Search results for

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.”

In December 1916 an old farmer from Cando, Kasper F. Ebner, made a startling declaration in the columns of the Nonpartisan Leader, newspaper of the Nonpartisan League: he claimed to be the author of the anthem of the plains, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.” “I claim authorship and copyright to this song and its title,” he wrote, “other claims of it to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The first public notice I have of Frank E. Jerome is a newspaper article from January, 1873. The writer posts the claim that Jerome is “the swiftest compositor in Kansas,” that he had set 2600 ems (a printer’s term, essentially pieces of type) in an hour. This is to say that Jerome was a printing professional who set type for a living. Such people were numerous on the newspaper-rich prairie frontier, and they were legend, for various reasons.

It was the very eve of the Dust Bowl era, the darkest time in the history of EuroAmerican settlement on the Great Plains, when the Greeley County News (that’s on the western tier of Kansas, smack on the Colorado line) chose to reprint the full text (eight stanzas plus chorus) of a ballad dating from the 1880s: “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim.”

Political history is not my cup of tea, but I cannot help being impressed and fascinated by this new book from South Dakota State Historical Society Press: After Populism: The Agrarian Left on the Northern Plains, by William C. Pratt. I’ve known Bill Pratt, professor emeritus at University of Nebraska Omaha, for forty years. His new book is of a conventional genre for historians—collected essays of an old guy summing up a long career. This one far exceeds the usual expectations of a bucket of odd nuts and bolts from the shop.

Somewhere on the prairies, as described by the Wahpeton Times of 24 January 1889, a crowd of young folks sprang a surprise party on an old gentleman they called Uncle Peter. To the bemusement of Uncle Peter as well as Aunt Candace, they invested their home with all the things young people did on social occasions--popping corn, bobbing for apples; engaging in play-party games of the era like “Weevily Wheat” and “Sister Phoebe;” and, this being the Gilded Age, singing, of course.