Not a native of the Flickertail State, nevertheless, in the course of decades, I have acquired a complex of defensive sensitivities about it. Phrases like “Flyover Country” and “Buffalo Commons” stir the little hairs on the back of my neck. I like to think this is because they are examples of sloppy thinking, and not because I am touchy, but self-delusion is a known part of the complex I am describing.
Some of these sensitivities manifest themselves in my life as a writer and editor—such as use of the phrase, “the locals,” as in, I arrived in Wishek, and found the locals sitting around the McTwist drinking milkshakes. As in, they are furniture or, at best, rustics providing local color. Wherever I am making stylistic decisions, the people are not locals, they are citizens.
Then there is that lumping phrase, “the Dakotas,” as if to say, the authorities got it wrong in 1889, it’s really not two sovereign states, it’s just a lumpy space on the map. Well, states matter. Our country is a federal democratic republic with fifty capitals, distinct sovereignties, and within them, distinct histories. Perhaps even cultures. And, given my area code, I’m willing to argue that historically, North Dakota is way more interesting than South Dakota. Let me count the ways.
First: the phenomenon of bonanza farming, the creation of James B. Power, land commissioner for the Northern Pacific Railway. I’ve spent considerable time poring over his letterpress books held by the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU. He was a complex figure who midwifed corporate agriculture on the prairies, suffered a sort of personal breakdown, and returned as a lifelong advocate of diversified family farming. Ever since, both land use and discourse about agriculture in North Dakota have hinged on these initial conditions.
Second: the fur-trade and Métis elements in our history. My research in the papers of territorial governors housed at the South Dakota State Archives shows the presence of Métis people in the northern part of the territory was a divisive political issue. Probably we should thank them more often for their formative influence in the creation of our state.
Third: the Dakota War of the 1860s, which was not, however you may hear the story out of Minnesota, merely the long tail of their conflict. The war in the northern part of Dakota Territory generated the largest armies and largest military engagements ever to take place on the Great Plains of North America. They were larger than anything in Montana, and indeed, what happened in Montana in the 1870s is not comprehensible without knowledge of what happened in Dakota in the 1860s.
Fourth: the Nonpartisan League, the outstanding example of state socialism in American history, with fascinating origins and consequences I cannot begin to detail here.
And fifth: the potent emergence of energy development in North Dakota, which is relatively minimal in South Dakota. I’m talking both about Iverson No. 1 in 1951 and everything downstream from that but also the lignite-mining and cooperative-power-generation emergence that commenced in the next decade. I recall vividly my conversations with Bill Guy about the assertive decisions which made that latter thing happen.
I could go on, but I am stopped not only by the limitations of time but also that bogus Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” Interesting histories can be hard to live through, or with.
