Plains Folk

In his nifty new history of the Homestead Act, Richard Edwards says the “three perils” of homesteading on the Great Plains were grasshoppers, prairie fires, and childbirth — and good on him for recognizing the third of these as the most perilous of all. Earlier historians of homesteading were so focused on masculine aspects of their subject, they neglected the obvious.

If we’re going to live in this level land we call the Great Plains — and I expect to do so until I die — then there are some fundamentals we need to come to terms with. Like the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln on 20 May 1862. Unless we are Indigenous, we should think about what it means to be the heirs of a landed, settler society. Fortunately, we have Richard Edwards and his book, Great Plains Homesteaders, to help us out.

I’ve been arguing, along with Richard Edwards and his new book, Great Plains Homesteaders, that we should rethink our history with the Homestead Act on the Great Plains. You can do some of this for yourself, of course. If you have a homesteading ancestor, then you can order up the land patent file from the National Archives and learn the gritty details of proving up. You can scroll through the digitized pages of your local and regional newspapers and watch the notices of final proof blink in across the landscape like farmyard lights at prairie dusk.

In the Enderlin Museum a few days ago I noticed an old handbill on display, dating from 1897, and addressed “To Cattle Owners”: The undersigned hereby wishes to announce that he is again ready to receive orders for herding cattle during the coming season, from May 1st to October 1st, 1897. Good and sufficient drinking water can be found on the land. All cattle entrusted to my care will receive the best attention. All cattle must be branded. Price of herding $1.50 per head.

Every year is a mixed bag, always with its measure of miseries, but this one, 2024, is packed with celebratory milestones for me. Fifty years of college teaching under my belt. One hundred fifty years of successful agriculture on our family farm. And now, one thousand radio essays under the title, Plains Folk, composed and voiced for Prairie Public.

Sometime soon I will come to Prairie Public studios and record Plains Folk radio feature no. 1000. I am not winding down, but ramping up toward that recording, wherein I will, of course, offer some wise and witty remarks about life on the Great Plains of North America and the enterprise of telling their stories.

To lovers of the outdoors, the legacy of Gunlog Bjarni “G. B.” Gunlogson is evident. Just visit Icelandic State Park, in Pembina County, established in 1964 following Gunlogson’s gift of a 200-acre nature preserve along the Tongue River to the state of North Dakota. See the homestead buildings of his Icelandic immigrant parents, Eggert and Rannveig, along with an assemblage of other historic buildings representing rural life. Hike the nature trails. Homesteading + country life + nature + conservation: it’s a simple legacy. Only, maybe not so much.

Women and men and how they get along, or not, are not just matters for contemplation and commiseration in our personal lives. They are historical questions in the settlement and development of the Great Plains. The homesteading era often featured men going out alone to stake claims. Historically, however, the late nineteenth century in America saw the enshrinement of romantic love as the beau ideal of the full life. Marriage came to be considered a love match, not just an economic alliance. Thus all those bachelor homesteaders in their little old sod shanties on the claim, they longed for their sweethearts to come join them and make their lives complete.

In a previous essay, I left you in the lurch, having quoted, in closing a discussion of the early work of the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota Agricultural College, now NDSU, a poem by John R. Milton. This opening poem of The Loving Hawk, a chapbook published by the Institute, ranges from the fall of man to the endless issues of place and identity fostered by open horizons. Never fear, there is salvation in the same booklet, in the form of another poem, Dust Storm, which doesn't sound optimistic, but wait, listen:

North Dakota Congressman, Hjalmar Nygaard, he knew his way around legislative corridors. A teacher and a businessman, his fellow citizens of Steele County had elected him to multiple terms in the state legislature, and then in 1961 he took office in the United States House of Representatives. One day in 1963, in the Capitol Building, Representative Nygaard felt a pain in his chest.

Threshing time in McIntosh County, 1926, and the thresherman Gottlieb Bendewald was in the field. A young bundle pitcher, a neighbor from just a mile away, sixteen years old — Christian Lux — hailed the thresherman to collect wages for work he had done, and things went badly from there. Witnesses disagreed what was said and done, and the parties disputed vehemently.

“When I went to Kent State in 1961,” recalls Shirley Fischer Arends, a great scholar of the history, language, and culture of the Germans from Russia, “I had no idea that I was part of any kind of a unique cultural people. I thought I was simply an American.”

The local press of Casselton reported in 1883 that a “broom brigade of ladies” assembled in town to march on the “residence of a grass widow with the expectation of finding their husbands.” They discovered, however, that their wayward mates were all occupied at a poker game in the saloon.

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.