A piece of history spent almost two years in the offices of the Dickinson County News. This five-part Stolen History series chronicles a four-year journey DCN News Editor Seth Boyes embarked on in order to help return a native artifact, which was supposedly stolen from the Gardner Cabin Museum in Arnolds Park some 70 years ago, to its display case. What initially seemed like a simple courtesy to the local museum became a major research project and called for deep dives into archives of decades-old reporting, formal record requests to government officials, help from fellow journalists, coordination with the State Historical Society of Iowa and contact with other individuals across the country.
DEAD ENDS AND NEW AVENUES
Almost every Lakes Area resident knows the family of young Abbie Gardner Sharp was killed near the shores of Iowa's deepest lake in 1857 – the violence became known as the Spirit Lake Massacre. But very few knew of the petty theft which took place there as the world was just entering the Cold War era.
Gardner was taken hostage by the Sioux war chief Inkpaduta and his band during the 1857 raids but was eventually ransomed and, in 1891, transformed the site of her family's murder into a pioneer museum. The cabin became one of the state's earliest tourist attractions, and a teenage couple broke into the historic site decades after Gardner herself had died. They spirited away moccasins to wear around the house. And they nabbed a Native American pipe bag adorned with beads and tassels too.
Gardner's family likely never knew what happened to those pieces of their inherited collection, but a relative of the now-deceased thieves contacted the Dickinson County News in the spring of 2019, asking for help making things right — the tipster said the moccasins had been worn out and tossed in the trash long ago, but she felt driven to return the pipe bag to the local museum.
The newspaper agreed to help the woman clear her family's collective conscience, but putting the pipe bag back behind glass would require more than anyone expected. Officials with the State Historical Society of Iowa needed a living relative of Gardner herself to approve of the item's return before the museum could accept it.
That task ultimately fell to the DCN's News Editor Seth Boyes.
CLIMBING THE FAMILY TREE
Boyes’ contacts at the state historical society expected they'd find contact information for relatives of Gardner somewhere in their records but, by early June of 2019, they had yet to find even an area code to help in the search.
But the Dickinson County News and its predecessors are a source for history too. Dickinson County's first newspaper, the Spirit Lake Beacon, began printing just 13 years after the Spirit Lake Massacre and more than two decades before Abbie Gardner opened her cabin museum.
So when the state effort started to wilt, Boyes began to tend to the Gardner family tree himself in hopes of tracing its limbs all the way to a living relative.
He found mention of Sharp’s two sons in the Beacon’s society pages during the 1910s. Back then, lunch with out-of-town guests was worth a line or two on an inside page.
But it was the Sept. 22, 1932, Beacon which coughed up the writer's first real lead.
A TRAIL OF NEWS CLIPPINGS
The headline mentioned a "Massacre Survivor," and the story featured an 8-year-old named Abigail Gardner Sharp —the great-granddaughter of the famed pioneer. The younger Abigail was the daughter of Albert Sharp — whose father, Gardner’s son Allen, had died in 1919. The cabin museum had been bequeathed to Albert Sharp and his sister Bonita upon their grandmother's death in 1921.
Albert Sharp took charge of the cabin site for a time. During the 1930s, he raised his family in a cottage that was originally built for his grandmother just a stone's throw from her log cabin museum. He also traveled the region and used hand-colored glass slides during "illustrated lectures" on his grandmother’s harrowing experiences.
Boyes traced a branch of the family tree to another generation when he found Albert Sharp’s eldest daughter Mary Jane. She was married at the cabin museum in 1941 while carrying a locket that belonged to her great-grandmother, according to the archives. The family sold the cabin site to the Iowa Conservation Commission that same year.
But soon, the local news pages stopped bearing fruit. Mention of the Gardner family was hard to come by — except for retrospective pieces on the massacre.
The search then shifted to Albert's sister Bonita. Archives of the Spencer News told of her move to Staples, Minnesota, with her husband Fred Wygle in the fall of 1924.
But Boyes' archive hunt could only extend so far.
Journalists at the Staples World didn’t have digital archives to offer, but their hardcopies were wide open – that is, if Boyes was willing to drive eight hours round trip to search page-by-page through each edition without so much as a dateline to guide him. Even a call to the Staples Cemetery Board hit a dead end – there were no Wygle family plots on file.
So a wider net was cast.
A search of the National Archives found record of a U.S. Navy Chief Electrician's Mate named Robert Allen Wygle aboard the USS Chevalier during WWII. The young sailor was one of 54 reported dead after a battle with Japanese forces near the Solomon Islands in October of 1943 — the destroyer's bow was severed by an enemy torpedo, which caused a collision with the USS O'Bannon. The young sailor fell overboard at some point. He was rescued but had inhaled oil during the ordeal and died about two days later, according to a Navy chaplain's account. Military records listed the young man as the son of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Wygle of Pillager, Minnesota — about 16 miles east of Staples.
The nearby Brainerd Dispatch offered another clue in the search for Abbie’s family.
It said the deceased sailor would be remembered from his time as a basketball star at Brainerd High School – about 30 miles east of Staples – in the 1930s. He was survived by his parents and two siblings, Gerald and Marjorie. Boyes looked for record of the sailor’s brother and sister, but the reporter’s next clue led him back to his own archives and closer to his original query.
Boyes had been searching through clippings for “Fred” Wygle and even "Frederick" Wygle — he should have been looking for “Alfred” Wygle.
A SECOND ARCHIVE DIVE
A chase that began in the spring of 2019 gained new life as December snows fell in northwest Iowa. Boyes found the Spirit Lake Beacon had written an apology to Alfred Wygle on Aug. 28, 1908. The then 23-year-old had taken issue with the paper's comical reporting of several problems he and his bride — Abbie Gardner's granddaughter Bonita — encountered on their wedding day. The couple had planned to be married in neighboring Clay County but found out their marriage license had to be signed in Dickinson County — leaving the soon-to-be-weds without a venue, a witness or the $1.50 in cash to pay a minister.
The coverage kerfuffle was another clue for Boyes to work with, and soon he found other Iowa newspaper archives that showed the groom had family some 130 miles away in Clarksville.
Reports there told of Fred Wygle's cousin...which guided the reporter to that man's son…and later that son's daughter...and she just happened to be on Facebook. Boyes tried his luck and sent the woman a message.
Almost a year after the DCN's tipster had asked for help returning the pipe bag, Boyes was sure it was time to contact Michael Plummer, historic sites manager with the State Historical Society of Iowa, and tell him the search for a living Gardner relative was over.
But Plummer's reply wasn't what the reporter had hoped it would be.
"The team is in agreement with the connections you've made so far," Plummer wrote. "For curatorial reference, they'd want the ownership to follow the most direct line of descent — the shortest path possible."
A granddaughter of a cousin of an in-law wasn’t going to cut it unless the trail to a direct descendant was, literally, a dead end.
But even the smallest branches can sometimes bear fruit.
The news writer didn't know it then, but the shirt-tail connection he'd made would actually pay off and put him within reach of just the person he needed to talk to.
But for the time being, the stolen pipe bag stayed in its tote in a back room of the newspaper office, where yet another search of the archives began.
Next week: The pieces fall into place
Missed an installment? Read the Stolen History series from the beginning: