Plains Folk

In a lovely book of 2008, America Eats, author Pat Willard puts fish fries into her subtitle, but hardly mentions them in her book-length discussion of food events in American culture. Examining the custom in our own region, I have figured out why. Willard relies heavily on WPA interview transcripts from the 1930s. And fish fries, it turns out, are a more recently evolved custom than that. I mean...

In Bottineau during the late 1880s, there emerged an association of men “on the ragged edge of civilization,” as one of them said, in a boom town on the Manitoba Railroad. They determined to have some fun poking fun at the booster spirit and the fraternal lodges that dominated the social scene. They gathered and wrote a constitution for the Ancient Order of Sit Stills and declared themselves the K...