MOUNT ERICKSON
Published in Wetmore Spectator—
March 27, 1936
By John T. Bristow
It was sixty-two years ago. Our quiet little village, surrounded by almost continuous open country, with grazing herds all bedded down for the night, slumbered. A gentle rain was falling.
The night train brought to Wetmore a man bent upon a desperate undertaking. Jim Erickson was a resident of these parts, but had been absent for some time. He did not seek lodgings in town. Under cover of the night he walked west on the railroad track for two miles, then turned off to the timber on the south. He spent the remainder of the night in a hay stack at the timber’s edge. Here he loaded his revolver for the cold-blooded murder of his neighbor and supposedly his friend, Adolph Marquardt.
With the coming of dawn on that spring morning, May 10, 1873, Jim Erickson-plodded on foot through the wet grass from his hay-stack bed to the Marquardt home two miles to the southwest. He knocked for admittance. The door was opened. Erickson’s gun flashed, and Marquardt fell dead by the side of the door.
Just what all happened after that is mere conjecture — but rumor had it that the whole abominable affair rested with Erickson’s burning desire to break the Tenth Commandment; and as expedient to this insane impulse he deemed it important for him to break also the Sixth Commandment. And as it turned out, he just about smashed the whole category of “Thou shall nots.”
Jim Erickson took the two small Marquardt children over to the home of Peter Nelson about a quarter of a mile away. He told Nelson that he had killed Marquardt; that he had shot Mrs. Marquardt in the thigh, crippling her, so that she could not get away, and that he intended to kill her when he returned to the home. Erickson also told Nelson that he had intended to take Mrs. Marquardt away with him, but she had refused to go.
It was never definitely established that there had been any promises or understanding between Erickson and Mrs. Marquardt. If there had been any clandestine meetings, they had the good sense, or more likely the good luck, to keep it well under cover. The one certain thing is that Erickson coveted his neighbor’s wife — and that was bad business.
The Marquardt children were too young to realize what had happened. The older child, a boy of four, could say nothing but “Boom!” The younger child died two years later in the home of William Morris.
The older boy — now Adolph Nissen — still lives. He was taken into the home of Christian C. Nissen. Or rather, the Nissens came to the boy’s home, acquiring the right through due process of law. And they adopted the boy.
The Marquardts were regarded as fine people, and if there had ever been any rifts in the family, the world did not know it. Jim Erickson was a rather quiet and apparently honorable man who owned a homestead north of the Marquardt home. The Marquardt land is now owned by Mrs. C. C. Nissen, Christian’s second wife, mother of Frits Nissen, and C. C.’s other four children—Bill, Homer, George, and Mrs. Charley Love. Peter Nelson owned the intervening eighty then. Erickson was a bachelor. The residents of that settlement were all countrymen. That is, they or their ancestors had immigrated to this country from that little corner of the old world known as the land of the midnight sun—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
There were no telephones then and the process of summoning the law was necessarily slow. William Liebig was constable. He was reputedly a very brave man, but that was one time when he displayed more caution than |. bravery. With a posse of deputized men, Liebig went to the scene of the murder—that is, they went near it. For long hours the men hung around on the fringe of the premises, watching and waiting. Finally Liebig crept noiselessly up to the house and very cautiously pushed the door open. His tension relaxed a bit. All occupants of the house were dead. Jim Erickson had killed Mrs. Marquardt while in bed. He then sent a bullet through his own head.
At that time there was a small publication at Netawaka whose outspoken editor believed in calling “a spade a spade.” His printed version of the affair, purporting to be based on revealments in the house on entry of the officers, was, to say the least, racily rotten.
Erickson’s body was brought to town and rested for a while in the wareroom of the DeForest store building. The doctors sawed Erickson’s head open, and decided that he had an “abnormal brain.” But evidently they were not satisfied with their findings. Anyhow, it would seem they craved another whack at him, as will be observed later. In making the post-mortem the doctors used a common carpenter’s hand saw. I saw them do it.
Marquardt and his wife were buried in the Wetmore cemetery. Marquardt was a Union soldier. His grave is marked with a slab bearing only his name.
There was no one here to claim Jim Erickson’s body. Neil Erickson, a cousin, lived in that neighborhood—but the crime was too horrible for him to have any part in the disposal of the murderer. Neil Erickson was a respected citizen. Neil later married Peter Pope’s widow. She was the sister of a Wetmore shoemaker named Reuter. Pope gave Reuter a cow for bringing his sister here—as a prospective bride—besides paying the woman’s way from Germany. She took with her into the Erickson home one child — Charley. I do not know if Charley was her son, or Peter Pope’s by his first wife. Likely the former. Pope had a daughter—Louise. She was old enough at her father’s death to make her own way. She worked in Dr. J. W. Graham’s home for several years. Neil Erickson was the father of Dick Erickson. Jim Erickson’s brother George came later, and lived here many years. He was an honorable man.
The town people decided that they did not want a murderer buried in the cemetery, so what was left of Jim Erickson after the doctors had finished with him, was dumped into a packing box, and he was buried on top of a high hill just south of town. This hill, then regarded as “no man’s land,” is now a part of the Bartley farm. It has been locally known ever since as Mount Erickson.
On the night following the planting of Erickson, two groups of doctors, with numerous assistants, started out to recover the body. But, as it turned out, the corpse was left undistributed—at least, for that night. Rumor had it that it did not remain long on the hill-top.
The Wetmore group, led by Dr. W. F. Troughton, was first in the field. Close on their heels came the Netawaka group. Dusk was upon them. One of the Netawaka men rode a white horse. That rider and his companions moved silently across the slough-grass swamp skirting the big hill, steadily gaining on the Wetmore men who had halted at the base of the hill. One of the local hirsute sentinels — they nearly all wore whiskers then—exclaimed, “It’s a ghost!” That was enough. The Wetmore group stampeded. The Netawaka group followed suit. And the cattle which had bedded down for the night at the base of the hill stampeded. The cattle bellowed, and what with terrified men and frightened beasts running this way and that way, pandemonium reigned supreme for quite a spell. Perhaps the cattle, too, had seen Erickson’s ghost.