Grandfather Peterson, Farmer/Miner

One time I was spending an overnight stay in my grandmother Peterson’s house (after my uncle Carl and aunt Esther had moved to the home at Madrid and they had deeded the house to my mother in appreciation for what she had done for them in their declining years) and I chanced across an old packet in the dresser of the room I was occupying which contained various documents that had belonged to my grandfather Peterson. As I was always interested in anything related to the doings of my forebears, I asked my mother if I could have them. She replied that she would have to ask her surviving brothers if they wanted them. They didn’t and I subsequently acquired them.

I would think that my mother’s brothers would have been interested in the packet, after all it belonged to their father, as contrasted to me who knew of my grandfather only secondhand (he had dies about five years before I was born). Indeed my grandfather Peterson never saw any of his grandchildren. Perhaps it was that our family grew up on Gowrie and had close contact with my grandmother and the members of the family who lived with her or came to visit her but I have always sensed that I have had a greater interest in the family than did any of my Peterson cousins. And of course we lived on the Peterson farmstead during the Depression years. Those were my teenage years and I think a very impressionable time in my life and I imbibed without thinking of it a feel for what life on the farm had been like during the time my mother was growing up there.

From the papers in the packet I was able to determine when the various parts of the farm were acquired by my grandfather. There were also some papers relating to the time he was working a a miner in Montana. There was also a little notebook in which were recorded the purchase of a number of items of food. I surmise that my grandfather was “batching” it while a miner, perhaps alone of in the company of other miners. There is a curious comment in my mother’s account of my grandmother’s history to the effect that once my grandmother was ill and my grandfather did the cooking. My mother commented that the pancakes he made were quite thick. I wonder, was this the way he made them in Montana?

There were also receipts for registered mail addressed to his brother Henry Peterson in Elysian Fields, Texas. Was he sending money to his brother? I know that after his marriage he tried to collect on some funds he had provided to relatives (without apparently too much success). Was he loaning money to his brother? The letters were sent from the post office in Phillipsburg, Montana. I have been in Phillipsburg twice. On one visit I tried to see if my grandfather had had a claim for mining gold (he had the nickname “Gold” Peterson in the Gowrie Swedish community). I could find no record of such a claim and I have concluded that he was working just as a hard rock miner for one of the mining companies in the area at the time.

The topography around Phillipsburg is a mixture of forest and open land. I speculate that [it] is like Sweden in that way and that was why my grandfather wanted to return to it after his marriage. But my grandmother would have none of that. I guess she was fed up with being plunked down in a completely alien milieu. My grandfather did return to Montana during the first year of his marriage to work as a miner. Was he in need of funds to start his life as a farmer? In one of the letters he wrote back to Sweden he comments that he guessed that he would spend the rest of his life as a farmer. Do I detect a sense that [he] felt tied down to a life of oil in an occupation that he really didn’t like?