Plains Folk: Recent Episodes
Prairie Public
Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."
If we’re going to live in this level land we call the Great Plains — and I expect to do so until I die — then there are some fundamentals we need to come to terms with. Like the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln on 20 May 1862. Unless we are Indigenous, we should think about what it means to be the heirs of a landed, settler society. Fortunately, we have Richard Edwards and his book, Great Plains Homesteaders, to help us out.
I’ve been arguing, along with Richard Edwards and his new book, Great Plains Homesteaders, that we should rethink our history with the Homestead Act on the Great Plains. You can do some of this for yourself, of course. If you have a homesteading ancestor, then you can order up the land patent file from the National Archives and learn the gritty details of proving up. You can scroll through the digitized pages of your local and regional newspapers and watch the notices of final proof blink in across the landscape like farmyard lights at prairie dusk.
In the Enderlin Museum a few days ago I noticed an old handbill on display, dating from 1897, and addressed “To Cattle Owners”: The undersigned hereby wishes to announce that he is again ready to receive orders for herding cattle during the coming season, from May 1st to October 1st, 1897. Good and sufficient drinking water can be found on the land. All cattle entrusted to my care will receive the best attention. All cattle must be branded. Price of herding $1.50 per head.
Every year is a mixed bag, always with its measure of miseries, but this one, 2024, is packed with celebratory milestones for me. Fifty years of college teaching under my belt. One hundred fifty years of successful agriculture on our family farm. And now, one thousand radio essays under the title, Plains Folk, composed and voiced for Prairie Public.
Sometime soon I will come to Prairie Public studios and record Plains Folk radio feature no. 1000. I am not winding down, but ramping up toward that recording, wherein I will, of course, offer some wise and witty remarks about life on the Great Plains of North America and the enterprise of telling their stories.
To lovers of the outdoors, the legacy of Gunlog Bjarni “G. B.” Gunlogson is evident. Just visit Icelandic State Park, in Pembina County, established in 1964 following Gunlogson’s gift of a 200-acre nature preserve along the Tongue River to the state of North Dakota. See the homestead buildings of his Icelandic immigrant parents, Eggert and Rannveig, along with an assemblage of other historic buildings representing rural life. Hike the nature trails. Homesteading + country life + nature + conservation: it’s a simple legacy. Only, maybe not so much.
Women and men and how they get along, or not, are not just matters for contemplation and commiseration in our personal lives. They are historical questions in the settlement and development of the Great Plains. The homesteading era often featured men going out alone to stake claims. Historically, however, the late nineteenth century in America saw the enshrinement of romantic love as the beau ideal of the full life. Marriage came to be considered a love match, not just an economic alliance. Thus all those bachelor homesteaders in their little old sod shanties on the claim, they longed for their sweethearts to come join them and make their lives complete.
In a previous essay, I left you in the lurch, having quoted, in closing a discussion of the early work of the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota Agricultural College, now NDSU, a poem by John R. Milton. This opening poem of The Loving Hawk, a chapbook published by the Institute, ranges from the fall of man to the endless issues of place and identity fostered by open horizons. Never fear, there is salvation in the same booklet, in the form of another poem, Dust Storm, which doesn't sound optimistic, but wait, listen:
North Dakota Congressman, Hjalmar Nygaard, he knew his way around legislative corridors. A teacher and a businessman, his fellow citizens of Steele County had elected him to multiple terms in the state legislature, and then in 1961 he took office in the United States House of Representatives. One day in 1963, in the Capitol Building, Representative Nygaard felt a pain in his chest.
Threshing time in McIntosh County, 1926, and the thresherman Gottlieb Bendewald was in the field. A young bundle pitcher, a neighbor from just a mile away, sixteen years old — Christian Lux — hailed the thresherman to collect wages for work he had done, and things went badly from there. Witnesses disagreed what was said and done, and the parties disputed vehemently.
“When I went to Kent State in 1961,” recalls Shirley Fischer Arends, a great scholar of the history, language, and culture of the Germans from Russia, “I had no idea that I was part of any kind of a unique cultural people. I thought I was simply an American.”
The local press of Casselton reported in 1883 that a “broom brigade of ladies” assembled in town to march on the “residence of a grass widow with the expectation of finding their husbands.” They discovered, however, that their wayward mates were all occupied at a poker game in the saloon.
A dry, wry farmer was hired to look after exhibits at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. A central figure in the exhibits was a female form composed of grasses and grains, a picture of fertility. The farmer was attending to business when a smart aleck Hoosier from Indiana came up and said, “I say, pardner, this ’ere show is great. You must have a rich country for grains out there in Dakota; but I don’t see no exhibit from your divorce courts."
There are scores of local historical museums across North Dakota, nobody knows just how many — county museums, community museums, organizational museums, special-interest museums. Some people regard this as a problem, for how can they be maintained and their collections cared for?
The hospitality was great when I took a gang of students to Ashley last spring to pilot the first cloud-cataloging project in a local museum in North Dakota.
The last time we pulled into the Starlite in Fingal, we stumbled into a hotbed of community memory, as it was all-school reunion day. The Starlite still stands. Its rounded roof spans white stucco walls. Top front, above the entry, is the Starlite Garden sign, indescribably inviting. The building now opens for events and functions.
