Tom Isern

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.

One evening in 1910, during an apparently genteel bridal shower in Grand Forks, a rambunctious event precipitated: a mock wedding. Friends of the bride appeared dressed as if for a wedding ceremony. “Miss Vernie Ryan took the part of the blushing bride,” according to the society report of the day, “appropriately attired in wedding robe and bridal veil.” Next to her stood the groom, in “the proverbial conventional black” — Miss Sadie Gravelle.

The relationship between George F. Will, Bismarck’s renaissance man and the son of the seed man Oscar H. Will, and Otis A. Tye, the rough and ready frontiersman who worked a few years for the seed company, was strong. George had his degree from Harvard, he was the heir to his father’s business, and he had a restless mind, always occupied with scholarly interests. Otis was the restless type too, having led the life of a bullwhacker to the Black Hills, a trapper on the tributaries of the Missouri River, and a cowboy on the Montana range.

Early twentieth-century North Dakota boasted a renaissance man named George F. Will — the son of the seedsman Oscar H. Will who got his degree from Harvard, came back to Bismarck to run his father’s business, but had a lot of other interests. He was an anthropologist, an archeologist, a horticulturalist, a historian, a hiker, a traveler, a dendrochronologist, and also — although not much remembered for it — a songcatcher. He collected cowboy songs and other frontier ballads.

Neither the most dedicated Nimrod nor the most enthusiastic retriever ought to get too nostalgic for the glory days of the Hungarian partridge in North Dakota. In the early 1960's. Hunters were begging near a half million a year, but rarely did they go looking for them. Hungarian partridge were picked up in the course of a hunt for pheasant or grouse.

A week or so ago a friend of mine from Aberdeen asked that if, in the course of my fall ramblings, I should happen to bring a Hungarian partridge to bag, I would send him the skin with feathers. It turns out the soft feathers of partridge are coveted by trout fishermen for tying flies. This inquiry, along with the surprise flush by my retrieving dog of a covey of partridge near my house, moved me to investigate the origins of this upland game bird in North Dakota, as begun in my last essay.

The buzz of rising Hungarian partridge was a pleasant surprise as I walked with my Labrador retriever yesterday. It was a lovely covey, ten birds. Game and fish people say the numbers of Hungarian, or European gray, partridge are on the rise just now, but they have been in decline for decades, so even a full day in the field is unlikely to result in a sighting. The decline is largely the result of changing agricultural practices.

To answer the question as to the social place of African-American barbers — such as Julius Whales, the subject of my last essay — in Dakota is a complicated matter. The relationship dynamics of a tiny black minority with an overwhelmingly white majority were full of nuance, whereas the historical sources are thin. In 1898 there arose in Edgeley, North Dakota, a case showing how inscrutable those sources can be, even when they are extensive.

Brief press reports went out from Mandan in February 1890 recounting an act of violence, saying, “A negro barber named Julius Whales stabbed another negro barber named Henry Wagner, in fifteen places with a jackknife. Wagner is in a precarious condition.” Oddly, that is the extent of reports. We read nothing as to the recovery of Mr. Wagner nor as to the legal fate of Mr. Whales. Evidently the matter was just left to rest.

Although by the time of mass settlement on the Great Plains — certainly by the time of the Dakota Boom — commercial baking powders and yeast cakes largely had relegated the use of sourdough to rustic memory, still that sour staple retained a sweet significance in regional remembrance.