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.
This is manuscript collection number 309, about 3½ shelf feet of records, much of which consists of artifacts utterly foreign in form to readers of the twenty-first century. I’m talking about letterpress copybooks, a technology for the preservation of pen-and-ink letters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Letterpress copybooks are a wonder to behold and to hold, a portal to a world where handwritten correspondence—which we think quaint and charming, useful for sentimental personal notes, that sort of thing—where handwritten correspondence directed the affairs of armies, nations, and corporations.
It has been my pleasure and consternation as a historian to work through many of these letterpress copybooks, which are defined thus by the Society of American Archivists:
... bound volume[s] of tissue paper containing reproductions, primarily of correspondence, made directly from the originals using a transfer process involving moisture and pressure in a copy press.
That’s rather terse, and so I turn to the work of communications historian JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, Johns Hopkins University Press. Yates explains that letterpress copybooks became fixtures in managerial offices by mid-nineteenth century. Military commanders of a certain rank used them during the Civil War; I have pored over them in the records of the Department of the Upper Missouri during the Dakota War of the 1860s, in the National Archives. Railroads, because of the complexity of their operations and their need for coordination, also eagerly deployed this communication technology.
With a letter press, which was a screw press, the sheets of tissue paper were smashed down on the wet-ink original letter to make copies. Copies thus would be read through the paper, hence the need for thin tissue.
This brings us back to J. B. Power, the father of bonanza farming in the Red River Valley of the North. We know the details of how he brought about bonanza farming through his letterpress copybooks. Which we have by virtue of the founding of the Institute for Regional Studies by Dean Hans Giesecke in 1950 and the assertive acquisition work by Prof. Leonard Sackett in 1955.
Encountered on a reading-room table, these papers seem impossible to use. They are not. Stop by some time, I’ll show you how it’s done! But as we labor to decipher details on the pages, we ought not to forget what they represent.
Dirt farmers in those days, the 1870s, were literate letter-writers, but they did not have letterpress copybooks. Corporate managers like Power, Land Commissioner for the Northern Pacific Railway Company, did. These copybooks represent the imposition of corporate agriculture on the prairies. Power, truth be told, had mixed feelings about what he wought upon the land. This, too, is worth talking about.
