Dakota Datebook: A hermit hid money under his shack

There once was an old farmer named Olaus O. Berg, in Walsh County, who lived in seclusion from the outside world. His neighbors called him a hermit, for he lived a solitary life in a tumbledown shack on his 160-acre farm in Vesta Township, seven miles northwest of Park River.

We don’t know very much about Olaus Berg. But we do know that he was born in Norway in 1845, and he immigrated to the...