If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, then you know that I am on the hunt for the folksongs of the Great Plains, which produced an amazing efflorescence of balladry in the generations of the original Euro-American settlers and their children.

A Searchlight for Cowboy Ballads

Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."

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The phrase “rest room” meant something different a century ago than what it does today. It was a new phrase in the 1890s, which came into general usage a decade later, during what is known as the Progressive Era — a time of political and societal reform across the country, from Congress right down to the local community.

Meet You at de Lendrecie’s

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.

Spotters and Piggers

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.

The Blind Pigger’s Farewell

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.

The Power of Printed Thought

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.”

A Searchlight for Cowboy Ballads

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