clay county histories

Randolph and Catherine Probstfield

Markus Krueger | Program DirectorHCSCC

150 years ago right now, Randolph Probstfield had a couple hundred people living in his yard. He was not used to neighbors. 

The German immigrant arrived on the “Red River Frontier” 12 years earlier in 1859. He and two friends trudged through snow from St. Paul to Lafayette, Minnesota, where the Sheyenne River flows into the Red. The “speculator city” of Lafayette consisted of one or two guys in a log cabin who hoped their claim would become a metropolis when the other settlers arrived, at which point they would sell their land at a profit. If they called it a city, they speculated, people would come.

Randolph Probstfield liked this land. He went back east so he could return with more people: his friend Adam Stein from St. Paul; his brothers Justus, Anthony and Paul from Germany; and the girl he loved, Catherine Goodman, whom he married.

The dozen years since 1859 saw much change. Anthony and Justus died fighting the Confederacy to save a country they barely knew. Randolph, Catherine, and their baby Mary became refugees in the US-Dakota War of 1862. The war drove the Dakota from their Minnesota homelands but also halted US colonization – white settlers were afraid to live here. All of the speculator cities – Lafayette, Dakotah City, East Burlington and others – withered on the vine. Most residents of Clay County were indigenous Métis and Ojibwe people working for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Georgetown or as part of the Holy Cross Mission at the confluence of the Wild Rice and Red Rivers. The Probstfields built a log home at a place they called Oakport. It still stands. A few neighbors joined them over the years – Adam Stein returned to Georgetown after fighting the Confederacy, a Swede named John Bergquist homesteaded just south of them (this too still stands), Job Smith was south of Bergquist, and some Norwegians farmed along the Buffalo River. And then, all of a sudden, hundreds of people started camping in Randolph and Catherine’s yard.    

The Northern Pacific Railway was building westward from Duluth, and everyone knew that wherever it crossed the Red River, the next great city of the West would arise. The NP already built Brainerd, Detroit Lakes, Hawley, Glyndon, and surveyors’ stakes leading to Probstfield Farm led all to assume it would cross at Oakport. Hundreds of merchants, adventurers, con-men, prostitutes, and gamblers flocked to “Probstfield” in the summer of 1871 to be first in line for the best lots in the new city. This was no place to raise a family, so Randolph sent Catherine and the kids to East Grand Forks while he looked after their home (and 10-year-old Mary looked after him).

The stakes leading to Probstfield Farm were a ruse. While speculators were scrambling for land around Probstfield, the railroad secretly bought Job Smith’s farm three miles south. In September 1871, they announced the real crossing point, and almost overnight nearly 500 people moved from Probstfield Farm to the site named for NP official William G. Moorhead. From then on, Moorhead’s first residents called their old Oakport tent town “Bogusville.”