The following appeared in the Rock County Herald on August 22, 1924:
OLE-TIMER RECALLS THE DAYS OF THE EARLY ‘70S
George DeForce Returns here After Absence of Forty-Eight Years — And, Becomes Reminiscent.
George DeForce, who first came to Rock county with his parents fifty-two years ago, returned here last week after an absence of forty-eight years, and expects to again make his home here.
Mr. DeForce, who is a son of the late Ed. A. DeForce, one of the first settlers of Kanaranzi township, still retains vivid recollections of Rock county when it was a wilderness in the first stages of transformation.
His father first came here in 1871, filing on a homestead in Kanaranzi, and the following year returned to Boone county, Illinois, and brought his family, which included George, then nine years of age, back with him. That fall the father passed away and the family moved into Collin Estey’s dugout for the winter. This dugout was on the south part of what is now known as the Frank Kohn place, but was originally the Henry Martin homestead.
In the fall of 1873 the DeForces returned to Illinois and later on, in the same year, Mrs. DeForce was married to Collin Estey at Mankato. The next spring they moved to the Estey homestead located four miles south and one half mile west of Luverne, on the southwest quarter of section 34, Luverne township. The year 1874 was the first year that the grasshoppers were here and they continued to ravage the crops in the county for the next two years.
In the summer of 1876 Mr. DeForce began to work in the first drug store in Luverne owned by Nathan Estey. That December he left this county and since that has lived, for the greater part of the time, in Colorado and Montana. For the last eighteen months he has been under a physician’s care, spending part of that time, in hospitals, but since his return to Minnesota, his health has shown considerable improvement.
Mr. DeForce, in company with Nathan and Collin Estey, are credited with having killed the last buffalo seen in Rock county, which was in 1873. Nathan Estey had often hunted buffalo in this section and he claimed that the male that was shot at that time was the largest ever seen on these plains. These buffalo, which consisted of a bull, a cow and a calf, were sighted one fall day in the tall, rank growth of grass about a mile southeast of the Collin Estey homestead.
One of the three hunters succeeded in crippling the bull as it made a mad rush for him, and then George was granted the privilege of firing the shot that put it out of its misery.
The cow and calf, were then trailed to near the present site of Valley Springs, where one of the party succeeded in dispatching the cow. The calf was captured and brought back to the Estey homestead, and kept.
Nathan Estey and a man named Moon came to the section of the northwest in 1866 and the next year filed on a homestead where Rock Rapids now stands. When Edward DeForce and his family came to where Rock Rapids now stands, all they could see was a dugout in the side of a hill and a pet deer, belonging to Mr. Moon, tied to a picket rope.
This article will continue next week.
Donations to the Rock County Historical Society can be sent to the Rock County Historical Society, P.O. Box 741, Luverne, MN 56156.
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