View source for Walter Sterland

Place of Birth: Chesterfield

Date of enlistment: 18 November 1872

Age given at enlistment: 21

Rank: Private

Company: M

Location on 25 June 1876: With General Terry

An Old Bismarckian

At Dickinson (North Dakota), upon alighting from a train a chubby individual, with a white slouch hat, approaches you and slips a card of the Eagle hotel in your hand. It is Walter Sterland, who, five years ago, was familiarly known in Bismarck as “Johnny Bull,” the glass juggler at Whitney’s opera house, and later in the fruit and stationery business.  Bismarck Daily Tribune, 21 August 1885.

Walter Scott Sterland was born on 16 April 1852 (not 1851 as is universally stated) in South Street, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, son of Henry Sterland, a grocer and tea dealer, and Sarah Scott Sterland, who registered the birth on 12 May.  He was therefore only age 20 years-old when he enlisted in the United States Army.

In 1861 the family was living in Beetwell Street, Chesterfield, next door but one to the Spread Eagle Inn, where Henry Sterland was a running a tallow chandler’s business and sufficiently prosperous to employ a live-in ‘house servant.’ Both Walter and his seven year-old sister, Charlotte, were atending school. Several siblings died in infancy.

The 14th century Parish Church of St. Mary and All Saints, Chesterfield - famous for its crooked spire. Walter Scott Sterland was baptised here 7 May 1852.

Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, Saturday, 30 May 1857 - DEATHS – On Thursday last, at Chesterfield, Clara, daughter of Henry Sterland, tallow chandler, aged three months.

Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, Saturday, 18 December 1858 – DEATHS – At Chesterfield, on Friday, Harry, son of Henry Sterland, chandler, aged 7 months,

Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, Saturday, 30 November 1861 – SALTER-GATE CANDLE MANUFACTORY AND PROVISION STORES – Henry Sterland, proprietor – will open his provision stores on Saturday, 7 December 1861, with a well selected stock of Flour, Cheese, Bacan, Hams, Lard, Butter, Eggs, Composite, Mould and other Candles, and hopes by strict personal attention to business, and purchasing only first-class articles, to merit the patronage of old and new customers.

Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, Saturday, 16 May 1863 - DEATHS – May 11, at Chesterfield, S[arah] Scott, infant daughter of Mr. Henry Sterland, grocer and provisions dealer, nine months.

Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, Saturday, 4 June 1864 – [Advert] Richard Wright, Tallow Chandler, Chesterfield (successor to H. Sterland). Shopkeepers liberally treated. N.B. Butcher’s Fat and Fine Quality received.

Sadly his mother died in the spring of 1864, by which time the family had moved to Holywell Cross in the centre of town.

It seems that Walter arrived in America in 1869, spent some time in Chicago where he enlisted in the U.S. Army on 18 November 1872 and assigned to the Seventh Cavalry. He had blue eyes, light hair, a fair complexion, 5′ 5 1/2″ tall, previously employed as a teamster. He joined Company M on 9 December, which was on Reconstruction duty  in Unionville, South Carolina, took part in the Yellowstone Campaign (1873), the Black Hills Expedition (1874), the Sioux Campaign (1876) – not present at the battle.  ”While at Powder River Depot, he served as [General] Terry’s butcher and came up to the Big Horn camp from the Rosebud on the Far West on 22 Jun 1876,”  Participants in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Frederic C. Wagner III, McFarlane, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2011, p. 91 - and finally the Nez Perce Campaign (1877), before being discharged at Fort Rice on 18 November 1877, on expiration of service, as a “Corporal of Good Character.”  Sterland spent much of his army service herding and butchering cattle.

Bismarck Tribune, 25 March 1881

He married Ella Jane Blanchard on 18 November 1879 and had one child, Arthur, born December 1881. They lived in Bismarck, D.T., from 1879 to 1885 during which time Sterland was the proprietor of a tobacco, fruit and newsagent’s business.

In 1882 ” .. his large pet Newfoundland dog bit a little girl and was ordered  shot, the family experiencing great sorrow,” Bismarck Tribune, 17 November 1882 (Williams, p. 285).

Back in England his father died in Higher Broughton, a surburb of Salford, near Manchester.

Manchester Evening News, Friday, 2 May 1884 – DEATHS – STERLAND, Henry, on the 23rd April at Hilton-street, Higher Broughton, Henry Street Sterland, age 67 years.

The family resided in Dickinson, Stark County, D.T. in 1885 where he ran a hotel, and later farmed around 160 acres in Township 140 R94, north of Gladstone (named after Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone), for 28 years.

Walter Sterland was almost certainly in Dickinson on 4 July 1886 and would have been among the assembled throng who heard Theodore Roosevelt make his first major public speech, which was reported in the  Jamestown Weekly Alert, 8 July 1886, see below.

It reads: THEODORE ROOSEVELT delivered the oration at Dickinson, Dak., on the Fourth. It took in the entire country, the present, past and future, the glory and the grandeur of Dakota, and the privilege that would descend to the individual’s children, even to the third and fourth generations, if we were good Dakotans, and made the politicians shape the political destiny of the future with regard to honesty. He declared that it was the duty of every individual to see that public officials were strictly honest. Mr. Roosevelt should know that, like whisky, all Dakota politicians are honest, but some more than others.

According to Men With Custer (p.337) Sterland visited his home in England in 1910.

The City Directory for Dickinson (1918) lists him as a “City Assessor, Police Magistrate and County Judge, Juevenile Commissioner for Tenth Judicial District [and] Masonic Temple,” living at 46 West 3rd Street. He died on 27 August 1922, at St. Alexius Hospital, Bismarck, following surgery for a tumour and was buried in Dickinson City Cemetery with full Masonic rites, where a distinctive headstone marks the spot (Lot 8, Block P, South 1/2). Ella Blanchard Sterland died 26 April 1924 is buried  near her late husband.

Note: One author mistakenly states that Sterland was born in Sheffield (nine miles north of Chesterfield) and implies that he died in Dickinson, not Bismarck, North Dakota.
The Dickinson Press - 26 May 2012

Cavalry Scout Honored, by Linda Sailer - The Dickinson Press, 26 May 2012

Headstone for Walter & Ella Sterland - Dickinson City Cemetery, Photograph courtesy of Judy Hamilton.

Tablet in front of Sterland's headstone (incorrectly stating was was 72 yrs not 70 years, which is correct). Photograph courtesy of Judy Hamilton