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- DAVID GAMACHE FAMILY
By Albert Gamache
My father, David Gamache, was born near Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1847. His father had died so the mother took care of the children. I know he had a brother Pete but I don't know anything about him. I do know that my father worked in the lumber camps in northern Maine when he was ten years old. When the Civil War broke out in 1861 he tried to enlist in the Northern Army but he was rejected because of his age. Then he hired out to northern individuals who were hauling provisions for the army.
My father did not learn to read and was illiterate most of his life. Because he did not know how to spell his own name, he let people call him DeMars. He did sign his name with an X in 1878 on a contract to run a dairy at Fort Buford. This contract is in the Archives of the Historical Society.
When the Civil War was over he took up freighting to the outposts in the Dakotas and Montana driving oxen and sometimes horses from one post to another. I know that he was at Deadwood, South Dakota; Miles City, Montana, and Fort Sully, North Dakota. He was married three times. I know nothing about his first two wives except that one died at Chamberlain, South Dakota, where he had set up a house. After she died he walked to Winnipeg, Manitoba. He wore his shoes completely out and was barefoot when he reached Winnipeg. He made provisions with the priests at a Catholic school there to have his daughter, Sophie, taken care of and I believe she told me she was there three years. I don't know how she got there and back. She died in Williston in 1927. Her sister, Philamen, was put out for adoption by the Catholic priests in Bismarck and wound up in Salt Lake City with a family named Savage. She died in 1949 at Nauvoo, Illinois.
My half brother, David, seems to have been of a later marriage. He died in 1953 at Watford City. My half brother, Medric, drowned in the Missouri River in 1888 at about eleven years of age.
Sometime between 1880 and 1885 my father bought squatters' right from someone in Buford. I believe his name was Dunn but am not sure. Then he brought his family from Chamberlain by covered wagon and a team of oxen to the home where I was born. My father married my mother in 1893 and I was born in 1894. My brother Joe was born in 1896 and died in 1959 at Polson, Montana.
My father died May 30, 1899 when he was struck by lightning while driving cattle into an enclosure during a thunder storm. Virgil Brothers, an 11-year-old boy who was helping him also died. My mother was born near Hamar, Norway, in 1855. She came to Whitehall, Wisconsin, where one of her sisters lived and she later came to Williston where she worked for the Metzgers and the Leonhardys.
Sometime in the 1890s my father's cousin visited Buford and our home and this is when my father found out his name was Gamache instead of DeMars. He could read some before he died and sign his name on checks. The tombstone states he was 55 when he died but the family thinks it should be 52, if he was born in 1847.
My father filed a preemption right on land along the river bottom before he died and my mother filed on a quarter of homestead land north of where our first home used to be which turned out to be a school section. We acquired a little more land as time went on.
My mother married William Anhrim in 1909 and he died in 1917 in Florida where he and my mother were living then. She came back to the farm then and she and I raised cattle and grain and put up a lot of hay. We kept 50 head of cattle and quite a few horses. My mother died in May 1936.
I joined the Army, Company E, in 1917. Later I was transfered to Company K, 26th Inf. 1st Division. I came home in 1919 and farmed for my mother and myself for 36 years. In 1926 I married Esther Jorgenson from Donnybrook and we lived on the farm most of the time until 1956 when I sold the land to the government and moved to Williston. Our farm now is known as the Lewis and Clark Recreation Area. We have two married daughters, Agnes and Patricia.
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