Plains Folk

By Prairie Public

What's Plains Folk about?

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 Unequal Battle Against ...

03.28.2020

There is the granite memorial, there is the song by Chuck Suchy, and there are countless commemorations of the sacrificial death of Hazel Miner, the Oliver County farm girl who died saving her brother and sister from the killer blizzard ...

Plains Folk episodes:

03.28.2020 The Unequal Battle Against the Elements There is the granite memorial, there is the song by Chuck Suchy, and there are countless commemorations of the sacrificial death of Hazel Miner, the Oliver County farm girl who died saving her brother and sister from the killer blizzard ...
03.21.2020 Up in Oliver County Of all the wonderful songs written by Chuck Suchy, none is more compelling than “The Story of Hazel Miner.” It begins in lyric style, gauzy and ethereal, and suddenly, just in time, transitions into solid 4/4 and into the rhetoric ...
03.07.2020 Lightning Rods and Dollar Signs The past few weeks I’ve been telling you stories about lightning rods and lightning rod men, who had a shady reputation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. At the same time, there was the emergence of respectable science affirming ...
02.29.2020 Lynching the Lightning Rod Man The lightning rod man drove up to a farmhouse and, espying a boy outside, said to the lad, “Is that your father lying there in the shade, sonny?” “No, sir; pa’s away, an’ me and ma is the only ones ...
02.22.2020 The Imminent Danger of Lightning On June 5, 1886, lightning struck the Washington Monument, with alarming effect. The strike induced a crack in the stone of the north face of the pyramidal structure, near the top. Site managers did two things in response.
02.15.2020 The Lightning Rod Man In April 1909 the Jamestown Alert issued the following public service announcement: “George E. Bates of Grand Forks, a lightning rod man, registered at the Capital Hotel today.” This notice may seem innocuous, but it was intended as a warning, ...
02.08.2020 Four for the League “At heart, the story of the Nonpartisan League is about leadership,” writes Terry L. Shoptaugh, author of Sons of the Wild Jackass: The Nonpartisan League in North Dakot a. His focus on the NPL elite is old-fashioned political history, but ...
02.01.2020 Living like the Kings of Tramps At dawn of the twenty-first century, prairie folk read in their weekly and daily newspapers that their communities were under siege by an invasion of tramps, hobos, who, when they were not engaging in outright crime, were a bad moral ...
01.25.2020 Well-Dressed Strangers in a Hobo Camp William Law was not a sterling citizen, but he had friends. A butcher by trade, and having fallen in with bad--meaning, hard-drinking--company in Fargo, he moved down to Mayville and took work in a slaughterhouse outside town. He kept a ...
01.18.2020 Some Gang of Hobos One night in August, 1897, a wooden railroad bridge over a dry coulee near St. Thomas, North Dakota, was consumed by fire. “There is no clue to the origin of the fire,” said press reports, which appeared in papers across ...
01.11.2020 Song of the Open Road Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. So begins the much-quoted, essentially American poem, “Song of the Open Road,” by the essentially ...
01.04.2020 The Beast in the Barberries Henry Luke Bolley is the pioneering botanist I have introduced over the past couple of weeks--a nimble scholar of North Dakota Agricultural College who was the founder of the football team at NDAC and the father of the flax industry ...
12.28.2019 Football, Flax, and the Far Frontier Reviewing the career of someone like Henry Luke Bolley, a stalwart scientist of the North Dakota Agricultural College, it is easy to conclude that in those days, there were giants in the earth. This is why we have archives. You ...
12.21.2019 Black Stem Rust The Jeffersonian vision of an ordered landscape--private property bounded according to section-range-township--breaks down when stressed by competing visions and unruly ecology. One farmer’s drainage for private property improvement spills water onto the neighbors. My failure to control noxious weeds prompts ...
12.14.2019 The Human Race in 8,000 Words In a previous column I made the case for what we might call the revenge of the farm boys--how, as a farm boy gone bad into academic life, I have now signed on to write a state-of-the-field history of agriculture ...
12.07.2019 The Rearview Mirror Some may say it is a sign I am in my dotage, but lately I have been thinking and writing more than ever about agriculture, farming and ranching. You see, I was never supposed to be a farmer. My eldest ...
11.30.2019 Here for the Birds “In your travels,” writes Larkin Powell, “you may stumble upon birders who make you wonder how a human being can drift so far away from the mainstream--these are the folks with binoculars that cost more than the car you are ...
11.23.2019 Fair Chase Sometimes I envy my companion in the fields of autumn. Angie the History Dog is, by profession and inclination both, a hunting dog. She takes to the field in truly recreational fashion, intoxicated with the sensate experience of it all. ...
11.16.2019 The Poison Was Taken Intentionally Last week I detailed how the arsenic-laced pesticide, Paris Green, came into general use more than a century ago, mainly to combat the Colorado potato beetle. I was led to this topic by a fascinating paper presented to the Western ...
11.09.2019 Potato Bugs and Paris Green Wrapping up the prairie gardening season of 2019, I bid farewell to some slimy companions. As I work in the beds, often barefoot, I welcome all the frogs, salamanders, and toads I touch with my toes. I like to see ...
11.02.2019 The Cry of the Plover Well, I will not inquire if you did your homework. Last week I asked you to go to a Cornell University website and listen to the call of the upland sandpiper recorded at Long Lake in 1988. As recorded there ...
10.26.2019 Plover on Toast One night in March 1900, the Pennsylvania alumni of Yale University gathered in the genteel quarters of the Scranton Club to host a visit by Yale President Arthur T. Hadley. A sumptuous feast was served, including courses of salmon, chicken, ...
10.19.2019 Peace and Quiet in the Dairy Prairie folk of the late nineteenth century were accustomed to reading grim reports of deadly gorings inflicted by horned cattle--a catalog of grief and outrage chronicled in my previous essay. In March of 1888 a correspondent of the Emmons County ...
10.12.2019 A Horrible Sight and a Terrible Death In one of our family photo albums is a snapshot of me, age pre-school, sitting astride our prize polled Hereford bull. I’m pretty sure his name was Domino. I’m also pretty sure if such a photo were taken and viewed ...
