Dakota Datebook

Ella, the Window Smasher

February 6, 2024 — According to the newspaper accounts, Ella O’Keefe appears to have been a likeable person who spent most of her time traveling from place to place on transportation furnished by local or county authorities. It appears that Ella had a problem. When despondent, she manifested her depression is a peculiar way—she smashed windows.

Ella the Window Smasher was well known in North Dakota cities and on this date in 1896, she was on her way to Moorhead courtesy of the cities of Bismarck and Jamestown. After a brief episode in Bismarck, the Burleigh County authorities decided there was a need to send her, unescorted, to Jamestown.

Her arrival in Jamestown was reported in the Jamestown Daily Alert where she “stopped in her progress up Fifth avenue and expressed an intense desire to smash the windows in the stores of Strong and Chase,” but she was prevented from doing so by parties who had accompanied her from the depot.

Hospitals have many windows and rather than being institutionalized at the state run hospital in Jamestown, Ella soon found herself on her way to Minnesota, that being the easiest and cheapest way of removing her from the community.

Upon her arrival in Fargo, Ella was arrested—as the year before she had attempted to break all the windows at the Fargo Women’s Home. After her arrest, it was learned that she had more or less escaped from an institution in Fergus Falls, thereby beginning her journey from town to town. The Fargo Police Chief secured a ticket for her to Wahpeton after she claimed that her real name was Marie O’Brien and she had a brother living at that location. After 1896 Ella drops from sight in North Dakota but one can only hope that she was able to find help.

“Dakota Datebook” is a radio series from Prairie Public in partnership with the State Historical Society of North Dakota and with funding from Humanities North Dakota. See all the Dakota Datebooks at prairiepublic. org, subscribe to the “Dakota Datebook” podcast, or buy the Dakota Datebook book at shopprairiepublic.org.