Terrie Losleben Sato, a great-niece, visited the grave of Pvt. Oscar Larum at the Argonne-Meuse American Cemetery in eastern France during August of 2013. Oscar was killed November 5, 1918, six days before the Armistice was signed on Nov. 11, ending the first World War.
Oscar Larum was naturalized as an American citizen on 29 July 1918 at Camp Kearney, San Diego, California. The Naturalization Court #283 in San Diego has his naturalization petition (NARA M1613, Roll 0016, Larum, Oscar). He is among the WW I casualties listed in The Washington Post of November 1918 … between David H. Larson and Stanley B. Latuk is the name: Oscar Larum, Malta, Montana.
1/19/2014 rev; by Glen Larum (great-nephew)
The original Oscar Larum (Oskar Hanssen of the Mellum Laerum farm, the younger brother of grandfather Henry) was born in Sande, Vestfold, Norway 6 Sept 1893, the fourth son and seventh child of Hans and Anne Sophie Engebretsen. He was named for the reigning King of Norway and, more likely, after a boy that Sophie had tended during her time as a servant in a household in Minnesota in the late 1870s. He died an American citizen on 5 November 1918 in eastern France as a U.S. Army soldier fighting in the Argonne offensive with the 306th Infantry Regiment, 77th Division, First Army, of the American Expeditionary Forces.
His death came just six days before the signing of the Armistice, ending the war. Family history has Oscar serving as a message runner, but as dangerous as that duty was, he survived it only to die in an indiscriminate roadside bombing. His sister-in-law Ingeborg Larum told her youngest daughter, Helen, that a member of Oscar’s company came to his brother’s homestead near Malta and related the events that led up to and included his death. The soldier explained to Henry that his younger brother had been killed by shrapnel from a bomb dropped from one of the German airplanes that were harassing U.S. soldiers hurrying toward the Meuse River as the enemy retreated. He is interred at the American Cemetery (Meuse-Argonne Cemetery) at Romagne-Gesnes, France, in Plot G, Row 21, Grave 37. He was a young Norwegian immigrant farmer at Lovejoy, Montana, working to “prove up” his 320-acre homestead when he was drafted in the late Spring of 1918. He was granted citizenship on 29 July 1918 at Camp Kearney near San Diego, California as he was preparing to go to Europe.
Oscar was 25 years old when he was killed, having celebrated that birthday just a month earlier (September 6) when he had been in France less than a month and in the U.S. Army less than six months. On Sept. 6, 2011, I wrote The National Personnel Records Center, 9700 Page Avenue, St. Louis, MO 631233-5100, hoping to find something of him in his military records. All I knew of him were a few sketchy facts my father had passed on to me to go with the mental image of the picture hanging in Aunt Helen’s Victorian house in Duvall, Wash., a formal portrait of a “Doughboy” taken in the U.S. just days before he went to Europe. That picture today hangs in Cousin Terrie Sato’s home. It turns out that Oscar’s records were part of a larger depository destroyed in a fire in 1973. The only information available was the location of his grave. So, I know now where he was born, the location of his homestead in Montana, when he came to the United States, when he was drafted, when and where he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen, where he died, and where he was buried. The rest of his life is lost to the fog of history.
He grew up as a middle child in a prosperous Norwegian farm family near Sande, Vestfold, Norway and probably heard stories from his parents, older brothers and sister about the family’s sojourn in the United States from about 1876 to 1890. Like all typical farm kids, he was hardened to work from an early age. During his teen-age years, he probably chafed at having to stay home in Norway to work on the farm while his older “American” brothers (Emmett, Conrad and Henry) went off to the Pacific Northwest in the United States to work in the timber. And he must have hung around during Henry’s brief return to Norway, a time concurrent with his older brother’s whirlwind courtship of a young local woman his own age, Ingeborg Marie Osterud. As a wide-eyed 19-year old, he accompanied his brother Henry and Ingeborg when the newlyweds emigrated in the spring of 1913. The ship sailed from Oslo on the young couple’s wedding day, March 26, 1913, and, according to a family story, docked in New York City 11 days later. I thought that might have been exaggeration until I read a website note that the Norwegian America Line (Den Norske Amerikalinjen) in 1913 offered direct service from Oslo to New York via Kristiansand, Stavanger and Bergen, service that took just one day longer than the line’s 10-day trip from Oslo to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. ”It had never been so easy to get from Norway to America.”–from the Norway American Heritage Website. Emmett already may have been in Alberta, scouting out homestead tracts to claim or he may have accompanied Henry to Norway. I suspect the former.
