Here Come the Immigrants!

By editor

Terry, Prairie County, Montana

The Northern Pacific Railroad came chugging into eastern Montana in 1881, laying down steel rails like a snake shedding old skin across the prairie. With the rails came a horde of immigrants who seemed to pour in like water running down a new ditch. They arrived from all corners of Europe: Norway, Sweden, Germany, Russia, and the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some came straight off the boats, others trudged from farms in the American Midwest where good, cheap land had become as rare as hen’s teeth. They came because the railroad’s land agents promised them the richest soil this side of Eden and enough rain to coax wheat from the hard earth with nothing but grit and pluck. Some of those promises were true--sometimes--but mostly, they were the sort of tall tales that make the pioneers laugh and the bankers frown.

Prairie County itself was carved out in 1915 from parts of Custer and Dawson counties. The land was claimed and homesteaded in the first two decades of the 20th century, a patchwork quilt of sod shacks and dreams. The town of Terry was plopped down in 1882 as a humble railroad siding, named after General Alfred Terry, who had commanded the Dakota Column during the infamous 1876 campaign against the Lakota. By 1910, the prairie benchlands around Terry were dotted with homestead shacks--each one a family's wager that the land would yield enough wheat to pay the mortgage, buy seed, and cover freight costs to far-off markets.

The Northern Pacific was more than just a conduit for locomotives; it was the great promoter and enabler of this land rush. Railroad officials sent agents to the Midwest and to Europe, waving maps and handing out letters of recommendation. One such agent, a man named John C. Ralston, wrote in 1905: "The soil here is deep and fertile; the rainfall averages twenty inches annually, sufficient for dryland farming if one knows the ways of the prairie." Twenty inches, mind you, was the figure they threw around, though it was a figure that could mean anything from a flood to a dust bowl, depending on the year.

What the agents did not advertise was the fickle temperament of eastern Montana’s climate. The 1910s and 1920s brought droughts that withered crops and broke the spirits of many homesteaders. The population of Prairie County peaked at just under 3,000 in 1920, then began a slow, steady decline that persists to this day. The wheat fields that once promised prosperity often yielded only failure. One local farmer, Ole Hanson, wrote in his diary in 1923: "The ground cracks like an old man’s knuckles, and the wheat chokes in the dust. The bank wants its money, but the rain, she is no friend to us this year." Hanson was one of many who lost their claim to the relentless sun and the merciless wind.

But not everyone folded. Those who stayed became Montanans, shedding their old-world accents and adopting the prairie’s tough rhythms. Their children and grandchildren still farm and ranch the same land their ancestors wrestled free with steel plows and stubborn hope. The bad years taught them to conserve and adapt; they learned to read the sky and respect the soil. It was a hard school, but it produced a people as rugged as the land itself.

The railroad also brought tragedy. On the night of June 19, 1938, a Milwaukee Road passenger train was crossing the Custer Creek Bridge near Terry when a flash flood struck without warning. The bridge collapsed, plunging seven of the train’s eleven cars into the swollen river below. Forty-eight passengers drowned, and seventy-five were injured. Another forty-three survived, many awakening in the rear cars to find themselves stranded and trapped. The disaster was the second deadliest train wreck in U.S. history at the time. One survivor described the scene: "I awoke in the middle of the night to see all this wreckage across the river, the cars floating, and people calling for help in the dark." The flood was a brutal reminder that nature, like the prairie, was not to be trifled with.

The land itself has not changed much since those early days. The Yellowstone River still cuts through the valley with a steady, stubborn grace. The badlands rise to the north, harsh and unyielding. The prairie stretches flat and endless to every horizon, where the sky seems to swallow the earth whole. The soil beneath your feet is the same soil that once promised prosperity and delivered hardship, that witnessed the hopes of immigrants and the tragedies of trains.

Railroads, land agents, and the weight of promises shaped this land and its people. The wheat fields, the towns, the stories--they all grew out of that strange mixture of hope and hard reality. As General Alfred Terry might have said, if he cared to comment on the matter decades after his military campaigns: "We conquered the land, but the land never quite lets you conquer it back."

See also

• Here Come the Immigrants! at Terry, Prairie County
• Hysham and Treasure County at Hysham, Treasure County
• Columbus at Columbus, Stillwater County