There is a word out of fashion in this era of specialization, referring to a notable type of individual, the “polymath.” A polymath is a person of multifarious talents and expertise who walks in several intellectual or artistic worlds and blends them with imaginative results.

It was Father Bill Sherman who brought the authorial papers of Z’dena Trinka into the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies, and thus available to researchers at NDSU Archives. Using Father Bill’s book, Prairie Mosaic, too, we can situate this Bohemian-American author into her circumstances on the northern plains.

Come September, there will be champagne times. For now, we have first chapters.

You can see it taking shape in pages of cursive in the letterpress copybooks of J. B. Power, Land Commissioner of the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Following the financial panic of 1873, he had to find some way to revive interest in land investment; he had all those land-grant sections on his hands, and no one was buying. The success of some modest homesteaders raising wheat, and the existence of a lot of discontented bondholders of the railway, gave Power an idea: let the holders redeem their bonds with railroad lands, jump-start big-time wheat farming on them, and initiate farming on a grand scale, bonanza farming, in the Red River Valley of the North.

In the early days of the Institute for Regional Studies, at NDSU (established 1950, the country’s oldest academic studies center for the history of the Great Plains), there were certain faculty members of the AC who demonstrated a truly entrepreneurial spirit, doing wonders with really no appropriated budget. Chief among these was an English prof named Leonard Sackett, a legendary collector of manuscripts. I’ll write more about him another day, but now let me dive into the boxes of what he considered his greatest acquisition: the papers of J. B. Power, acquired from heirs in 1955.

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.”