Don't I Look Fierce?

Home on the Range
original lyrics by Dr. Brewster Higley (1876)

Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam

Where the Deer and the Antelope play;

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

And the sky is not cloudy all day. 

 

Chorus 

A home! A home!

Where the Deer and the Antelope play,

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

And the sky is not cloudy all day.

 

 

Oh! give me a land where the bright diamond sand

Throws its light from the glittering streams,

Where glideth along the graceful white swan,

Like the maid in her heavenly dreams.
Chorus

Oh! give me a gale of the Solomon vale,

Where the life streams with buoyancy flow;

On the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever,

Any poisonous herbage doth grow. 

Chorus.  

 

 

How often at night, when the heavens were bright,

With the light of the twinkling stars

Have I stood here amazed, and asked as I gazed,

If their glory exceed that of ours.
Chorus  

 

I love the wild flowers in this bright land of ours,

I love the wild curlew's shrill scream;

The bluffs and white rocks, and antelope flocks

That graze on the mountains so green.
Chorus  

The air is so pure and the breezes so fine,

The zephyrs so balmy and light,

That I would not exchange my home here to range

Forever in azures so bright.

Chorus  

Aug.7, 1909

Dear Friend Susie,   I spose you
rec'd the other postal. here's one of
the Landa band on practice evening.
Don't I look fierce, don't judge me
to severely I'm not so bad looking as
the camera tried to make me.  Am
or was out of wind "Donchernaw"
I'm going to a y. P.S. to have a
good time drikke kaffe og spise
lefse og fattig mans behkelse. 
{drinking coffee and eating
flat bread and poor mans pastry}
Dont you
wish you were here.   Au Revoir
I am with best wishes
your friend
Ed. Asker

Edward Asker was the eldest of 6 children of Kathinka and John P. Asker. They lived on a farm between Eidsvold and Landa North Dakota. In August 1909 he was 18 years old and played snare drum in the Landa Brass Band, which had 14 musicians, not counting children. Edward's father was an immigrant from Sweden and his mother came from Norway. 



Landa is a small community in Bottineau County in Northern North Dakota, about 7 miles from the Canadian border. In 1910, Bottineau County was booming with 17,295 citizens, nearly six times the population as in 1890. Today the county's farming communities have declined and population is only 6,716. 


Landa is located on a spur of the Great Northern Railway line that runs from St. Paul, MN to Seattle, WA. It incorporated as a city in 1922 and reached its largest population in 1940 with 149 citizens. As well as a town brass band, it once boasted of a bank, hardware store, lumber yard, hotel, and other businesses. But today the number of residents is estimated at only 38. 

North Dakota is very flat
and also very bright,
because the sky is not cloudy all day.

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This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
click the link, but whatever you do, please don't wake the baby.