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#1032 – Dick Bernard: Catching a Moment in Time. Saturday, March 18, 1905

Visiting the graves of Ferd and Rosa Busch, and three of their children, Verena, Edithe and Vincent, Berlin ND St. John's Cemetery, May 24, 2015

Visiting the graves of Ferd and Rosa Busch, and three of their children, Verena, Edithe and Vincent, Berlin ND St. John’s Cemetery, May 24, 2015


Seventeen of us gathered at the old Ferd and Rosa Busch farm in Henrietta Township on May 24. It was the end of an era: for 110 years the farmstead has been owned, and for the vast majority of that time occupied, by Ferd and Rosa’s family. Now the old place is up for sale, and at some early point new occupants will take over the newly re-surveyed 10 acre farmstead, 10 miles northwest of LaMoure, 5 miles northeast from Berlin, about the same southwest from Grand Rapids ND.
Saturday a few of us were doing the last run through of the artifacts now stored in the metal machine shed.
One item remaining was the formidable wooden packing crate which brought the Busch possessions from southwest Wisconsin via Dubuque in March of 1905. For years the crate resided quietly in the attic in the old house; thence in Vincent’s bedroom in the new. It had been opened previously, but not examined in detail.
This day, we took out everything, including Grandma’s wedding dress, in near perfect condition after 110 years.
But there was something else I noticed in a box within the crate. There were a couple of old newspapers, used for packing back then. I took them out: one of them was a pretty well crumpled newspaper in German from November of 1904; the second was the Dubuque Morning Telegraph for Saturday, March 18, 1905. Grandma and Grandpa married on February 28, 1905, and I knew they hadn’t left immediately for North Dakota. I can now deduce from the newspaper date that they probably left for the prairie shortly after March 18.
That was only the first piece of “news” from that paper….
(click to enlarge)
Dubuque Morning  Telegraph, page one, Saturday, March 18, 1905

Dubuque Morning Telegraph, page one, Saturday, March 18, 1905


There were four pages from the newspaper, pages 1, 2, 7 & 8.
The main headline on p. 1 immediately caught my attention: “GENERAL KUROPATKIN IS DISMISSED IN DISGRACE”, followed by the sub-headlines so common in papers of that day: “Gen. Linevitch in Suspreme [sic] Command” “…withdrawing what is left of the great Army of 250,000, men hemmed in on all sides, confronts him.” “Czar shows no signs of yielding” “Preparation for carrying on the war on a greater scale are made by Russians-Oyama in Mukden”.
The front page news in Dubuque was about a war being waged between Russia and Japan in the far eastern reaches of Siberia.
Places like Harbin and Vladivostok were mentioned. Dispatches were included from London and Berlin sources. You could see the same kinds of headlines in today’s newspapers….
In this issue, the Russians were – the Czar was – being defeated.
This defeat was a harbinger of the Czars becoming a thing of the past; Communists were a part of the future. The German-Russians, Lawrence Welk’s kin, probably didn’t know it yet in 1905, but they were all being squeezed out of Russia to new homes, a great many of them migrating to North and South Dakota.
The other stories on the front page had a deja vu aspect to them. A law passed in Delaware to “Abolish Pillory” “inhuman” punishment; in Peoria IL an oil “pipe line across certain highways” hit a snag (“Strikes Snag in Illinois” read the headline); there was a “scheme” by powerful interests “to grab Niagara” Falls, threatening the tourist attraction with extinction.
It was announced by Secretary Taft of the Theodore Roosevelt administration that the U.S. “will retain the Philippine Islands” for perhaps at least a generation. And a fascinating headline prominent at the top of page one said “Castro is preparing to send an Army of 30,000 to take New Orleans to demand Indemnity.” This was not Fidel Castro, rather the then President of Venezuela.
There were no pictures on this front page: it was all news. Other headlines at the bottom of the page: “Sold Wife for $10” (the deal was legal, and okay with the wife, apparently); “Missouri legislature Passes Law Against Bookmaking”. A Baltimore Whiskey maker won a trademark lawsuit against a clever impostor in Brooklyn who had borrowed part of its name.
And so it was, on and on, in Dubuque, Iowa, and the world right after Grandma and Grandpa Busch were married, February 28, 1905.
It was like opening a time capsule….
Some of those at the small reunion at the Busch farm on May 24.  From left Pinkney's, Dick Bernard, Bill Jewett, Carter Hedeen.

Some of those at the small reunion at the Busch farm on May 24. From left Pinkney’s, Dick Bernard, Bill Jewett, Carter Hedeen.