received little traffic. The refugees were often seen pushing or pulling a variety of handcarts. These included garden carts, wheelbarrows, perambulators, deer hauling carts, toy wagons, and even a wheeled golf bag. Some of the refugees were persistent beggars, and a few were even stridently antagonistic.
After the first such encounter, Ken mentioned the “safety through anonymous giving” technique that Durward Perkins had used in Iowa. The Norwoods weren’t Christians, but they were moral, and they could see the need for charitable giving. In December, Ken contacted the bishop at St. Mary’s Church in Newell. Two days later, with the help of three men from the church who came in a pickup, they butchered an older cow, a steer, and a steer calf. The latter had been born partially lame the previous spring.
The three men from the Catholic church arrived in a ubiquitous “mobile butcher” pickup with a small boom hoist arm mounted on the back. This arm had a hand-cranked cable hoist. Not wanting to waste any ammunition, they stunned the cattle with a pneumatic captive bolt pistol that was administered to the cows’ skulls, just as they passed through a mechanical squeeze chute. They were then dumped from the chute and quickly “stuck” to bleed out. The oldest man in the group was an experienced butcher, so they made quick work of gutting the cattle and using a meat saw to remove their heads. The hearts and livers went into an ice chest. The guts, lungs, forelegs, and heads went into the manure scraper, to be hauled to the garbage pit for burial. The carcasses were hoisted onto the truck and hauled into Newell with their hides still on.
That afternoon, the meat was butchered into small cuts and hauled to the church and stored outdoors in several old chest freezers that would soon be buried in a snowbank that was formed each year by snow sliding off the church roof. Carl also donated 300 pounds of corn-oat-barley blend cattle feed to the church. When soaked in water and cooked, it made palatable breakfast mush.
Carl painted a sign for his gatepost that directed refugees to the Catholic church, which was located on 6th Street in Newell.
For handling bands of refugees, the Norwoods developed an SOP: Using the Motorola FRS walkie-talkies, whoever was on OP duty at the woodshed would alert those in the house that strangers were approaching. They would then be greeted at shouting distance from behind the small firewood pile on the ranch house’s front porch. Meanwhile, the OP sentry would remain hidden and quiet. In case there was any trouble, the OP sentry would then be the ace in the hole—standing ready to engage anyone at the gate in a close ambush.
After they put up the sign directing refugees to St. Mary’s Church, their interaction with them became more brief and blunt. Usually, Ken or Carl would simply shout, “Read the sign…. May God bless you. Now move on!”
On December 22, Graham rode his horse into town to attend a Christmas party hosted by some of his homeschooling friends. When he returned the next day, Graham gave an update on the security situation in Newell. “There’s a concrete company at the south end of town that used to make pre-cast septic tanks and outhouses for the State Park Department and the Forest Service. Nobody’s heard anything from the owners of the company. I heard that they went to go double up with some relatives in Montana. Anyway, there’s all these vault toilet buildings sitting around, unused. So an ex–telephone lineman with the Vigilance Committee figured out a way to turn them into pillboxes. They set up a generator and used a wet diamond saw to cut gun ports. They hauled two of the vault toilets on trucks to each of the three roadblocks, and set them up on either side of the road. I saw the setup on Highway 212. They have it just east of the KLT Road junction. It is
17. From the Oil Patch
“Never, under any circumstances, ever become a refugee…. Die if you must, but die on your home turf with your face to the wind, not in some stinking hellhole 2,000 kilometers away, among people you neither know nor care about.”
Waterville, Vermont
December, the First Year
Brent Danley had known the Crunch was going to be bad. He had been following the posts on a variety of survivalist blogs and forums for several years. He would have liked to be better prepared, but his tight budget kept him from working up his pantry to more than a three-month supply. Brent also saw the need to be better armed, but again cash was the constraint. He owned an older bolt-action Winchester .30-06 that had belonged to his father-in-law, a Remington 870 shotgun with a thirty-inch barrel, and two .22 rifles.
Brent worked as an emergency room trauma nurse at Copley Hospital in Morrisville, Vermont. But he lived fifteen miles away in his hometown of Waterville. He and his wife, Jennifer, owned a modest three-bedroom house on Lapland Road that was built in the 1970s. With six kids ranging from four to thirteen years old, the house was a tight squeeze. They were on well water and a creek ran through the property year-round.
Before the Crunch began, Brent made some extra money each year “sugaring”—making maple syrup, which was a family tradition. He sold most of his syrup wholesale. But he saved the best to sell retail, marketed under the trade name Northern Comfort. He was once threatened with a trademark infringement lawsuit by a company using the same name, until he mailed a photocopy of a newspaper clipping from 1946 showing that his grandfather had used the trade name Northern Comfort at least that far back. His short note hinted at a countersuit. That was the last that he heard about lawsuits.
After times got hard, Brent reanimated another one of his grandfather’s ventures: an alcohol still that was built in 1931. At the same time that Brent’s grandfather first operated the still, his great-uncle ran a small pharmacy in Johnson, Vermont. He sold both moonshine from his brother’s still and whiskey smuggled in from Canada. Both products were sold surreptitiously to trusted customers out the back door. The extra income from the booze helped the pharmacy survive the Great Depression. It also allowed grandfather Danley to extend credit to many of his customers for many years. Later, during the Second World War, these customers gradually paid off their bills, and they expressed their gratitude.
The Norwood Ranch, Newell, South Dakota
January, the Third Year
In January, Ken caught up with some maintenance on their guns. Terry’s CAR-15 had a metal rail fore-end with an Israeli folding foregrip and rubber rail covers. These covers had gradually gotten lost in their travels, with constant handling. By the time they reached the Norwoods’ ranch, there were six of the gun’s twelve short rubber rail covers missing. With some inquiries via the CB network, they found a man on the south side of Newell who had some spares. In exchange for two silver dimes, they got eight UTG rail covers in a mix of green, tan, and flat dark earth colors. Terry actually grew to like the odd assortment when she realized that it made her carbine blend in more than it had when the rail covers were all black. At the same time, Ken did some touch-up painting on both rifles. After more than a year of daily use, they had both lost some of their finish, mainly on their sights, muzzles, and charging handles. To remedy this, Ken was given a small bottle of flat black lacquer and a tiny brush from Durward’s collection of model-making supplies that had languished since his teenage years.
They were shoveling manure out of the trodden snow in the south corral. Ken asked Carl, “What can you tell me about Belle Fourche?”
Carl chuckled. “Well, Belle Fourche is just a cow town that had a good Ford dealership, a western clothing store called Pete’s, and not much else worth mentioning. It’s the town where John Wayne and his crew of kids drove their cattle to, in that old movie
