A National Guard unit, maneuvering Army Corps of Engineers heavy equipment, arrived overnight at the Sweetly town line five miles from the village after nearly six weeks in a pitched battle with volcanic elements to open the rails along the eastern flank of the South Dakota. Another few days and they’d have the train at the town crossing.
A strategy to block the Guard from the offloading of Sweetly Coop grain from the grain elevator complex consumed Harland Sven. The angular Swede hoped he would find a large circle of fellow farmers at the coop, ready to fend off the ash-removal crews. A confrontation, he told anyone who would listen, would be a struggle for the town’s survival.
With food supplies all but exhausted in the region, each of Sweetly’s grain-elevator silos was an immense lifeline. Sweetly Coop manager Jim Bottomly rigged an antique belt-driven gristmill to produce corn and soy meal for local families and for what few head of livestock and egg-laying hens had managed to survive the threat of the butcher’s knife.
Harland convinced many of his friends and neighbors that it would be suicide to give up a huge food resource when there were no assurances that food shipments could reach Sweetly from the east. In organizing farmers for this very day, Harland had been overwhelmed by the shrill outcry from the local farmwomen. Whereas the men saw the coming confrontation with the Guard in dollars and cents, the women saw it in the more stark terms of protecting their families from the ravages of hunger. The cry of pain from children with empty bellies was shock treatment for the women. They howled at the idea of Sweetly grain slipping through their hands when there were young mouths to feed. Many had told Harland they would be joining their husbands down at the coop, guns at the ready, if it came to that. The reaction and heartfelt support had stunned the farmer.
Harland’s old Farmall made the turn at the brewery and rumbled up to the coop. Arrayed before the towering silos were half a dozen powerful farm tractors, but far fewer of them than Harland had anticipated. As the farmer rolled toward the coop office, he could see just a dozen of his neighbors—men, women, grown sons and daughters—had already assembled and were awaiting his arrival. He had expected to see scores on hand. Several spotted the farmer as the Farmall moved up the lane, and a tepid greeting went up from the lips of the assembled.
The little gaggle of citizens gathered around the Farmall. Harland recognized Jim Bottomly among the group and tipped his head toward him. Old friend and goose hunting companion Percy Bliss stood beside Bottomly. The manager of the coop called out to the farmer, “Harland, glad you got yourself here. What’s the plan?” Harland scanned the environs for his foster son, Andy Regas, but the man was nowhere in sight.
For weeks, Harland had plotted how the citizens of Sweetly might foil an attempt to offload the grain. Now he had a chance to spell it out. He removed a large fold of paper from his shirt, opened it before him and laid it out on the floor of a flatbed utility trailer for all to see.
“First thing, the rail line should be open to the coop in a few days,” Harland said. “They’ll get that train in here. It’s down on the town line right now, coming this way. In two days, come back in and set up your tractors side by side on the tracks near the crossing. That will send a pretty clear message. If you don’t want to get a scratch on your new John Deere, well, leave it home. But if you want to eat the day after tomorrow, stick it down the track.”
“I’m with you, Harland,” rang out a voice.
A dozen voices seconded the first.
Harland nodded. “Good! Okay, then, let’s keep going. Percy over here, he went down to Milbank and broke into the gandy-dancer shack there. We have railroad crowbars and track lug wrenches. We’re going to pull up a rail right here. We just need to remove one rail. That’s it. No train can get past it. Then we’ll ditch the tools.
“Now, we need a united stand. I’d hope that a few of you would cradle your firearms and simply stand your ground here at the office. Jim is going to talk with whoever comes up to try to negotiate with us. The word is we just won’t let the grain go.”
From the back of the assembly, a question sailed on the air. “What are we going to do if they won’t accept what we say?”
Harland paused for a minute. “I’ve thought about that a great deal. I didn’t call you folks down here to get hurt. I don’t want the Guard shooting at you or anything. If they don’t respect our numbers here, then they still won’t be able to get at the grain. I’m going up into the headhouse.”
The farmer turned and pointed at the boxy structure at the very top of the old elevator silos that ran the whole length of the complex. In the headhouse were the mechanical workings of the granary. It was the control center that pneumatically pulled grain into the buildings, sorted it among various elevator bins, and then shuttled grain by gravity to the offload compartments and tubes so that grain could be channeled down to rail cars. The headhouse was the brains and brawn of any grain elevator facility and Harland meant to control every inch of this one high above Sweetly.
Still pointing to the top of the towers, Harland boomed, “I’m going up there, and I’m staying there come hell or high water, Percy, too. We’ll have some protection up there. You don’t down here. If things get ugly, Jim will come up and tell us what’s going on.”
Over the previous two weeks, Harland and Bliss had moved food, water, sleeping rolls, ammunition, fuel, warm clothing, reading materials and sanitary goods up into the headhouse atop the grain towers. Day after day, they donned backpacks and boarded the ingenious man-lift inside the complex to take them to the heights. All they had to do was throw a breaker on the wall, step onto a tiny steel platform hooked to a continuously revolving belt hoist, and ride to the headhouse high in the heavens. The trick was not to look down and witness the ground floor fall away fifty feet or more. Once in the headhouse, they grabbed a pull-bar and slipped out onto the floor. The men emptied their packs, climbed back on the hoist and dropped down for another load.
Now the headhouse could shelter several men for as long as thirty days without resupply. Harland was eager and ready, and Percy Bliss was determined to follow his friend into the loft and create a fortress.
“So now,” Harland bellowed for all to hear, “Jim is going to tell the Guard that the community is not willing to part with its grain stores no matter what the official order is. That’s not likely to go over well. But remember, in order to move the grain, the Guard has to get a train in here. They’ll have to fix the rail once we take it apart. No one is going to be able to do that with Percy and I up there.
“So the idea is to show force, but not use force. We didn’t come here to die, just to get the Guard to move on somewhere else and leave us alone. The boys are South Dakota boys, after all. They’re probably just a work crew anyway. We want to intimidate them so they’ll pick up and go. Understand?”
The crowd rumbled in support of Harland’s words.
The length of track the farmers pried up was in the line of sight from high in the headhouse. With strenuous effort, the men loosened the huge rusted nuts on the rail bolts that held the rails together in an endless steel ribbon. They labored to pull dozens of rail spikes so one section of track could be swung to one side and hauled away. The breach was all that was necessary to foil the advance of any rail car.
The heavy work done, Harland called to everyone to reassemble. “All right,” he declared, “we are all set. We’ve only got a few days before the crew gets here and the train pulls in. Show your stuff, look like you mean business, but don’t take unnecessary risks. Think of your families. Put your trust in what Jim’s going to say and in what Percy and I can do up there in the headhouse. Remember, that train can’t move into place to get at the grain, and Percy and I have our hands on the machinery up there. That’s all that’s really necessary to win this thing. “Now, go home, get some rest. Be back here early two days from now, and see if you persuade some others to join us.”