{"id":34306,"date":"2013-02-14T12:15:06","date_gmt":"2013-02-14T18:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=34306"},"modified":"2013-02-14T11:33:49","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T17:33:49","slug":"the-harvest-home-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=34306","title":{"rendered":"The Harvest Home (30th Anniversary)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote this piece<\/a> five years ago yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of what had to have been the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.<\/p>\n

Not much has change for me, or the story, since then. \u00a0So while I usually don’t re-run pieces, I’m going to basically just update the piece from 2008.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

I was a 20 year old college kid working a grindingly-boring Sunday afternoon shift at KQDJ Radio in Jamestown, ND on February 13, 1983.<\/p>\n

I was doing what I usually did on those boring Sunday shifts; playing\u00a0records, doing homework, taking transmitter readings.<\/p>\n

Then,\u00a0the police scanner in the \u201cnewsroom\u201d next door, which normally burbled with the desultory reports of DWIs and bar fights and traffic stops that make up the lives of most small town cops, suddenly erupted.\u00a0 There\u2019d been a shootout; officers were down; cops and sheriff\u2019s deputies were being dispatched to\u00a0Medina<\/a>, a town of about 400 people about 35 miles west of Jamestown on I94.<\/p>\n

It took hours to untangle the story, which became perhaps the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Two US Marshals, dispatched from Fargo to try to arrest a group of tax-protesters affiliated with the neo-Nazi-sympathetic \u201cPosse Comitatus\u201d, had been killed in the shootout that ensued.\u00a0 Their leader, Gordon Kahl, and several others fled the scene.\u00a0 The scanner reported ambulances on their way to the hospital in Jamestown bringing the wounded, which included Yorie Kahl, criticially injured by a gunshot; in one of the many ironies that day, Kahl\u2019s life was saved by the doctor on duty in the Emergency Room that day, Dr. Evan Kostick, father of my high school pal David (himself a doctor today), and one of Jamestown\u2019s tiny Jewish community.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The scene of the shootout when the first TV station, from Bismarck, arrived on the scene.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the shootout. \u00a0The anniversary passed without much notice in the regional media. \u00a0Five years ago it was another matter; the\u00a0Fargo Forum<\/a>\u00a0led the coverage;\u00a0others from the Bismark Trib<\/a>\u00a0pitched in;\u00a0former Forum staffer James Corcoran wrote \u201cBitter Harvest\u201d<\/a>, the definitive book on the event, relating not only the shootout and the apocalyptic trial of the survivors, but the social\u00a0sturm und drang\u00a0<\/em>that the event caused on the Northern Plains.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

Times were brutally tough in the Dakotas in the early \u201980s.\u00a0 The rest of the US was slowly recovering from a recession; it\u2019d be hard to call what happened on the Plains anything less than a depression.\u00a0 What the foreclosure crisis is to the inner city today, the farm crisis of the \u201980s was to the Great Plains.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Medina water tower. The tower was there in 1983, although without the antennae.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some farmers \u2013 and some of the workers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture, which in North Dakota back then accounted for pretty much every job in the place \u2013 did what human nature naturally bids some people to do; blame someone else.\u00a0 And for some \u2013 like Kahl and a thin film of like-minded people \u2013 it wasn\u2019t a big leap from \u201closing your farm to the bank\u201d and \u201closing your farm to Jewish Bankers\u201d.\u00a0 The Times\u2019 review of \u201cBitter Harvest\u201d notes:<\/p>\n

The book that turned his head at an early age was \u201dThe International Jew: The World\u2019s Foremost Problem,\u201d and it was written by Henry Ford.<\/p>\n

It is based on a 1918 treatise called \u201dThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion,\u201d which purported to be the minutes of a cabal of Russian Jews plotting to destroy Christianity and the white race and take over the world. Ford wrote \u201dThe International Jew\u201d in 1920, and it was not until 1929 that he finally conceded that \u201dThe Protocols\u201d was a fabrication concocted by czarist Russian anti-Semites.<\/p>\n

