James W. Foley Jr., who on his passing in 1939 was eulogized as “North Dakota’s unofficial poet laureate,” has always intrigued me. Not because of sublimity as a poet, although sometimes he surprises you with poems like “The Passing of the Prairie” or “The Garden of Yesterday.” More often he lapses into faux-vernacular rhetoric that doesn’t age well. Sometimes he descends to cynicism. Overall his contemporary, Clell Gannon, is a better poetic exponent of the children of the pioneers on the northern plains.
The more I learn, however, the more I am inclined to cut Mr. Foley some slack. I got interested in his father, James W. Foley Sr., on account of his relationship with the Marquis de Morès. James Sr. was a Civil War veteran (Company K 97th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry) who remained in service and was posted to Fort Abraham Lincoln, post returns listing him there 1878-83. After which he and his family, including his wife Rachel and a houseful of kids, took residence in Bismarck.
James Sr. we find listed there as a “traveling agent” and then as an “agent of the N.P.R. Car Co.” Subsequently he got into handling refrigerator cars, which seems to have generated his relationship with Morès, who famously attempted to slaughter and ship beef from the West. When the Marquis left Dakota, he left Foley in charge of substantial interests there.
I cannot quite parse the Foley family relationships at this time. James Jr. was the bright kid of the bunch, graduating Bismarck High School at age fourteen in 1888. I think he was attached to his mother, but his father was still in his life and was known and liked in both Bismarck and Medora. When Rachel died in 1891, James Jr. shifted into the father’s Medora orbit. There he learned business from James Sr., taught school, and took to writing, for publication—features, essays, poetry.
In 1892 James Jr. hired on at the Bismarck Tribune to edit the city page and write features. In 1894 he assumed the general editorship. He went on to write many books of poetry, become an important political operative in the capital, grow disillusioned with the passing of the frontier and the general situation in North Dakota, and relocate as a writer to California. Just days after his death there in 1939, the press reported his wife Edith “fell or leapt to her death” from a sixth-floor window of the Pasadena Athletic Club. Edith, in fact, was James Jr.’s second wife. He had married young and lost his first love, Emma, to a drowning accident at Duluth in 1898. Overall, I see a tragic trajectory in his life, one loss after another, and on reflection, I think it was grief that animated his best poetry.
All of which made it the more exciting to discover a couple of lost poems of the man generated from his formative years as a writer, with his father in Medora, and published in the Dickinson Press in 1892. One is a comic piece, but a pretty good one, in which he recounts falling asleep stretched out on a church pew and then overhearing the conversation of a bevy of young ladies making fun of another’s flowery hat. The other raises a large theme for the emerging poet, the passing of the frontier. He describes,
A plainsman, old and grim,
Whose eyes are growing dim.
For the sickle of the reaper nearly ripe.
Yet he sits within his door,
And he spits upon the floor,
To the singing of a corn-cob pipe.
The description enlarges, deepens, and I’m starting to like this guy—both of them, really, the plainsman and the emergent poet I may have underrated.