In 1918 a farm boy from McLean County, Clell Gannon, entered the Art Institute of Chicago, full of hope. Two or three years later, disillusioned and debilitated by diphtheria and influenza, he was back in Bismarck. In 1924 he published (with a pay-to-play publisher, Gotham Press of Boston) his book of poems, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. Wherein he declares,
This new work from North Dakota State University Press, Lynched — it’s not a feel-good book. “The fact that we were a nation where lynching was a common occurrence should never be forgotten or excused,” say the authors, Doreen Chaky and Adrienne Stepanek, of Williston.
The book is about justice, and it is justice. It has a long title: In Order that Justice May Be Done: The Legal Struggle of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa, 1795-1905. The editorial team who worked on it at North Dakota State University Press, among themselves, called it “the justice book.”
Coming home from the Midwestern History Conference, changing trains in Chicago, laying over a few hours at a fourth-floor table in the downtown Harold Washington Library, writing this essay. I am quite certain I am in the midwest. Dawn tomorrow morning I’ll ride the Empire Builder into the Red River Valley and alight in Fargo. At that point I will be equally certain I am in the Great Plains. If I were to ask the first citizen I met whether we were in the midwest, however, the person probably would say yes, and I would not say this is mistaken.
When in 1950 Dean Ernst Giesecke proposed an Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota Agricultural College, not many people had a clear idea what he was talking about. President Hultz went along, though, and on 8 March 1950, the state board concurred, establishing the institute as a program of the School of Applied Arts & Sciences.
In 1949 a new dean arrived to head up the School of Applied Arts & Sciences at North Dakota Agricultural College, one not from the customary midwestern lineage for NDAC appointments. The press said he was “a native Texan,” but his name didn’t sound like it: Gustav Ernst Giesecke.
I’ve been talking lately about rest rooms — no-no, not about the odd preoccupation we seem to have nowadays as to who might be using what facility, but rather about the reform movement, in the early 1900s, which aimed to provide comfortable lounges for farm women who came to town with their husbands, transacted their business, and then were left in the lurch by husbands not yet ready to go home, and had to sit waiting in a livery or some such place.
The phrase “rest room” meant something different a century ago than what it does today. It was a new phrase in the 1890s, which came into general usage a decade later, during what is known as the Progressive Era — a time of political and societal reform across the country, from Congress right down to the local community.
One day in 1905 a stranger named Harvey Severn showed up in the town of Litchville, asking where he might find a drink — the state had been dry, by constitutional provision, since 1889. Severn got more than he reckoned for: some toughs from the town waylaid him and beat the tar out of him. They suspected he was a spotter for the Law Enforcement League gathering information to give to legal authorities. Which he was.
Prohibition as a historical subject is easy to caricature: shifty bootleggers, dauntless G-men, assumptions of futility. We like the broad strokes of how prohibition, established constitutionally in 1889, went down here in North Dakota. We love to tell the romantic stories of rumrunners along the Canadian border and booze wagons crossing Red River. On the ground, though, the action was fraught with contradiction and complexity.
When club women across North Dakota learned by newspaper exchange that their peers across the country were seeding their public libraries by means of book showers — celebratory gatherings where citizens brought in donated books to stock the shelves — they quickly made book showers a recognized community development. This emergence, generated by second-generation club women, took place in the early years of the twentieth century.
By the action of a local donor, the town of Canton, South Dakota, had a new public library in 1913. They had the building, but unfortunately, no books. The night of its opening, however, they turned on the lights, and as reported in the local press, “the public came in throngs all bearing books,” books “of every description.”
Cain and Abel were only the beginning, it seems, from the point of view of the American plains. It was possible, as they sang in the old musical Oklahoma, for the farmer and the cowman to be friends. Up and down the Great Plains, however, the growing pains of the country included conflicts between agriculturalists and pastoralists, or between rival groups of stockmen.
In her charming book about McIntosh County, Along the Trail of Yesterday, right under Seth McNeal’s 1886 Independence Day ballad singing the praises of pioneers, appears a photograph of the stone monument to the same: a squarish obelisk alongside which stands a bullet-pocked tin sign saying, “Old Settlers Monument Original Site of Hoskins First Settlement McIntosh County Established 1884 / Monument Constructed Out of Local Rocks and Names Chiseled by Herb Larimer Ashley Pioneer.”
The ten speculators who laid out the anticipation town of Hoskins beside the lake in McIntosh County in the mid-1880s were aspiring capitalists; every action bespoke their acquisitive visions. Such restless souls always saw themselves as something more, something praiseworthy and eminently American, worth remembering when their physical works were gone. Perhaps to be celebrated in song and story, or songs that were stories.
Our notions as to how any particular tract of prairie came to be settled in the nineteenth century are important. We project our values onto the process. Some of us, farm folk perhaps, like to envision sturdy, wholesome plowmen who look like Charles Ingalls fanning out across the landscape to build little houses and raise little families on the prairie. Others of us, more industrialist by nature, point out that everything starts with the railroads, establishing a business ethos from the beginning.
The laundry business became competitive in Bismarck in 1877, when two Chinese businessmen, Sing Lee and Sam Lung, opened for business. Since the Northern Pacific Railroad had not yet crossed the Missouri River, the laundrymen came up from the Black Hills, where many of their nationality were serving the new goldfields.
