Western

réf. 80817 — A substantial archive of 779 original photographs documenting a young woman homesteader's life in North Dakota and Eastern Oregon beginning around 1910 through the 1940s. Photos are generally about 3" x 5" or the reverse a few smaller including some wallet-size images and several larger up to approximately 9" x 6". 102 are loose photos; the remainder are laid into four well-composed albums of varying dimensions as ennumerated below. About one third of album images are captioned though none are dated. Overall condition is Very Good with occasional rippling to images that have been pasted onto album leaves; occasional mild fading to the earliest photographs; five album images missing though very possibly present among loose photos. Idella Cook née McElrath was born in 1894 to a farming family in Dakota County Minnesota about twenty miles south of Minneapolis. The U.S. Census of 1910 shows the McElraths still residing in Orchard Lake Minnesota; but around that time the family appears to have emigrated to Plaza North Dakota in the sparsely-populated northwest corner of the state near the present-day Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Idella remained in North Dakota until 1917 when she relocated to Klamath Falls Oregon possibly in the company of her future husband a druggist professional photographer and traveling salesman named Roy H. "Doc" Cook. The couple married in 1922. In Klamath Falls Idella learned photography and darkroom work presumably under the tutelage of Mr. Cook then in 1929 the couple opened a general store "Idella's" that operated continuously until 1947 and then until 1978 under new owners selling groceries curios photographs of local scenery and folk remedies. All of these phases of Idella Cook's life are captured in the current archive as is a one-year sojourn 1925-6 in Hawaii. However the bulk of material contained in two thick albums is devoted to the relatively brief interval - no more than six years - between the family's arrival in North Dakota and Idella's departure to Oregon in 1917. Idella's precise status in North Dakota is difficult to pinpoint. Her 1972 obituary in the Klamath Falls Herald and News states: ".as a young girl she staked out a claim on a homestead in North Dakota.17 miles from the nearest town" implying that she had emigrated to North Dakota on her own. However the photographs present here clearly show Idella in the presence of her family members including her younger sister Izetta born in 1904 and looking eight or nine years old in the earliest photos; another photo shows a stout man leading two draft horses captioned "Papa". A January 1913 notice in a Minot ND newspaper The Ward County Independent lists an "N.G. McElrath" almost certainly a transcription error for "U.G. McElrath" Idella's father as one of a group of about 200 settlers activating to carve a new county out of the the northeastern portion of the Bertholdt Reservation which had been opened to non-Indian settlement in 1910. So while it is clear that Idella's family settled in Plaza at some point between April 1910 and January 1913 it is not clear that Idella had yet ventured out as a homesteader. Assuming then that these photos date from the period 1911 to 1912 Idella would have been seventeen or eighteen years old - not precisely a "young girl;" also not old enough to claim a parcel under the Homestead Act but certainly old enough to strike out on her own. Not until 1917 when she is 21 do we find land office records in Idella's name - as the purchaser of four parcels totalling sixty acres near the now-defunct town of Sanish which was later inundated in the construction of Lake Sakakawea in 1953. Shortly after the purchase of those parcels Idella appears to have moved to Oregon. Idella's dependent status notwithstanding these are extraordinary photographs. The earliest images present a vivid picture of the windswept and desolate existence of the area's early settlers. The brand-new town of Plaza founded in 1908 is well represented looking rather like a 1950s cowboy movie set with horse-drawn carriages far outnumbering motorcars on the towns main street. Also represented in a number of photographs is the now-disappeared hamlet of Sanish a town which was inundated in the creation of Lake Sakakawea in 1953. Also lost in that event were many square miles of land sacred to the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation whose members are also a constant presence in Cook's photographs; one important series of photographs captures a large Indian pow-wow likely held on the newly-established Fort Berthold Reservation around 1910. Though the albums are extensively captioned providing a wealth of information on the early settlement and demography of the region they are occasionally wanting for specifics of date and/or locale leaving much deductive work to be done to pinpoint locations and events. Of almost equivalent interest are the many photographs taken and developed by Idella after her move to Klamath Falls around 1917. These were still early days in eastern Oregon with many towns only coming into being in the 1890's and provide a wealth of grass roots historical detail that cannot be found outside primary source materials like this. unknown books