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- Title
Boyhood Days on the Glenheim Ranche: The Memoir of Maurice C. Haas.
- Authors
HAAS, WIILUAM D.
- Abstract
Maurice Charles Haas began life in a cabin in the shadow of the Black Hills of western South Dakota in 1901 and ended a long career in engineering and metallurgy in 1960 as the president of American Metals in Mexico. In between, he grew up on his parents' ranch near Whitewood, South Dakota, attended college, and worked in the mining industry in Russia, Canada, and Ecuador. He and his wife, Edna Opal Holmes Haas, were firsthand witnesses to wars, revolutions, political upheaval, and economic strife both within and outside of the United States. Maurice, my oldest uncle, wrote his life story on school tablets in 1960 and 1961, shortly after he retired. In 1976, he sent a partial typed draft, as well as several handwritten chapters, notes, and an explanatory letter to my father, William Karl Haas. It appears that Maurice did nothing more with the manuscript, and he died six years later. While sorting through my father's files after his own death in 2004, I discovered the box containing this material, which remained untouched for another eleven years. In 2015, I finally read Maurice's memoir, which was so compelling that I could hardly put it down. Unfortunately, pages and parts of chapters were missing, and others were out of sequence or nearly illegible. I wanted to reconstruct the entire story so that I could share it with family and others. The Haas family has long been interested in history, and Maurice's personal papers are archived at the Homestake Adams Research and Cultural Center in Deadwood, where I found some of the missing pieces. In the end, Maurice's memoir totaled approximately three hundred pages. In reading the following excerpt, which relates Maurice's years growing up in South Dakota, it is not difficult to see where he developed his talent for engineering and taste for adventure. His parents, Charles Haas and Jennie Pickering Haas, were not just practical, "make-do" people, but true innovators and entrepreneurs. Through Maurice's description of life on their "Glenheim Ranche," readers gain a glimpse of the real-life applications of the technological and scientific advances that changed agriculture during the first decades of the twentieth century. The push for irrigation, increasing use of gasoline-powered tractors and new farm implements, and development of better varieties of crops such as alfalfa adapted to dry, cold climates were among the factors that helped make farming more profitable in the semi-arid plains of western South Dakota. In preparing the excerpt for publication, obvious typographical errors and misspellings have been corrected, and terms with which modern readers might not be familiar have been explained in brackets or footnotes. In a few places, wording and paragraphing have been adjusted and punctuation added to clarify meanings or improve readability. Omissions are indicated with ellipses.
- Subjects
SOUTH Dakota; UNITED States; RANCH life; HAAS family; MEMOIRS; BOYS; FRONTIER &; pioneer life; BIOGRAPHY (Literary form)
- Publication
South Dakota History, 2017, Vol 47, Issue 1, p31
- ISSN
0361-8676
- Publication type
Article