Ole Melby was born and educated in Norway and left home at seventeen. He worked in Minnesota and in the North Dakota wheat fields, homesteaded in South Dakota, and worked on Bill Shaw’s CD Horse Ranch in Harding County. He married Bess and raised her children. Tip, the youngest, took the Melby name and counted Ole as his father.
Ole and Bess raised horses and then sheep, moved to the Willett place in 1933, and later bought the Battle Mountain Auto Camp in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Ole died in 1951.
Photographs
Stories About Ole
- Ole, My Stepfather: Tip’s chapter about the man who raised him, from Tip’s Story
- Ole Melby ~ 1950 or so: photographs, with the scanned pages of Tip’s chapter
- The Battle Mountain Auto Camp (BMAC)
- Battle Mountain Auto Camp Gets Robbed!
- Marion Painter’s Story – 1983
- Accounts of the Melby Family through the Lens of Pat Melby
See also: Bess Melby
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