A few years ago a popular author came out with a popular book titled, The Children’s Blizzard. Credit where due: he effectively captures the catastrophe and trauma that overwhelmed the people of the plains on 12 January 1888. They called it “the children’s blizzard” for the same reason that it seared a deep scar into historical memory — because of the many schoolchildren, from North Dakota down into Oklahoma, who were caught out in the storm, scores perishing, along with their teachers.
It seems I had to travel to Winnipeg to discover, in the inventory of a favorite bookstore, that there is a new biography of Larry McMurtry, our late great American novelist, written by a chap named Tracy Daugherty. This life is an absorbing read for me, but not always a comfortable one, as so much of the narrative knife cuts to the bone.
In March of 1916 the Valley City Record reported a battle having taken place in Hobart Township — but the paper called it a “sham battle.” A battle against whitetail jackrabbits, which had come to be regarded as an agricultural pest, particularly for their consumption of alfalfa. And the Great War was on, providing rhetorical inspiration for the event.
A couple of weeks ago I suggested that one way to approach our environmental history on the Great Plains is to look at our human relationship with another species. I suggested the whitetail jackrabbit as a case study.
Beginning here with a confession: I have never dined on whitetail jackrabbit. When I write about culinary topics, I generally do so from considerable personal experience, but here I am, reading an essay under the title, “Jackrabbit Pie,” and I may not know what I am talking about.
An item from the Fargo Forum of 27 November 1908: The jackrabbits turned white before the snow came--and made themselves targets for hunters.
Western cities on railroad lines emulated whatever was au courant in cities back east. So in 1876 the editor of the Bismarck Tribune inquired, “Why can’t the ladies of Bismarck organize a Leap Year ball? In style, you know: ladies come after the dear young fellows; escort them to the hall, fetch ices, etc.” In the east such balls were society affairs, with well-heeled ladies forming committees to see to the elegant details, then on the appointed night, showing up for their beaus with coaches.
The ringneck pheasant, like most of the people living on the plains, is a second-stage immigrant. Its successful introduction on the Great Plains is commonly dated from private efforts in Spink County, South Dakota in 1908-09. The state commenced releasing pairs in 1911, then went big in 1913, releasing 5,000 birds. Although Chinese in ancestry, they came from a game farm near Chicago.
If I were to tell this story in the style of its subject, I would start out something like this: “Twas in the spring of 2020.”
There's a Christmas ballad I like to sing this time of year that comes from the High Line country of Montana in 1929 — “A Christmas Pageant with a Practical Result,” it’s called, and it was written by a character named Henry Everett (he went by H. E.) Prall. I call him a “character” because I have discovered that prairie balladeers — the writers of storytelling poems and songs during the settlement era and for a generation after — were, well, characters. They were folk artists with a performative impulse.
When the songcatcher from Grand Forks, Franz Rickaby, died in California in 1925, he was much mourned, both for his scholarly work and for his charismatic persona. One obituary characterized him as “a young man of an unusually pleasing personality.” Of all the great songcatchers, I find Rickaby most appealing.
By all accounts, Franz Rickaby, the young instructor of English and theater at the University of North Dakota, was lovingly devoted to his wife, Lillian, and she to him. They were fully engaged together with the students in Grand Forks, teaching, directing plays, even leading singing of the university fight song, which Rickaby wrote.
Montana has a historical vocabulary all its own, devising its own labels for people and processes of frontier settlement. I have described before how the word “pioneer” had its own meaning in the Treasure State, referring not to a doughty homesteader, but rather to a miner or cattleman who came before and held homesteaders in contempt.
Although by the time of mass settlement on the Great Plains — certainly by the time of the Dakota Boom — commercial baking powders and yeast cakes largely had relegated the use of sourdough to rustic memory, still that sour staple retained a sweet significance in regional remembrance.
As the COVID curtain descended in 2020, there was a stirring of domestic impulses among folk isolating themselves at home. There was, for instance, an efflorescence of sourdough culture. People were establishing sourdough starters, nurturing them, trying to cook and bake with them.
Before I myself had seen the piece in print, I heard from readers who had their copies and, judging by their comments, actually had read my essay, “‘Happy as a Clam”: The Origins and Evolution of ‘Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,’ the Anthem of the Plains.” I know, long title, right? Something for which academics are notorious. And yet — readers.
As the long nineteenth century neared its close, the star of Uncle Ben Corbin — frontier hero and champion wolf-slayer of Emmons County — descended and then fell. He sensed this, but had no good answer. He tried going capitalist and growing up with the country. In March 1898 the rough-and-ready hunter advertised he was going into the land business: as a land locator, and as a dealer in investment lands.
By the time settlement came to the middle of Dakota Territory, the prototype of the frontier hero a la Davy Crockett — an amalgam of rough and ready experience, promotion, and self-promotion — was well established. It came into play with Bill Corbin of Emmons County.
Given the recent favorable action by the legislature, the state recreation area at Pembina Gorge soon will become Pembina Gorge State Park. This action is great news in the Rendezvous Region of northeastern North Dakota. Travelers attracted to the area by the vistas of the gorge will find much more to explore — as was evident by the events associated with the demisemiseptcentennial — you know, I’m just going to say “175th” — of Walhalla, the oldest town in the state.
