Tom Isern

A dry, wry farmer was hired to look after exhibits at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. A central figure in the exhibits was a female form composed of grasses and grains, a picture of fertility. The farmer was attending to business when a smart aleck Hoosier from Indiana came up and said, “I say, pardner, this ’ere show is great. You must have a rich country for grains out there in Dakota; but I don’t see no exhibit from your divorce courts."

There are scores of local historical museums across North Dakota, nobody knows just how many — county museums, community museums, organizational museums, special-interest museums. Some people regard this as a problem, for how can they be maintained and their collections cared for?

The hospitality was great when I took a gang of students to Ashley last spring to pilot the first cloud-cataloging project in a local museum in North Dakota.

The last time we pulled into the Starlite in Fingal, we stumbled into a hotbed of community memory, as it was all-school reunion day. The Starlite still stands. Its rounded roof spans white stucco walls. Top front, above the entry, is the Starlite Garden sign, indescribably inviting. The building now opens for events and functions.

In 1918 a farm boy from McLean County, Clell Gannon, entered the Art Institute of Chicago, full of hope. Two or three years later, disillusioned and debilitated by diphtheria and influenza, he was back in Bismarck. In 1924 he published (with a pay-to-play publisher, Gotham Press of Boston) his book of poems, Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres. Wherein he declares,

This new work from North Dakota State University Press, Lynched — it’s not a feel-good book. “The fact that we were a nation where lynching was a common occurrence should never be forgotten or excused,” say the authors, Doreen Chaky and Adrienne Stepanek, of Williston.

The book is about justice, and it is justice. It has a long title: In Order that Justice May Be Done: The Legal Struggle of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa, 1795-1905. The editorial team who worked on it at North Dakota State University Press, among themselves, called it “the justice book.”

Coming home from the Midwestern History Conference, changing trains in Chicago, laying over a few hours at a fourth-floor table in the downtown Harold Washington Library, writing this essay. I am quite certain I am in the midwest. Dawn tomorrow morning I’ll ride the Empire Builder into the Red River Valley and alight in Fargo. At that point I will be equally certain I am in the Great Plains. If I were to ask the first citizen I met whether we were in the midwest, however, the person probably would say yes, and I would not say this is mistaken.

When in 1950 Dean Ernst Giesecke proposed an Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota Agricultural College, not many people had a clear idea what he was talking about. President Hultz went along, though, and on 8 March 1950, the state board concurred, establishing the institute as a program of the School of Applied Arts & Sciences.

In 1949 a new dean arrived to head up the School of Applied Arts & Sciences at North Dakota Agricultural College, one not from the customary midwestern lineage for NDAC appointments. The press said he was “a native Texan,” but his name didn’t sound like it: Gustav Ernst Giesecke.