The story of North Dakota's youngest 'vagrants' in 1923

Stutsman County officials faced an unusual challenge with some young vagrants wandering the area in 1923.

The problem started on a Sunday when residents of the Windsor area brought two boys to Jamestown. The boys, ages 11 and 8, were found in the area and claimed they had been traveling alone for a “fortnight,” according to newspaper reports.

A fortnight is two weeks, in case you are not familiar with the time reference.

The children said they had been sleeping in hay and straw stacks in the fields and eating food begged at farmhouses along their route or snitched from vegetable garden plots.

Officials brought them to juvenile court, where Judge Coffey asked them how they had come to be traveling on their own.

According to the boys, they were traveling with their parents and five siblings by wagon across North Dakota headed toward Dickinson. Somewhere along the way, they had grown tired and stopped for a little nap. When they awoke, the wagon and their family were nowhere to be seen.

I suppose a family of seven children is difficult to keep track of, but it is no excuse to lose two of them along the way.

The children claimed they had tried to track the wagon but were never able to gain sight of their family.

According to newspaper articles, the children were placed under the Stutsman County sheriff’s authority while officials made attempts to locate their parents.

The newspaper coverage referred to the children as “North Dakota’s youngest vagrants” but also included some skepticism about their story. The article used the term “they said” often and presented no other information about the story.

It appears there were no follow-up articles about the children in any of the regional newspapers.

They may have been runaways, or they might have gotten lost by inattentive parents on a wagon trip across North Dakota

No matter how they came to be traveling along across North Dakota, they managed to spend a fortnight living off the land and surviving.

Author Keith Norman can be reached at

www.KeithNormanBooks.com