Plains Folk

In February of 1992 I, accompanied by Bancroft the History Dog, blew into a frozen Fargo, North Dakota, determined to shift my energies to a land grant university on the plains, even at the price of serving a sentence as an academic dean. One of my first new friends in Fargo, the poet David Martinson, immediately told me I must read a remarkable new book by Kathleen Norris, entitled Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I read it; we invited Kathleen to read and lecture at NDSU; and thus I contributed to the minor literary sensation swirling around her book.

This isn’t what I expected to find when I started investigating the early history of Halloween pranks. But then, Medora was not your typical frontier community.

In his first issue following Halloween 1885, the editor of the Hope Pioneer recounted the doings of the holiday.

You can’t go home again, Thomas Wolfe said, but I do, and I do so without discomfort. Although I get a little tired of replaying the buzzer-beater in the state semifinals of 1970, because that was a long time ago and a lot of miles, too, and was not necessarily the apex in the trajectory of local history. Or maybe it was, and everything since then has been downhill. This actually is a thing among Great Plains historians, the assumption of inevitable decline, such that scholars have adopted the term, declensionism, to describe it. Scholars devised the term, but the phenomenon is real, we feel it at the grassroots in prairie communities.

One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring overhead, eagles huddling over carrion on the road.

So I think the main reason my friends in McIntosh County invited me down to speak at their chokecherry festival this year was that a few years ago, I wrote a little ballad called “The Chokecherry Song.”

I’ve been describing the community culture of berry-picking that emerged during the 1880s, focusing first on juneberries and then on chokecherries. Wagon caravans carried townsfolk, particularly young people, into the countryside to pick. Every community had its known thickets that were transformed into ritual places; press reports referred to them with affectionate familiarity.

Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years the Grafton Farmers Market and the McIntosh County Heritage Center have initiated folk festivals focusing on these black pearls; I’m on my way soon to speak at the 2nd Annual Chokecherry Festival in Ashley. Even though my personal crop, generally so dependable, is meager in this parched summer.

There’s a sense across the country that we have made a dog’s breakfast of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American independence. I don’t wish to sugar-coat past developments, but I remember 1976 pretty well—perhaps because although my education at a certain land grant university had taught me a thoughtful appreciation for sour mash whiskey, my head was happily not muddled by more destructive indulgences.

Not a native of the Flickertail State, nevertheless, in the course of decades, I have acquired a complex of defensive sensitivities about it. Phrases like “Flyover Country” and “Buffalo Commons” stir the little hairs on the back of my neck. I like to think this is because they are examples of sloppy thinking, and not because I am touchy, but self-delusion is a known part of the complex I am describing.