Even so, as a young man in the 1940\u2032s, Mr. Kahl believed it totally. He had considerable encouragement. He came of age at a time when the velvet voice of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who reached into almost as many homes with his weekly radio show as Fred Allen, broadcast some of the nastiest anti-Semitic propaganda ever heard on the airwaves; when Gerald L. K. Smith established the Jew-baiting Christian Nationalist Crusade in Arkansas and gained a national following, and when Gerald Winrod, an apocalyptic fundamentalist preacher in central Kansas gained tens of thousands of adherents to a movement that came to be known as the Jayhawk Nazis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Winrod\u2019s son, George Gordon Winrod, kept the ministry alive.\u00a0 I remember his followers leaving corrosively anti-semitic leaflets under the windshield wipers of cars in the church parking lot when I was in ninth grade.<\/p>\n

Nobody in\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em>circle bought into it, of course \u2013 but we all knew people for whom it rang true.\u00a0 There\u00a0was\u00a0<\/em>an audience, out there.<\/p>\n

And they \u2013 like Kahl \u2013 weren\u2019t necessarily easily identifiable:<\/p>\n

When Mr. Kahl came home from World War II, he was 25 years old, and he was regarded as a hero. He had shot down 10 enemy planes as a turret gunner on B-25\u2032s, and he had won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two air medals, a Presidential unit citation and two Purple Hearts. That was not all the metal he brought home. Surgeons never did get out all the shrapnel he took in the jaw, chest and hip.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Kahl in World War 2<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n

So the combination of hard times and ready scapegoats found some adherents.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

Kahl escaped that day; with two federal agents dead, the federal law-enforcement machinery sprung into place.\u00a0 Two blocks from the house where my father still lives in Jamestown, in Stutsman County\u2019s then-brand-new courthouse, the FBI and an alphabet soup of other federal law-enforcement agencies set up their command post; local hotels were jammed with brusque men and women in sharp suits and\/or, occasionally, battledress utilities.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Kahl<\/p><\/div>\n

And they were not happy.\u00a0 Rumors began to circulate; the Feds were tramping about the prairie with big, nasty boots; they were conducting no-knock raids, presuming the locals guilty until proven innocent, acting like a hostile occupying power \u2013 or so said the rumors.<\/p>\n

The previous summer, I\u2019d worked at KDAK, a little station in Carrington, a town of about 2,000 about 40 miles north of Jamestown.\u00a0\u00a0 The station had also just hired a new \u201cNews Director\u201d, a pretty mid-20-something named Peggy Polreis who\u2019d just come from Carrington\u2019s newspaper.\u00a0 One of my jobs had been to make her broadcast-worthy.\u00a0 I did a good job.<\/p>\n

One day, a few days after the shootout, Peggy got a tip from a source that the Feds were going to search a farmhouse near nearby Fessenden.\u00a0 She arrived on the scene to find that the press were being cordoned away from a farmhouse located a solid half-mile up the road, behind a shelter belt.<\/p>\n

Peggy slipped away from the group, and crawled \u2013 so the story went \u2013 a quarter of a mile along the shelter belt, keeping out of sight of the cops.\u00a0 She was, apparently, the only non-cop to see what happened.<\/p>\n

The police \u2013 and, as I recall, a North Dakota National Guard armored personnel carrier \u2013 had surrounded the farmhouse.\u00a0 A dog darted from an outbuilding; a policeman shot the dog dead.\u00a0 The gunshot sparked more gunfire, and before long the farmhouse was completely riddled with bullet holes.\u00a0 Finally, the police moved in\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"

This is a photo, as I recall, from the search near Fessenden. That’s an M-114 Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle on the right, a ND National Guard vehicle that was pretty much the only armored vehicle in the state at the time that wasn’t intended to carry cash.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2026to discover the farmhouse empty.<\/p>\n

It was one of many incidents that angered, and occasionally alienated, the locals from the Feds.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

How you look at the events of that winter (and the ensuing spring and summer, when the manhunt for Kahl led to a final shootout in Arkansas that left Kahl and another Christian Identity supporter dead) depends on who, and where, you were back then.<\/p>\n

If you were a local, you knew that North Dakotans tend to be good, law-abiding people; they\u2019ve voted Republican in pretty\u00a0much every Presidential election since statehood, making them marginally less conservative than Utah.\u00a0 And yet the Posse, and Christian Identity, found recruits and adherents \u2013 and it was no mystery why.\u00a0 Radical fringes were no stranger to the plains; the Non-Partisan League, the Grangers, the Bund and other fevered activists had gestated in the area in response to other crises since the 1890\u2032s.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The seven Kahl case defendants<\/p><\/div>\n

