North Dakota Congressman, Hjalmar Nygaard, he knew his way around legislative corridors. A teacher and a businessman, his fellow citizens of Steele County had elected him to multiple terms in the state legislature, and then in 1961 he took office in the United States House of Representatives. One day in 1963, in the Capitol Building, Representative Nygaard felt a pain in his chest.
He walked himself to the office of the Physician of Congress and died of a heart attack right there. His family afterward thought, what should we do with these 17 boxes of political papers? Fortunately, although the congressman had been a UND grad, they remembered that in 1950, North Dakota Agricultural College had established an office, the Institute for Regional Studies, to collect the historical resources of the Northern Plains. Thus, the papers ended up at the Institute in Fargo, where they remain for the use of scholars.
Earlier this year, I talked about the founding of the Institute, the first academic center for the study of the Great Plains ever established, by Dean Hans Giesecke of the College of Applied Arts and Sciences. Giesecke was familiar with the rise of regional studies on the Southern Plains of Texas and Oklahoma. He also, on arrival at NDAC in 1950, realized that his college was in the dumps, and he thought the focused study of life on the plains of North Dakota might inspire them.
Which it did, but there was a question just what it might inspire them to do. The mission mandated by the State Board was rather open-ended. Looking over newspaper reports, the records of the Institute and its publications, I see how the program of activity, in turn, shaped habits of thought that gave the Institute character.
Two things are evident. First, the deeper understanding of a region like the Great Plains would require work by multiple academic disciplines, centered in the arts and sciences, but extending across the university. Second, the work, indeed, the character of the Institute would come to resemble the land and people of the plains.
It would reflect what I call the Dakota mystique, the sense that the beauty and austerity of the land, the rich mix of cultures, and their common causes and interests would mingle to constitute a landed people. That there would be a sense of place to be documented and expressed with and for the people. Collection of papers and records was one avenue.
Right away in 1952, Erling Rolfsrud, who once was a janitor at NDAC, but went on to become an immensely popular teacher and writer, best known, I think, for his juvenile novels, including Gopher Tales for Papa, deposited his early literary manuscripts in the collections of the Institute. Art, and specifically folk art, was a focused interest. In 1955, the organized traveling exhibit of rural arts, figurines, saddles, baskets, ceramics, textiles, you name it.
That opened at the NDAC library and then traveled to Bismarck and Minot. This was truly an ambitious project. Publications, more than any other enterprise, gave voice to the Dakota mystique, including its ambivalence.
In his poetry chapbook of 1962, The Loving Hawk, John R. Milton writes of the fall of man. Heaven splits the earth and sky. Horizons dimly then delineate an aching world.
Identity of rim and edge, a teasing substance, nothing more. Well, maybe I can sort this out next week.
