Batter up!! The Boys of the Dakota Summer are ready to play! My uncles Helmer Erickson (top row - far left) and Ernest Julius Erickson (bottom row - 3rd from the left) with mitts in hand were ready to go.The two brothers, team-mates on a North Dakota baseball team called the Blue Sox pose for a team photograph in 1910. The photograph was taken somewhere along the rolling hills of the Great Plains, a place you can hit a baseball that will go for miles and miles along the Missouri River.

The hand-written back is included below. The going style in photography in middle late 1800s was a "carte de visite," By the 1870s the "cabinet card" became very popular in printing of a photographic image.

The back was written by my great grandmother, Christine Britta (Olson - Anderson) Erickson from the family farm in Regan, North Dakota to her son, my grandfather Frank. He was living in Miles City, Montana and working at Fort Keogh at the time. Christine no matter what, kept Frank up on the family and his six sisters and brothers and did it often in this style of postcard writing. I think it fantastic and a shame in so many ways that today this art form is practically gone.

Christine wrote in Swedish and the translation will be added here soon.

Hillsboro and Reynolds are two neighboring communities in northern Cass County, North Dakota. They are about forty miles north of the state's largest city, Fargo. Think of the Coen Brothers and Steve Buscemi and smile. Today in the Cass County they have a co-op American Legion Baseball team co-sponsored by Hillsboro Post 4 and Reynolds Post 256. Ironically, they are called the Blue Sox and likely are the heir to this team in the 1910 photograph.