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On January 6, 1805, the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition trapped a fox that was apparently hanging around Fort Mandan. Russell Reid, in his book Lewis and Clark in North Dakota (1988) speculated it could have been a swift fox. Most North Dakotans are familiar with the red fox. But the swift fox, also known as kit fox or prairie fox? Not so much, if at all.

For the kind indulgences of the people of the northern plains, who not only tolerate my essays here on our public radio voice but even speak kindly to me about them, I feel like I owe a gift of the season, and here it is: a set of stanzas by our premier poet, once emergent and now rampant, Bonnie Larson Staiger.

If you’re lucky this Christmas, you may find a Russian nesting doll in your stocking. Its title will be Field Notes.

I’m in love with the idea of singing businessmen—guys like the Williston grocer, F. J. Davis, who, when he managed to stay on the right side of the law, sang the virtues of his fresh fruit and seafood across the counter; or the Great Falls haberdasher Mike Mullin, owner of the Mikehasit men’s clothing store, who wrote a great ballad advising his customers, while “Waiting for a Chinook,” to stock up on warm winter wear from his store.

If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, it’s likely we share certain values. One of these is that life is not a purely transactional matter. There are important things that are not reducible to calculation and exchange. On the other hand, you have to make a living. One of the delightful findings of my investigation of folksong on the Great Plains is that it is possible to combine commerce and art. I’m talking about the phenomenon, fairly common in the heyday of prairie balladry, of singing storekeepers. These guys gave their customers both bargains and ballads.

Awakening in winter dark, I felt a peculiar consciousness of a living, stirring thing in the house — something other than the usual snores of a Labrador retriever. I padded downstairs to the prairie kitchen, lifted the towel covering our big Medalta mixing bowl, and checked the progress of my vorteig — my pre-dough, the batter stage of a baking project I had left on the counter for first rise overnight. It was alive, and alluring — I bent over the bowl to take in the scent.

Have the boxelder bugs been bothering you this fall? They have been inspecting lots of homes in search of a nice warm place to spend the winter.

Early morning a few days ago I ventured onto the icy section road to take Angie the History Dog for her morning constitutional and was delighted to feel a warm breeze supplanting the icy gales of the recent cold snap. Returning to my desk, I commenced checking weather reports for Dickinson, Billings, Belle Fourche, and such points west to confirm what I suspected: that at my home in Cass County, we were the beneficiary of a chinook. In the Red River Valley we seldom get a chinook wind with force, but we are grateful when a remnant arrives, spent but still warming.

The prairie ballad, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,” the anthem of the settler society on the Great Plains, may have originated in western Kansas in 1880—flowing from the pen of the homesteading printer, Frank E. Jerome—but it was a hardy traveler. During the early 1880s the song percolated in Dakota Territory, especially along the Jim River, living a quiet life of little public notice—only to emerge full-blown as a popular favorite in 1883.

There is something that has always bothered me about the first verse of the classic homesteading ballad, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.”