10.05.2019 Real Things in Real Places “Spend less, see more” -- this has been the candid and standard advice dispensed for 25 years by Seth Kugel, author of “The Frugal Traveler” in the New York Times . Now, in book form -- under the title, Rediscovering ...
09.28.2019 Hunter’s Dilemma It is a yellow dawn on the northern plains as I settle into a sunny place for some reading. My head pivots frequently, from the hazy rays streaming through corn raised by farmers of perilous tenure and destined for markets ...
09.21.2019 Wolf Hunters Coyotes, known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “prairie wolves,” were considered merely a nuisance in the days of the overland trails. As agricultural settlement dug into prairies, however, farm folk redefined prairie wolves as a menace. Organized ...
09.14.2019 Prairie Wolves It can be confusing to read, in documents of early prairie settlement, references to “prairie wolves.” The creature of note is no more a wolf than a prairie dog is a dog or a prairie chicken is a chicken. Canis ...
09.07.2019 The Cows Came Home One day in October 1907, a herd of milk cows belonging to townspeople in Pembina broke into a pasture that belonged to a farmer named Jim Kneeshaw. “The town herd got into solitary confinement in Kneeshaw’s pasture on Wednesday,” the ...
08.31.2019 The Town Herd “The large amount of grain that has been seeded near town will necessitate the herding of stock now running at large,” announced the Dickinson Press in 1883. “Mr. S. Burnside proposes starting a town herd and will herd all stock ...
08.24.2019 Ice Age Climate change is a subject I hesitate to introduce, for fear of igniting disputes between political partisans debating anthropogenic climate change--that is, change caused by human actions--and what ought to be done about it. I am a historian, so that ...
08.17.2019 Gopher Tails in the Collection Plate A couple of weeks ago I detailed that scandalous episode in the history of the Flickertail State, the great gopher-tail fraud case of Ransom County, 1900, which had to be settled by the state supreme court. The court’s opinion hinged ...
08.10.2019 The Problem with a Colorful History The most prominent historian in the history of African Americans in the American West is Dr. Quintard Taylor, of the University of Washington. He is a revered--some might even say formidable--scholar. He is the empressario of the go-to website on ...
08.03.2019 Southern Dinners and Plantation Melodies The Second Baptist Church, Bismarck, North Dakota, organized in 1917 to serve the African-American residents of the city, some of whom previously had attended the predominantly white First Methodist Episcopal Church--now known as McCabe United Methodist Church.
08.01.2019 The Gopher-Bounty Frauds On October 17, 1900, the supreme court of North Dakota upheld the conviction of one Robert H. Stewart, a resident of Sargent County, for “having fraudulently obtained money from Sargent county by means of a false, forged, and fictitious instrument. ...
07.20.2019 The Food Cache Sean Sherman calls himself the Sioux Chef. That’s in the title of his book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen . S-i-o-u-x Sioux, as in Lakota, not sous chef, as in the hands-on guy who runs a kitchen operation and reports ...
07.15.2019 Great Plains Geology Great Plains Geology , by R. F. Diffendal Jr., is a recent volume in the Discover the Great Plains Series of handbooks organized out of the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska, and published by University of Nebraska ...
06.22.2019 Soothing Chamomile On a still summer evening, my retriever has her nose pressed against the screen door. Just outside, on the patio, a dehydrator is desiccating a load of chamomile blossoms. The aroma must be intoxicating to a sensitive nose. Come the ...
05.11.2019 Still If you’re like me, you’ve already filled up your calendar with events and expeditions for the summer. Make room for one more: 2pm Sunday afternoon, June 9, Rebecca Bender will booktalk her recent work, Still , at the Wild Rose ...
04.27.2019 Prairie in Your Freezer Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about northern pike. Other people in spring are thinking about walleye. Walleye, I like to say, is fish for people who don’t like fish. And they are wimpy fish, too, so there. With ice ...
04.20.2019 Heroes of German-Russian Country Here are a couple of things that seem far apart, but in my mind, there is a connection. We are recently returned from a research expedition to the high dry interior of New Zealand, where we spent time with people ...
03.23.2019 Heart of Dakota The Missouri River never had a Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, to pilot its historic steamboats into the literary canon. Steamboating on the Great Plains in general has been shortchanged by regional historians, beginning with the great one, Walter Prescott ...
03.16.2019 The Shame of Noah The name Bertha Rachael Palmer has an ambiguous resonance in our history on the northern plains. I have written in admiration of her 1928 book, Beauty Spots in North Dakota , indeed, have offered metaphorically to carry her bags for ...
03.09.2019 Fires of Hope This is not an attempt to rekindle an old controversy, but in my opinion, our state’s flagship university missed an opportunity when a few years ago it selected a new nickname for its sports teams. It seems to me the ...
03.02.2019 Learning from the Lindis About the time you hear this essay, Suzzanne and I will be jetting to New Zealand once again. We have scheduled our spring break in the Hocken Library, at the University of Otago, the southernmost university in the world. From ...
02.23.2019 A Book-Hungry Land The words you hear are composed in an exceedingly literary environment. An entire floor of our split-level house is devoted to office and library, as I am a writer and my wife is a publisher. She is always overhauling someone’s ...
02.09.2019 The Duck Stamp Guy Waterfowl hunters, check your wallet, and you will see that this year’s duck stamp - now known as a Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp, but who calls it that, anyway? - this year’s duck stamp features a pair of ...
02.02.2019 Malbec in Your Chili Deep winter is a time for serious culinary work, and we have a freezer full of venison. In a previous essay I made the case for a new code of the sportsman suited to the prairies--a code that partakes both ...
01.28.2019 River of Stories Notes from a winter diary. Awaiting rosy fingers on the eastern horizon, I make a prayer of thanks for the morning dark, the starry quiet, and the companionship of this interlude. Not a creature is stirring, not even Angie the ...
01.28.2019 Venison Chronicles Whitetail deer populations on the Great Plains, like so much of life in the region, are a boom-and-bust proposition. Not being a wildlife biologist, I speak from the experience of a long life connected to the land and its history ...

