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Note: er County had its Kinkaider family. Most built sod houses, marked now only by those frew trees the roots of which have survived trampling by cattle. The Kinkaiders came to farm as they had in the corn country of Nebraska and Iowa. Many Sandhill valleys were plowed. good crops grew for a few years and more plowing was done before the persistent winds excavated the fields and began to drive out those homesteaders who could not adapt to the grass-covered sand dunes.
Duke adapted and stayed. He had learned from his forebears how to persevere. His childhood was spent at the family home in Miller, Nebraska described by his sister Fannie in a letter to him in later years:
'Our house was 16x16 frame, set down in the waist-high blue-stern grass which waved as far as one could see. Carried water 3 miles from the loup River for a year or so. that room was the kitchen of our house afterwords. Tell me how that room escaped the terrible prairie fires that roared down from Dakota. Everyone was burned out more than once.
In a letter of Mar. 16, 1947, from Duke to his son, Jay he wrote:
I live here with my parents until I was 15 yrs old and found out that there were other schools than the little sod scholl where we had all gone. A traveling mission ary driving a little burro hitched to a cart told us about Hastings College and asked the folks to let me go there, which I did in the fall of 1899. I went there 4 years through the Academy and 4 more years to finish the college in the spring of 1907. I was a member of most of the track, football, and basketball teams. Ran the mile in 4.48 and the half mile in 2.04, which wre college state records at the time. After finishing , I worked one year on the hastings Daily Republican as city editor and advertising manager. In the fall of 1908 I came to Custer County to live on my homestead. Left Hastings with $12.45 in cash and a debt of $300, not my own. Took a local school to teach at $45 per month and obard myself, sleeping on the ground until cold drove me inside a little 10x10 fot tin shack I had built. From there I went on improving my land, and about 5 years later I was married to Ethel Pearl Wright at Downs, Kansas, by Ethel's brother elmer, A Baptist minister. At this time we built our present cement block home.
In the Sandhills west of Anselmo and south of Dunning--a settlement called Climax, which has long since disappeared--the settlers encouraged one another and battled the summer heart and winter blizzards. A country telephone party line with perhaps 20 families ran along the top wire of the barbed-wire fences. Climax had a store, post office, church, maybe two houses and fora time around 1925, a high school taught by Duke alone. He conducted classes in the basic subjects plus Latin, Carpentry, and cooking. He coached a girls' basketball team (with some players over 6 feet tall) which won over the surrounding much larger towns. To prepare for teaching the music lessons--a subject for which he had shown no inclination--he was coached by Ethel each evening.
Duke was probably the only one in the community who had completed college. He drew on his more diverse background and interests to fill roles for which most pioner settlers were not prepared. Once he conducted a funeral. He was called upon regularly to be the neighborhool veteninarian--to remove bones and burlap and taught Sunday School.
Ethel had attended Hastings College for three years before going to Springfield, Massachusetts, for library training and then to work at the library in Jacksonville, Florida, until her marriage to Duke. She also taught school the first few years in the Sandhills. She played thepiano and enjoyed literature throughout her life.
Their 2 children were born at the ranch, and Ethel taught Jay at hime through his first two years of grad school. By that time climax was gradually being abandoned and dismantled. The church was moved to a valley a mile southeast of the Forrester ranch to become the 1 room schoolhouse which jay and Barbara attended, and where Duke taught during his last 2 years of teaching before retiring to devote full time to ranching in 1927.
The Kinkaiders were moving out. A square mile of Sandhill land was inadequate to support a family. A few like Duke and Ethel had the courage and persistence to abandon farming and buy more land. they survived the depression of the 1930s when cattle prices fell from $12 per cwt to $4, and when dust storms coatd grass with so much clay from southern Nebbraska and Kansas that 35 large steers died from eating the grass. In time they became ranchers in a style which adapted to the native grass and water supply of the Sandhills.
Cattle-Threatened by thirst, blizzard, and prairie fire--require constant care. Throughout the active ranching years, duke nad Ethelstayed at the ranch with seldom a cacation until they retired and had a few years to travel before Ethel's death.
Then Duke, returning to interests of his college days, entered politics and served after age eighty in the 1961 and 1963 terms of the Nebraska Unicameral Legislature. He continued ot live alone on the ranch until about 2 years before he died. (From an account prepared by his son, jay (142), who held the rand in 1989.
His grandchildren and young people from the town of Arnold remember him as having delightful ways of entertaining them with horses to ride, games to play, tractors and pickup truck to drive over the open prairie, and an endless number of funny stories to tell. He was a man of stern moral character with a playful spirit.
Note: Marmaduke (Duke) homesteaded Section 1, Township 19, Range 25 under the Knkaid Act of 1904 that allowed a square mile to each settler in western Nebraska. Almost every section of the Sandhills in Cust
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