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Remarkable Betsy
The prairie fire survivor
who inspired Nellie Barsness to enter
medicine was widow Brita Dalager Sjobakken / Schobakken
(1851-1921) of Webster, SD, a community in
east-central South Dakota, then of around
500 citizens.† Brita's name was
sometimes given as Bertha and her nickname
was Betsy.
In 1884 Betsy, her
five children and her mother, Guri
Hostager Dalager (1805-1986), traveled west by ox-drawn wagon one
hundred and twenty miles from Pope
County, Minnesota to establish a homestead
in Day County, South
Dakota. Betsy was in her early thirties and her children were
two to thirteen years old. Guri was
seventy-eight. They had decided to
relocate after the accidental hanging
death of husband and father, Peter Shjobakken.
It also offered the opportunity to be near Betsy's brother, Hans Dalager.
He and his large family had relocated to South Dakota from Pope County, MN.
In the next two years, widow Betsy and her brood managed to
erect a home and sod barn, and accumulate a
few cows and hogs. Tragedy struck in mid-April 1886. A
neighbor three miles distant, John Dodd,
had used fire to clean out a swamp on his
land. Wind swept
his fire to adjoining properties and caught
Betsy's haystacks afire, followed by her barn
— where Guri struggled to save their
cows and hogs. She became trapped by
the blaze and her remains were found later with
those of their livestock, the barn burned to
the ground. Her clothing afire, Betsy ran and
climbed into a ten-foot deep well where the
water was still partly frozen. Betsy's
children survived by sheltering in a fire
break, then helped their mother out of the
well. Betsy suffered
extensive burns on her legs, arms and hands. After a lengthy
burn recovery, she spent the
last thirty-six years of her life in a wheelchair, a victim of crippling rheumatism and
disabling burns to her arms and hands. Guri's is thought to have been the first
recorded death by a prairie fire in South
Dakota. In 1967 the state erected a
road marker four miles from Betsy's
homestead to tell the family's
story.
It seems possible Nellie Barsness
teaching in Day County, SD was in some way
connected to a prior friendship with the Dalager-Skjobaken
family. In
1880 Betsy and her family lived in the area that would
become Barsness Township,
including Betsy's two daughters that were the same age as
Nellie Barsness.
Continuing education
In 1904, a few months after the Iroquois fire, Dr. Barsness
traveled to Niagara Falls to attend the first
medical conference about new technology: Xrays.
She had learned to operate the equipment during her
internship in the electrotherapeutics department at
the St. Paul Lutheran Hospital. In 1910 she
went to Europe for additional training.
World War I
In September 1918, determined to help the fighting men in WWI
and having been turned away when she tried to
enlist in the U.S. Army Medical Reserve Corps, Nellie traveled to
Europe to spend fifteen months as a volunteer to the
French Army. She was one of thirty
female medical volunteers assigned to work in Cempuis, Nancy and
Rheims France. The group was one of
several organized by the Women's Overseas
Hospital (W. O. H.), an organization of the
National Women's Suffragette Association who
worked with the Red Cross and other
volunteer organizations.
Nellie's first two months, before the armistice, were spent as an ophthalmologist in
one of three "gas hospitals" in Cempuis, Oise, France. Located just a half-mile from the
front and often under attack, Cempuis had been
converted from an orphanage to form a
treatment center for soldiers suffering from
exposure to chlorine and mustard gas.
Though ophthalmology was not Nellie's area
of expertise, physicians there had treated
fifteen thousand patients over the summer
and with fifty to seventy-five new patients
arriving daily, welcomed relief,
even from females.
From Cempuis her group
traveled to Nancy, France to replace Red Cross
physicians. While there Nellie headed a busy
dispensary clinic for local patients in Neuves-Maisons.
Funding for the clinic came from donations
made by residents of St.
Paul, MN. For the first
three months after the armistice the
hospital in Nancy, a former girls
boarding school, cared for a stream of women
and children arriving in Lorraine hungry and
exhausted from long travels through
decimated areas in France and Germany.
In mid-April, 1919 Nellie's group was
transferred to Rheims, France to help care for refugees. In addition
to helping distribute food, clothing and
shelter, they treated injuries from exploded
shells left behind after combat.
Upon her return from Europe, Nellie
visited Jennie in Idaho before returning to St. Paul
to become the physician for the State Reformatory for
women in Shakopee, MN, and the state health director
for the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
In addition to establishing a general practice, Nellie
did post-graduate work in New York and Chicago and returned to Europe in 1927 for
studies in Berlin and Vienna.&
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