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The physical appearance of the photograph is itself a metaphor. The Farm Security Administration photographer John Vachon took it, having stopped along the road in Morton County, North Dakota, in February 1942.

In 1962, the North Dakota State Highway Department, as it was known then, installed a radio site west of Merricourt, North Dakota. Merricourt is south of Jamestown, about 20 miles from the South Dakota border. The town’s peak population hit 153 in the 1940s. Now, it’s mostly gone, but not forgotten.

In 1905 on this date, Orville Wright piloted the first flight longer than a half hour. It lasted 33 minutes, 17 seconds and covered 21 miles. Five years later, Frank Kent, the Grand Forks postmaster, became the first airplane passenger in North Dakota when Archie Hoxsey, a member of the Wright brothers’ Flying Circus, made an appearance at the Grand Forks fairgrounds and took Kent up for a nine-minute flight.

Tuesday, October 4, 2022 - While The Windmill Watched: A Slice of Rural America in the 1950s is a memoir from sisters Jackie Pfeiffer McGregor and Janine Pfeiffer Knop about growing up in Menoken, ND. It’s now being made into a movie from Bismarck’s Daniel Bielinski of Canticle Productions. ~~~ Chuck Lura shares a Natural North Dakota essay on the fall bird migration. ~~~ The annual LGBTQ+ Summit will be held in Mandan this month. Here to discuss why such a gathering is helpful are two of the organizers, Mattie Bogard and Cindy Roholt.

No doubt many of you are familiar with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Published in 1962 the book warned that continued widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides could result in extensive ecological damage, including the death of songbirds, resulting in a “silent spring” when no songbirds would be heard. It is hard to imagine such a thing. But it looks as if we may be experiencing quieter springs.

Driving out to St. Mary’s of Dazey for the fall supper, I kept thinking about a great old friend from north Barnes County: George Amann, a lifelong farmer and devout Catholic with a strong sense of his place on earth and under heaven. George told me stories about the Corpus Christi procession at St. Mary’s and about life on Bald Hill Creek.

In 1899, revised laws in North Dakota stated that no two townships could have the same name. However, most townships didn’t act on the change. Pembina’s Pioneer Express opined, it was a law “in existence, but … in innocuous desuetude”—which was a fancy way of saying a harmless state of disuse.

The Genie in the Bottle

A creepy one!

Thursday, September 15, 2022 - A recent report from the C.D.C. says the life expectancy nationally for Native Americans dropped by nearly 7 years from 2019 to 2021. While Covid was largely to blame, other factors are present. Here to discuss the problem and how North Dakota’s indigenous community is faring is Dr. Donald Warne of the Department of Indigenous Health at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences at UND. ~~~ Historian Tom Isern has this week’s Plains Folk essay, “The Dakota Herd Law.” ~~~ Sue Balcom is discussing ways to preserve your harvest as she joins us for Main Street Eats.