PHOTO ESSAY

Mo

 The Rinke homestead at Round Butte, about 5 miles from Ronan Montana. Mission Mountain range is in background.  The man to her left is Julius Caesar Augustus Rinke born in 1860 in Wesphalia Germany.    I believe that is uncle Burley on the far right.  The children include my grandmother Nellie Manassas Rinke.  The O'Oneil clan lost a man in the first battle of Manassas (only ynkees call it 'Bull Run'.  My grandmother was an educateed chool teacher who understood about The South and defended their second revolutionary war of independence.  The littlest boy in the photo  went on to ride the rodeao ciurcuit into his mid 60s.  He also owned a bar in Ronan that had a bocat that wndered up and down the bar.  

 My grandmother, Nellie Manassas Rinke (1904 - 2001) was about 7 when her family moved from Mississippi to Montana.  Her father was Julius Caeser Augustus Rinke born in Westhphalia (Germany) in 1860.  Her mother was Ruth O'neil of Scots-Irish descent.    Many of you have the photo of the pioneer homesteading family at Round Butte with two Conestoga  wagons and the family of three adults and four children posed in from of the first homestead house.

The photo of the Rinke homestead was taken with an early panoramic camera.  The mountains in the background are the Mission Range that extend beyond Flathead Lake and reach Glacier Park.The rich farmland of the Mission Valley was where they farmed in Round Butte, about 5 miles from Ronan Montana.  Note the two conestoga wagons and horses.  The Rinke family sit on wooden chairs.  The woman is Ruth Caroline O'Neil (1881 - 1931) who married Julius Caesar Aaugustus Rinke in Mississippi.  Great grandfather Julius was born in Westphalia Germany in 1860.  

The family had moved to Montana via steamboat where they embarked to the wagons in about 1910. Julius and Ruth sit with the children and I think the man on the far right is a brother named Burley Rinke who went on to prominence in state politics and became sergeant at arms on the legislature floor.  The children include my grandmother who is the one with the feisty countenance.  Nellie Manassas Rinke got her middle name because that is the name the Confederacy called the first battle of the Civil War.  Only Yankees call it Bull Run. Ruth O'Neil's uncle had been killed in the batlle of Manassas.   



My grandmother met my Danish grandfather, Alfred Hendricksen, at a Seventh Day Adventist tent meeting in Ronan, Montana.  After they married they were active in the building and direction of the Adventist church in Missoula, Mt.  While they were devoted and knowledgable people about the teachings of Ellen G. White, they had the true spirit to reach for the ultimate guidance of God in matters of living, family, and love.  I remember looking at soe gruesome, Second Coming illustrations in a pew at church.  Grandpa quitely closed the book and pointed at the minster who was a good man and was probably not walking about God smiting those who didn’t keep the Sabbath on Saturday.  Grandpa Alfred is not say a world but I could hear and understand what he was saying and I never forgot.  My grandmother was always uzzled when I played at being a Yankee soldier becccause I thought the North were the good guys.  Grandmother Nellie was a school teacher and was always patient with me until I was old enough to understand that Confederate soldiers were people too. She  was well-educated and understood the defiant complexity of the war.  

The littlest boy in the photo is Hubert who rode the rodeo curcuit into his 50s and was a legendary tough guy who owned a bar in Ronan with a bobcat who walked up and down the bar.  

As a boy, my adventures on family outings would sometimes include a pilgramage to Round Butte, Jeep trips to ghost towns, and rowing out to a point on Flathead Lake where we discovered tipi rings. We raised an elk discovered alone in the woods.  Raised from a very young bottle-fed calf, his name was Bugler.  When he got fairly large he saw us cousins floating in  a galvanized tub at a pond by the milk house.  So excited to see us that he jumped in and sank us.  Grandma thawed us out by the kitchen wood stove.   

Grandma was a woman of prayer and in her later years I wold often see “Guideposts” magazine on her busy coffee table.  Guideposts is a New Thought magazine which is  a valuable instruction of faith beyond dogmatic doctrine.  

Impressions the Hendricksens gave were  of faith, garden, genuine concern, and working for the extended family.  In those days, their children could maintain satellite homes within easy driving distance and even walking distance.  I knew my cousins on a daily basis.

A FAMILY CONSTELLATION OF EXTENDED KINDRED

The orbit of family homes on the circumference of a homestead farm was my first environment.  It was a large, wild, and dynamic world with actions of love and ambition.  Grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were only a short walk or quick drive away.  These people were gods and playmates.  Respect and awe were a natural response to them when they entered my physical, imaginative and intuitive world.

Stories of far away places and more difficult times were learned as an oral tradition that always honored the courage of their forebears and gave gratitude for the thriving conditions in the little family 'village' in Montana.  

There were also incomprehensibly dangerous times in places further away in a time of conflict.  My parents sponsored my 'uncle' Kris to be rescued from war-torn Europe where his Latvian parents had been herded into a cattle car to die in a Gulag.  They had value as competent farmers so they were not immediately taken to the killing pits and shot. Kris had been advised by the village elders to surrender to the Germans rather than the Russians when they were surrounded by a pincer invasion.  The Russians shot the young men and the Germans conscripted them into military operations.  My uncle was too young for the military so they put him to work digging graves for the devastation in the Baltic.  

