m a r k e r i c k s o n p a i n t i n g s Frank Severin Erickson Ernest Julius Erickson Andrew Anders Sebran Erickson American Expeditionary Force 1918 - 1919 Out West & North Dakota
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My grandfather Frank Gustaf Severin Erickson left home in 1910 at the age of eighteen and headed west seeking warmer climates, adventure and work. He left Bismarck by train bound for the West to see the Pacific and California, and lived in Daly City outside of San Francisco for awhile. Over the next seven years between visits back to North Dakota to work on the family farm in Regan, he traveled, worked and lived at an assortment of jobs. His adventurous spirit took him all over the West, Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains states. The letters and postcards that he wrote home have postmarks from Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Port Huron, Michigan, Armstead and Polaris, Montana and Phoenix (where he wrote this letter in 1914 looking for work). In the Spring of 1915 he was cutting timber in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. Over the years he worked as a hunter, logger, a miner and a warehouseman. Frank loved to camp and went deer hunting when he had no work. By early 1917 Frank and his older brother Ernest Julius Alfred Erickson traveled by train from Wilton to Bismarck to Baker, Oregon. They had their sites on finding some land to buy. Besides working for various lumber mills they became deputies for the Oregon Railroad out of La Grande, Oregon. Frank and Ernest would join the American Expeditionary Force in the Summer of 1917 and in 1918 would serve in France with the 308th and 361st Infantry respectively.
Frank wrote home regularly to his parents Christine Brita (Olson) and Anders Alfred
Erickson and here is his August 3rd, 1914 letter when he was living in Phoenix.
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