Little towns need a claim to fame. Lehr, population about eighty, bills itself as the “Smallest City in USA Situated in Two Counties.” In 1948, when the population was more like five hundred, the town fathers worded the slogan a bit differently: “The smallest city in the United States incorporated in two counties.” Logan and McIntosh being the two counties.
Uncle Ben Corbin — who homesteaded on Beaver Creek in the 1880s, sold catfish to his neighbors in Emmons County, earned a reputation as a frontiersman who could live off the land, and gave that wonderful wedding dance for his daughter in 1894 — had another persona: the Wolf Slayer. The reputation goes back to his time in Iowa, where Corbin swore he could “catch more wolves in a month than any man living; but the money must be in sight first.”
One August afternoon in 1896, the editor of the Emmons County Record greeted a well-known visitor to his Linton office. The editor called him by one of his many nicknames, “Colonel Ben Corbin, the Wolf-Worryer from Wayback.” Colonel Corbin bore gifts — a “nice mess of catfish,” which he taught his host how to skin for the table.
In 1874 Walter A. Burleigh, a notorious grafter, was seeking to return to Congress as the delegate for Dakota Territory, which the Bismarck Tribune insisted would be a “calamity.” Lest anyone over east in the Red River Valley take his side, the Trib reminded people how Burleigh had pronounced their part of the territory “only fit for the production of mosquitoes and catfish.”
Might as well admit it, I’m a sucker for the Glorious 4th. My affinity for the national holiday probably goes back to family gatherings on the farm where food miraculously materialized around a bonfire and nobody ever successfully totaled up how many cousins there were sitting on the hayracks and throwing fireworks.
Cather, and her persona Jim Burden in My Antonia, were perhaps a bit too mystic about ground cherries, but it sort of makes sense. Cather in her Nebraska novels is a deeply Romantic author, with a certain twist: she embraces sensual experiences, often as triggers to mystic insights. So Jim lies down in the garden, picks and munches a few ground cherries, and proceeds to become one with nature.
I have the most lovely row of ground cherries growing in my prairie garden this summer. Ground cherries are a niche crop, much confused, even by nurseries. This year I observed flats of ground cherries in one greenhouse that bore, simultaneously, the labels “Ground Cherry,” “Tomatillo,” and “Tomato.” Lots of confusion there, although all three are members of the nightshade family.
When New England-born Ninette Maine Lowater moved to North Dakota in 1916, her journey was not joyous. As a teenager she had moved with her family from Connecticut to Wisconsin in 1859. After the Civil War she had married a returning soldier, Harrison Lowater. With him she raised three children and lived in comfortable, although not luxurious, circumstances. Mrs. Lowater became a poet of some note, publishing her work in both local and the national press.
Is there still musical performance in the legislature since Representative Carolyn Nelson retired? Is there a legislative choir? If not, then Senator Erbele, how about it? Somebody needs to make a place for harmony.
The legislature has gone home, prompting sighs of relief across the state, not least among the legislators themselves. Yes, I have been among those taking shots at them during the recent session, or rather, I would make the distinction, taking shots at some of their actions.
In a frame shanty on a homestead claim in Spink County, Dakota Territory, a Norwegian mother imprisoned by a blizzard gave vent to her hopelessness. “We are as if we were living on an island in the middle of an ocean,” she lamented, “with nobody to care if we blow away or if we freeze to death. There is not a person with whom we can talk and who understands our language.
Sometimes when you travel you plan your itinerary carefully, but you get lost anyway, and then it turns out what you stumbled into while lost is better than what you had planned. The same goes for doing archival research in prairie history.
Rummaging around in a manuscript collection of the Institute for Regional Studies at the NDSU Archives the other day, I was surprised by the contents of a folder of correspondence labeled “Jury Duty Requests, 1893-97.” This was in the papers of Sheriff Oscar G. Barnes, of Cass County.
It wasn’t what I was looking for, but that's how things go when you rummage around in archival collections. I came to the North Dakota State University Archives to search the Institute for Regional Studies collections for information about Lilac Days, that lovely college custom—of which I will write soon—that sought to promote the planting of a lilac hedge along the highway from Fargo all the way to Grand Forks. Indeed I did find the sheet music for the ritual song, “Lilac Days.”
"Come all you jolly fellows and listen to my tale / And I’ll tell you about the trouble which landed me in jail." So begins a remarkable and rare ballad of the northern plains — the confessional composition of one Archie L. Baker, a bootlegger languishing in jail in Fargo in 1929.
During the 1890s, the so-called Gay Nineties, two developments transformed popular culture and folklore across the country, including the Great Plains. The first of these was the proliferation of urban music halls, entertainment venues that were masculine, sometimes a little bawdy, and, surprisingly to us today, exceedingly sentimental.
In 1916 the Grand Forks Herald published the words — three 8-line stanzas and a chorus — to a popular song that was making the rounds. The chorus starts out in heartwarming fashion, but then it takes a deadly turn.