Older episodes

Plains Folk

What's Plains Folk about?

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Plains Folk episodes:

The Unequal Battle Against the Elements

Up in Oliver County

Lightning Rods and Dollar Signs

Lynching the Lightning Rod Man

The Imminent Danger of Lightning

The Lightning Rod Man

Four for the League

Living like the Kings of Tramps

Well-Dressed Strangers in a Hobo Camp

Some Gang of Hobos

Song of the Open Road

The Beast in the Barberries

Football, Flax, and the Far Frontier

Black Stem Rust

The Human Race in 8,000 Words

The Rearview Mirror

Here for the Birds

Fair Chase

The Poison Was Taken Intentionally

Potato Bugs and Paris Green

The Cry of the Plover

Plover on Toast

Peace and Quiet in the Dairy

A Horrible Sight and a Terrible Death

Real Things in Real Places

Hunter’s Dilemma

Wolf Hunters

Prairie Wolves

The Cows Came Home

The Town Herd

Ice Age

Gopher Tails in the Collection Plate

The Problem with a Colorful History

Southern Dinners and Plantation Melodies

The Gopher-Bounty Frauds

The Food Cache

Great Plains Geology

Soothing Chamomile

Still

Prairie in Your Freezer

Heroes of German-Russian Country

Heart of Dakota

The Shame of Noah

Fires of Hope

Learning from the Lindis

A Book-Hungry Land

The Duck Stamp Guy

Malbec in Your Chili

River of Stories

Venison Chronicles

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