Orlo Jerome Dane: 1868-1940
Fresh Country, Fresh Start
Orlo Jerome Dane is my second great uncle, the only son of
my second great-grandfather Jerome Dane, for whom he was named, and my second
great-grandmother Mary Jane Mills. Orlo was born August 27, 1868 in Minnesota,
probably near Janesville in Waseca County, although I have been unable to find
a birth record. The family soon relocated to a farm in Leray Township in Blue
Earth County, where Orlo met Eva Preston, the daughter of Benjamin H Preston
and Jane Irish Preston. The couple married on December 5, 1888.
Orlo
and Eva moved a few years after marrying, settling in Crow Wing County in
northern Minnesota. Orlo filed paperwork to make a homestead claim near
Brainerd in 1899, and was farming the land in the 1900 census. However, he
didn’t stay long enough to prove up his claim. By 1903, the family had moved
into a house in Brainerd, and Orlo was employed by the FE Kenney Land Company.
I have been unable to determine what the company did, although I found reference
to the FE Kenney family moving out of Brainerd to Garrison, Minnesota, located
on the enormous Mille Lacs Lake, so probably the company was selling lots for
development in that area.
Orlo
must have been dissatisfied with life in Crow Wing County. He and Eva had lost
two of their daughters by this time. Their oldest child, Hazel May, died of
“brain fever” in 1898 at the age of six, and their daughter Bertha May died in
1901 at age four from pneumonia. They may have longed for a change of scene—their
home in the photo below looks small and primitive. Orlo settled on a fairly
dramatic change, seeking a fresh start in a completely different country.
Sometime in early 1904, the family
emigrated to Canada, settling far north of Regina, Saskatchewan, near a small
community called Shellbrook. I wondered why they chose to go there—how had they
even heard of such a small, remote place?
According to my research, the Canadian
government was advertising quite heavily in the upper Midwest farming regions
for would-be farmers who didn’t have the money to buy their own land and were
renting. The government wanted settlers for their prairie provinces, and were
puzzled as to why immigrants were pouring into Minnesota and the Dakotas, but
were ignoring similar land opportunities to the north. According to a paper
written by historian Randy William Widdis, the Canadian Minister of the
Interior Clifford Sifton, “aimed his aggressive promotion of western settlement
toward farmers in the United States and Europe. He deemed the United States the
greatest source of "first class" settlers because American immigrants
had capital, goods, and experience in prairie farming and because Ottawa
considered them ‘ethnically desirable.’” Sifton’s office opened land offices in
the United States, ran newspaper advertisements, and sent representatives to
Midwest farm gatherings to speak about Canadian homestead opportunities. Below
are some of the types of advertisements Orlo might have seen in Brainerd.
Meanwhile, in the United States,
land was filling up and becoming more expensive, making it harder for new
farmers to enter into the business. Orlo faced this difficulty, although he had
abandoned his opportunity to homestead near Brainerd. Perhaps he was more
susceptible to the Canadian land advertisements due to his work for the Kenney
land development company. He may have been more comfortable taking chances on
land after seeing the Kenneys make money speculating on it. In 1903 and 1904,
nearly 80,000 American citizens moved to Canada. Nearly 5000 of them headed to
the prairie regions of Saskatchewan and Alberta to homestead land, including
Orlo and Eva Dane.
Orlo filed his Saskatchewan Homestead
Grant Application on February 9, 1905, as seen below. By the 1906 Canadian
census the family was settled and was farming. According to the census, they
owned 15 cattle and 5 hogs, but oddly had no horses. How he expected to grow
grain with no horses to pull a plow or other farm implements is beyond me,
unless his “cattle” included an oxen team.
The family remained in their new
country only four years. The photo below was taken in 1908 shortly before they
moved back to the United States. I was fascinated by the cluster of photos
behind Eva and Jeannie’s heads—probably sent by family members back in the
United States. I am guessing the Danes were homesick. However, they chose to
move to the Chelan area of Washington state instead of returning to Minnesota
where their family still lived.
Orlo never got over his roaming
ways—he continued to search for a ”fresh start” every few years. According to a
story posted by another descendant, on their 50th wedding
anniversary, Eva guessed they’d probably lived in 50 places during those 50
years. I admire her pluck and strength. It couldn’t have been easy to follow
him time after time.
Sources:
Saskatchewan Bound: Migration to a New Canadian Frontier by
Randy William Widdis, Univ of Regina. Published
in Great Plains Quarterly 12:4 (Fall 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great
Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/649/
Canadian Museum of History, “Advertising in the United
States, 1900-1920s.” https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/hist/advertis/ads6-01e.html
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