Uncle Nis Refslund

Uncle Nis Refslund, had he been relate to me, would have been a great, great uncle.  Although not a direct blood relation, he looms large in the stories from my dad’s side of the family.    Nis was the much younger brother of the second wife of my grandmother’s father.  He was born in Denmark near the German border, around 1890 and, at the urging of his sister living in Chicago, immigrated to America around 1910.  After a visit with family in Chicago he went west and established his homestead in the wheat country of eastern Montana.  The nearest town was Wolf Point.  It’s still there. 

When he arrived, Uncle Nis didn’t speak English.  By the time he left the US, he had developed his own brand of English.  The sing-song cadence of Danish combined with the crudeness of the cowboy -- and all the swear words!

Nis lived alone on the homestead until he sold up and returned to Denmark in the late nineteen forties. He stayed at our house, saying good by to my Dad and family members. I remember him sitting on our screened-in porch, dressed in dungarees and an old undershirt, his hair long and his beard white, wearing cowboy boots and spouting in his inimitable English. My mother was horrified. I was enthralled. Nis became my childhood hero.  

Probably due to the influence of Teddy Roosevelt, it was common for families living in cities, who could afford it, to send their boys to the country to spend the summer in the fresh air.

When my father, Richard Christensen, was a teen, he and his good friend Warren Neilsen spent two summers around 1926 on Nis’s homestead. They would have boarded the Union Pacific line in Chicago and several days later, stepped off in Wolf Point. The town is on the north side of the Missouri River. The homestead was on the south side.  If the river was low enough you could ride a horse across. If not, there was a makeshift “ferry” a flat barge that was hauled across by hand-pulling an overhead rope.

One way to cross the Missouri

The boys rode horses and helped around the farm.  There is one photograph of Warren holding up a rat snake they had found in the barn and killed.  It looked to be five feet long.  Nis was very unhappy with the boys!  It was a RAT snake.  It killed rats.  It was his friend.

In 1963, I spent a year studying French at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.  On one of the long holidays my father suggested I go visit Nis.  I flew to Copenhagen then took two trains and a ferry to find the small town of Toftlund to which Nis had returned some twelve years before. Descending from the train I searched the almost empty platform looking for my childhood hero.   

There was only one other person there. But he was wearing a cowboy hat and boots!  And my hero was small.  He barely reached to my shoulder.  

I stayed with him and his housekeeper, Tante Steine, for about 5 days.  He had built a small red brick house and raised chickens and grew strawberries and vegetables in the small garden.  VILLA MONTANA was spelled out in large white letters across the front of the house.  He talked about homesteading and life in Montana.  He also told me that when he came to America he had planned to bring over his fiancée, Kristina, once he had built a house for her.  Then came WWI, and when that finally ended, came the 1918 influenza epidemic.  Kristina died in the epidemic and Nis continued on alone on the Montana prairie for the next thirty years.  He died a few years after my visit.  He would have been around 80.

In 1988 my husband and I and our four children rode the Union Pacific line from Chicago to Seattle for a vacation.  The train stopped in Wolf Point, Montana and we all stepped off and I took pictures.  The circle was closed.

Karen Christensen McGirr