These stories can also be heard on Sunday mornings around 9:00 am on WILD 102’s “Look Back in Time” program. Each week’s radio story will be posted here on our website.
Weekly radio stories are researched, compiled, and read by Sheila Winstead, RCHS Board Member.
July 12, 2026
I’ll read today from Bill Adams’ Cornerpost column in the Roseau Times-Region that I referred to last week in which he interviewed Andy Erickson of Badger about his recent completion of the Bicentennial Wagon Train. This concludes the five-part series of radio stories on the Erickson’s Wagon Trail.
Andy said the train made about 20-25 miles a day and “there were people everywhere.” There was no other way he said, that they could have seen people except by going “foot by foot.” His most anxious moments were spent keeping those people away from the horses. There was one close call when a youth touched the leg of the wagon master’s horse and spooked him into a wagon which nearly tipped over. The rider fell in front of a car but the driver fortunately used the brakes and stopped in time to avoid hitting the man’s head. “It was a close one,” Andy said.
The evenings were fun, Andy emphasized. People would gather around as they built a big bonfire after circling the wagon train like in the old days. “We’d eat and stay by the wagon,” he said. Andy and Oline were the only ones to sleep in the wagon all night and so were last ones around the fire. Andy kept it up until time to go to bed and was then the first up to stoke it again. “It got cold … down to 24 once, and it was the only way to get warm in the morning,” he said.
It also rained 75 per cent of the time and Andy noted the wind came one day so he was wet “from the belly button down.” Wet and cold. But they kept going and enjoyed meeting people. Autograph seekers were so thick that Oline, who did most of the signing, kept going steady half the night. “They’d even shove a book in front of my face when I had the reins in my hands,” Andy snorted.
Once Andy had to stop and unlatch the front and rear sections of the canvas cover to prevent the wind from blowing the wagon over. The horses took it well but didn’t like the cold rain. “I didn’t have any trouble with the horses at all,” he affirmed.
Andy said people from all over came over to see them. One he had not seen for 47 years, an old schoolmate, Danny Dowhower. “There were all kinds of people who knew us. One was the former superintendent of schools at Greenbush when Oline went to school there. “Some of those people would follow us for three or four days, just to visit,” he laughed. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal for them and for us.”
“They all had the same question, how did we get on the train and how we got the lead wagon. Be darned if I know how we got the lead,” he said.
News coverage of the event was “fantastic,” Andy said. Ron Miller of ABC TV was in their lead wagon for three days and Andy appeared on a nationally televised interview in which, he admits, “I choked up a little.” The interview brought a letter from a woman in New York who wrote that his emotion made her cry … “I too, love America,” she wrote. Their faces appeared in every newspaper along the route. They were also on Harry Reasoner’s show and on Good Morning America. One day Andy got to ride in one of the helicopters as newsmen filmed the train.
Andy chuckled at the people in the train who would “go and hide in their support vehicles,” to escape people. Andy and Oline stuck it out every night as the pioneers did. “Those who visited with us came back. One lady brought an ice cream pail full of oats for each wagon in the train with a note of “good luck” in the bottom of the pail.
Andy was thrilled when, near Redwood Falls, Indians were camped on a hill and the chief, “mounted on a beautiful horse and in full dress, rode down and presented the wagonmaster with a handmade quilt. It was beautiful. … one of the best moments,” he recalled. “There was also an old fellow who ran alongside the
wagon with a $5 bill in his fingers, trying to give it to us. We almost ran over him.” Another older couple baked a cake with “To Mr. and Mrs. America with Love” on it and gave it to them.
The remark they heard most often was “beautiful, beautiful.” Andy said it “gave me a lump right here!” Young people seemed to have the most interest in the train. There were also thousands of school children brought to see the wagon caravan. “We talked to teachers who said they never had such good history students as when they had seen the wagon train,” Andy revealed. “So, maybe it did some good. To me, that was the purpose of the trip, to do something for our nation – which needs it! Maybe they would stop for a moment and forget their own greed and change their attitude from ‘what can I get from the government’ to ‘what can I do?’”
Andy was struck by the preservation of the countryside in Pennsylvania “like it was 100 years ago” and with the real beauty of America. “You know, the land doesn’t belong to us, we just use it for a while, and we must leave something for the generations which follow. Generations to come must live from it … we can’t have it all concrete and blacktop.” It bothers Andy when he sees people misuse the land. “We have to put something back.”
Andy was out for four days when his blood got so low he had to have a five-pint transfusion. “I got up on the seat and just couldn’t move,” he said. The blood transfusion put him right back in the swing and he finished the trip in fine-style.
There were two things Andy didn’t like: the way sheriff departments in the southern part of the state tried to shove them along to get rid of them and the treatment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the destination of the trip.
They pulled into Valley Forge, had to unhitch and were herded into a 550-acre tract, “so crowded the horses fought and got banged up.” People who came a long way to see us didn’t see us as we didn’t get to pass the reviewing stand as had been planned. We didn’t get to see a soul from the other trains either.” They did get to see Thelma Gray whose idea the whole wagon train trek was. “We sent an invitation for her to ride with us for a day but she couldn’t make it.”
The crowd at Valley Forge stripped wagons, stole flags and caused much of the celebration to be cancelled. “We were to have photos taken and be presented with plaques and that wasn’t possible,” Andy said.
He and Oline didn’t get to see President Ford because he was about two miles away “and there was no way I could walk it,” Andy said.
Andy feels it was the most fantastic journey of his life and was “a real privilege to represent my county and state. It makes you feel pretty humble.” He also feels there are more good people than bad people in the country. “It’s a great land,” he notes, and he ought to know. He covered much of it in pioneer style. “I can only say “fantastic,” he concluded.
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for letting us share our county’s history with your listeners by donating air time, studio time, and production staff every week.