At any rate, by mid-April 1913, Henry, his bride and the two brothers, Emmett and Oscar, were settling in the County of Paintearth in east central Alberta, Canada, and soon after Henry enlisted in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, apparently in order to expedite the homestead claim east of Red Deer near Coronation. It was squalid circumstances for the Larums, a one-room sod house on the bleak Canadian prairie in the Sullivan Lake area. In February of 1914, Ingeborg remembers delivering her first-born son, Norman, in a portion of the room while her brother-in-law Oscar was sick in bed with the influenza in another part of the room, a hanging curtain all that separated them.
Henry may have had a Canadian homestead and cut a dashing figure in his Mountie uniform, but he and his brothers obviously were looking for something more than what Canada offered. Homestead laws in Canada allowed an individual to claim 160 acres, while the revised homestead laws in the United States now permitted a person to claim up to 320 acres. That may have been the lure. Or Henry may have become disenchanted with the RCMP’s pomp and circumstance, its rigid rules, or with the stark Canadian homestead. Whatever the reason, in 1914 after the birth of Norman, he decided to reclaim his birthright. He was an American, virtue of his having been born in Petersburg, Dakota Territory three years before the family returned to Norway at the height of the Ghost Dance uprising in 1890.
It seems likely that Emmett, the older bachelor brother, had been to Montana prospecting for another homestead. That was certainly the case later when Emmett went west to Hot Springs and Henry followed, eventually to purchase property at Plains from an old acquaintance, Ole Berg. If Emmett had been out “prospecting”, he would have run into other Norwegians in Phillips County, Montana, who would have raved about the tremendous grain harvests of 1912 and 1913. A century later, nearly a quarter of the county’s residents still claimed Norwegian descent (21.2%).
All that is certain about the migration into the United States is that when Henry, Ingeborg and baby Norman went south, it was in the company of Emmett and Oscar. It may have been on the trip that the brothers discovered an unclaimed tract that appealed to them en route to homesteads Emmett had already scoped out and persuaded Oscar, as the younger brother without a homestead prospect, to file his own claim. Oscar’s homestead was located on the wagon route from Coronation to Malta.
Lovejoy, not two words conjoined but the name of an early-day settler, was southwest of present-day Loring, Montana on Little Cottonwood Creek, a tributary of the Milk River which meanders out of northern Montana into Canada, then drops back across the border in north central Montana en route to the Missouri. (There is a county road in Phillips County near where Highway 212 turns east toward the Whitewater cutoff which winds its way west to Little Cottonwood Creek). In my lifetime, this has not been an inviting country for a homesteader, but it may have been in 1914. It was that summer Oscar staked out his 320-acre homestead in northern Phillips County on Little Cottonwood Creek on the east half of Section 8, Township 34N, Range 28E of the Montana Principal Meridian 45 degrees 47’ 13” N and 111 degrees 39’ 33” W. (A township is 6 square miles, consisting of 36 sections and 23,040 acres.)
The Larums left Alberta on 10 July 1914 and entered the United States on 14 July. (Naturalization Petition, Oscar Larum) The nearest community was Lovejoy, which had been settled just four years earlier. It was southwest of present-day Loring, Montana. His two older brothers went 40 miles further south and claimed homesteads a quarter mile apart on the Milk River bench north of Malta, Montana in Township 31N, Range 30E. In the first two years, they were blessed with rain and bumper wheat crops. Henry’s wife, Ingeborg, gave birth to a second son, George Stanley, in April 1915 and a daughter, Lillian, in October 1916. The couple participated in the community life, helped found the Lutheran Church in Malta. The Norwegian newspapers published out of Minneapolis were full of stories of the war now being waged in Europe after the assassination of an Austrian Archduke (Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary). The war spiked the price of wheat and it rained on the high plains. These were halcyon days for Montana homesteaders.
Things would get tougher after that. In late 1915, it stopped raining and it was on the heels of two years of drought (1916-1917) and two poor wheat harvests that Oscar was drafted into the U.S. Army out of Phillips County, Montana (#1711438) along with five other neighbors in the spring of 1918. The first draft since the Civil War had been in force since the declaration of war April 6, 1917 in the wake of Zimmerman Telegram incident (it invited Mexico to join the war as Germany’s ally in return for promising Mexico the recovery of territories lost during the Mexican War 70 years earlier.)
