Tom Isern

It was a lovely spring morning when we arrived early for Sunday services at Bethany Church, in Tanunda, South Australia, in the heart of the Barossa region. I inquired after the congregational president, who was up in the loft, preparing to ring the bells.

In a meeting on campus a few days ago, along with many of the best and brightest at NDSU, interviewing a candidate for a high position in the university, I asked the question often on my mind these days as a senior dude at our land grant university, the people’s college, as we used to say. Is higher education, college learning, I asked, fundamentally transactional, a matter of contracts and credentials, or is it relational, a matter of mentorships and relationships? I’ll tell you later how that came out.

I cannot recall a conversation with Brother Placid Gross that was not a delight. He is, foremost, a man of faith who made his final profession under the rules of St. Benedict in 1967. Ever since, as a monk in Richardton Abbey, he has been known as Brother Placid. He was born and baptized, however, in 1935 as Aloysius Gross, one of the sixteen children of John and Magdalena Gross of Emmons County.

We will arrive in the Barossa at peak jacaranda. Reviewing the sentence I just spoke, I realize I am speaking gibberish as far as my neighbors in Dakota territory are concerned. So I’ll explain.

People in Larimore a century ago recognized their veterinarian, Dr. Hermann M. Eisenlohr, by his black derby hat as he came up the street. Figuratively, too, he wore many hats, and was a truly colorful local character.

The waterfowl hunters of Dakota Territory were mainly townsmen, who ventured into the countryside and returned with ducks and geese to distribute among neighbors. These middling folk shared the venatic landscape with a more effete and elite class of hunters who traveled in style.

The first newspaper notice of the City of Saginaw, the railway hunting coach of outdoorsman and author William B. Mershon, is in the Fargo Argus of 6 September 1883. Described as “plainly but elegantly fitted up,” the Saginaw carried nineteen hunters, their dogs, and equipment. “Dogs and guns were to be seen everywhere,” writes the reporter. “The coach seemed a hunter’s perfect paradise.”

As the folk culture of duck hunting burgeoned in late nineteenth century, hunting accidents proliferated. Many shotguns still had hammers, which were sources of accidental mischief. Also, ammunition became less expensive in the late 1870s as manufacturers replaced brass with paper for shotshell casings.

When I came to North Dakota, from another prairie state, in 1992, many things seemed familiar, others not so much. For one thing, as the owner of an enthusiastic Labrador retriever, I found local habits of waterfowl hunting perplexing. I remember heading out for opening day at a nearby waterfowl production area, setting decoys, and rather quickly taking a limit of teal, the usual thing for opening day here, as it turns out.

In late nineteenth century, rabies scares animated communities all over the northern plains. Most were brief, and published reports lacked analytic detail. Certain episodes, however, attracted attention and produced documentation that gives us some insight into prairie community dynamics.