Plains Folk

“This is a great land--one filled with resources not yet exploited and opportunities still ungrasped. Its prosperity is dependent on agriculture--upon the soil.” So speaks Professor Alfred G. Arvold, of North Dakota Agricultural College, in a talk probably delivered in about 1915. This country “is certainly a Land Where the Farmer is King. East of the Montana copper mines and west of the Minnesota iron ranges is the agricultural Mecca of the continent,” declares Professor Arvold, thus situating his own Flickertail State in the middle of things.

You can talk about your daffodils and your cherry blossoms, but this is the springtime emergence that counts: rhubarb. As the bulbs grow rank into stalks and leaves, there are two things I crave. I’ll tell you about one of them now, and the other in the end.

This essay originated during the Good Friday Blizzard of 2018 on the northern plains, when the only person who still liked snow was my Labrador retriever. She has a coat like a bear, about two inches of body fat, and a serious case of cabin fever. (And yes, I realize I just referred to my dog as a “person,” what of it?)

The story of Wilhelmina Geiszler is a legend long told by the people of North Dakota, and I have been one of the tellers--here in this radio space.

When I was going to college, we had things figured out in Great Plains history. We knew that the climate (as opposed to weather, which was changeable) was constant. It set the baseline for history and life.

Tom Isern shares a Plains Folk essay, “Gregarious Geeese.” 

The great Alfred G. Arvold, founder of the Little Country Theater at North Dakota Agricultural College, was a heckuva storyteller. His classic work on his life’s work, The Little Country Theater, published in 1923, begins with a scene, a scene that is about a scene.

In the changing seasons of the prairies, there are certain developments that capture our attention for their continentality. They are sprawling events that progress up the latitudinal length of the Great Plains.

In past weeks we’ve already driven through two Dakota War battlefields at 75 mph--Big Mound, which took place north of Tappen, and Dead Buffalo Lake, which happened near Dawson. These battles of 1863 all took place in the central reaches of the Missouri Coteau and within spitting distance of the future route of Interstate 94. The region’s lakes, or maybe you call them sloughs, figure in the military actions associated with what is commonly known as the Sibley Expedition of 1863.

Nobody wants to drive I94 across central North Dakota with me anymore. Every transit calls to my mind the engagements of the Dakota War in 1863, and I can’t help myself, I have to tell whoever is with me about the historic sites we are passing through.