North Dakota has its own version of the “The Grapes of Wrath.” Similar to John Steinbeck’s Great Depression story is “The Bones of Plenty” by Lois Phillips Hudson. She writes about the fictional George and Rachel Custer and their family’s wheat farm near Jamestown during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.
The story unfolds over fifteen months, throughout drought, fire, disease, death and taxes.
George Custer is a hotheaded farmer who reads the Jamestown Sun backwards and forwards and criticizes the federal government, the local sheriff, his landlord, neighbors and members of his own family for their opinions and shortcomings. His wife, Rachel, is a former schoolteacher who thinks of the past and worries about her runaway, alcoholic brother. The Custers have two children, Lucy and Cathy, and live near Rachel’s parents, who are moderately successful after prosperous early years in farming the land near fictional Eureka, North Dakota.
Around this date in 1933 of the story, George Custer visits his landlord in Jamestown to negotiate his lease. He wanted to put in more hay, but his landlord told him to plant a hundred and sixty acres of wheat, to which Custer begrudgingly agreed before he left. Author Lois Phillips Hudson described the moment like this: “He was very hot. His hands were slippery on the varnished arms of his chair. His hands were hungry, pleading to wrap themselves around a neck.”
Hudson’s story also describes the bone-chilling cold of winter, the black dust storms of the drought, and the misery of Depression-era farm life – from nearly losing a horse in a poorly-buried water well to a hay fire destroying a barn. And there are anecdotes ripped from the headlines, such as the politics of Governor Bill Langer. She even references the “twenty-story white tower” of the new state Capitol building.
It isn’t a happy story, and it’s one the author knew well, as Lois Phillips Hudson grew up on a farm near Cleveland, North Dakota. The farm ran to ruin in the Depression before her became migrant workers, moving west to the state of Washington.
In 1965, Hudson joined band leader Lawrence Welk in receiving an honorary degree from North Dakota State University. She died at age 83 in 2010.
Dakota Datebook by Jack Dura
Sources:
Hudson, L.P. (1962). The bones of plenty. Minnesota Historical Society Press: St. Paul, MN
https://www.ndsu.edu/commencement/honorary/
http://www.readnd.org/hudson-lois-phillips.html
https://english.washington.edu/news/2013/12/13/memoriam-lois-phillips-hudson
