Burglars Get Good Price

Wheat Stolen, Farmer Is Happy

Two confessed burglars stole 191 bushels of Thatcher wheat from a Viding township farmer Wednesday night but instead of being angry C. M. Dahlsad was mighty happy about the whole thing today.

Dahlsad didn't find out about the theft until early this morning when he was routed out of bed by County Attorney James A Garrity and Sheriff Rosco Brown.

Yesterday the two officials were called to Breckenridge by Wilkin County Sheriff James A Fitzgerald, who was holding two Breckenridge men for thefts of grain in Wilkin County. The pair, Kenneth Troxel, 27, and William Davis, 44, had confessed theft of 191 bushels of grain in Clay County.

No such theft had been reported to Clay county authorities. They questioned the two men, who drew a description of the granary which they had robbed and told officers it was "near a barn, both the granary and barn were painted red. There was no house on the farm."

Armed with this description Garrity and Brown found the granary eight and a half miles northeast of Georgetown. The nearest neighbor lived a mile away.

After further search they found Dahlsad, who knew nothing of missing grain but was willing to check up on his property. The grain was missing, they discovered. Dahlsad's estimate was only nine bushels more than the 191 bushels stolen.

"How much money did they get for it?" he asked Garrity.

Garrity told him the two had sold the grain at Sauk Center on Thursday and had been given a check for $159.

"That's a good sale" said Dahlsad in high glee. "That's more than I could have gotten for it."

Since Art Mcintree, Stearns county sheriff at St. Cloud, had stopped payment on the check, Dahlsad will receive the money.

The two Breckenridge men will prosecuted {sic} in Wilkin county for the burglary charges for grain thefts there.

The pair had sold the wheat for nearly $1 per bushel because they had hit a rising market when wheat topped a dollar in the Chicago market.

Moorhead Daily News, 5/17/1941

Sidenote: this was my great-grandfather, and I have never heard this story before.