Williston Sunday Herald
Williston, ND
December 2, 1984

Story teller keeps alive history of pioneer days

By Grayce Ray
Staff Writer

Helen Porth is a teacher, a gardener, a homesteader’s daughter and a story teller. Porth began her career as a story teller unwittingly years ago as a little girl when she listened to stories told by her mother and neighbors in the Ambrose area.

They were true stories; narratives of daily happenings, adventures encountered with the then newly opened territory and the Native Americans. There was immediate relevance in the stories for the child who simply had to walk out the door of her home near Ambrose to see tepee rings on the hills or pick up a war axe in the plowed fields.

Porth has been quietly saving, and savoring, those stories and others since her childhood, but this year she will be telling her stories across the state.

She was chosen from 52 applicants to be part of the North Dakota Humanities Council Speakers' Bureau. The 21 speakers, experts on North Dakota heritage and culture of other areas of the world, make presentations on their topics to service clubs, schools and churches and other interested groups in the state. The council pays for the cost of the presentations.

Porth does not know yet where she will be invited to speak but she is ready to go “wherever and whenever”.

“My specialty is stories about the pioneers and the Indians. And they are not just stories; they illuminate the history of North Dakota. I tell my stories to inform and entertain.”

Porth draws on the stories she heard as a child, as well as others she added 10 years ago when southeast finally began writing them down. At that time she began collecting more by visiting senior citizens, old-timers in the area and her students at the University of North Dakota Williston, many of whom are descendants of homesteaders.

“This country has changed and we are forgetting so much of our history,” she said. “We’ve lost a lot already. There is hardly anything left of Ambrose but I can remember when it was the end of the Soo line railroad and people swarmed in from as far away as Montana to shop and do their business there. Now it’s nearly died out.”

Porth’s mother Louise Trene (sic) was one of the few woman homesteaders in North Dakota. “She was a young girl, frightened and lonely,” Porth said. “She was small, delicate, a fearful little person and that homesteading stuff was not for her. But her father pushed her to do it so she did.”

The “fearful, delicate little person” was made of stern stuff though, for when she was widowed at an early age and left with two youngsters to raise, she never took charity.

“She never took anything free from anyone, never mortgaged our home place.” Porth said. There were bad times in the ‘30s and ‘40s but we managed. My brother Vernon and I still live on the place she homesteaded and it’s never been mortgaged to this day.”

Porth graduated from university in New York state*  and returned to North Dakota to begin teaching school when she was 18 years old.  Some of her stories are about those days in one room schoolhouses on the prairies, firing coal stoves to keep the school warm, and begging her big, rough boy students not to talk when the superintendent came because “they couldn’t speak a sentence without swearing. And they didn’t want to embarrass me so they kept quiet.”

Porth kept taking classes when she could, accumulating a master’s degree and almost finishing a doctorate.

Porth has been writing poetry for years, quietly putting down her impressions and feelings for the land and the people she knows.

“But there’s not much market for poetry,” she said with a smile. “Then about 10 years ago I started writing down the stories I knew, listening to the last few pioneers left tell me more. I wanted to save the stories. They are a part of our heritage and they explain more than the history books can in some ways.”

She keeps in touch with modern dreams through her students at UND-W where she has been teaching for the last 24 years. “The students haven’t changed that much. There are still the few hard workers, the ones who want to learn no matter what. They are just like the kids I had in my first classes back when I started, and they have stories to share with me about their people.  One of my students now is the grandson of one of my first students.”

* This conflicts with other sources which say that Helen attended college in Minot prior to teaching.