Tom Isern

An item from the Fargo Forum of 27 November 1908: The jackrabbits turned white before the snow came--and made themselves targets for hunters.

Western cities on railroad lines emulated whatever was au courant in cities back east. So in 1876 the editor of the Bismarck Tribune inquired, “Why can’t the ladies of Bismarck organize a Leap Year ball? In style, you know: ladies come after the dear young fellows; escort them to the hall, fetch ices, etc.” In the east such balls were society affairs, with well-heeled ladies forming committees to see to the elegant details, then on the appointed night, showing up for their beaus with coaches.

The ringneck pheasant, like most of the people living on the plains, is a second-stage immigrant. Its successful introduction on the Great Plains is commonly dated from private efforts in Spink County, South Dakota in 1908-09. The state commenced releasing pairs in 1911, then went big in 1913, releasing 5,000 birds. Although Chinese in ancestry, they came from a game farm near Chicago.

If I were to tell this story in the style of its subject, I would start out something like this: “Twas in the spring of 2020.”

There's a Christmas ballad I like to sing this time of year that comes from the High Line country of Montana in 1929 — “A Christmas Pageant with a Practical Result,” it’s called, and it was written by a character named Henry Everett (he went by H. E.) Prall. I call him a “character” because I have discovered that prairie balladeers — the writers of storytelling poems and songs during the settlement era and for a generation after — were, well, characters. They were folk artists with a performative impulse.

When the songcatcher from Grand Forks, Franz Rickaby, died in California in 1925, he was much mourned, both for his scholarly work and for his charismatic persona. One obituary characterized him as “a young man of an unusually pleasing personality.” Of all the great songcatchers, I find Rickaby most appealing.

By all accounts, Franz Rickaby, the young instructor of English and theater at the University of North Dakota, was lovingly devoted to his wife, Lillian, and she to him. They were fully engaged together with the students in Grand Forks, teaching, directing plays, even leading singing of the university fight song, which Rickaby wrote.

Montana has a historical vocabulary all its own, devising its own labels for people and processes of frontier settlement. I have described before how the word “pioneer” had its own meaning in the Treasure State, referring not to a doughty homesteader, but rather to a miner or cattleman who came before and held homesteaders in contempt.

In 1878 Samuel W. Williston, a veteran of dinosaur-fossil hunting expeditions on the plains, was a would-be scientist between jobs. He wrote an article for a popular magazine, The American Naturalist, entitled, “The Prairie Dog, Owl and Rattlesnake.” He begins, “Very singular and amusing stories have been, and still are, accepted by many of the amicable relationship between the prairie dog, burrowing owl and rattlesnake.”

Mock weddings — folk dramas featuring gender-bending, cross-dressing, and general hilarity — became fixtures at bridal showers on the prairies in early twentieth century. By the 1950s, the girls who had staged these parodies of married life had become, we hope, mature women enjoying late middle age with their partners. The mock wedding then was reinvented as a fixture in wedding anniversary celebrations staged for popular couples, particularly in small towns, where people were accustomed to homegrown entertainment.