Plains Folk

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.