Plains Folk

You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-beater in the state semifinals of 1970, because that was a long time ago and a lot of miles, too, and was not necessarily the apex in the trajectory of local history. Or maybe it was, and everything since then has been downhill. This actually is a thing among...

One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring overhead, eagles huddling over carrion on the road.

So I think the main reason my friends in McIntosh County invited me down to speak at their chokecherry festival this year was that a few years ago, I wrote a little ballad called “The Chokecherry Song.”

I’ve been describing the community culture of berry-picking that emerged during the 1880s, focusing first on juneberries and then on chokecherries. Wagon caravans carried townsfolk, particularly young people, into the countryside to pick. Every community had its known thickets that were transformed into ritual places; press reports referred to them with affectionate familiarity.

Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years the Grafton Farmers Market and the McIntosh County Heritage Center have initiated folk festivals focusing on these black pearls; I’m on my way soon to speak at the 2nd Annual Chokecherry Festival in Ashley. Even though my personal crop, generally so dependable,...

There’s a sense across the country that we have made a dog’s breakfast of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American independence. I don’t wish to sugar-coat past developments, but I remember 1976 pretty well—perhaps because although my education at a certain land grant university had taught me a thoughtful appreciation for sour mash whiskey, my head was happily not muddled by more destructi...

Not a native of the Flickertail State, nevertheless, in the course of decades, I have acquired a complex of defensive sensitivities about it. Phrases like “Flyover Country” and “Buffalo Commons” stir the little hairs on the back of my neck. I like to think this is because they are examples of sloppy thinking, and not because I am touchy, but self-delusion is a known part of the complex I am descri...

In my mail appears a thoughtful gift, a book, inscribed to me by one of the authors: The Missouri: America’s Longest River, edited by Jon K. Lauck and published by the Center for Western Studies, Augustana University. The chapters are various, from native forests to Indian-White conflict to big dams and their consequences, so let me focus on some pieces, then try to say something about the whole....

It says something about me as a historian that I am preoccupied with the origins of things. I mean, I seldom just launch into an abstract investigation into something in the past from which I am disconnected. I begin with a thing here and now, and then get curious about the question, Where did this come from? How did this thing come to be?

A half-century ago—actually, a little more than that—I charted my course as a professional historian by choosing to specialize in Western Americana. Keep in mind, I was studying at a western land grant university that had not completely shed its skin as a cow college. When my peers and I were asked what field we were working in, we would say, “Cowboys and Indians.”

I know I used to have one, but it’s disappeared, along with the cause it celebrated—one of those old black-mesh American Agriculture ball caps. I thought about it this week as I was working up, for a historical journal, a little piece about the American Agriculture Movement and its Washington tractorcade of 1979. It always makes me feel a little queer when someone calls on me to treat events that...

In sublime overview of the valley of the Little Missouri River, in the Badlands of North Dakota, stands a simple but elegant residence from the 1880s known as the Chateau de Morès. As a historian, I have a little bit of a problem with anachronism here. You see, I can uncover no evidence that people in the territory ever called this place the Chateau des Morès. There was no Chateau de Morès, but th...

A powerful new biography of Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, here generally known as the Marquis de Morès, has consequence on both sides of the Atlantic—in France, and in Dakota Territory.

James W. Foley Jr., who on his passing in 1939 was eulogized as “North Dakota’s unofficial poet laureate,” has always intrigued me. Not because of sublimity as a poet, although sometimes he surprises you with poems like “The Passing of the Prairie” or “The Garden of Yesterday.” More often he lapses into faux-vernacular rhetoric that doesn’t age well. Sometimes he descends to cynicism. Overall his...

An old friend left an orphan cookbook on our doorstep, and it proved to be of more than passing interest. It is a centennial cookbook from the town of Lignite, near the Canadian line, published in 2007. It is a rich register, containing some recipes I’m going to try out, each credited to a particular person. I’ve never been satisfied with recipes for beer cheese soup—Jud and Gen Tracy’s recipe fro...

Since publication of Thom Tammaro’s new book of poems, Aurora, by North Dakota State University Press, I have been present at two venues where Thom read from his work. He reads his work well (not a given among poets and writers). He reads with a manner that makes the room gentle. He owns the podium by ignoring it. Quiet confidence in his work.

Two conferences of regional scholars, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, the other in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, have taken the future of the Great Plains as their theme this spring. This sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. I can mouth off about the future like anyone else, but when I take up my tools as a historian, I have to say, the future is not my business. Heck, I’m not even sure the present exists...

Finally I found it, this song people were telling me about; found it in the Alfred G. Arvold Collection of the Institute for Regional Studies, at NDSU. The song, written by an NDSU graduate, James Golseth, is “Lilac Days,” an ode to spring, and beauty. Maybe also to hope, and persistence.

There is this group of people that gathers now and then in a converted gas station in Rapid City for what they call the Morning Fill Up. The agenda is to have a conversation with some interesting thinker with ideas about life in rural America, to have a “national conversation” within the context of the Great Plains. Now and then the contributions are gathered into a book and published by North Dak...

Christmas Eve, 2015, on the Montana Hi-Line, somewhere near Glasgow, in a one-room school called Willow Bend. Miss Miller had prepared her pupils well, and the local correspondent declared their program “a success.” Then there was the ringer: a quartet of bachelor homesteaders, the Willow Creek Quartette, comprising Will Lloyd, bass; Raymond Sullivan, baritone; James Lloyd, tenor; and L. O. Carter...

Early in his new memoir from North Dakota State University Press, Tough but Fair: Reformation of a Prison, Memoir of a Warden, Winston Satran recounts a great escape. Ten prisoners broke out of the North Dakota Penitentiary in 1973. They overpowered officers in recreation areas, scaled the walls, stole a car, and lit out east on Highway 10. The ten-day manhunt required to return them to captivity...

If you are familiar with the face or name of Henry R. Martinson, it is likely because of the classic documentary film of 1978, Northern Lights, about the early days of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota. In which, the aged Martinson plays himself, his words and persona framing the narrative.

Exploring the sandhills countryside in search of something, I stepped into a white frame Lutheran church along the road and found, on a table in the entryway, for reason unknown, an old, slender booklet, unrelated to church business: Songs of Charlie and Cedric was the title. Never heard of them, but I took notes.

In Dakota Territory, the outbreak of spelling bees in the late 1880s was commonly referred to as a “craze.” Since publication of The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 the craze, epidemic, or infatuation with spelling bees, as it was variously called by cultural commentators, had constituted a conscious revival of old custom. When announcing a spelling bee on the prairies, organizers almost always refer...

“The spelling bee at the Baptist church Tuesday evening was quite a lively entertainment,” so says a press report from Jamestown in April 1885. “Rev. S. N. Griffith acted as umpire, Professor Clemmer conductor and Professor Culver and C. T. Hills captains. Between thirty and forty participated in the exercises. Professor Culver and Miss Flagler were the last contestants for the honors, and finally...