In Oslo last summer, we called in at the Gustav Vigeland Museum, adjacent to Frogner Park. In a cluttered corner of the museum I espied something that signified nothing to other visitors, but meant something to me. It was a plaster cast of Norway’s great Romantic poet, Henrik Wergeland. I recognized this as the original study for the bronze statue of Wergeland that stands in Island Park of Fargo.
I made a cold call to the Jamestown offices of the North Dakota Farmers Union in order to talk with Trevor Lewis, the Youth Education Specialist in charge of the Farmers Union summer camp program. I asked Trevor, are you familiar with the old song, “The Farmer Is the Man”? And bless his union heart, he was! I wanted to know whether the summer camp songbook still contained the stanzas of the song. Trevor got right back to me with a copy of the 2022 Farmers Union Camp Songbook.
Early morning a few days ago I ventured onto the icy section road to take Angie the History Dog for her morning constitutional and was delighted to feel a warm breeze supplanting the icy gales of the recent cold snap. Returning to my desk, I commenced checking weather reports for Dickinson, Billings, Belle Fourche, and such points west to confirm what I suspected: that at my home in Cass County, we were the beneficiary of a chinook. In the Red River Valley we seldom get a chinook wind with force, but we are grateful when a remnant arrives, spent but still warming.
The prairie ballad, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,” the anthem of the settler society on the Great Plains, may have originated in western Kansas in 1880—flowing from the pen of the homesteading printer, Frank E. Jerome—but it was a hardy traveler. During the early 1880s the song percolated in Dakota Territory, especially along the Jim River, living a quiet life of little public notice—only to emerge full-blown as a popular favorite in 1883.
There is something that has always bothered me about the first verse of the classic homesteading ballad, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.”
In December 1916 an old farmer from Cando, Kasper F. Ebner, made a startling declaration in the columns of the Nonpartisan Leader, newspaper of the Nonpartisan League: he claimed to be the author of the anthem of the plains, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.” “I claim authorship and copyright to this song and its title,” he wrote, “other claims of it to the contrary notwithstanding.”
The first public notice I have of Frank E. Jerome is a newspaper article from January, 1873. The writer posts the claim that Jerome is “the swiftest compositor in Kansas,” that he had set 2600 ems (a printer’s term, essentially pieces of type) in an hour. This is to say that Jerome was a printing professional who set type for a living. Such people were numerous on the newspaper-rich prairie frontier, and they were legend, for various reasons.
It was the very eve of the Dust Bowl era, the darkest time in the history of EuroAmerican settlement on the Great Plains, when the Greeley County News (that’s on the western tier of Kansas, smack on the Colorado line) chose to reprint the full text (eight stanzas plus chorus) of a ballad dating from the 1880s: “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.”
Political history is not my cup of tea, but I cannot help being impressed and fascinated by this new book from South Dakota State Historical Society Press: After Populism: The Agrarian Left on the Northern Plains, by William C. Pratt. I’ve known Bill Pratt, professor emeritus at University of Nebraska Omaha, for forty years. His new book is of a conventional genre for historians—collected essays of an old guy summing up a long career. This one far exceeds the usual expectations of a bucket of odd nuts and bolts from the shop.
Somewhere on the prairies, as described by the Wahpeton Times of 24 January 1889, a crowd of young folks sprang a surprise party on an old gentleman they called Uncle Peter. To the bemusement of Uncle Peter as well as Aunt Candace, they invested their home with all the things young people did on social occasions--popping corn, bobbing for apples; engaging in play-party games of the era like “Weevily Wheat” and “Sister Phoebe;” and, this being the Gilded Age, singing, of course.
Twas Christmas Eve upon the prairie / And we hovered round the fire / We could hear the coyote, wary / Seemed as if he’d never tire.
For the kind indulgences of the people of the northern plains, who not only tolerate my essays here on our public radio voice but even speak kindly to me about them, I feel like I owe a gift of the season, and here it is: a set of stanzas by our premier poet, once emergent and now rampant, Bonnie Larson Staiger.
If you’re lucky this Christmas, you may find a Russian nesting doll in your stocking. Its title will be Field Notes.
I’m in love with the idea of singing businessmen—guys like the Williston grocer, F. J. Davis, who, when he managed to stay on the right side of the law, sang the virtues of his fresh fruit and seafood across the counter; or the Great Falls haberdasher Mike Mullin, owner of the Mikehasit men’s clothing store, who wrote a great ballad advising his customers, while “Waiting for a Chinook,” to stock up on warm winter wear from his store.
If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, it’s likely we share certain values. One of these is that life is not a purely transactional matter. There are important things that are not reducible to calculation and exchange. On the other hand, you have to make a living. One of the delightful findings of my investigation of folksong on the Great Plains is that it is possible to combine commerce and art. I’m talking about the phenomenon, fairly common in the heyday of prairie balladry, of singing storekeepers. These guys gave their customers both bargains and ballads.
Awakening in winter dark, I felt a peculiar consciousness of a living, stirring thing in the house — something other than the usual snores of a Labrador retriever. I padded downstairs to the prairie kitchen, lifted the towel covering our big Medalta mixing bowl, and checked the progress of my vorteig — my pre-dough, the batter stage of a baking project I had left on the counter for first rise overnight. It was alive, and alluring — I bent over the bowl to take in the scent.
