Chapter 4 of Molly Rozum’s masterwork of Great Plains history, Grasslands Grown, opens with Kjersti Raaen on a train. Kjersti was the sister of the well-known writer Aagot Raaen. They were daughters of Norwegian immigrant settlers in the Goose River valley of Dakota Territory. Had not Kjersti died young, I think she, too, might have been celebrated.
A teenager, she travels for the first time far from home, by train to Helena, Montana, thus spanning the northern plains, in 1895. “The next day,” she says, “I was so dizzy and my head ached so that I wished I had stayed home.”
Possibly motion sickness, or just fatigue--or possibly too much to think about all at once. The section lines and the villages clicked by. “There are small towns all along the railroad, and the train stopped at every one,” she writes. “They are so much alike that I could not tell one from the other.”
As Kjersti processed what she had seen, she, her feet still calloused from going barefoot on the soils of Traill County, realized that her girlhood experiences were not merely local. They were rather, parcel to a larger, regional experience. This, Molly says, “spoke to the end of childhood small-world local life.” She calls it an “adventure beyond locality.”
If you heard or read last week's Plains Folk essay, then you already know what I think about Molly’s book, Grasslands Grown. The work is, in the first place, essential to understanding the mentalité of folk who were boys and girls on the prairie, formed from the earth of sensuous experience.
The book elevates, however, to consider another question, to which the story of Kjersti Raaen makes metaphorical answer: how did the formative, personal, local experiences result in a higher sense of place, a regional consciousness of being, you might say, plains folk. How did we acquire, Molly asks, a “common intellectual foundation”?
In a nutshell, it happened like this: boys and girls formed by personal experience in “particular locations” went out into the world, often seeking advanced education. Then they found out there were others like them, from different localities, but of similar character. They networked. Many of them advanced to influential positions in powerful institutions.
And when they told their stories--whether biographical, botanical, agricultural, or historical--they were no longer merely local. “This generation of settler society created patterns of writing, language, and thought,” Molly says. They “created modern regional cultures and senses of place from personal experiences.”
That goes for the Raaen sisters, for Walter Prescott Webb, for Willa Cather, for John Ise, for Edward Everett Dale, for Wally Stegner, for Louise Pound--all the great voices of the Great Plains experience. People like Molly Rozum, Jim Hoy, and I, modest but unabashed, assume the mantle.
I find myself listed in the credits of Grasslands Grown among “supportive mentors and friends,” right after the great prairie scholar, John Herd Thompson. This is sweet company. I think John is up there saying now, with me, Molly, you are the teacher now.
You and I, dear woman, by virtue of our lives and letters, our institutional situations and gaudy titles, are the academically designated hitters for sustaining the Regional Project in our respective states and common region. Let us labor with courage.
