Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years the Grafton Farmers Market and the McIntosh County Heritage Center have initiated folk festivals focusing on these black pearls; I’m on my way soon to speak at the 2nd Annual Chokecherry Festival in Ashley. Even though my personal crop, generally so dependable, is meager in this parched summer.
There are chokecherry festivals with longer lineage. The earliest I know of is that of Lancer, Saskatchewan, in its fifty-fourth year in 2026. Here in North Dakota we have the Williston Chokecherry Festival, which celebrated its twentieth this summer.
We applaud this native fruit despite having many other options today in the fruity food group. It was not so for the settlement generation, which discovered, as with so many other things in life, their pie options petered out, and they had to make do. Their beloved horticultural assets lacked the DNA for prairie life; they were not cold-hardy or drought-hardy enough.
They had rhubarb, which thrives in our latitude and isn’t too insistent in its thirst; it holds today a loyal public. I lost track of how many printings the ladies of Litchville have made of their classic cookbook, Ritzy Rhubarb Secrets. The German-Russians brought with them the citron, or pie melon, and made use of it, but most plains folk ultimately concluded pie melons were better as livestock feed than as human fare.
Regional scientists picked up on the desire of new settlers for fruit options. Most notable among them was the Danish-born Niels Ebbesen Hansen, at the South Dakota Experiment Station. He saw potential in the sandcherry bush, which I rather like, but it won no lasting place in the hearts or diets of settlers; probably because it languishes in heavy soils.
Hansen’s far greater contribution was the introduction from Siberia of the Dolgo crabapple. I planted a Dolgo in 1992, and today it is majestic. We welcome its snowy blossoms every spring, and the Dolgo is, I think, the best crabapple for jelly. You can mix Dolgo juice with chokecherry to make a delicate jelly that jells without adding pectin. Moreover, there is Dolgo DNA in most all the ornamental crabs beautifying our streetscapes.
Settlers took a cue from Indigenous folk in the 1880s and embraced the juneberry. Indeed, it was the fruit around which coalesced a community culture of berry-picking in the 1880s. Reported the Hope Pioneer in 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.”
This is interesting, as berry-picking expeditions, involving caravans of wagons conveying townsfolk to known juneberry hotspots in the countryside, were commonly mixed-gender activities, and young folk embraced them (and possibly one another). As a press report from Burleigh County noticed in 1899, “Juneberries are ripe and young folks are busy picking them.”
This gives us insight as to why a North Dakota soldier boy in California in June 1898 would write his mother, “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.”
By this time chokecherries were right up there juneberries in the esteem of the rising generation of plains folk. I’m going to follow up on that.