My work with  ‘the knowing field’ began long before I learned of the formal "Family Constellation" therapy as carried forward by the Fausts.  My uncle's great wisdom and appreciation for life in the thriving world outside the concentration camp was a formative inspiration for me.  The horror was incomprensible for a young boy but I found one of those 'gods' of adulthood in his energetic craftsmanship, strong accent, and his fascination and love for the extended family I knew.

Considerable motive power for my writing of family history, for which I'm known, concerns how this energy field can be accessed in both the Primordial unity we all have on the planet and specific family and regional cohesions of a psychic DNA.  My reach was intended to be for the cousins and their progeny who were scattered by economics across the nation rather than the mountain farm valley where we had all been together.  If the kindred were no longer on the farm (indeed there is no longer a farm or lakeside gathering place), they could still remember and learn our sagas and the ethics and spirit that would by Cosmic function live on within them.  

My reach went back further than they might like as devout Seventh Day Adventists of other Christian believers.  But they can find the principles within their own faith.  It's just that at the lakeside gathering place alone one summer the Germanic runes spoke to me of a timeless dimension that would include all time.  We would be together forever in a very real historical and future sense.  I told my stories and extended the metaphysics in what was at first a dogmatic way - - you must return to the ancient ways of the ancestors.  Later, with wisdom that can't help but arrive by ancestral spiritual work, I tell the stories in the context of valuing wherever they are now with appreciation rather than judgment.  The Energy is generic but it does form a constellation around family lines.  


That satellite of homes and daily communication with extended family is a metaphysical and meta-political theme that I will touch upon in this project to bring this book to relevance for a wider reading public. The central farm and ranch remained in agricultural and dairy production so the extended family had a centralmeeting place for holdiays and speciial occassions.  Much as the cenral hall sevred in older times.   Family overcoming of a subversive world as concerning specific events will be on a return visit here to ancestral gumption.  First, let’s look at principles that will bring you into power with living your own true legacy. 

 

 

Notice the Conestoga wagons in the photo.  I believe they travelles from Missippi  up the unldoad from a steamboat    

 

Flathead lake is one of the largest freshwater lakes in America.  Located in Western Montana, it is a real environmental and cultural place of power.  I chose this photo because it could be Mulligan Bay which is a small bay within the larger Skidoo Bay. 

Rebuilding our dock in Mullgan Bay.  Storms on Flathead Lake can have the intensity of an ocean.  We all had to rebuild docks every few years. 

Dad was n Patton's Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge and beyond.  Photo here is him with a range finder for a mortar unit.   I remember Dad saying his squad had the 81 millimeter mortar.  That means it was the M1 which weighs 136 pounds.  A mortar squad consisted of Squad Leader, Gunner, Loader and Ammo Carriers.   Walking beside the big tanks did as much to damage his ears as the direct hits taken in their log-roofed foxhole at the Bulge.  He could act as a leader in real situations but following stupidity was not something he countenanced.  That is why he ended up as a private at the end of the war. Not a company man, he was a creator and builder.  

 

Dad building a home.

Mom being beautiful and classy.  Verna Hendricksen taught roller skating at a hardwood floor skating rink called The Avalon.  When Dad arrived there in his military uniform he was handsome and worthy.  Many were at the rink hoping Mom would be the one to teach classes but it was my Dad who won her heart. 

Dad showing me at age 3 how to use a concrete float.

Ranch gathering of the Hendricksen clan.  

This pictoria features more of the Rinke-Hendricksen caln but it must be remembered that The Witenberg home in East Missoula is where Dad first showed how he could support and lead a family after his own father had a stroke.  Dad quit school to work at family income but he first showed the gumtption to lead a family when he saw his mother, Elseie i Benine crying because she had no food during the Great Depression.  Dad went right out to catch several brook trout and brought home dinner.  This was why he had a lifetime attacment to catching brookies in mountain streams.  

Dad and his East Missoula friends found an old steam donky at Rock Creek and refurbished it to become and operating saw mill.  They hauled lumber in a Model T Ford pickup and sold the cut lumber in town.  There were ways for the ambitious and courageeous to make money during the Great Depression.  Then it was General Patton's Third Army and the battle of the Bulge and beyond.    Patton was a front lines leader and talked to Dad and his unit while under fire.  I learned from a primary source about the leaership and mission of men inaction.  

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More photos being located to honor my Uncle Stan and Uncle Dal.  Ranch life.  Uncle Stan is a man I should have listened to when he had consul for me.  Stan was always there for the family in growing times and again in hard times.  Kept us going.  Uncle Dale was also there in hard times.  He made sure Mom had transportation to therasy during her stroke recovery.  These Hendricksen lads took care of their father and do him honor.  There are good reasons I'm proud of my people.