There were a lot of great ballads that originated in points south on the Great Plains and somehow made their way to North Dakota. Bismarck’s renaissance man, George Will, collected folksongs from his father’s seed company employees more than a century ago, and one of the first songs he reported was “The Texas Rangers.” The expansion of the range cattle industry was the context for the migration of many such ballads north.
Sooner or later, I suppose, someone is going to get wise to the hidden storyline of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and demand the ballad be outlawed from the public schools. Generations of children have sung the story of the hardy traveling woman, Betsy, crossing the plains to California. The continental journey is the first obvious theme of the ballad.
Sooner or later, I suppose, someone is going to get wise to the hidden storyline of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and demand the ballad be outlawed from the public schools. Generations of children have sung the story of the hardy traveling woman, Betsy, crossing the plains to California. The continental journey is the first obvious theme of the ballad.
In 1882 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its magnificent, now-iconic bridge across the Missouri River at Bismarck. Dedication ceremonies hailed this as a triumph of progress. Cattle hereafter would be shipped readily into the northern Dakota badlands, while settlers would take up land near the railway and commence field agriculture.
In 1882 the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its magnificent, now-iconic bridge across the Missouri River at Bismarck. Dedication ceremonies hailed this as a triumph of progress. Cattle hereafter would be shipped readily into the northern Dakota badlands, while settlers would take up land near the railway and commence field agriculture.
It’s a debatable proposition which is the great Western novel: The Virginian, by Owen Wister, or Shane, by Jack Schaefer. Both works deal with conflicts on the open range, specifically in Wyoming, and the heroes who resolved them.
It’s a debatable proposition which is the great Western novel: The Virginian, by Owen Wister, or Shane, by Jack Schaefer. Both works deal with conflicts on the open range, specifically in Wyoming, and the heroes who resolved them.
Driving out to St. Mary’s of Dazey for the fall supper, I kept thinking about a great old friend from north Barnes County: George Amann, a lifelong farmer and devout Catholic with a strong sense of his place on earth and under heaven. George told me stories about the Corpus Christi procession at St. Mary’s and about life on Bald Hill Creek.
The physical appearance of the photograph is itself a metaphor. The Farm Security Administration photographer John Vachon took it, having stopped along the road in Morton County, North Dakota, in February 1942.
In April 1874 the Bismarck Tribune saw fit to remind residents of the territory of the provisions of a certain law that had been passed by the territorial legislature in Yankton in 1871: the “Dakota Herd Law.” In order to avoid misunderstandings and disputes, people needed to know that the law had repealed the practice of open range in Dakota Territory.
One of the great promoters of western settlement in mid-nineteenth century was William Gilpin of Missouri — military officer, western explorer, first territorial governor of Colorado. In 1857 Gilpin was distressed about the still-prevailing notion that the country east of the Rockies was a Great American Desert.
We live in a time of hyper-sensitivity in matters of contagion. Dr. Kelley and I are members of a rather conservative—actually, really conservative—Lutheran parish where some members still exercise the option of the common cup. On the other hand, we recently took part in a communion service where we were issued little sealed plastic packages, one compartment of which contained just a splash of wine, the other a dime-size gluten-free wafer.
When I wrote some weeks ago about drummers--traveling sales representatives--in the prairie communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I was also reporting on the currency in those days of a folklore genre — the fraternal prayer, you might call it. By which I mean, a declarative sort of prayer, recited publicly, on behalf of some self-conscious group, often one that felt itself misunderstood, and thus called on the Almighty for understanding and relief.
There is a lot of texture to historical life on the prairies that gets glossed in historical memory. As my old friend John Helgeland used to say, doing History is mainly a matter of leaving things out. That is how a historian, academic or popular, tries to get at the essentials and make a manageable, useful story.
When I say that Dr. Kelley and I are flying to Norway, people around here make assumptions. So let me clarify that although I am a card-carrying member of Kringen Lodge of the Sons of Norway, I have no Norwegian ancestry; I’m in it for the pie.
A farm boy in Burleigh County known as “Happy Mac” was not happy in July 1936. He had been doing his part for the family during hard times, herding their beef and milk cows wherever they might find forage. It was sparse.
Without doubt the most famous song of the Dust Bowl is Woody Guthrie’s ballad, “Dust Bowl Disaster.” Writing from the vantage of Pampa, Texas, he sings, “On the 14th day of April in 1935 / There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.”
I just came in from an inspection tour of the Prairie Garden, and the news is bad. The juneberry crop is not worth harvesting this year. Maybe it was the hard winter, maybe the late freeze, maybe the spring flood, or maybe the siroccos of early summer, but we have so few berries I am just leaving them for the birds.
Now in the fields I’ve put the seed / And, Lord, I’ve done my best indeed / Look now with kindness, Father dear / To all the little kernels here!
Across the western United States (and even in New York), western riders take part in what is known as “cowboy church.” The cowboy church movement is commonly credited to Glenn Smith, an ex-rodeo clown who was inspired with the idea and made an enterprise of it. Worship from the saddle is not exactly my subject today, however.
Most of the EuroAmerican heroes of generations past on the Great Plains have feet — or at least toes, and some of them whole legs! — of clay. This is to say, if we look at them closely, and especially if we look at them with twenty-first century lenses, we see things that make us uncomfortable.
