Plains Folk

One day in 1905 a stranger named Harvey Severn showed up in the town of Litchville, asking where he might find a drink — the state had been dry, by constitutional provision, since 1889. Severn got more than he reckoned for: some toughs from the town waylaid him and beat the tar out of him. They suspected he was a spotter for the Law Enforcement League gathering information to give to legal authorities. Which he was.

Prohibition as a historical subject is easy to caricature: shifty bootleggers, dauntless G-men, assumptions of futility. We like the broad strokes of how prohibition, established constitutionally in 1889, went down here in North Dakota. We love to tell the romantic stories of rumrunners along the Canadian border and booze wagons crossing Red River. On the ground, though, the action was fraught with contradiction and complexity.

When club women across North Dakota learned by newspaper exchange that their peers across the country were seeding their public libraries by means of book showers — celebratory gatherings where citizens brought in donated books to stock the shelves — they quickly made book showers a recognized community development. This emergence, generated by second-generation club women, took place in the early years of the twentieth century.

By the action of a local donor, the town of Canton, South Dakota, had a new public library in 1913. They had the building, but unfortunately, no books. The night of its opening, however, they turned on the lights, and as reported in the local press, “the public came in throngs all bearing books,” books “of every description.”

Cain and Abel were only the beginning, it seems, from the point of view of the American plains. It was possible, as they sang in the old musical Oklahoma, for the farmer and the cowman to be friends. Up and down the Great Plains, however, the growing pains of the country included conflicts between agriculturalists and pastoralists, or between rival groups of stockmen.

In her charming book about McIntosh County, Along the Trail of Yesterday, right under Seth McNeal’s 1886 Independence Day ballad singing the praises of pioneers, appears a photograph of the stone monument to the same: a squarish obelisk alongside which stands a bullet-pocked tin sign saying, “Old Settlers Monument Original Site of Hoskins First Settlement McIntosh County Established 1884 / Monument Constructed Out of Local Rocks and Names Chiseled by Herb Larimer Ashley Pioneer.”

The ten speculators who laid out the anticipation town of Hoskins beside the lake in McIntosh County in the mid-1880s were aspiring capitalists; every action bespoke their acquisitive visions. Such restless souls always saw themselves as something more, something praiseworthy and eminently American, worth remembering when their physical works were gone. Perhaps to be celebrated in song and story, or songs that were stories.

The laundry business became competitive in Bismarck in 1877, when two Chinese businessmen, Sing Lee and Sam Lung, opened for business. Since the Northern Pacific Railroad had not yet crossed the Missouri River, the laundrymen came up from the Black Hills, where many of their nationality were serving the new goldfields.

A few years ago a popular author came out with a popular book titled, The Children’s Blizzard. Credit where due: he effectively captures the catastrophe and trauma that overwhelmed the people of the plains on 12 January 1888. They called it “the children’s blizzard” for the same reason that it seared a deep scar into historical memory — because of the many schoolchildren, from North Dakota down into Oklahoma, who were caught out in the storm, scores perishing, along with their teachers.

It seems I had to travel to Winnipeg to discover, in the inventory of a favorite bookstore, that there is a new biography of Larry McMurtry, our late great American novelist, written by a chap named Tracy Daugherty. This life is an absorbing read for me, but not always a comfortable one, as so much of the narrative knife cuts to the bone.

In March of 1916 the Valley City Record reported a battle having taken place in Hobart Township — but the paper called it a “sham battle.” A battle against whitetail jackrabbits, which had come to be regarded as an agricultural pest, particularly for their consumption of alfalfa. And the Great War was on, providing rhetorical inspiration for the event.

A couple of weeks ago I suggested that one way to approach our environmental history on the Great Plains is to look at our human relationship with another species. I suggested the whitetail jackrabbit as a case study.

Beginning here with a confession: I have never dined on whitetail jackrabbit. When I write about culinary topics, I generally do so from considerable personal experience, but here I am, reading an essay under the title, “Jackrabbit Pie,” and I may not know what I am talking about.

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.