Oscar and Emmet had been in Malta on June 5, 1917 about two weeks after the Selective Service Draft was instituted (May 18, 1917) and both signed up on that day –the first day of registration– although Emmet was 33 years old and outside the 21-to-30 window for draft registrants. (The Act was amended in August 1918 to include all men 18 to 45). Oscar was Class 1, unmarried with no dependents. His older brother Henry was Class IV, married with dependent spouse and children with insufficient family income to support themselves if he were drafted.
Just a little more than year after registering, Oscar was climbing aboard a Great Northern Railroad train headed for an Army training depot (Camp Lewis, Washington). There, instead of being assigned to the 91st (Wild West) Division, he was assigned to California’s Sunshine Division, the 40th), sent to Camp Kearney at San Diego, California and underwent a few hectic weeks of training. (Family stories always made the point that Oscar had just six weeks of basic training before going to Europe, but he spent part of May, all of June and July in training locations in the United States.)
A portion of his early training may have occurred at Camp Lewis, but all that is certain is that he was at Camp Kearney on 29 July 1918 because that was the date he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen prior to his departure to France.* The 40th Division arrived in France sometime in August 1918 and immediately began providing replacements for eight other divisions –the 26th, 28th, 32nd, 77th, 80th, 81st, 82nd, and 89th Division. Suppose he departed Camp Kearney on July 30-Aug. 1. There would have been a cross-country train trip, probably three or four days, a day mobilizing at Camp Merritt, N.J., another day embarking the ships at the Hoboken port, and a trip across the Atlantic that likely took a day longer than his trip to the New World five years earlier, due to the zigzag courses that the troop convoys took to evade German submarines. They would have been in France two weeks after leaving Camp Merritt (probably about August 16-18 depending on whether they had made landing in England, Scotland or France). When Oscar disembarked in France, it was probably the week of his oldest brother’s 35th birthday. Emmett, if he paused harvest to observe the event on Aug. 16, was a half a world away on his homestead on the Milk River bench north of Malta.
Oscar was among the late draftees who were “fillers” to enable the Division to reach full strength before its departure from Camp Kearney, which was later to become the U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot during WW II. Earlier Montana soldiers from Lovejoy included Pvt. John Field, Co. C., 91st Division (Field, who had been at Lovejoy since 1910, was the son of a Norwegian from Bergen named Fjilde who changed the spelling of his last name when he came to America in 1878.) John Field died in 1922, never recovering from being gassed in the Battle of the Argonne. The 600-pound Swiss bell that hangs in the Loring Lutheran Church was given in his memory by his mother Sara in 1935. The church itself had been graced by Field’s presence. It was moved from Lovejoy to Loring after 1928 when track for the Great Northern’s railroad spur was laid 13 miles east, spelling Lovejoy’s demise. But Lovejoy was a busy village from 1911 until 1928 and Oscar and John were among the young men in the community during some of its most vibrant years. In addition to the young men who left Lovejoy to fight in Europe, there were young women from the community who also did their part. Pearle Watson, the dashing young schoolteacher who rode her black-and-white pinto from her homestead [on the southeast quarter of Sec 3, NE 1/4 Sec 10, Township 34N Range 29E] to the community schoolhouse, was working as a nurse in Paris with the Red Cross when the Armistice was signed.
Other Phillips County residents serving in WWI were Cpl. Peter Twede, Co. C, Malta; Alexander Wilson, Co. B, Zortman; Pvt. Lars Kodalen, Co. C, Dodson; and PFC Delbert Salsberry, Hdqtrs Co., Harb, and Albert Morgan. Unit casualties who were buried on the battlefield were later reinterred at the American Cemetery at Romagne-Sous-Montfaucon, France. Casualties for Field’s 91st were 5,838 (about 25 percent of its original strength). By comparison, the 77th lost 9,423 soldiers in its action in the Argonne.
“We are the dead. Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.” –In Flanders Fields
Some of the soldiers in the 40th Division were eventually transferred into the 77th Division, a unit made up of mostly New Yorkers, tough guys in their own right. These transfers may have taken place in late October of 1918 to replace casualties after a series of punishing battles with the Germans, including the famous “Lost Battalion” episode featuring members of the 307th and 308th infantry regiments. Ironically, in the Hollywood version of the story of the Lost Battalion, the unit’s deadliest sharpshooter was a rifleman from Montana. Sometimes, there is a truth buried in the fiction. We only know from numbers on his headstone that by the time the huge Argonne offensive was winding down, Oscar was among the rifle-carrying soldiers of the 77th Division’s 306th Infantry Regiment. (One late draftee from MInnesota, Theo Stalemo, reported that he trained at Camp Lewis in May then was sent to the 40th Division at Camp Kearny, Calif., before going to France in June where the 40th was broken up to replace casualties in other divisions. (This could be the scenario which accounts for Oscar’s presence in the 77th Division on November 5, 1918 when he kept his appointment with destiny.)
