Trip to Bismarck (Part Two)

I've been asked about the story of the bass and violin, and I can't say that I remember them very clearly. The bass was used on a ship during one of the wars the US fought(see how little I remember? :)) and the only reason the bassist survived (everyone else was killed) was because he was a member of the band. The structure of the bass was pretty well preserved, but it was missing two of it's strings. The Hardanger fiddle was brought over from Norway by a family, and other than the family's travels through Minnesota and North Dakota, it's life has been rather uneventful.

We met so many of the people that work in the Heritage Center, and so far, I like them just as well as I like the people I work with at the Chateau. And, while we were in the archives, we saw Frank Visraylek (most likely spelled wrong) who is a North Dakota researcher and has written some works on the Marquis. I haven't read his work yet, but now I'm interested and hopefully, I'll get a chance before I leave.

We also got a chance to go part way through the main gallery, which interprets North Dakota history from the time of the dinosaurs to the present day. The State Historical Society has set up a new program called "History on Call" and we had intended to try it out by finding the parts that Ed and Don (the assistant site supervisor and one of the interpreters) had worked on. We found the man that Don portrayed, but couldn't find Ed's. After asking around, we realized that the "History on Call" program has sort of been put on hold.

Around 2:30, the lady that works in the Heritage Center gift shop loaded up Karen's truck with all of the stuff that needed to be transported to the Chateau. We soon realized that we wouldn't be able to continue exploring Bismarck because of the amount of stuff that we had to take back. So, we went to eat lunch and then went back to Medora.

--

Since that point, Samantha and I have had our first oral history interview with a man that worked on restoring the Maltese Cross Cabin (Theodore Roosevelt's first cabin in Dakota) and also on some aspects of the Chateau. It was really interesting and he had plenty of stories about what life in Medora was like years before I was born. I would have liked to have seen it.

Last night we had a really bad storm -- tornadoes were sighted in the national park and up at the golf course. It was very windy and there were sheets of rain for awhile... It was incredible!

We've also had quite a few bull snake and rattlesnake sightings in the last couple weeks. There was one over by the bathrooms near the taffy shop, and we apparently have a nest of baby rattlers under the porch, even though we've sighted bull snakes in the area, too...