When I came to North Dakota, from another prairie state, in 1992, many things seemed familiar, others not so much. For one thing, as the owner of an enthusiastic Labrador retriever, I found local habits of waterfowl hunting perplexing. I remember heading out for opening day at a nearby waterfowl production area, setting decoys, and rather quickly taking a limit of teal, the usual thing for opening day here, as it turns out.

In late nineteenth century, rabies scares animated communities all over the northern plains. Most were brief, and published reports lacked analytic detail. Certain episodes, however, attracted attention and produced documentation that gives us some insight into prairie community dynamics.

At the community level on the prairies, people of the late nineteenth century took threats of hydrophobia, or rabies, seriously. Authorities and editors knew news when they heard it, but did not want to incite reactionary panic, the phobia of the phobia.

In May 1886 a physician in Watertown, Dakota Territory, was bitten by what press reports said was a “mad dog.” The doctor immediately booked steamship passage, “gone to Paris,” the papers said, “to consult Pasteur.” Just the year previous, 1885, Louis Pasteur had announced discovery of his somewhat tortuous vaccination procedure for rabies.

There is a word out of fashion in this era of specialization, referring to a notable type of individual, the “polymath.” A polymath is a person of multifarious talents and expertise who walks in several intellectual or artistic worlds and blends them with imaginative results.

It was Father Bill Sherman who brought the authorial papers of Z’dena Trinka into the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies, and thus available to researchers at NDSU Archives. Using Father Bill’s book, Prairie Mosaic, too, we can situate this Bohemian-American author into her circumstances on the northern plains.

Come September, there will be champagne times. For now, we have first chapters.

You can see it taking shape in pages of cursive in the letterpress copybooks of J. B. Power, Land Commissioner of the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Following the financial panic of 1873, he had to find some way to revive interest in land investment; he had all those land-grant sections on his hands, and no one was buying. The success of some modest homesteaders raising wheat, and the existence of a lot of discontented bondholders of the railway, gave Power an idea: let the holders redeem their bonds with railroad lands, jump-start big-time wheat farming on them, and initiate farming on a grand scale, bonanza farming, in the Red River Valley of the North.

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.

The common bullhead catfish on the northern plains is the black bullhead. The state record for North Dakota is 4 pounds, 9 ounces, taken from Devils Lake by a lad from Fort Totten. I’ve never seen a bullhead even half that size.