Oscar was at the crest of the tidal wave of American soldiers who flooded France during the summer of 1918. July, when over 300,000 US troops went to France, was the “peak of deployment” for the AEF. Beginning with 244,435 Americans landing in France in May; 276,372 in June, over 300,000 in July, and more than 250,000 in August, the U.S. presence in Europe grew to more than 1.4 million men (of which some 122,000 never came home). The 306th and 77th are the numerals on Oscar’s grave stone. If his service in France was all with the 77th, he can almost be tracked across the hilly terrain of the Argonne. That unit’s history is among the best documented of all the American units, along with the account of front-line duty and hand-to-hand warfare with the enemy.
His body was never returned to his boyhood home in Norway or to the homestead for which he paid with his life. His “legal representatives” (likely father Hans and brothers, Henry and Emmett) were granted an ownership patent (#798954), “pursuant to government regulation”, after wading through the bureaucracy dealing with a war casualty’s unpatented homestead claim. Bureau of Land Management records indicate the claim was approved on March 3, 1921, two and a half years after his death on that battlefield in France. There was a provision in the Conscription Act of 1917, following the Declaration of War on April 6, 1917, that expedited granting of citizenship to resident aliens who joined the military, as well as granting them homestead patents in return for their service.
While that may have appealed to Oscar, there is no evidence to suggest that he was anything other than a single homesteader drafted to swell Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force. The fields of France and Belgium would be littered with 100,000 dead doughboys before the carnage ended. Montana contributed more than its share, the highest ratio of dead per capita in World War I of any state, thanks to an error in the draft formula that went undiscovered until the war was over. The draft lottery commenced on July 6, 1917, but it wasn’t until April of the following year that they got to the young Norwegian homesteader who had registered almost a year earlier in Malta (a trip that most surely included visits to his two older brothers both coming and going). He indicated on his draft form that he was employed by an Art Murphy of Malta, Montana. He would have had a full year in which to enlist and the war had been going on for four years before he entered the Army. Had he been one of those young men often described as “spoiling for a fight”, he could have remained in Canada and joined the Queen’s armed forces or enlisted in a branch of the American military after entering the U.S. in 1914. He did neither. But years later, his sister-in-law, Ingeborg, told her youngest daughter, Helen, that just before departing for Camp Lewis, Washington for training, Oscar said, “A county good enough to own property in is good enough to fight for.”
While his brother Henry rarely spoke of his younger brother in the next half-century, he had to think of him almost daily. Or, at the very least, call out his name. Henry and Ingeborg’s next son, born just six months later in April 1919, was named for him. And there was the classic studio doughboy picture of Oscar that hung on the wall in the family living room –at Malta and at Plains. He would look into his face every single day of his life. That photo was bequeathed to their youngest daughter, Helen, who passed it along to her daughter, Terrie.
(The Oscar of the next generation also would see his share of war, serving in the Marine Corps and participating in the bloody Pacific beachheads as the U.S. troops island-hopped their way toward Japan. He was living in Plains, but visiting his brothers in Phillips County where it came time for him to register with the Selective Service Board. He registered in the same town that his Uncle Oscar has registered in some 25 years earlier. “He always said he saddle-broke a horse during the 140-mile round trip from his brother’s place on the river to Malta to sign up for the draft,” Helen recalled. In the end, he didn’t wait to be drafted, enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps on Jan. 15, 1942 with Bob Earhart and Bill Doney at Plains. I am sure Henry and Ingeborg were reminded of the older Oscar’s death in France as they prayed for the safety of their Oscar during the dreadful days of that second war in the far-off Pacific. But, unlike the uncle for whom he was named, this Oscar would survive his last battle and go on to a career in the service, retiring at the Marine Corps Supply Depot in Albany, Georgia, in 1969.)
Were Emmett and Henry present when the original Oscar boarded the train in Malta for Camp Lewis? Or had they had shaken their younger brother’s hand and said their final words to him there on their farms north of the Milk River, then watched Oscar as he walked down the lane toward that little railroad station and, ultimately, toward Europe and that marked grave in a French field. They could not have known, but ghost guessed, that he was walking into a place in history, to become a line in the Soldiers of the Great War, a massive three-volume list of the dead in the war to end all wars.