Tom Isern

The year 1889 is so full of meaning in the history of the Great Plains. To Samuel Western (that’s his real name, seriously), it connotes the writing of constitutions, five of them, all in the Great Northwest — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — as authorized by Congress in the Omnibus Bill of 1889. He writes about them in his new book from University Press of Kansas, The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies.

This sort of notice appeared ritually in the newspapers of the settler society on the northern plains sometime in April — I quote from the Griggs County Courier Democrat, 29 April 1909: "The pasque flower or prairie crocus, the first flower of spring, is showing its head above ground."

There was a certain irony in the determination of immigration authorities and aroused citizens of the early twentieth century to turn back immigrants at Ellis Island on account of the eye disease, trachoma. It was true that many Germans from Russia and others arrived with telltale granules of the disease under their eyelids. But it was also true that trachoma was already established extensively in the United States. It could not be kept out. There is no reason to think trachoma had not been present here since the early days of the republic — at least ever since Napoleon’s woebegone soldiers, shielding their diseased eyes from the sun, returned from the Nile in 1801.

Trachoma, the contagious eye infection, was a serious complication for Germans attempting to immigrate here from Russia. I’ve already talked about the cases of Magdalena Klipfel of Ashley and Benedict Fried of Richardton in the early 1900s. Germans from Russia were not the only ones affected by public fears of trachoma among immigrants.

Trachoma, an infectious eye disease now handled readily with antibiotics, was considered a menace, the major cause of blindness, early in the twentieth century. It came to public attention in 1897 when Dr. Porter S. Wyman, surgeon general of the US Marines, issued a report calling trachoma a “dangerous contagious disease,” after which inspectors at US ports of entry commenced watch for it. Inspections of all immigrants--lifting of eyelids, looking for the telltale follicles underneath--were standard by 1905.

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.