George Armstrong Custer is not a source I ordinarily would cite as to geographical terminology, but let me draw attention to a hopeful distinction he makes early in his memoir, My Life on the Plains. He remarks how schoolchildren were being taught to refer to the midsection of the country as “the Great American Desert.”
So maybe by now you know that I object to the lumping term, “the Dakotas,” in reference to the two sovereign states, North Dakota and South Dakota; likewise, that I regard the vernacular terms “West River” and “East River” as culturally interesting, but politically pernicious. In general, as a student of the Great Plains, I have come to believe that in our federal nation, the sovereign states are important and possess their own defining histories.
Certainly there are others who, like me, wince at usage of the lumping term, “the Dakotas,” in news reports and popular parlance — especially, I think, those emanating from Minnesota, where “the Dakotas” is shorthand for “beyond the horizon,” “way out there.” (Similarly, I grind my teeth when I hear disparaging, or perhaps just thoughtless, references to prairie populations as “the locals” — as in, those quaint folks living their little prairie lives and clueless about the wider world.)
If Teddy Blue Abbott, he of that classic memoir of the open range, We Pointed Them North, is to be believed, the song was a worn cliche among cowboys in Montana. They got sick of it; Abbott and others made up their own, new ballads to supplant it in their night-herding repertoires.
On May 17, 1910, the Grand Forks Herald took a forthright stance in defense of rhubarb. Its editorialist had tolerated recent Chicken-Little reports about the deleterious effects of the tail of Haley’s Comet, but when alleged scientific authorities commenced expounding on the dangers of rhubarb, he had enough.
It was December 1916, just about the end of a leap year, in the rural Cavalier County community of Mt. Carmel. A local wag decided to offer some free advice to single ladies of the community who might wish to exercise the waning prerogative of the leap year and latch onto a likely bachelor.
Where does a folksong come from? When I was a folkie, way back in the last century, we were pretty definite about being indefinite about that. A song like “The Cowboy’s Lament” or “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim” was a feral thing. Nobody owned it.
“Lord Byron No. 2” - yes, that’s the way he signed his work. An otherwise anonymous poet of the West River, writing for the Dickinson Press. His epic ballad was published on 13 March 1897. His subject: coyotes, or rather, the destruction thereof.
Anna Oien came over in 1907 from Norway to her uncle’s place at Halstad, and after celebrating her seventeenth birthday, promptly went out to work as a hired girl on the prosperous farm of another Norwegian immigrant. The scholar who interviewed her in 1954, Leonard Sackett (the interview transcript to be found in the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies), records that every night Anna took to her cot in an upstairs hallway and “cried in the dark for fatigue and homesickness.”
Early October of 1906, the sheriff of Emmons County came out to a threshing site near Milton and arrested William Smith, a member of the crew, resulting in thirty days in jail for Smith. According to press reports, Smith had “threatened a woman in charge of the cook car with death if she didn’t drink out of a cup he offered her.”
The primary narratives from the hired girls--women, really--who staffed the cook cars and fed the working men on the threshing crews of the Great Northwest are engaging, even charming, but a little unsettling. They offer upbeat local color, but I feel like they may not tell the whole story of their lives as working women deployed to dispense meals to rough men in open country.
When, a full generation ago, I published my book about harvesting and threshing in the days of steam, Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs, I devoted some pages to the work of women in feeding threshing crews. Now I review that work and realize how blinkered my view of the subject was.
As the English sparrow, a.k.a. the house sparrow, Passer domesticus, made its way from New York, where it was introduced in the 1850s, to Dakota Territory in the 1880s, prairie folk braced themselves for the invasion. The US Department of Agriculture, in a 405-page farmer’s bulletin of 1889, warned them of “the obnoxious character of the English sparrow.”
Just a few years ago—2018, by my notes—I was wondering what had happened to the English sparrows, a.k.a. house sparrows, that I had cussed for years as they cleaned out my bird feeders. A quick internet search disclosed that the sparrow disappearance was a global phenomenon, some sort of plague that had swept across Asia and Europe and North America. Not to worry, the sparrows are back now and as voracious as ever.
You may know by now that I am getting obsessive about my quest to discover and regenerate the ballads and balladry of the Great Plains. Many a dark morning I carry my coffee with me through digital portals into that world where the Canadian settlers of Emmons County are writing and singing their own homesteading ballad, or where picnicking Grangers are breaking into choruses of “The Farmer Is the Man.”
Angie the History Dog is driving me nuts in mid-winter. Out for a hike or a snowshoe, we cut a deer track, and she thrusts her chubby nose deep into a hoofprint, ruminating indefinitely until spoken to harshly--upon which she proceeds eighteen inches ahead and repeats the same ritual with the next print. In a frozen landscape, she is struggling for olfactory stimulation.
People sometimes ask me where I get all these stories about life on the prairies. My typical reply is, Why, there’s one up every section road. That’s actually understating things a bit. There are several good stories up any section road, and they intersect and entwine one another.
It’s not like I have any experience in the matter, but there are fellows who really need a smart woman around to let them know when they are behaving badly. A few weeks ago I was talking about a remarkable ballad that originated in Minot in 1908, “A Bachelor’s Lament.”
