Tom Isern

In her 1941 book on the early history of McIntosh County, Along the Trails of Yesterday, Nina Farley Wishek writes of her life with the Germans from Russia among whom she lived. One chapter is entitled “German Maids Whom I Have Known,” for as the wife of the town’s leading business figure, Mrs. Wishek employed domestic help. Like other upper-class women across the prairies, she recruited her help from among the immigrant farmers’ daughters.

Most of us have a hard time admitting that the days of our youth are now history, and I’ll admit a certain ambivalence on the question myself, but History is my job, and so I have to face up to the task of chronicling and interpreting the experience of what I have named, borrowing a label from Larry McMurtry, the Last Picture Show Generation on the Great Plains of North America.

Coming in from the icy parking lot, you don't really find your footing until the scent fills your nostrils. The place is the foyer of St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church, on the south side of Piesk. The scent is kraut, pungent and welcoming.

Comes now the time of year when North Dakotans of a certain age will tell you stories about the Blizzard of 1966. Which I myself, being not averse to storytelling, might do on a given day, but today I’m going to talk about the significance of this particular tale. It’s a Lutheran question: What does this mean?

If in your historical memory, the open range of the northern badlands is fully stocked with lanky longhorns, then it’s time for a reset. With the opening of the Northern Pacific railroad bridge at Bismarck in 1882, Shorthorn cattle, purchased in the northern midwest, flowed in freely.

In writing and conversation, nineteenth century Americans commonly would drop phrases, deriving from popular songs of the day, and expect people, of course, to understand the connotation. On the prairies, for instance, any old place of residence might be referred to, with nostalgic affection, as the “little old sod shanty on the claim.”

After you pass that biblical milestone of three-score and ten, if you’re determined to remain active, then you have to take stock, make sure you’re on course and on pace. By which I don’t mean, chasing after every shiny new thing.

On 17 July 1939 Alan Lomax, of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, wrote to Myra E. Hull, the mild-mannered ballad collector from Kansas, “My dear Miss Hull: I just received the issue of the publications of the Kansas Historical Society and read your article on cowboy songs with great interest. It is a real contribution to original studies in the field.”

Let me tell you about a visit I made to the Library of Congress the first week of January. Specifically, to the library’s American Folklife Center. I was following the trail of a prairie balladeer named Myra Hull.

The Friday evening of the 24th of April, 2020, you remember that spring when we descended into the COVID time of troubles, enabled by Dr. Kelly, I lit up a live streaming camera and commenced chatting and singing my way through the first episode of the Willow Creek Folk School. This wild hair grew from my checkered history as a folky in the 1970s and was, in retrospect, a response to the looming isolation of the pandemic.