If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, it’s likely we share certain values. One of these is that life is not a purely transactional matter. There are important things that are not reducible to calculation and exchange. On the other hand, you have to make a living. One of the delightful findings of my investigation of folksong on the Great Plains is that it is possible to combine commerce and art. I’m talking about the phenomenon, fairly common in the heyday of prairie balladry, of singing storekeepers. These guys gave their customers both bargains and ballads.

Bargains and 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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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.”

Book Showers

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.

Bargains and Ballads

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