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Episodes of Plains Folk
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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 Unive
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
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 boa
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 s
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 lou
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 societ
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
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
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 she
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 p
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 g
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 alongsi
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 someth
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 Ch
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 B
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 “th
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 re
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, particular
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
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 th
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 commenc
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
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