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.”
Two things about this profession by a Flickertail far from home. First, the lad was declaring himself a son of the frontier, where things are wild, and expressing disdain for the refined “tame fruit” in California’s manicured orchards. Second, he spoke for the emerging settler consensus on the northern plains that wild fruit, especially juneberries, was a good thing—good for culinary use, yes, but more grandly, emblematic of a tie to the land and an emergent community thereon.
We realize there was a possessive impulse in play here. Embracing native fruits intellectually was part of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, who consumed them, made pemmican with them, used their stems for arrow shafts, and in the case of Dakota and Lakota peoples, named a calendar moon for the wipazuka.
And it took a little while for settlers to take to the wipazuka, which they called juneberry. Whereas settler newspapers of the late nineteenth century are full of notes about juneberry picking, the first such mention I have located is from Emmons County on the first of July 1887, when the country correspondent at Armstrong observed, “A great many are availing themselves of the opportunity now afforded to gather the luscious juneberries along the creek.”
Now, the nomenclature. Outside of the northern plains, what we call the juneberry is known as the American serviceberry. Moreover, in the Canadian provinces, it is proudly referred to as the saskatoon. Neither of these names ever was current in North Dakota’s settler society. Here, we have juneberries.
Which seems a bit odd, as juneberries hardly ever fruited in June, a point I will examine later. Ordinarily they were expected to be ready for picking in mid-July; the instance of 1 July cited from Armstrong was rare indeed. Before composing this essay, I went out with our beagle dog to inspect the patch of juneberries on our property, and it looks to me like they might be ready by the 4th of July, a date noted as remarkable in settlement days.
Juneberries did, however, flower spectacularly in June, and so although I know of no one else who has so asserted, I think it possible they were named for their month of efflorescence, a noticeable and welcome development. See, for instance, this fond note from Williams County on 8 June 1899: “The coulies are all white with juneberry, plum, and cherry blossoms.”
Ripening juneberries drew covetous crowds from the prairie towns. Writes the Hope Pioneer in mid-July 1890, “Large crowds of people, some country folk and some hopeites, gather daily along the banks of the roaring Sheyenne, to pick the prolific June-berry, which is more plentiful this season than usual.”
From Glencoe, Emmons County, mid-July 1898: “The whole country is up in arms over the Juneberry crop, and almost every man, woman and child is in the timber gathering the big crop.” Then this mention from Burleigh County in 1899: “Juneberries are ripe and young folks are busy picking them.” Is it my imagination that this report conveys a sense of young love?
