Honoring Argo old-timers

Brookings County Now & Then

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Some Kings will be honored tomorrow at a late afternoon party on an Argo Township homestead.

Other Kings will deal out pork loin sandwiches to family, friends and neighbors who drop by to wish Cathryn “Katie” King a happy 90th birthday.     

Picnic tables will be aligned in the shade of the same home on the same farm north of Brookings that was homesteaded 140 years ago by her late husband’s grandfather. 

Cathryn, a product of the 1930s Depression and Dust Bowl years, grew up just down the road from the 1878 homestead that became her home in 1949 when she married the original homesteader’s grandson, Bob King. 

Just as three generations of Kings had done before them, Bob and Cathryn farmed the good land and raised a great family on that historic quarter section. 

Bob King was born in 1925 in the same one-room shanty his grandfather, Robert Lewis King in 1879. The little house has undergone considerable expansions and improvements over the years. 

In fact, the King shanty is now the comfortable living room of the farm’s stately nine-room home.

Bob was 84 when he died in 2009, and Cathryn soon left the farm she knew so well to live in a Sioux Falls senior center near her son David and family. David and his son Jesse, continue to work the 140-year-old farm.

They have every intention to emulate their ancestors and pass it along to future Kings. 

The man who started it all, Robert Lewis King, was a lumberjack in Wisconsin dreaming of homesteading in Dakota Territory. He saved his meager earnings and waited for that day. 

In 1874 he read of Custer’s gold discovery out there, and in 1876 he read of Wild Bill Hickok’s notoriety in the territory’s pine-clad Black Hills after Hickok was shot holding a poker hand of aces and eights.

The next year, in 1877, King took a few days off from work and walked from track’s end at Canby, Minnesota, to scout out the lay of the land. He was walking into the future state’s worst insect invasions, kicking up clouds of chirping grasshoppers as he hiked west.

He found good land to plant his roots and plan his future in Argo Township one mile south of the Brookings-Deuel County line. Returning to the site in 1878, he unpacked and then walked to Sioux Falls to file a homestead claim. He married Ella Smith in 1880 in Lake City, Minnesota.

He also bought wheat seed for 60 cents a bushel and paid 40-cent a bushel for oat seed. His timing was excellent. The grasshoppers were gone and it was the beginning of what became known as the great Dakota Boom.

That fall he sold the progeny of his wheat seed for $1.04 a bushel and stored away an oats crop for his two workhorses that were among 249 horses, nine mules and 23 oxen recorded at that time on the county’s Argo Township tax rolls.

For a decade the markets, the land and the weather cooperated. Robert and Ella and their neighbors worked dawn to dusk. They prospered.

Then in 1886 a heavy-footed drought marched down Argo Township’s dusty dirt roads to test the settlers’ mettle. The Kings and their neighbors learned that farming wouldn’t always be milk and honey.      

From time to time they would be dealt aces and eights.

But as tomorrow’s joyous party illustrates, Dakota pioneers like Robert and Ella King, and those who would follow, held firm and never threw in their cards. They stayed in the game. 

And they won. 

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.