Chapter 4 of Molly Rozum’s masterwork of Great Plains history, Grasslands Grown, opens with Kjersti Raaen on a train. Kjersti was the sister of the well-known writer Aagot Raaen. They were daughters of Norwegian immigrant settlers in the Goose River valley of Dakota Territory. Had not Kjersti died young, I think she, too, might have been celebrated.
The first time Molly Rozum started telling me about the genesis of her book, Grasslands Grown, I said, "Molly, stop! You’re making me cry." She was talking about the importance, to boys and girls growing up on the prairie, of going barefoot. And many of you hearing this know exactly why that might move me to tears.
In 1997 an English scholar published a paper on the origins and use of the word, “blizzard,” and concluded, “The etymology of the word is still speculative.” Well, no, I don’t think it is. In a previous essay, I started up the road toward the origins and dissemination of the term. And I hinted it might have something to do with baseball.
Laundresses in Bismarck in December 1874 found themselves in a cost-price squeeze, as they were being charged fifty cents per barrel to have water hauled up from the Missouri River. As reported by the Tribune, "'Tempering the wind to the shorn lamb' was the way the Bismarck washerwomen put it when Missouri River water advanced to fifty cents a barrel, and the next day’s blizzard piled a big snow drift near her back door."
“The merry-makers then joined hands in a circle and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” Thus closed last week’s Plains Folk essay, which marveled at the depth of energy and the sense of community exhibited by New Year’s celebrants in Emmons County in 1885. By this time not only had the custom of singing “Auld Lang Syne” established itself on the prairies, but its manner of observance--holding hands at midnight in teary comradeship--was a commonality of such occasions.
New Year’s Eve, 1885, at the Williamsport Schoolhouse, Emmons County, the crowd was less than expected on account of rough weather, but all that was promised as far as community and conviviality. Thirty-some neighbors answered the call of Dan Williams for a night of festivity.
The Jamestown Alert of 7 December 1883 printed the bill of fare for the “dust cap social and oyster supper given by the ladies of the Methodist Church at the Dakota House dining room.” So now you’re thinking, What the heck is a dust cap social, or possibly, what the heck is a dust cap? That’s a subject for another day, because this week I’m returning to the topic of oysters as a treasured culinary custom in the folkways of the Great Plains, especially during winter holidays.
Press reports from Jamestown in November 1915 described a “stag party given at the farm home of Russell Wright” that featured fried oysters on the menu. “A number of masculine neighbors and friends made things very sociable during the afternoon,” we read. “Mrs. Wright was not present.”
Remember first, as you read Sarah Vogel’s remarkable book, The Farmer’s Lawyer, that it is a memoir. This is her story to tell, grounded by solid legal records and trial transcripts.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been engaged in a revival of balladry on the Great Plains. Returning to my roots as a folkie from way back in the twentieth century, I have been revisiting the histories of folksongs once considered of unknown origins, documenting them, and singing them as a contribution to our regional literature. It is amazing how, with the advantage of digitization of documents, especially newspapers, it is possible to track traditional ballads to their very origins.
The activity of the mind of George Will was matched by the activity of his legs. Son and heir of the seedsman Oscar Will of Bismarck, he put his Harvard education to work on everything around him, from horticulture to folksong to archaeology. And he was a boots-on-the-ground sort of guy.
“The village of Mountain in Pembina County is the center of a sizable Icelandic community,” writes Father Bill Sherman in his classic study, Prairie Mosaic. The settlement in North Dakota spun off from the colony of Gimli, in Manitoba, and comprised not only Mountain but also Hallson and Gardar. Mountain, however, was a cultural center.
She was reluctant at first--to go live, reading her own writing to strangers, at a public celebration--but when the time came, Rose Sell, the country correspondent from Guelph, North Dakota, nailed her part.
In March of 1901, the country correspondent at Bloomenfield informed the readers of the Jamestown Weekly Alert about the recent local movements of the horse trader, Herman Cook, from Windsor. “Think the charming young lady at Mr. K’s has something to do with it,” was the report. “How is it, Herman?”
“We want country correspondents and are offering good inducements,” announced the Wahpeton Times in July of 1913. “Write us about it.”
If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, then you know that I am on the hunt for the folksongs of the Great Plains, which produced an amazing efflorescence of balladry in the generations of the original Euro-American settlers and their children.
It all started with a letter of lament written by a woman who signed herself, “A Marriageable Girl,” published in the Minot newspaper, the Ward County Independent, on 9 January 1908. Well, actually, this grievance had been simmering for a while among the young women of the Magic City.
A week or so ago Dr. K and I were part of a group assembled to sit at the feet of three literary masters—Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, and Louise Erdrich—as they talked among themselves about the sense of place. This was in the Fargo studios of Prairie Public.
The past few weeks I’ve been trying to explain how we on the Great Plains are so fortunate to have a prodigious crop of ballads and folksongs dating from the settlement generation and its children.
Now and then in the middle of a Plains Folk essay you may hear me erupt into song, sometimes mournful, sometimes exuberant, because singing is a significant part of my life. I am, as I sometimes remark, an unreconstructed folkie from the 1970s, and there was a time when I made rent with a Martin dreadnought. Thank God I don’t have to do that now. Because the music business is full of, well, real musicians.