![]() ![]() In the winter and spring of 1882, Hackett returned to Villard with American settlers and Norwegian immigrants, and houses and shops began to dot the prairie. Hacket was exploring possible railroad routes through the Souris River country in 1881 and his wanderings took him to the site of Gardipee’s log home, near which he drove a stake in the ground and proclaimed the village of Villard. Paul to Seattle, prompting speculators to establish townsites along the suspected path, hoping to lure the railroad. The Great Northern Railway was pushing west from St. Gardipee was a Métis, descended from Plains Ojibwe, Plains Cree and French fur traders, who carried mail in the vicinity of Villard, a community on Turtle Lake.ĭuring winter, the only way to transport mail in the area was by dogsled from Washburn, 75 miles to the south, a treacherous undertaking that Gardipee survived by drawing upon skills he acquired as a buffalo hunter, army scout and Pony Express rider. The interconnected lives of Gardipee, who Berget considers an “everyman caught in the web of cultural change,” and those of the opportunistic Haskell and vengeful Cantrell drive Berget’s narrative. The result is a nonfiction work, “Montana Stranglers in Dakota Territory.”īerget found snippets of the story scattered among county histories. ![]() That discovery was the beginning of a years-long quest to learn more of the colorful history of cowboy vigilantes who roamed the Dakota Territory Badlands and beyond during the lawless era of the open range in the 1880s.Īfter more than two decades of periodic research, Berget thought someone should write a book about this overlooked facet of western North Dakota history, and decided that someone should be him. Years later, while in high school, the picture began to come into focus when Berget read a local history book that briefly noted a posse of cowboys from the Minot area caught not one, but three suspected horse thieves they murdered. ![]() His father thought the name Hangman’s Point could have some connection to a story about a posse of cowboys from the Minot area who cornered a horse thief and hung him from a cottonwood tree. “They were like little strings you would follow,” he said of the clues he collected.īerget’s boyhood imagination was ignited by the colorfully named Hangman’s Point on Crooked Lake near the farm where he grew up. The interconnected lives of the three men were pieced together by Ron Berget, a former wildlife manager and minister who lives in Alexandria, Minnesota. The other two men whose lives intersected with Gardipee were Edmund Hackett, an ambitious and conniving businessman who was the first constable of rough and rowdy Bismarck, and Flopping Bill Cantrell, a woodchopper-turned vigilante. His body was one of three that turned up in a grisly discovery in the spring of 1886 by a pair of fishermen who were trying their luck on Crooked Creek in western North Dakota’s McLean County. That man was Francis Gardipee, a mixed-race frontiersman whose buffalo-hunting way of life died off and who, for some reason lost to history, fell in with a gang of horse thieves. The fates of three men became entangled with deadly consequences for one of them, a man once trusted to run a Pony Express mail route out of Fort Stevenson in Dakota Territory. ![]()
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