So\u00a0we weren\u2019t surprised that some of the locals were sympathetic.\u00a0 It was a minority \u2013 a small one \u2013 but it\u00a0drew attention.\u00a0\u00a0One of them\u00a0even wrote\u00a0and recorded \u2013 on a home cassette player, I think \u2013 a song praising\u00a0and rooting for Kahl, during the manhunt and\u00a0before the final fatal shootout in Arkansas.\u00a0 It got a little play \u2013 mostly from news organizations who were reporting on the acceptance Kahl, the Posse and other extremists got from the area.<\/p>\n

If you weren\u2019t from the area, and didn\u2019t understand it, it must have seemed odd.\u00a0 And maybe a little scary.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

Hollywood certainly knows nothing of the area, and understands less about it.\u00a0 But that didn\u2019t stop it from making a made-for-TV movie, based rather loosely on\u00a0Bitter Harvest<\/em>, in 1991.\u00a0\u00a0Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>starred\u00a0Rod Steiger<\/a>\u00a0as Kahl, andMichael \u201cFamily Ties\u201d Gross<\/a>\u00a0as an FBI agent from New York who flew to the state to help solve the crime.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The show got the\u00a0basic\u00a0<\/em>facts right; the names, the places (most of the show was putatively set in Jamestown), the timeline (sort of).<\/p>\n

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.\u00a0 Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you\u00a0can\u00a0<\/em>hear the\u00a0Fargo\u00a0<\/em>accent (\u201cYah, sure, you betcha\u201d) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.\u00a0 The locals, to Hollywood, were out of\u00a0Gomer Pyle\u00a0<\/em>or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe\u00a0Deliverance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Rod Steiger as Kahl, during the shootout scene.<\/p><\/div>\n

Worse?\u00a0 While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds\u2019 heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout),\u00a0Manhunt in the Dakotas\u00a0<\/em>showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as \u201cChief Walters\u201d, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and \u2013 in the movie\u2019s climactic scene \u2013 the two walking, nervous, down \u201cJamestown\u201d\u2018s main street as the \u201clocal radio station\u201d played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers)\u00a0boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.<\/p>\n

\"\"

“Main Street in Jamestown”, from “Manhunt in the Dakotas”. Note the 1986 Honda Civic wagon inserted into a story set in 1982. Also note the movie theatre – and I’ll point out the relative lack of local significance to “The Alamo” in rural North Dakota. Perhaps that’s why all the “Locals” in the movie had Arklahoma accents.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was crap, of course, factually (no station in the state played the song, except as news) as well as\u00a0socially (Jamestown is a college town of 16,000\u00a0that hosts a state hospital, and a\u00a0school for the profoundly disabled<\/a>, where Kahl had little traction; Kahl\u2019s base of support was out on the isolated drift prairie).\u00a0 But it was interesting, seeing how inscrutable \u201cflyover land\u201d was to the people who actually produce these things, and the almost-superstitious fear the place engenders.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n

That part of North Dakota is a huge place in terms of the land and the sky; the human geography is much smaller.\u00a0 In the 27-odd years since I left the place, whenever I meet other expats, it\u2019s hard to go more than thirty seconds without finding a common acquaintance.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same with events.\u00a0 Besides Dr. Kostick, and Peggy Polreis, I knew\u00a0Darrell Graf<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 Medina\u2019s police chief at the time (and\u00a0Graf has actually turned up on this blog<\/a>) and people in his family.\u00a0 Scott Kopp was another \u2013 a guy I remember as a Stutsman County deputy who lost a finger from a Kahl shot that could have done much worse.\u00a0 Another guy \u2013 a Medina cop who was on the periphery of the action \u2013 was my friend\u2019s sister\u2019s boyfriend (and, the last I checked, husband of about twenty-five years).<\/p>\n

The internet can make you acquainted with even more people.\u00a0 Scott Faul \u2013 one of the Posse members who was arrested, tried and did prison time for his role in the shootout \u2013\u00a0had a blog<\/a>, although it hasn’t been updated since the first time this piece ran.<\/p>\n

Thirty years is a long time, even out there.\u00a0 But memories are longer still.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote this piece five years ago yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of what had to have been the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout. Not much has change for me, or the story, since then. \u00a0So while I usually don’t re-run pieces, I’m going to basically just update the piece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,46,21,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-five-ate-for-oh-won","category-midwest","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34306"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34308,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34306\/revisions\/34308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}