613 - Linda Slaughter

Linda Warfel Slaughter, author and wife of Dr. Benjamin Slaughter, Camp Hancock’s army surgeon, experienced and wrote about pioneering on the prairie as the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway established Bismarck as a city. She diligently recorded many of Bismarck’s firsts, such as the first party, where attendants drank champagne and ate buffalo tongue sandwiches, and the first funeral, held when a herder was killed in an attack led by members of an area tribe. Linda even wrote the first telegraph message ever sent out of Bismarck, to announce the completion of the telegraph line and the inauguration of Bismarck, then called Edwinton, as a city.

While living in Dakota Territory, first at Fort Rice, then at Camp Hancock, Linda started Bismarck’s first Sunday school and public school. She became the county’s first Superintendent of Schools, the first postmaster, and founded the Ladies Historical Society, ancestor of the State Historical Society, amongst other activities and achievements. She and her husband also raised three daughters, one of whom, Jessamine Slaughter Burgum, collected her mother’s diaries and sketches and published a book, Zezula or Pioneer Days in the Smoky Water Country, which details “the early and romantic history of Dakota Territory along the Missouri River.” Zezula includes a poem Linda wrote, “State Song for North Dakota.” You can hear Linda’s deep reverence for the state in her lines,

“From the timbered Turtle Mountains
To the James’ winding tide
By wide coteaux, fair and fertile,
Where the Sheyenne’s waters glide,
Stretch the plains of North Dakota.
Farm and homestead free to all,
Foreign lands to free Dakota
Sent their people at our call.”

*Linda’s poems and journal entries provide perceptive observations of life on the prairie and reflect the values she and many pioneers living in Dakota Territory held at that time.

She died in St. Cloud, MN in 1911, but her legacy lives on at Camp Hancock and beyond.