Tom Isern

The common bullhead catfish on the northern plains is the black bullhead. The state record for North Dakota is 4 pounds, 9 ounces, taken from Devils Lake by a lad from Fort Totten. I’ve never seen a bullhead even half that size.

There is an outpouring this summer of events, as well as books from North Dakota State University Press, pertaining to the Germans from Russia, the state’s largest ethnic culture.

There are hundreds of commercial saskatoon plantations in the prairie provinces of Canada; here we have few, although the Nowatzki pick-your-own operation near Langdon has been going for a couple of decades. Perhaps this is a neglected commercial opportunity, but I am personally sort of happy that juneberries in North Dakota remain largely in the realm of folklife. People have their favorite picking places and guard their secrets.

In late June 1898, a North Dakota boy—I suspect he was a serviceman en route to the Philippines—got homesick and wrote home to his mother in Jamestown. The question on his mind?: “Are there lots of juneberries at home? I would rather fall into a patch of juneberries, chokecherries, or bullberries than to have all the tame fruit in California.”

I’m on my way to St. Paul for the annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society (yes, there really is such a thing, comprising an impressive community of scholars), where I’m supposed to present a paper entitled, “A Hidden Hand: The Significance of Climate Change in Great Plains History.”

We’re just home from a Lawrence Welk weekend, and by that I mean, total immersion in all things Welk. Three things came together.

Reading the documents on the rise of Syttende Mai celebrations in North Dakota in 1906, I was more than a little alarmed at the themes and tropes that emerged. In matters of ethnic identity, I am prepared to accept a certain measure of cultural chauvinism, but the remarks of future senator Asle Jorgenson Gronne in Grand Forks went way beyond that. They stereotyped immigrant cultures (including his own!), they invoked white supremacy, and they posed a fossilized model for immigration: We’re here, we got ours, now close the door, we’re done!

During the early heyday of Norwegian immigration to the northern plains, during the First Dakota Boom of the 1880s, nobody celebrated Syttende Mai. Occasionally a newspaper, doing its best to make a cultural translation, would note on 17 September the occurrence of what it called “Norwegian Independence Day.”

Was there ever a town whose name better expressed the buoyant optimism of the prairie frontier than Westhope, near the Canadian line, in Bottineau? Local chroniclers have credited the name to a phrase, “Hope of the West,” emanating from the railroad men who founded the town in 1903, but I want to believe the sentiment was honest. Westhope.

Things were pretty raw out on Duck Creek, northeast of Hettinger in Adams County, in 1907, but the Milwaukee Railroad had arrived. Soon, over in Lemmon, on the South Dakota line, there was a flourishing newspaper, the State-line Herald. By which we know that “the boys” on Duck Creek, as the editor said, were singing some stanzas about their life as homesteaders.