Martin Julius Berg writes: a biography of events and happenings remembered from 1884 when I was four years of age. First, in the sod house at Colfax ( North Dakota) . One time my Uncle Carl (Karl Berg was 19 at the time) came for a visit. Pa, in a bad humor that day, slapped Charley and me. I was crying and mother threatened to divorce Pa and go back to Chicago to her mother to live and take us kids with her. This, I think, was the real reason why she made the trip to Chicago later on. As soon as I heard them talk about leaving, I ran for the washbasin and started to wash up for the trip.

My next memory is all of us, Henry, Mary, Charley and I and mother on the train and sleeping all in one bunk. Then in Chicago at the Lincoln Park watching a bunch of seals swim around a log house in the center of a pond.

Somehow I wandered away from the others and started walking across a half-mile network of railway tracks. Henry came and took me back. While we were away in Chicago, father rented a farm of 200 acres from Julius Callum near Abercrombie, nine miles from Colfax on the Red River, for a three year term. Mother fell in love with the place.

Exciting events was when the steamboat came on the river blowing its whistle. We kids would run to the riverbank and sit watching. Sometimes they were hung up for hours. In winter after a heavy snow, we kids would make a trail to the river, one behind the other, tramping through the snow. I remember carrying a tin pail for syrup and walking to town about a mile with mother, Mary and Charley. I was so glad we were going to have syrup.

My uncle, Olaf Helgeson, (this is the youngest son of Helge Aslagson) age 16, used to come over. One time Pa got him to do some plowing with a team of horses and walking plow. Henry, Mary and I went along, following behind in the furrows. While we sat down, resting after a round, Olaf started throwing hard lumps of dirt at my head. That made me cry, so when he started up again, I stayed behind. I was mad, and seeing his coat on the ground, I picked it up. I found a pair of gloves, which I threw way into some brush and also some money. This I took with me. I hid fifty cents by the road side on the way home. and seventy-five cents, in corners outside the house. Uncle was raving mad and accused me to Father, who threatened to pound me up. I denied the whole thing and suggested that maybe a dog had been nosing in his pockets. However, under threat I went to hunt for the gloves but couldn't find them. 5o Mother, after giving me a big piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee, went and found the gloves. Mother, I guess, saved me from a hard spanking.

In the winter of 1887, we left Abercrombie and moved back to Colfax, but not to the sod house. Father had built a frame house and a barn by this time. 

Back: Henry, Knute, Charlie, Mary, Martin;
Front: Bill, Engebret, Helen, Sam, Hannah, Lillian, Helmer