nibble. To try to change our luck, we decided to rile up the water a little. We walked into the water hole wearing our overalls and stirred around the water. Our goal was to stir up enough mud that the fish would need to come to the surface to breathe. It was a muddy mess! Some bullheads came to the top for…

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Summer Job: Finding Food for the Cattle

When my brother Ted was 12 and I was 10, one of our jobs was to herd cattle. During the Great Depression and drought the pastures were dried up and there was nothing for the cattle to eat. However, there was some edible growth along the roadsides. We would take our whole herd of cattle out along the roadsides so they would have something to eat. Our job was to control the cattle so that they wouldn’t sneak into fields along the roadsides of adjoining farmland.

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Homemade Toys…the Smith Way

Welding and Forging Toys The Smith’s were well known for their mechanical abilities. When neighbors needed help with their farm machinery, they called the Smith boys to help. Our parents expected us to entertain ourselves, and that entertainment often included welding and forging our own homemade toys in the tool shack. We spent hours in the tool shack making homemade toys out of a big pile of scrap-iron which we called “the iron pile.” We searched through this iron pile for various things that we could use to weld into toys like our clicker dings and cranker dings. (See “The Great Gopher Hunt” to learn about our clicker dings.) The Cranker Ding As you might expect, a cranker ding is a toy that you crank. A cranker ding has wheel on one end (perhaps a bicycle tire) with a 6-foot long shaft, and at the end of the shaft was…

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Daniel and Marvin as small children in Fountain Prairie

The Great Gopher Hunt

Pa announced that the gophers along the pasture were going into the cornfields and had already dug up the whole first row of the newly planted corn. 

“If you boys can catch some of these gophers I’ll give you a penny a piece for them.” 

Ted and I were really excited. If we could catch those gophers we would make a lot of money.

Ted said, “Let’s take our buggy. Let’s put a barrel on it and fill it with water. Then we’ll go out in the field and drown out those gophers. We should be able to drown out a whole lot of them with a whole barrel full of water. At a penny each we will be making a lot of money!” 

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The Smith Family

Read about the members of the Smith family. Henry Smith, the family patriarch had ten children, nine boys and one girl.

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Photo Gallery

See photos of the family growing up in Fountain Prairie. If you have photos you would like added, email them to smetoxen@gmail.com.

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Memories

Daniel documented many memories about his family and growing up during the Great Depression.

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