Gopher Tales
May 17, 1999 Grand Forks, N.D.

Dear classmates and friends,
Every year at this time I wonder why we try to pack so many events and activities into these weeks between Mother's Day and Memorial Day. This year we're busier than ever because on top of everything else we're getting ready for Mom's auction sale.

Mom picked Saturday, May 29, to sell all the stuff she won't need and won't have room for any more after she moves from her big house in Eureka to the Sunrise Apartments. So our mission this week is to finish
moving her into her new place, and then to get everything else ready for the sale. Please pass the Excedrin and the Canadian Windsor. It will be a big change for Mom moving from her three-story house into a one-bedroom apartment. But she's definitely ready and even excited about it.

Of course it will be sad, too, to say good-bye to the place that's been our family home for 20 years. But we count our blessings that Mom was able to sell it and leave behind all the work and worries of taking care of a big house and yard.

As we begin sorting through all of Mom's stuff, I wonder which items will turn out to be the most desirable come sale day. Every sale is different and what may be THE hot item at one may bring next to nothing at the next. One of the things Mom is selling is Dad's old .22 rifle and she's already had one inquiry about it, which surprised me. I had never given the gun much thought, perhaps because Dad was never much of a hunter. He and my brothers used the gun mostly to shoot gophers.

I don't know if McPherson County still offers a bounty for gopher tails, but when I was a kid it paid from 4 to 6 cents per tail. I never hunted them with a gun, but for a couple of years my brother David and I set traps. However trapping and killing little animals, even gophers, gave me nightmares and so I gave it up. My older sister and brother apparently were more successful at trapping because June says they used to earn enough money from selling gopher
tails to pay for their rides at the Fourth of July carnivals. June said she and Gerry walked their trap line every day and before Gerry got a pocketknife they used two rocks to pound the tails off the dead gophers. The tails were tied on a piece of string and hung in the garage until they were sold.

My brother David said most of the gopher tales he remembered were gross, including the time he and I accidentally trapped a skunk and Dad had to come out and shoot it. Also David and two neighborhood buddies, Terry Schlack and Larry Jundt, used to play "gopher ball" with dead gophers. (Wait till PETA hears about this.) One of them would pitch a dead gopher and someone else would bat it with a big stick. "The third guy just watched the guts fly when contact was made," David said. He and his gopher hunting buddies considered it a real accomplishment if they could line up a shot and hit two gophers with one bullet.

But my favorite gopher story comes from a WPA writing project called "Homesteaders of McPherson County" which I found on Duane Stabler's McPherson County genealogy website. (To find that website address, just
scroll down on this page.) The story of "The Pied Piper of Leola" begins in 1903. A man named C.W. Hawes ran a livery stable in Leola and was a born promoter, so he was elated when he received a communication from G.A. Tolbett of Chicago appointing him the local representative of the Australian Rabbit Extermination Company. Hawes received a letter outlining the company's plan to exterminate the rabbits in Australia by shipping in live gophers from America. The plan included the inoculation of gophers with a disease fatal to rabbits but harmless to the gophers.

Hawes part in the plan was to buy live gophers and hold them until Tolbett came to Leola to claim them and ship them to Australia. So on April 23, 1903, Hawes placed this advertisement in the McPherson County Herald: "10,000--LIVE GOPHERS WANTED--10,000. We will pay 25c apiece for female and 15c for male gophers delivered at Leola House on May 2, 1903."

Soon Hawes had gophers by the hundreds in all kinds of containers including buckets, wooden boxes and crates covered with screen wire, lathe or wooden slats. Soon the livery was so full of gophers there was no room left for extra horses or anything else. On May 2, the date appointed for the gopher pickup, Dawes began allowing people to stack crates of gophers on the front porch of his hotel, the Leola House, much to the consternation of his guests. A crowd of people gathered and waited for the representative of the Australian Rabbit Extermination Company. At the end of the day they were still waiting.

As time passes the difficulties of storing thousands of gophers in close quarters became apparent. Some gave birth to more gophers. Then the captive and poorly fed rodents started to attack and eat each other. The stench became unbearable.

What to do! There was still no world from the Australian Rabbit Extermination Company. Finally Hawes couldn't take it anymore. He hacked off lath, ripped off screen wire and turned the gophers loose on Leola. They swarmed under and over boardwalks until people could hardly pass without stepping on gophers. As the animals spread over town they decimated the early gardens. Hawes lost his investment and whatever popularity he may have had. It was not until long afterward that Leola folk learned that the whole affair was a practical joke played on Hawes by William Cochrane, a young man who had come West for his health and was employed as principal of the Leola schools. Cochrane was suffering from tuberculosis and before he died a few years later confessed the whole thing to his brother. Cochrane had called on a friend in Chicago who helped him set the whole thing up.

All of which makes for a gopher tale that could be hard to top.

Your friend, Paulette