His Sod House Had No Woodpile in January - Until the Trains Stopped and the Town Came Begging

Hard Winter, Dakota Territory, 1880-81: in a treeless prairie town that burns railroad coal and hauled cordwood, Jakob Reisig, 52, a Black Sea German farmer, keeps no woodpile at all. Instead he spent the summer building a massive whitewashed clay-brick stove through the middle of his sod house and cutting and drying bricks of pressed manure and straw (mistholz) the way his village did on the steppe, stacking them in a dug fuel cellar under his floor. Coal and lumber dealer Garvin Pellham, who holds the town's only fuel stock, mocks him as 'the man who burns dung', gets the town board to order his drying stacks torn down as a nuisance, and refuses to sell him coal at any price so the town will watch him beg. In January the blizzards close the railroad for months; Pellham locks up his last coal to sell at ruinous prices while wood shacks go cold, and in a three-day blizzard the neighbours who laughed come through the snow to the one house whose stove never goes out. All characters, places and events in this story are fictional. Subscribe to Earthwall Hollow for more stories.