Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years the Grafton Farmers Market and the McIntosh County Heritage Center have initiated folk festivals focusing on these black pearls; I’m on my way soon to speak at the 2nd Annual Chokecherry Festival in Ashley. Even though my personal crop, generally so dependable, is meager in this parched summer.

There’s a sense across the country that we have made a dog’s breakfast of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American independence. I don’t wish to sugar-coat past developments, but I remember 1976 pretty well—perhaps because although my education at a certain land grant university had taught me a thoughtful appreciation for sour mash whiskey, my head was happily not muddled by more destructive indulgences.

Not a native of the Flickertail State, nevertheless, in the course of decades, I have acquired a complex of defensive sensitivities about it. Phrases like “Flyover Country” and “Buffalo Commons” stir the little hairs on the back of my neck. I like to think this is because they are examples of sloppy thinking, and not because I am touchy, but self-delusion is a known part of the complex I am describing.

In my mail appears a thoughtful gift, a book, inscribed to me by one of the authors: The Missouri: America’s Longest River, edited by Jon K. Lauck and published by the Center for Western Studies, Augustana University. The chapters are various, from native forests to Indian-White conflict to big dams and their consequences, so let me focus on some pieces, then try to say something about the whole. If that’s possible, because the more you read, the more you become conscious of our failure to comprehend, historically, the Missouri River as a whole.

It says something about me as a historian that I am preoccupied with the origins of things. I mean, I seldom just launch into an abstract investigation into something in the past from which I am disconnected. I begin with a thing here and now, and then get curious about the question, Where did this come from? How did this thing come to be?

A half-century ago—actually, a little more than that—I charted my course as a professional historian by choosing to specialize in Western Americana. Keep in mind, I was studying at a western land grant university that had not completely shed its skin as a cow college. When my peers and I were asked what field we were working in, we would say, “Cowboys and Indians.”

I know I used to have one, but it’s disappeared, along with the cause it celebrated—one of those old black-mesh American Agriculture ball caps. I thought about it this week as I was working up, for a historical journal, a little piece about the American Agriculture Movement and its Washington tractorcade of 1979. It always makes me feel a little queer when someone calls on me to treat events that I remember personally as history. Oh well, I did it.

In sublime overview of the valley of the Little Missouri River, in the Badlands of North Dakota, stands a simple but elegant residence from the 1880s known as the Chateau de Morès. As a historian, I have a little bit of a problem with anachronism here. You see, I can uncover no evidence that people in the territory ever called this place the Chateau des Morès. There was no Chateau de Morès, but there was a Chapeau de Morès. Which is to say, the hat of the Marquis de Morès.

A powerful new biography of Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, here generally known as the Marquis de Morès, has consequence on both sides of the Atlantic—in France, and in Dakota Territory.

James W. Foley Jr., who on his passing in 1939 was eulogized as “North Dakota’s unofficial poet laureate,” has always intrigued me. Not because of sublimity as a poet, although sometimes he surprises you with poems like “The Passing of the Prairie” or “The Garden of Yesterday.” More often he lapses into faux-vernacular rhetoric that doesn’t age well. Sometimes he descends to cynicism. Overall his contemporary, Clell Gannon, is a better poetic exponent of the children of the pioneers on the northern plains.